STUDENTS: THOSE ANIMALS!
The following text is the Abstract of an Italian article published by Oscar Eugenio Bellini and Martino Mocchi:
O.E. Bellini, M. Mocchi (2016), “Students: those animals! The issue of the ‘users’ in the student housing design”, in R. Del Nord, A. Baratta, C. Piferi (a cura di), Residenze e servizi per studenti universitari, TESIS, Firenze, pp. 285–296, ISBN 9788894151824.
The student housing, rightly considered by the scientific literature as a pivotal theme for the development of the “human and social capital” of a nation, it’s emerging as an area of experimentation, due to the change in the traditional framework: in terms of housing solutions, types of users, functional supplies, spaces for living and sharing.
Especially in Italy, the role of the university residences has deeply changed during the last decades: the needs that they have to meet are no longer related only with a class of students coming from the poorest areas of the country searching for a bed, but they have to deal with a more articulated audience, linked to different social and cultural models: both for the increasingly international standards of the universities and for the change of the academic context itself, which promotes cultural and scientific exchanges also among PhD students, researchers, visiting professor, etc. The “student” housing has therefore to face the necessities of a large number of people, belonging to different ethnicity, age, religions, cultures, traditions, with specific needs related to variable periods of staying, that require special housing solutions.
A proper design approach cannot ignore the transformation of this scenario: in order to be efficient, the architecture must overcome the mere quantitative reference — as the one followed by the national regulation — too based on the fulfillment of physical and spatial parameters which don’t allow to manage the increasing complexity of the demand.
Recent anthropological and axiological studies conducted in France have attempted to classify more in detail the different types of students/users, through a comparison with particular animal species, in order to stress the specific relation that every individual establishes with its private house, with the common and shared spaces, with the other members of the group etc. The aim of these studies is to favor an interdisciplinary approach, based on the idea of “performance” as a key concept which can exceed the current regulatory approach. What matters is the possibility to ensure the quality of the functional offer, open to different housing solutions in relation with the specific situation. This approach is gradually emerging in other European countries, including Sweden and Germany.
For a more complete Italian version of the article:
