On the other side of the quad, a giant blanket hangs over the railing in Hurt 1. It cascades to the shrubs on the ground in all its massive, red glory, covering the door below and confusing the other Hurt residents.
I have no idea what the giant red blanket in Hurt 1 is for. As I stare at it from my bedroom window, which faces the upstairs walkway and overlooks the quad, I realize that the Hurt 1 guys wouldn’t be able to display this magnificent piece of cloth in most other college housing complexes. Union dorms are unique in many ways (personal washer/dryer set, anyone?), but the open, motel-esque hallways are an overlooked signature of the on-campus housing experience.
Other colleges I had visited before finding my home at Union featured more traditional collegiate dorms. Two beds, two desks and enough space to take maybe half a step before you bumped into your roommate. But outside the dorms? Residents congregated in the interior hallways, cultivating a community in the narrow, shared space between doors.
Union residence halls don’t have that shared space. Without a “hall life culture,” do students lose that integral sense of community with their neighbors? Will we go through our undergraduate years without knowing the name of the girl next door whose guitar riffs drift through the thin walls at night, or the boy upstairs who has the most unique laugh you’ve ever heard?
“I’m so tempted to buy a couch and put it right in front of my building,” Corrina Jackson, a junior social work major and the RA of Hurt 3, said to me with a laugh. “I just wish there was a communal living room or something in the middle of the quad that is more easily accessible.”
Jackson transferred to Union from Crown College in the spring of 2021. She explained to me that her old residence hall had three floors of dorms and interior hallways between them.
“We had a TV [in our hallway],” she said. “But it was never on because we’d just sit out there all the time. It was a lot different with all of our doors on the inside of the building, so the RA could just open her door and be like, ‘Hi everyone!’ But I can’t really do that, so it’s kind of hard.”
Open hallways were not in the original plan. In fact, they had already begun construction on a four-story residence hall with interior hallways. Until a tornado hit campus on Feb. 5, 2008. The disaster posed the glaring problem of housing the university’s on-campus students.
“Except for Heritage, all of the dorms were either destroyed or condemned,” Ashley Blair, chair of the communication arts department, said about the tornado.
Blair, who was a student at the time, worked with the then dean of students Kimberly Thornbury, who had to make many of the necessary decisions after the tornado struck. With only a few Heritage buildings remaining, there wasn’t enough housing for the students who would return in the fall. They considered moving forward with their plan to construct multiple four-story buildings with interior hallways, but they hit a roadblock: steel.
“To build buildings that are higher than two stories, you have to have steel,” Blair said. “We literally could not get enough steel in time to build those [dorms] to reopen in the fall. The key decision was, ‘How can we rebuild these in time, and in a way that is student-centered?'”
In this effort to remain focused on the individual student and reopen in the fall, they rebuilt two-story buildings with two bathrooms and an in-house washer/dryer set. Most prominently, feedback from students dictated the decision to move forward with the quad design.
“They wanted more quad space because of that college feel of, y’know, throwing a frisbee, or having a place to sit out on blankets,” Blair said. “There was no place for that in the old dorms. There was no place to gather.”
Despite the lack of interior hall culture at Union, the tight-knit community on campus is impossible to miss. Every weekend, I see residents from all over my quad throwing a football or a frisbee across the lawn. Or when a student is in quarantine, I’ll find them having a picnic with their neighbors in the grass. The picnic table in front of Hurt 3, however, has been the most exciting addition to the quad in encouraging community.
“I see a lot of people playing frisbee or football [in the quad],” Jackson said. “For those of us who are like me and don’t know how to catch a ball, the picnic table and things like that are so important.”
I often see friends huddled on the benches with blankets around their shoulders at midnight, or a couple of girls playing guitar and worshiping the Lord from on top of the table.
The hallways aren’t there, but the community is ever-present.
“If we were going to have interior halls, that would also allow them to see people they would not usually see. In the quad, that would create community in an interesting way, as well,” Blair said. “Despite the fact that we had all these limitations, the focus was still on community. How, under these circumstances, can we make this the best communal experience possible? And that’s how we came up with quads.”
Photo by Union University
