Student Housing Business is the voice of the student housing industry.
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ARCHITECTURE January/February 2017 StudentHousingBusiness.com 54 Customized Environments Architects are designing for a demographic with a complex blend of needs. By Lynn Peisner O Off-campus student housing design trends are going in many different directions to achieve one common goal: to meet students — some- times literally — right where they are. Many of today's off-campus projects are convenient and cater to how young people socialize and study, providing the living spaces that make them feel safe, social and independent. This can mean assembling and developing on land so close to campus that students can sometimes see new apartments from their classroom windows, or designing unit plans and amenity spaces that physically embrace a student's subtle predilections for work and play habits. It's not easy to keep up with. The millennial cohort is vastly different from pre- ceding generations and is full of surprises. "The off-campus student housing market- place seems to have adopted a new stan- dard of automatically equipping projects with highly integrated technological systems," says Peter Bartash, associate principal with CUBE 3 Studio, an architectural, interior and plan- ning firm based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. "But in our minds, the standout projects are those that reach beyond these expectations and respond to the greater complexities of the millennial community. Most students now have the unprecedented option of being as engaged or isolated as they want to be at any time." University Student Living owns The Radius @ 15th. The 210-bed community designed by Cuningham Group strikes an intimate chord with students attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The design is inspired by the region's culture so that students, who may be living away from home for the first time, will be comforted by details influenced by Minnesota's cabin culture. Image courtesy of Gilbertson Photography " College students are at a transitional point in their development. They're moving from adolescence to adulthood, and we're designing spaces that reflect that and are attractive to them. — Jeff Schoeneck, Principal, Urban Living, Cuningham Group