Between the smallest scale of roommates and the largest scale of the whole 250-to-500-person Quad, there is a fundamental need for a scale of community that is structured around the natural social niche of thirty to sixty people for QuadEx to be successful at building and sustaining real communities within the model.
My hope is that Duke will have the bold leadership and creative vision to grow these seeds of belonging into some mature and flourishing evergreens, so that QuadEx may one day be a name for something beloved and lasting. Until then, students, alumni, and other university stakeholders should continue to be critical and insist that we can do better. I know I will.
If you happen to love the Bryan Center, then I can only applaud you for what amounts to building a house on the side of a steep mountain and making the best of poor circumstances. My aim here isn’t to make everyone hate the BC, just to expose some of the implicit ways its structural arrangement fails to foster the kind of integrated, collaborative, equitable environment that Duke’s current values align with. Your emotional reactions, attachments, or rejections of the building are your own to cherish or abhor, but in either case my aim is to provoke a closer, more critically engaged look at the built spaces that make up Duke.
Another perspective, however, has been absent from the stream of discussion, one which I’d like to make a gentle but thorough case for; that QuadEx is a seriously good idea that will unequivocally improve the student experience of living at Duke.
The built environment generates stories, and the stories attach flesh to stage, script, choreography, actors, performances, and reviews. Three intentions and three actions, three forms and three interactions of content — all six a standard set to understand design at Duke.
Written as gerunds to communicate their ongoing and perpetual nature, these categories overlap and fracture into smaller ones and so are inexhaustive, but nevertheless serve to illustrate the story of the past few years.
Next time you take a walk around campus, notice the trees that compose the forest our university sits within.
Duke is composed of several categories of people who hold a stake in the university and care about what it does and what happens to it. Like an urban mural or a ceiling fresco, I want you to picture them all arranged in a close group how they’re normally not pictured: right next to each other, sitting around a table, talking in earnest about the place they all love.
Remember that your world at Duke is full of very deep thinkers besides yourself, and consider often the benefit of entering into others’ ways of knowing.
There’s so much we can’t perceive in the social interactions we have with each other due to the necessary restrictions of a global pandemic, but from at least six feet away and even beneath the veil of a face mask, a person’s gait can communicate their very self through the mundanity of getting from one place to another.
