A typical morning at James Madison University’s (JMU) Paul Jennings Hall starts off quietly, with students engaged in quiet study time throughout the common spaces. As the day progresses, students return from classes and animate the 500-bed residence hall, and by afternoon, the recreation room comes alive with students playing pool or watching television. Come evening, they gather to study—even those who don’t live in the building. 

“People would rather study with friends in Jennings than in their own dorm,” said Dalton Stroupe, who spent three years as the residence hall’s director. “Everyone who walks in is like, ‘Wow, this building is beautiful.’ And once you’re inside it has a great flow.” 

While it is a magnet for random encounters, the hub-like atmosphere of Paul Jennings Hall is anything but accidental. When the university planned the new building, which opened in 2019, administrators and architects were thinking not only about how to accommodate students but how to create opportunities for spontaneous connection that lead to improved wellbeing. 

College campuses have always been designed to bring people together. But amid growing concern about student mental health, loneliness, and belonging, architects and university planners are paying added attention to how the physical environment can shape student experiences. The emerging emphasis goes beyond attractive lounges and inviting green spaces to consider how building design might encourage interaction and help students feel part of a community. 

In April 2026, a report published by the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (which goes by its old acronym, NASPA) examined how intentional campus design can foster inclusion, engagement, and community. In “Spacing It Right: Designing Higher Education Institutions for Student Success,” a consideration of 12 attributes assesses how physical spaces, alongside institutional culture and practices, shape the student experience.

“Helping the campus community understand how spatial arrangements preclude or support retention, graduation, pedagogical innovation, and a host of campus priorities is an essential first step,” the report’s authors write. “All must realize that good space is not a luxury, but a key determinant of good learning environments.”

Designing for the Encounters 

Design decisions at JMU’s Jennings Hall ranged from the expected focal points—how to design the main common space—to intimate ones. One of the most deliberate choices involved the bathrooms. 

Ask most students what dorm bathrooms they prefer, and it would be the privacy of their own in small shared suites, said Holmes Browne, the associate director of facilities for JMU’s Office of Residence Life. But the university knew that bathrooms are one of the main flight paths that draw students from their rooms to interact with hallmates and create opportunities for unplanned, repeated conversations—the building blocks of familiarity, and friendship.

Paul Jennings Hall at James Madison University. Photo credit: VMDO Architects

“We were intentional about creating community baths so that we would get people out of their rooms,” Browne said.

The solution was a hybrid: shared bathroom areas with sinks and individual, fully private bathing-dressing pods. Students could have the privacy they wanted without remaining entirely secluded in their own suite units. Stroupe described the goal as “intentionally designing for community building that gives them the privacy they want but doesn’t take away the opportunity for them to meet other people.”

Other decisions similarly served more than one purpose. Rather than separating two residential wings, the university advocated for a connection between them—in part to preserve accessible routes if an elevator failed but also to further promote cross-class connection, with first-year students on some floors and upperclassmen on others.

That mix matters, Browne said, because younger students can observe how more experienced students navigate college life. And it creates a different social environment from residence halls occupied almost exclusively by first-year students.

"Each design strategy was linked to a measurable outcome, such as healthy eating, physical activity, or sense of belonging, so the design could be held accountable."

The university also included a faculty apartment and classrooms in Jennings as part of an effort to bring academic life into the residential setting. Students have the option to participate in residential learning communities organized around shared themes, taking classes and living alongside others with similar interests or academic areas.

Paul Jennings Hall at James Madison University. Photo credit: VMDO Architects

The architects guiding the effort—VMDO—have experience in designing with wellbeing front of mind. Brown credits them with a conscious design approach that paired each architectural decision with a social one: How can a building make it easier for students to encounter one another, develop relationships, and feel connected to the place where they live? The payoff of this approach was recognized by the juried Livable Buildings Award. Administered by UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment, the award is given annually to the single project that best exemplifies design, sustainability, and occupant satisfaction. Jennings is the first residential building of any kind to win it. But VMDO has also won for its design of two elementary schools—which like Jennings, had satisfaction surveys pointing to the happiness of its occupants. 

