College Life in the Mountains

By DAVID LORD 
business manager

Note:  This article was requested for publication in Education West magazine.

Dorm life -- it’s not what you think it is.  No more 1960s, Formica-clad motel rooms.  No more long, terrazzo-paved corridors ending at boxed-in metal stairwells, no 30-stall bathrooms with hospital-tiled walls.  Institutional is out, residential is here.  Where college dormitories once had students scouring campus neighborhoods for their own apartments, those mass-produced motel structures are gradually giving way to smaller community clusters -- "academic villages" -- as schools like Colorado College try to capitalize on the simple economics of increased on-campus residency. 

Increasingly, such new campus residence projects are “not just about beds, bricks and mortar,” as one administrator puts it.  Colorado College was intent, he explains, on creating an academic community with a quality living and learning environment. “We see living and learning as integral to the years a student spends at Colorado College,” he insists.

Colorado College's new Western Ridge Housing Complex, a village-like eight-structure setting in Colorado Springs, is already filled with about 300 students this fall. The new project has instantly increased current on-campus residency from 67 percent, achieved through required residency in a student’s initial three years, to 80 percent.  The difference in residency rates is entirely voluntary.  And filling the new complex with contented residents wasn’t difficult -- it was fully occupied upon completion in October, and students in traditional campus dorms are eyeing the new quarters hungrily for their own chance to move in.  “We built it and they came,” says a pleased project manager. 

The college’s latest campus master plan proposed two such residence clusters, the 240-bed complex of five apartment buildings on the western ridge above the college playing fields, and a cluster of three smaller theme houses (about 60 more beds) nearby off Cascade Avenue.  The entire project has added more than 200 new beds to the campus and features landscaped breezeways, colonnades, terraces and piazzas, and a 100-seat cafe.

Many of the new units are singles with stellar views of Pikes Peak. Most have a small kitchen and dining area.  The cafe and central community rooms are designed to entice students to remain on campus after hours. Several different floor plans are available, including lofts, studios, flats, and 1-, 2-, and 4-person apartments, all wired with data and cable ports. The adjacent area off Cascade Avenue features language-oriented theme houses, connecting students in a community setting.  The three new theme houses (accommodating students from a single academic theme or discipline) cluster about a secondary campus quadrangle with three older theme houses in a Victorian vernacular.

In addition, the complex includes an inviting library-lounge the students have dubbed the "Tattered Cover space" (after the famed Denver bookstores).  It provides a friendly multi-purpose area where students meet for group discussions or relax in stuffed chairs, some wearing slippers while at work on laptops. The apartments combine the amenities of an independent, apartment-style residence with all the perks of being on campus. “It’s an innovative response to what people are beginning to envision for student housing,” says the college’s Western Ridge project leader.

The project architect is Scott Smith of San Francisco-based Sasaki and Associates.  The cost to develop the two Western Ridge sites was $26 million, a figure that includes all infrastructure improvements, landscaping, furnishings, relocation and/or demolition of five existing buildings, new off-site parking, a new classroom, computer lab, and a centralized state-of-the-art security dispatch center.  Construction costs came to $135 per square foot.  The newer, energy-efficient housing is less costly to operate and maintain, and passes stringent codes of the Americans with Disabilities Act -- wider elevators supplementing stairwells and apartments with amenities specifically for disabled students.

The success of the Western Ridge Project is the result of careful planning. During the six-month feasibility study, project goals were defined through a series of charettes with students, faculty, and administrators. The early planning included a marketing study, financing plan, and food service master plan.

In the first room lottery held this fall, about 400 students, selected by class and academic standing, drew for first squatters’ rights.  Anna Euser, a senior from Broomfield, CO, was first to select an apartment in the new complex.  

