THE CATALYST BUILDING

The Catalyst Building

Lawrenceville Neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Literature Review

While higher education around the world is intended to help students attain intellectual competence, enliven personal character, and aid in forming patterns of behavior, thought, and imagination which should lead to a fulfilling living experience, campus housing as an integral component of the university plays a major role in promoting these objectives. Adequately planned residential facilities foster mutual interests and desirable educational outcomes. Suitable residential facilities provide cooperation, security, responsible citizenship, intellectual stimulation, mutual composition, and inspiration. Residential systems help enlarge a student's perspective and knowledge of disciplines other than his own through contacts with roommates of different backgrounds who are specialized in other fields of study . Therefore, the contribution of sustainable campus housing facilities in achieving the quest of improving the performance of students should not be underestimated. The term “sustainability” in the context of this paper refers to the capability of a building as an enabling resource, whether recently occupied or remodelled, to perform as was intended in its programming and design. Sustainable development may be defined as the type of development which is socially just, ethically acceptable, morally fair, where the environmental indicators are as important as the economic indicators.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation

A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) can provide valuable feedback to planners, design professionals, housing administrators and facility managers involved in the planning, design and operation of student housing facilities (Stollard 2003). POE can assist in continually improving the quality and performance of the student housing facilities they design, construct, operate and maintain. It is defined as “the process of systematically evaluating the extent to which a facility, once occupied for a period of time, meets the intended organizational goals and user-occupant needs” (Preiser et al., 1988). POE concentrates on building users and their requirements. It provides insights into the outcomes of past design decisions and the resulting building performance. This knowledge forms a sound basis for improving existing buildings and designing, constructing and operating better buildings in the future (Stollard 2003), which would qualify it as the paradigm of investigation for the purpose of the present research.

The origin of student housing facilities at Pittsburg

The initiative of campus housing as separate facilities dates back to the fourteenth century. The dominant school of thought at that time is that a college or a university is responsible for the total training of the individual, including social and personal education, and must provide student housing facilities (Chiara 2003). A new description for the term university has then emerged. The university has been described as “a society of individuals living and working together for the advancement of learning and the dissemination of knowledge”

The scheme of campus housing has been supported widely by professors at colleges who believe in the English collegiate tradition of being concerned with the “whole man”. The New College dormitories at Oxford - about AD 1400 - provided for a complete accommodation of teaching and living requirements. The same discipline was then followed by Cambridge, Harvard and ...