LAUSR

Carla Yanni Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 304 pp., 14 color and 132 b/w illus. $140 (cloth), ISBN 9781517904555; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 9781517904562 Living on Campus is a lively, intriguing history of dormitories that combines social and architectural history to provide a glimpse of something most readers know about but may not have realized they did. Anyone who has gone away to college—or taught at one that has residence halls—is probably aware of many of the things Carla Yanni describes without being fully conscious of where this knowledge came from. Unsurprisingly, the inspiration for the American system of housing students came from England, from Oxford and Cambridge in particular. As Yanni notes, most European universities do not provide on-campus housing (although a few do), but both men's and women's dormitories were often arranged in quadrangles with semiprivate green space. In American higher education, there has been, almost from the beginning, a desire not only to teach but also to shape the character of students. When the first dormitories for women were built, female students were “protected” in ways males were not. Women were almost always housed in dormitories with double-loaded corridors and housemothers guarding single entries, while men usually lived in buildings with entryway plans (also called staircase plans), which provided residents with direct access to the outdoors. Administrators felt no need to guard the men's virtue. The first high-rise dormitories appeared in the 1950s when college enrollment increased exponentially as a result of the GI Bill. Coed housing did not appear until the 1960s, and even then, the sexes were separated by floor, often with separate elevators for men and women. Racial integration did not begin until the 1960s, and it too developed slowly. Segregation was so much a part of the story that the first dormitory in America, the Indian College at Harvard, was built around …