The design of the academic village was driven by two central considerations -- the college’s unique curricular arrangement known as the Block Plan, and the unsurpassed natural and residential setting that the college enjoys in Colorado Springs.  Wood Avenue, parallel and a block west of the Cascade Avenue campus thoroughfare, dead ends at the verge of the Western Ridge development.  The broad, shady street retains much of its former grandeur (and reputation) as “Millionaire’s Row,” and a transitional vestige is carried over in two brick Victorians on the campus side of the intersection.  The nearby theme houses repeat some of the architectural flavor of the private residences they face -- clapboard siding, verandahs, complex rooflines, slate-and-earth colors, large windows and lawns, for example.

Moreover, Colorado Springs and the college itself lie on a high plain at the base of the Front Range of the Rockies and Pikes Peak.  The view from nearly any point on campus is spectacular most days of the year.  The irony heretofore, points out Laurel McCleod, vice president for student life, is that when the college was founded over a century and a quarter ago, it strove mightily for a New England Congregational respectability in rough frontier where the cultural tone was set by nearby mountain mining camps.  “We have never built facing the mountains,” she notes.  “This is really the first time we’ve celebrated the mountains.  The Western Ridge is the expression of a new frontier ethos on campus that recognizes the roughness and wildness that surrounds us.”

Nowadays it is an unspoken article in any campus master plan that this iconographic view shall not be obscured.  So the five new apartment buildings in the complex have been offset in a village-like configuration -- spacious arched walk-throughs, terraces and central piazza, ranged wherever possible perpendicularly to the north-south axis of the nearby mountain range.  This arrangement permits “view corridors” and open spaces facing west to Pikes Peak.

Here as well, motifs in rooflines and archways, color palettes and materials repeat the vernacular of the surrounding centenarian buildings.  Together, old and new form a harmonious, architecturally integrated residential quad that seamlessly incorporates the newest structures into the oldest part of the campus.

The college’s unique teaching plan was an equally compelling design consideration.  For three decades and more, Colorado College has been famous for an academic block plan in which students take one course at a time from professors who teach but one course at any time. Instead of dividing into traditional semesters, the academic calendar divides into eight “blocks,” each block or single course lasting about three-and-a-half weeks.  The intellectual pace during each block is focused and intensive, teacher/student interaction is close and sustained, and students often learn significantly through steady interactions with classmates.  “The Block Plan encourages students to work closely together,” McCleod points out. 

The physical environment of the Western Ridge -- a residential cluster containing interior and exterior common spaces -- colonnades and corridors, private rooms and public spaces, flexible multi-use areas, an open café -- was designed to suit the college’s typically small, mobile classes.  The curricular approach meshes nicely with these surrounding spaces to encourage intellectual connection among students and faculty, and to foster the real practices and customs of an academic village.  “The students own their own classrooms for the duration of the block,” says McCleod.  “No bells ever ring.  The only hours that regulate our classes are starting time on the first day and noon on the final day of each block.  Between those times, classes might meet anytime, anywhere.”

The voluntary boost in the college’s on-campus residency should have been predictable.  Before beginning his design work on the complex, Scott Smith, with several Colorado College upper class students in tow, toured other campuses to inspect alternative residences.  The students were turned loose at each site, cameras in hand, to interview residents and photograph features that struck them as worthy of inclusion in Western Ridge buildings.  What the students told Smith has been incorporated in the new complex -- a wide choice of floor plans (Western Ridge has 14 options); a large proportion of singles (75 percent are single rooms); low occupancy (no building has more than 50 residents, theme houses hold half that number); personal storage spaces for skis, bicycles, etc.; sufficient bathroom facilities; full kitchens with separate food and utensil storage for each resident.

The buildings, totaling 127,800 square feet, are designed for maximum energy efficiency.  None has an air conditioning system; cooling is effected by e-glass and by north-south ventilation ducts that allow free outdoor airflow.  Each unit is extensively glazed to provide light and views of the nearby mountains.  

The Western Ridge really is what Laurel McLeod has called it, a celebration of those mountains.  More than that, it’s a whole community celebrating. 

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