VMDO points to its people-first philosophy as a critical piece of its success in the education sector. “These are facilities designed to support vulnerable populations—children in the early stages of their development and young adults that, as a group, struggle with high levels of social isolation, anxiety, and depression,” writes Michelle Amt, a co-managing principal, in VMDO’s profile of the award achievement. ”The winning projects began with strategies that support health and well-being: abundant daylight and views, fresh air, and thermal and acoustic comfort. Spaces are designed to foster community, encourage connection, and reinforce a sense of identity, safety, and inclusion.”   

Built Spaces that Feel Human

At UC San Diego, architects held similar goals but on a much larger scale. The university’s North Torrey Pines Living & Learning Neighborhood brought approximately 2,000 student beds together with classrooms, dining, retail, outdoor gathering areas, and other amenities. The university faced competing pressures: a need for more affordable student housing in an expensive market, limited available land, ambitious environmental goals, and concerns about student mental and physical health.

For Renae Mantooth, a design researcher at HKS, the architectural firm behind the project, the challenge was to capture those institutional priorities in the experience of individual students.

“We translated those goals through an idea we call nested scales, designing intentionally for each scale of a student’s experience: the neighborhood, the building, the floor, the suite, and the room,” Mantooth explained. “Belonging built at one scale tends to carry into the next.”

At the neighborhood scale, that meant a walkable main street with dining and a market at its center, along with outdoor spaces intended to draw people together. At the building level, communal kitchens and gathering rooms offered places to meet. Within two-level residential suites, shared living rooms created smaller communities. Individual rooms included operable windows and opportunities for personalization.

North Torrey Pines Living & Learning Neighborhood at UC San Diego. Photo Credit: HKS

The idea was to make a large residential development feel human in scale, while giving students different levels of connection to choose from.

Much of the thinking drew on point-of-decision design, an approach developed through the Center for Advanced Design Research and Evaluation that seeks to make healthier behaviors easier and more appealing through the built environment. Visible stairs might encourage students to walk rather than take an elevator. Conveniently located food options could support the most nutritional choices. Gardens, bicycle routes, and shared kitchens could encourage dynamic interaction.

“Each design strategy was linked to a measurable outcome, such as healthy eating, physical activity, or sense of belonging, so the design could be held accountable,” Mantooth said.

That accountability distinguishes North Torrey Pines from many projects whose success is described primarily through architectural awards, photographs, or the enthusiasm of university administrators. At UC San Diego, the designers and researchers set out to find out how students actually responded after they moved in. The university’s Live-Learn Lab, conducted with HKS and research partners, studied students’ experiences in both older residential facilities and the new North Torrey Pines neighborhood. Researchers surveyed students, conducted focus groups, and observed how they used outdoor spaces.

The findings were encouraging in several respects. The report documented an 8.2 percent lower average self-reported depressive-symptom score among students in the new neighborhood, along with a nearly 28 percent increase in satisfaction with residential spaces and a roughly 13 percent increase in satisfaction with campus social spaces.

North Torrey Pines Living & Learning Neighborhood at UC San Diego. Photo Credit: HKS

A subsequent peer-reviewed study, published in the Journal of College and University Student Housing in 2024, also found significantly lower depressive-symptom scores among first-year students living in the new facilities compared with those in the older residences, after accounting for differences in overall life satisfaction. 

Interstingly, the researchers’ observations also suggested that students experienced social connection in ways that conventional measures might not fully capture. In the neighborhood’s outdoor spaces, researchers recorded more instances of social activity than solitary activity. Students tended to gather near active destinations such as the dining hall and market. Those spending time alone often chose quieter places where they could still see other people. The researchers came to see the importance of providing places where students could see and be seen, as well as places where they could observe without being the center of attention.

