Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory by Carla Yanni (review)

Most people assume that dormitories developed on American college campuses mostly out of necessity as utilitarian spaces meant to house students within arm’s reach of more crucial classroom buildings. Yet, according to Carla Yanni’s Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory, this is only part of the story. In her groundbreaking investigation of the ubiquitous structures that populate most American colleges, Yanni correlates the design of these buildings directly to ideas about the purpose of higher education. She argues that those who pay for and control educational institutions create these specially designed residential spaces as a way to impose their preferred cultural values on students and to teach them how to behave in social situations.

Yanni’s investigation is organized chronologically into five chapters, with each chapter relying on several case studies to illuminate trends in dormitory design and the ideas behind them. For each era, she connects the historical context of the American cultural landscape, the history of education, and architectural fashion to dormitory design. This method works for Yanni in that a focus on overlapping key moments allows for a connection between cultural change and built forms. By relying on these moments, Yanni’s study focuses on both well-known institutions and some lesser-known ones as well. This inclusive approach adds further credibility to her study as it shows how a variety of institutions all demonstrate a similar pattern.

Chapter 1 focuses on dormitories in all-male colleges, beginning with the first higher-education institution in America: Harvard College. At a school where both students and faculty were men (and mostly white, upper-class men), residences reflected the roles that single men would perform in traditional domestic spaces: students would have tea together, study in public areas, and create a type of family environment. Because upper-class social decorum was expected and enforced, the Harvard dormitories became sites of exclusion and division for those who lacked this cultural knowledge, as did similar dormitories at other all-male institutions such as Prince ton and Dickinson College. Yanni contrasts these spaces with contemporary boarding houses and fraternities. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, fraternities were created by a contingent of students who were disappointed with the conformity enforced in dormitory life and who chose to fight against it. Yanni argues that these students are particularly important to the history of residential spaces as they initiated separate houses focused on fun and rebelled against the supervised official residences that enforced a particular type of social etiquette and propriety. Because of this, the buildings they created and inhabited offer a critical comparison to the campus-approved dormitories.

In chapter 2, Yanni encounters the first big change in college campuses with the introduction of female students. She begins with an exploration of Oberlin College, founded in 1833 as the first coeducational institution in America. At Oberlin, administrators believed that women needed two things that men did not— protection from those outside the school and purpose-designed spaces inside the dorms in which to socialize— and they imagined that these both should be found in buildings that functioned more like domestic spaces than institutional structures. For her discussion of women’s dormitories, Yanni draws directly from Helen Horowitz and her pioneering work Alma Mater, but she also pushes the interpretation further.¹ Instead of concentrating solely on women’s dorms and social concerns therein, Yanni considers how these buildings were meant to level the playing field between female and male students while enculturating them in differentiated roles. In dorms at Oberlin, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan, all discussed in this chapter, women had less autonomy than men, as the double-loaded corridor and structures of supervision meant that female students were both protected and controlled. In their social spaces, these dormitories both taught women their role as hostesses...