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An exploration of the architecture of dormitories that exposes deeply held American beliefs about education, youth, and citizenship

Academic leaders in the United States assert that on-campus living enhances the moral character of youth, a somewhat dubious claim that nonetheless influenced the design and planning of these ubiquitous yet often overlooked campus buildings. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, Yanni will discuss a selection of residence halls from the middle of the twentieth century, including examples by Saarinen, Breuer, and Moore. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. 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. 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 and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Carla Yanni is Professor of architectural history in the Art History Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is the author of three monographs; the most recent, Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. In 2019, she was honored with the Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award from Rutgers, a university-wide recognition for professors who creatively introduce their scholarship into the undergraduate classroom. Her second book, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, won a Graham Foundation subvention grant and was named a 2007 “Book of Critical Interest” by the journal Critical Inquiry. She was the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. She is currently the Second Vice President of the Society of Architectural Historians.