A Place of Dwelling for Graduate Students

The lives of graduate students are often insular and focused, with high workloads and resultant stresses. Beyond the unifying demands of academia, graduate students have a diverse set of individual challenges. Some students have families, some are visiting the US and learning to live in a new culture, and some are fresh out of undergraduate studies and living on their own for the first time. In addition to these challenges the graduate student body is a diverse and disparate group, representing varied cultures, experiences and generations. Due to these demands and circumstances the students have little time and energy to build a community with fellow graduate students, and therefore don\u27t have a strong and supportive community when they need it most. The idea of creating and supporting intentional communities through the design of housing has been architecturally explored for many years. From the mass housing of the early modernist movement through contemporary cohousing, there have been varying degrees of success.The intent of this thesis project is to design a place of dwelling for graduate students within the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. By analyzing examples of intentional communities and the actual needs of the graduate community at UMass Amherst, I intend to design a place of dwelling for graduate students that supports the development of community, and therefore the individual residents