State-of-the-Art Housing
Mar. 9th, 2007 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebSo after the session on interactive documentaries I took a tour of the campus's newest dorm which just opened in January. It's "a brand new, state-of-the art housing facility" (sounds like a prison or high-priced doggie day care). The tour includes "a student resident's room, computer labs, lounges and laundry facilities."
The building is ugly on the outside, like a prison. Brick, small windows, exceedingly rectangular and plain.
Inside is different. There are multi-colored bright earth-tone tile floors and there is a lot of thick dark wood trim like we're in a British pub. In the activity room, which is mostly tables and chairs people can study in but which is big enough for presentations, there were panels of wood inlaid with other wood in the shape of longhorns. We were told each of these panels cost $3000. This is why one might not want to donate money to one's alma mater.
To get into a hall or the exercise room or the laundry room, you needed some kind of ID card, and if the door was left open too long, an alarm went off. Since our tour group was rather large, we set off the alarm every time we went through a door. I hope the fire alarm sounds different, because people were ignoring this alarm completely.
The rooms had two beds with immovable bed posts, but you could move the mattress to the top like a top bunk, to the bottom like a regular bed, or several places in between. All the other furniture was movable, so you could put your dresser or desk under the bed. Also, there was a bar under the bed you could hang clothes from. It was kind of cool but the furniture was rather ugly.
Each room had cable and internet access, but you had to pay extra for each, and it's already the most expensive dorm on campus.
There was a bulletin board outside each room. One resident still had a white board the way everyone used to when I lived in dorms. But no one was even using the bulletin boards and no one left paper there or any way for people to leave notes. I didn't even see thumbtacks; the boards were just decorative.
The exercise room was right next to the laundry room, so you can exercise while keeping an eye on your laundry like at the now defunct Clean and Lean. I liked that. The room also had a pool table and stereo systems and TVs. It definitely had the potential for major sound overload.
I only saw one new idea I liked. I'd seen the desk-under-the-bed trick, but I hadn't seen the clothes-pole-under-the-bed trick. You could have your bed only halfway up with your dresser on one side and some of your shorter clothes hanging on the other side.
Otherwise, I was unimpressed by this state-of-the-art dorm.
Web site of the day: Get Rich Slowly's Building a Personal Finance Library: 25 of the Best Books about Money - This guy put together a much longer list than I did, and gave each one a nice paragraph-long description.
The building is ugly on the outside, like a prison. Brick, small windows, exceedingly rectangular and plain.
Inside is different. There are multi-colored bright earth-tone tile floors and there is a lot of thick dark wood trim like we're in a British pub. In the activity room, which is mostly tables and chairs people can study in but which is big enough for presentations, there were panels of wood inlaid with other wood in the shape of longhorns. We were told each of these panels cost $3000. This is why one might not want to donate money to one's alma mater.
To get into a hall or the exercise room or the laundry room, you needed some kind of ID card, and if the door was left open too long, an alarm went off. Since our tour group was rather large, we set off the alarm every time we went through a door. I hope the fire alarm sounds different, because people were ignoring this alarm completely.
The rooms had two beds with immovable bed posts, but you could move the mattress to the top like a top bunk, to the bottom like a regular bed, or several places in between. All the other furniture was movable, so you could put your dresser or desk under the bed. Also, there was a bar under the bed you could hang clothes from. It was kind of cool but the furniture was rather ugly.
Each room had cable and internet access, but you had to pay extra for each, and it's already the most expensive dorm on campus.
There was a bulletin board outside each room. One resident still had a white board the way everyone used to when I lived in dorms. But no one was even using the bulletin boards and no one left paper there or any way for people to leave notes. I didn't even see thumbtacks; the boards were just decorative.
The exercise room was right next to the laundry room, so you can exercise while keeping an eye on your laundry like at the now defunct Clean and Lean. I liked that. The room also had a pool table and stereo systems and TVs. It definitely had the potential for major sound overload.
I only saw one new idea I liked. I'd seen the desk-under-the-bed trick, but I hadn't seen the clothes-pole-under-the-bed trick. You could have your bed only halfway up with your dresser on one side and some of your shorter clothes hanging on the other side.
Otherwise, I was unimpressed by this state-of-the-art dorm.
Web site of the day: Get Rich Slowly's Building a Personal Finance Library: 25 of the Best Books about Money - This guy put together a much longer list than I did, and gave each one a nice paragraph-long description.
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Re: Clean and Lean
on 2007-03-11 05:54 am (UTC)I haven't actually used the place in probably a decade, so I may be remembering things wrong. Googling showed me Austin Unique (http://www.austinunique.com/about.htm) which says they closed in the late 1990s and spawned their whole web site, which looks interesting.