AIRED: October 28, 2019
SPECIAL GUEST: Professor Carla Yanni
College Dormitories: Places of Exclusion as much as Sites of Fellowship Have an Uncertain Future.
“In clear, elegant prose, Carla Yanni tracks the 350-year architectural history of the college dormitory and exposes its contested social meanings, marked by inclusions and exclusions on the basis of class, gender, and race. This is a remarkable achievement—a welcome addition to the architectural history of youth, higher education, and institutions.” —Marta Gutman, author of A City for Children
Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. But housing policies often enabled discrimination according to class, race, and gender, despite the fact that deans envisioned the residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. In “Living on Campus,” Rutgers University Professor Carl Yanni focuses on the dormitory as a place of exclusion as much as a site of fellowship, and considers the uncertain future of residence halls in the age of distance learning.
Background: Every fall on move-in day, parents tearfully bid farewell to their beloved sons and daughters at college dormitories: it is an age-old ritual. The residence hall has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. Whether a Gothic stone pile, a quaint Colonial box, or a concrete slab, the dormitory is decidedly unhomelike, yet it takes center stage in the dramatic arc of many American families.
This richly illustrated book examines the architecture of dormitories in the United States from the eighteenth century to 1968, asking fundamental questions: Why have American educators believed for so long that housing students is essential to educating them? And how has architecture validated that idea? “Living on Campus” is the first architectural history of this critical building type.
ABOUT PROFESSOR CARA YANNI
Carla Yanni is professor of art history at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minnesota, 2007) and Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. She earned the doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.
