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A Look at Design School Dorms, Part 01: RISD First-Year Housing

By now you crazy college kids have had time to settle in to your Fall Semester ‘18, and your dorm room is starting to feel like home. But the curious among you must wonder: How does your dorm room stack up against the dorms from other design schools? In this series we’ll take a look at what each school offers.

First up: RISD housing for first-year students.

If you’re a freshman at RISD, you’re housed at one of six buildings in The Quad. This is regardless of what major you’ll eventually choose, so those of you planning to go into ID will be rubbing shoulders with the scum from inferior majors like Architecture, Photography and Animation.

All students have access to laundry facilities (even though we all know that Fine Arts majors don’t even do laundry), access to a kitchen (that the slobs from Animation will slowly destroy), shared bathrooms (which Fashion/Apparel folks will clutter with an appalling amount of product), work lounges (as if those lazy Photography people ever do any actual work), and a living room with sofas and a flatscreen TV. This latter one is important: Fighting over access to the remote control to the flatscreen will help first-year students build the social skills needed to navigate future contentious design firm meetings, where you must fight for what you believe in while figuring out how to pin the blame on others if the show turns out to suck.

You can have a single room if you prefer to smell your own farts, but if you enjoy the variety of many people’s farts you can also get a shared room.

Single Rooms offer:

- an “extra long” twin bed
- a dresser
- a desk
- a chair
- only yourself to blame when you lose something

For a 360-degree view of a Single Room, click here.

Shared Rooms (Double, Triple or Quad) offer:

- an “extra long” twin bed (for each student)
- a dresser or closet space (for each student)
- a desk (for each student)
- a chair (for each student)
- up to three other people that you can blame when you misplace your things and assume they have been stolen

For a 360-degree view of a Shared Room, click up above on the Single Room link and use your imagination. Because there was no 360-degree view of a Shared Room available at press time.

There are six dorms available in the Quad. Here are the floorplans and square footages for each:

Carpenter House

The Carpenter House conveniently offers two staircases, so that you’ve got a choice of which stairwell to sit and cry in after your high school sweetheart breaks up with you because s/he met somebody that’s like you but taller and better-looking at whatever college they decided to go to.

East Hall

As you can see, East Hall is much larger and can hold many more students to share a bathroom with, offering you ample opportunity to secretly try other people’s shampoos while jealously guarding your own.

Homer Hall

The relatively towering Homer Hall has a much more classical college dorm configuration, with orderly, repetitive room configurations. Communal bathrooms provide the opportunity to overhear gossip while you’re in a toilet stall. You’ll also learn to avoid that one shower stall that always seems gross in comparison to the others, favored by some hairy person who always clogs the drain.

Nickerson Hall

Like Homer Hall, Nickerson features long, communal balconies that only students living on the south side of the building have access to. This is the perfect spot for Southies to congregate and discuss how lame Northies are.

Pardon Miller House

Compared to the dense Homer and Nickelson Halls, Pardon Miller is a smaller structure consisting of only shared rooms, no singles. Loner-types who wind up in Pardon Miller can form the annoying habit of sighing and rolling their eyes every time one of their roommates walks in.

South Hall

Unlike Pardon Miller, South Hall offers single rooms–and even single basement rooms, for those who want to live both alone and below the surface of the earth.

The upper floors offer relatively massive suites with up to four rooms sharing two bathrooms, giving you the opportunity to decide: Are you the kind of person that uses up all the toilet paper and doesn’t load up a fresh roll afterwards? If so, do you feel good about yourself?

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Note: If you’re a RISD freshman that has anything to add–factoids, experiences, photos, videos–please let us know in the comments!