Graduate Student Residential College

Graduate students make up a third of Notre Dame’s campus, ~4,000 out of 12,000 students. Current graduate housing is all off-campus with the closest being large apartment complexes on the northeast edge of campus surrounded by wide roads and parking lots. A residential college campus could not only bring students closer to a traditional, walkable college but closer to each other. This proposal focuses on building a tighter community with a T-4 urban transect building density, a pedestrian-only riverfront park, and college housing wrapped around shared green quads. A variety of beautiful public amenities, like the riverfront reading room, a commercial plaza, a lecture hall, a church, and multiple dining halls on the campus provide the space for more daily student gatherings and special events.

I had the opportunity to take a closer look at what 1000 dwelling units could look like on a graduate residential campus. Inspired by Yale’s graduate housing, apartments share a stairwell, rather than a double-loaded corridor, so student’s front doors can open onto a grassy quad instead of the typical windowless hallway. Floor plans with 1, 2, 3, or 4 bedrooms accommodate different types of graduate students, like small families, married couples, and singles. Students can pick a more communal living style with the option of sharing a kitchen with the neighboring apartment or the traditional private layout with 1 kitchen per apartment. These plans are all laid out within a 35’x35’ square so that these modular units can be strung together and stacked to create any length or height of college necessary creating a diverse yet cohesive campus that welcomes all types of graduate students to living in a Notre Dame community.