On Wednesday, September 10, the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture (COA) hosted a conference on sustainable design with Architectural Record, a major architectural journal. This is not about the event itself, though I am going to try to get a review out for next week.
The event took over much of Crown Hall. I was trying to study at some of the tables, and was playing music through my fairly good quality noise-cancelling earbuds at a reasonably high volume. But it wasn’t enough to block out the sound. I was trying to get studio work done while working in the studio, but I couldn’t focus because of the event going on. The Graham Resource Center (a small library for the COA in the basement of Crown Hall) was the only place I was able to find in the building that was even sort of tolerable for study.
Now, I actually really liked this event, and I frankly wish I’d been able to go to more of it. I would’ve loved to attend Jeanne Gang’s entire presentation rather than getting random bits and pieces when I could dart out from studio class. I wish it wasn’t running during class time, but I’m glad we had it on campus. It was a great opportunity.
That said, holding it in an active academic building made it incredibly difficult to try to get work done. We have Hermann Hall, which was designed to be a conference center, available on campus. And as far as I know, there weren’t any major events going on in Hermann at that time. I get that it makes sense to hold an architectural conference in an architectural building, but they’ve held industry-specific conferences there before; I remember there being a machine learning conference once, not too far back. It’s designed for conferences and makes sure students can actually work and study in a class space.
This is a recurring issue that I’ve brought up before, but it’s back this year as well. Tours are still going to certain dorm floors on campus, and when I was applying for housing, I didn’t see anything notifying students that said, “hey, this floor is going to be used for tours”; as someone who used to live on one of those floors, it makes you paranoid to even go take a shower, because you don’t know who will be outside your door. I have also seen large groups of reserved tables in the Commons (and the people they were reserved for weren’t using them, and were taking up regular tables).
Anecdotally, when planning events for a club, I’ve tried to reserve event spaces (such as certain rooms in Hermann or even the conference rooms in the Pritzker Club) that were available on certain dates, so clubs could reserve them for events. Sometimes, we’ve just been denied without any explanation given, and on at least two occasions, we were told to instead plan the events in dorm lounges. This also makes it functionally impossible for off-campus students to attend without extensive planning. We actually tried to reserve spaces for events or activities, and were sent to student spaces instead. (Side note: this was during the period that neither Rachel Hirsh nor Patrick Fina worked here, so maybe this was an issue of a lack of staffing in the Office of Student Life? But when taken as part of a larger pattern of events being forced into student spaces, I still think this is relevant.)
I’ve gone somewhere to study and found myself in the middle of the event at least a couple of times this semester. And given that, not all events that take up large spaces for students are on the 312 Campus Group event page (for instance, the Architectural Record conference was not announced on there), it can also be easy to think you’re going somewhere to work or study and run into something unexpectedly. It can also make it hard to figure out exactly what is going on when you get there or who is behind it — you know, information that is really important to have if you want to address an issue.
I’ve also had Public Safety tell me to leave areas or refuse to unlock rooms for me, even when I showed I had an event reservation that allowed me access. Functional access to spaces is as much of an issue as theoretical access. It’s not just about whether or not we can generally use spaces for students. There are issues of students being barred from student spaces even when they have approval to access them.
I will also acknowledge that this may somewhat be my perception (I started at Illinois Tech in 2021, when we were still dealing with some pretty substantial restrictions due to COVID-19), but I do think these events have been ramping up over the past few years. Again, some of this may be the perception just due to re-opening and other similar protocols, but I don’t think it’s entirely false.
And I’m not saying that we should get rid of all of these events. Like I said, I actually really liked the Architectural Record conference, and I’m glad we were able to host it. My request here is for the school administration to be better aware of how events like these impact students. If you want to host conferences on campus, that’s great! Would it be impossible to hold it in the spaces that are designed for conferences and not places that make it difficult or impossible for students to use academic study spaces? That’s all I’m asking for here. I just want the school to be more considerate of the students who are impacted whenever they take over student spaces. After five years here, I’m getting more than a little sick of this.