Students touring Student Village Phase II this week may think the tower seem to have risen from the muddy construction site overnight, but plans for the building are older than most of its residents will be next year, Housing Director Marc Robillard said.
StuVi 2, which is scheduled to finish construction in May, will house 960 sophomores, juniors and seniors next fall. The project, which initially included plans for three residences to house 2,300 students, began in 1984.
‘There’s an old economist and his name was [Jean-Baptiste] Say, a French guy,’ Robillard said. ‘His theory was that supply creates its own demand. The same is true with on-campus housing, as long as you’re building what people are looking for.’
Robillard said his experience at Boston University since 1987 has taught him that students have different housing needs from the time they enter as freshmen until the time they graduate, and he works to balance community and independence for each phase of the student’s time at BU.
Almost 99 percent of entering freshmen live on campus, partially because they are required to do so, and about 75 percent of them remain in BU housing for their sophomore years, he said. However, between study abroad and the demand for apartments, only about 65 percent of juniors remain on campus.
‘Our housing system has been a great freshmen-sophomore housing system,’ Robillard said. ‘It has not been a great junior-senior housing system. We’re trying to improve that.’
To meet the needs of older undergraduates, StuVi 2 has two living options. The 26-story north tower will be comprised of apartments, and the 19-story south tower will have suite-style dormitories. Whether apartment- or dorm-style, rooms will be equipped with Ethernet, cable, ten electric outlets per person and wireless internet, making StuVi 2 the first completely Wi-Fi building on campus, he said.
Furniture, which will arrive this month, will be ‘more modern’ than the pieces in StuVi, Robillard said. Desks will not be as large as the 60-inch wide StuVi desks but will still be about six inches wider than the standard 42-inch desks found in other residences. Rooms will also have light fixtures above the desks that face upward to light the room as well as the desktop.
Unlike dorms such as Warren Towers or West Campus, common areas will not be in the middle of individual floors. Instead, that extra space will be allocated to each suite. Bathrooms will have more cabinet space than those in StuVi, and they will be equipped with dual-flushing toilets, which save water by having an option for solid or liquid waste.
StuVi 2 study space will include quiet rooms, a media room and two rooms that can double as classrooms. The building will not, however, include a dining hall for the 544 students living in suite-style dorms who will be required to have a dining plan.
Although Robillard said this number will not cause dining hall overcrowding because students will no longer be living in the Hyatt Regency, only 387 lived there in the fall semester, and it is likely that West Campus will see more dining hall traffic than other areas on campus.
‘ ‘We’re very concerned about it,’ he said. ‘The only things under consideration right now are to extend the dining hours so that dinner would go about an hour later, and really looking at the other retail options that are available in the West Campus area and seeing if we can extend them.’
He said he is looking into altering Buick Street Caf’eacute; and the old McDonald’s location at the corner of Harry Agganis Way, as well as extending seating at West Campus.
Staff writer Vivian Ho contributed reporting to this article.
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