“Even seeing other people being social makes me feel being part of a college campus,” one first-year student told the researchers. Another student described a favorite feature of the residence halls: “I like to look outside and see the community and not feel stuck.”

And the students themselves found uses for the architecture that the designers hadn’t necessarily anticipated. Large residence-hall windows became informal galleries, displaying artwork, messages, pop-culture references, and expressions of personal identity. They offered ways to communicate with neighbors and the larger campus community.

The findings pointed toward an important lesson: Opportunities for connection matter, but so do comfort, individuality, and a sense of control over one’s surroundings. The peer-reviewed analysis found that satisfaction with students’ private residential spaces was a particularly important predictor of lower depressive-symptom scores, underscoring the value of the immediate environment in which students spend so much of their time.

As one first-year student told the Live-Learn Lab researchers, “My room [is my favorite place on campus] because that’s the place that I can relax without anyone seeing.”

Knowing You’re Welcome

Back when he was a high school student, Andrew, a student at George Washington University, developed an interesting way of evaluating college campuses with his family. During a tour of one technical school in upstate New York, he was struck by how few comfortable places there seemed to be to sit around campus. There were hard metal benches, but little that suggested students were expected to stop, relax, or spend time together.

“The benches were awful, just these metal tubes to perch on, It became a joke with my family—people here never stop and sit down, ever,” he recalled. Other campuses made a different impression. He remembered one college with hammocks on the quad and another with Adirondack chairs facing a grand view. “It just gives a vibe as to whether or not students hang out,” he said.

When Andrew arrived at GW and moved into the renovated Thurston Hall, the largest first-year residence at the Foggy Bottom campus, he found plenty of places to sit both indoors and out. This was no accident; an overt goal of the renovation was to reduce the building’s density by enhancing and expanding the courtyard and access to natural light in the terraced hang-out space that opens right onto F street and the urban rhythm of D.C.

“There were so many places to sit down and chill,” he said. “The question was just whether or not I was going to study in it.”

His experience captures something that architects and campus planners increasingly try to account for: Students make quick, intuitive judgments about whether a place invites them in. 

At Western Michigan University, that question helped shape an entirely new student center. Rather than simply providing an impressive but generic central gathering space, the university and architects at CannonDesign sought input from a wide range of students—including commuters, graduate students, members of affinity groups, and students with disabilities—to understand what would make the building welcoming.

The resulting student center, which opened in 2023, includes a large central atrium lit by skylights designed to be a flexible and accessible place for individuals and events. Throughout the building, students have options of private, semi-private, and public student gathering spaces and amenities that acknowledge different cultural and personal needs, including a prayer and meditation room and an ablution room. The designers also considered different degrees of social engagement, from busy gathering spaces to smaller quiet areas.

“The building can look beautiful, but if students don’t feel connected to it, it won’t matter,” Christopher Sligh, Western Michigan’s director of student engagement, told CannonDesign.

Architecture that Opens the Door

Of course, there are limitations to what good architecture can do. Even the most carefully designed building cannot make students form friendships or become involved in campus life. But maybe, just maybe, if you design activity hubs and classroom spaces directly into a residential footprint, the engagement will rub off.

At JMU, Browne has seen that firsthand in the residential learning communities. The building includes spaces intended to bring students and faculty together, but the success of those communities depends heavily on the people involved.

“We’ve had programs be super successful, but it tends to be because you’ve got a faculty member that’s really passionate about it, building that community,” he said. When that commitment is missing, even a promising residential program can struggle to attract students or sustain itself.

When Stroupe sees JMU’s shared spaces hum with student activity, he can’t help thinking it’s one of reasons some students choose to return to Paul Jennings beyond one year—not a common occurrence in residential life.

That’s perhaps the most pithy description for designing for belonging: creating the right conditions for successful, healthy living. Architecture can’t create relationships or happiness, but it can offer them fertile ground. The proof that it’s been effective can be as simple as watching them grow.