Mourning a Common Space
When I first moved into the Co-op, Wash U’s intentional community dedicated to cultivating a safe and non-hierarchical space on campus, what struck me most was the living memory of the space. Walls were painted lime green and canary yellow and deep blue, filled with names and quotes written in sharpie. We could never get the thin layer of grime off the floor made from years of student’s trekking dirt into the apartment. Old paintings and uneven chairs gathered in living rooms, standing proudly in corners despite missing legs and chipped paint. A shoddy bunk bed had been built in my room by an unknown resident, the beams so precariously balanced that I did not dare to climb on it. Every time I walked down into our basement, I lost myself in the stacks of records and piles of books that always reassured me that no matter how lost I felt, someone had lived there and had been through this struggle before me.
The WashU Co-op was conceptualized between 2003 and 2005 by architecture students Chloe Byruck and Dan Koff, who during their sophomore year, proposed starting a residential Co-op on campus as part of their self-created Social Design major. In the fall of 2003 Chloe and Dan pitched their idea to university administration who loved the idea and gave them funding to renovate an intentional space that fostered tight-knit social relationships. By mid 2005 renovations were complete, and until spring 2019 various students have lived in and interacted with the Co-op as an event space and living community.
Every day I walk past new glass buildings and have discussions in classrooms with antiseptically white walls, all indifferent to my presence.
My time at the Co-op has made me critically reflect on the impersonal spaces that characterize my experience of this university. As an underclassman, I had been used to a cycle of dorm life wherein one has to erase all proof of their existence in the room at the end of every year. Every day I walk past new glass buildings and have discussions in classrooms with antiseptically white walls, all indifferent to my presence. The collegiate gothic style of our brick buildings that is consistently reproduced in campus construction efforts implies a historical timeline that I will never have access to and campus planning entities over which I will never have influence.
Living somewhere with a tangible history, with a memory that I could touch, see, and feel all around me profoundly impacted my well-being. In our building that centered around the renovated basement, I found a history I could actually participate in, and it gave me the agency to alter space in a way that I had never experienced before in my time at this university. At times I burnt the meals I cooked for Thursday potlucks and filled our communal kitchen with smoke, but that hardly mattered as I served my meals to community members. In 3W, the apartment above mine whose residents made it their mission to decorate every wall with an ever-changing mural, I painted my favorite lines of Spanish poetry and patterns of triangles that spanned continents. I hung up framed prints in my room and tacked lights along the bunk bed I slept under and finally saw myself in the structures around me. I felt like I belonged and like I was not the only one disregarded by the university. I knew I could always return to the memory we created together and to this space and to find others who shared a commitment to the goals of our community.
We eat and cook together in each other’s individual apartments, constantly redefining the meanings of personal boundaries. We enter each other’s spaces, at times stumbling and mis-stepping through another person’s carefully constructed world.
We are a community persisting despite immense loss and struggling to maintain this memory as Wash U forced us out of our building at the end of spring semester 2019. In destroying our space, Wash U reinstated the power of institutional memory that endlessly repackages the commercialized university experience for incoming classes. What the university chooses to memorialize are the events or developments that give it a more recognizable name: our sites for the 1904 World’s Fair, our top ranked dorms, our state of the art labs. The never-ending cycle of construction perpetuates the feeling that every graduating class or torn down building was only worth as much as it could contribute to Wash U’s quest for higher prestige. Our displacement from our building hurts not only the existence of the only official affordable housing option for students but also a different mode of memory that empowers students to manifest their visions in university spaces.
We live together in an off-campus building and intend to live by the same values as before, but it is immensely hard to do so without a common space. In the absence of university support, the Co-op primarily exists now in our hopes and the actions we take towards each other. We eat and cook together in each other’s individual apartments, constantly redefining the meanings of personal boundaries. We enter each other’s spaces, at times stumbling and mis-stepping through another person’s carefully constructed world. We address the hurt. We come together to enact solutions. We continue to move through spaces with the weight of a new memory, one formed in the recognition of another’s tender home that they create for themselves in the image of a common space found only in our shared dreams.
