Web | ArchDaily

Principal Juan Miró has penned an opinion piece for ArchDaily that sounds the alarm about the rise of windowless bedrooms in college living quarters across the United States, and the impact of the trend on students’ health and wellbeing:

For the last 22 years, I have given to my students at the School of Architecture of the University of Texas at Austin an assignment called “My Window”. It is a very quick exercise asking students to draw by hand a detailed section of the head and the sill of the window in their bedroom. I have always assumed that all my students have windows in their bedrooms. It is a basic expectation among American architects that for a room to be a legal bedroom, it must have a window. I have repeated this as a mantra as well in my architecture and urban design studios.

Well, I am afraid I must stop repeating it. Last fall, I learned that I have students whose bedrooms have no windows. I could not believe it when they first told me, thinking that perhaps shady landlords were illegally renting them large closets as bedrooms. But that is not the case. Many UT students rent perfectly legal windowless rooms in brand-new residential buildings mushrooming west of UT’s campus. The transformation of this neighborhood in the last few years has been hailed as a poster child of success by advocates of higher density in cities across the country. Unfortunately, it is coming at a cost to many students’ health and well-being.

Read the full piece here.