Hlafter ’61: Butler will have best dorm rooms

“Butler will have the most gracious and spacious rooming arrangements, surpassing Whitman [College],” Hlafter said. “It will have the most comfortable and convenient communal facilities, surpassing Forbes.”

Roughly 525 students will live in the new dorms, Butler College Dean David Stirk said at the discussion.

The new Butler dorms’ main advantage over Whitman will be the size and quality of the rooms, Hlafter said. While Whitman architect Dimitri Porphyrios GS ’74 spent a lot of money on exterior decoration, he explained, the architects in charge of designing Butler, Pei Cobb Freed, gave priority to utility instead.

Each room in Butler will have its own bathroom. “A lot of the money that at Whitman went into the exterior stonework, here [it] … went into the bathrooms,” Hlafter explained.

The new buildings will contain mostly quads and doubles, since the rooms in Bloomberg are mostly singles, Hlafter said.

Quads in Butler will come in two sizes: 607 square feet and 547 square feet. Both types of rooms will include a 67-square-foot bathroom. The doubles will consist of two 150-square-foot rooms joined by a bathroom.

Hlafter noted that bedrooms in the new Butler buildings will be more generously sized, explaining that University-provided furniture — such as a desk and dresser — should fit in the bedroom with bunked beds.

Hlafter contrasted this with Holder and Blair halls, in which “most of the furniture is in the common room because the bedrooms are too small.”

The lowest level of one of the new buildings will contain a convenience store and a servery to supplement the dining hall, Hlafter said. The servery will open into a courtyard with cafe tables, he added.

Hlafter also emphasized the effort the architects have made to make the construction environmentally sustainable. Plants on the roof will help drain water from rainstorms and offset the effect of the new construction on drainage.

“The benefit of a green roof is that it retains rainwater,” Hlafter explained. “Because water is retained in the plants, it takes a lot longer for that water to get to Lake Carnegie.”

Students are not allowed on building roofs as a general policy, Hlafter said, but noted that the University might make exceptions for students who want to conduct experiments on the effect of the roofs.

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Though the architects originally planned to include residences for Butler College masters and deans in the quad, they scrapped these plans in favor of more open space.

“The tradition of the masters living in the colleges goes back to Oxford and Cambridge, where everyone wanted to live within the walls because there were ruffians on the streets,” Hlafter said.

“That situation may still exist in New Haven,” he said, but added that many administrators at Princeton prefer to live in town.