Housing Crunch: Hitting home in the architecture school

While the rest of the university crams for midterms this week, we architecture majors are preparing for our mid-semester reviews with a charrette. It's a brief, intense period of work leading up to a presentation before a panel of judges. It's always a stressful time in the architecture school, but often an exciting one, with all the junior and senior studio classes working on their individual projects for days on end without a decent night's sleep. Charrette's tough, but it builds a sense of camaraderie among the roughly 300 undergraduate and graduate students in the architecture program. Through studio, we've become a tight-knit community.

While I'd gotten used to working late with my classmates last year, I was surprised this semester to find the senior studios empty at 10 p.m., even as the juniors were still going at it. I'd been told once that the best part of studio was if you ever went home, you wouldn't have any homework. So what happened this year? We still have plenty of work. My fellow seniors, most of whom have been kicked off campus, have just been taking it home, and our studio culture's taken a hit for it.

In April 2006, that year's juniors were unceremoniously dumped from university housing, forcing many to scramble for a place to live after most options both on and off campus had disappeared. This past year, my class knew well in advance that they wouldn't be living in the dorms, but they didn't expect to be shut out of University Courtyards and South Campus Commons, as well. As a result, the only seniors living on the campus now are those who, like me, were lucky enough to get into Commons as juniors, or those who were offered spots in dorms late this summer.

I have a few classmates who moved to Knox Towers, which is within walking distance of the university, but I know College Park's tight rental market has sent many others further out - up Route 1 toward IKEA, down Aldephi Road toward Hyattsville and even into Silver Spring. Working in studio until 7 a.m. was easy if you could just walk back to your dorm, but those who now live a 20-minute drive away from the campus think twice about staying late. The goal now is to do as much work as you can at home, even if it's harder to get it done - it's too much trouble to mess with the university's complicated parking regulations and the potential danger of driving home at the brink of exhaustion.

Living off the campus may not be as big a deal for students in other majors who only meet in classes two or three times a week, and they would be hard-pressed to name everyone in their TA section, let alone their entire program. But in the architecture school, a dearth of housing options within easy walking distance of studio have definitely impacted our sense of community. As we enter charrette this week, I'm hoping to see my classmates busy at work trying to build it back up.

Dan Reed is a senior architecture and English major. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.