OU students discussed present concerns and new ideas for first-year housing with architects designing the next phase of on-campus residencies in a Monday meeting.
In the weekly 7:30 p.m. Housing Center Student Association meeting in the Couch Storm Shelter, students shared their ideas for resident hall lounges and study areas, including the need for more flexible spaces, plenty of natural lighting and design, better community kitchens, gender-neutral spaces and improvements to the suite or community-style bathrooms.
In a 2021 Board of Regents meeting, OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. announced the administration's plan to replace the residential hall towers located on south campus. The project’s goal is to update housing to better engage freshmen students in the hopes of increasing retention rates. The first step will be demolishing one of the current freshman housing buildings and the first new building is expected to be constructed by 2025.
Merrilee Hertlein, a principal architect at Mackey Mitchell Architects, and Robert Meek, an architect at the Architectural Design Group, who are both in the process of designing OU’s first-year housing, formulated two activities where students shared their ideas. In the first activity, students placed red or green dots on pictures of designs they liked or disliked. The next activity was an open discussion of what students generally liked or disliked in their residence halls.
“(We) really try to have a deep understanding of what makes residence halls really great, what makes them not so great, and how we can use design to really create a cohesive community within the residence hall,” Hertlein said during the meeting.
Students also advocated for both open and closed study rooms, more laundry room options, more personal mailboxes and better ways to communicate with their fellow residents such as a chalkboard hung up in the hall.
Wink Winkle, president of the HCSA, said in an interview with The Daily that the meeting was extremely beneficial to the students present.
“I think it's really important to me to have those conversations and have actual students who currently live here give that input, and then also some upperclassmen and folks who are sort of allies to HCSA that care a lot about housing and know a little bit more about like how this works long term,” Winkle said.
Not only did the students benefit by sharing their opinions during the meeting, but Hertlein said it benefits the design and architectural teams as they begin working on designs for first-year housing indoor and outdoor spaces.
“There are things that we know because we've done it 50 times, but things are always changing,” Hertlein said in an interview with The Daily. “Getting that kind of input about things like bathrooms, which seemed like such a generic kind of thing in a building, is really important to help us design and make sure that we're creating space that students are going to be comfortable in. It’s going to be really useful and (is) going to attract the next generation of OU students.”
