With the fall 2005 opening of RISD’s largest residence hall ever, 500 more upperclass and graduate students are now housed on campus - in a 12-story former bank building known as 15 West (for its location, 15 Westminster Street). This housing expansion represents a 65-percent increase on a campus that was previously able to accommodate only 790 of its 2,300 students and means that well over half of RISD’s student body is living in campus housing for the first time in the school's history.

Conceived as an unusual pairing of RISD’s library on the first two levels and student housing on the upper floors, 15 West is poised to change the way RISD students work, interact and experience their increasingly urbane campus. “For students, it provides appealing riverside accommodations designed to meet their needs for comfort, security and close proximity to studios,” notes President Roger Mandle. “For the rest of the on- and off-campus communities, who are welcome to use the ground-floor facilities, 15 West offers an attractive destination and a bright spot in the ongoing revitalization of downtown Providence, not to mention helping to reduce the impact of college students on the city's tight housing market.”

To solve the need for appealing, centrally located housing, RISD entered a long-term lease agreement with Gilbane Properties, Inc., which renovated the building in a year. Before designing the interior of 15 West, Mónica Ponce de León of Office dA, the concept architects for the space, and Janet Stegman BAR ’78 of STEGMAN + Associates: Architects, a student housing specialist, talked with students at length to determine exactly how they prefer to live. In response to their preferences, 15 West is configured with three distinct styles of housing: on floors 3-5, each living unit offers two sleeping/living rooms that share a common entrance, a small food prep area and a private bathroom; on floors 6-9, three- and four-person apartments feature single bedrooms, full kitchens and generous living/dining areas; on floors 10 and 11, lofts with private baths come in mini, studio, double and two-bedroom configurations.

“As you go up, the building offers progressively more independent lifestyles,” explains Brian Janes, RISD’s director of Residence Life. “In terms of creating a useful building, it was a really smart way of doing it,” Stegman says. Since students on each floor live in the same type of housing, it helps “reinforce the sense of community,” she says. And the alcove units on floors 3-5 - double rooms with Tyvek-curtained sleeping alcoves for each student - “are very inventive and very special for this particular user group, and may in fact be a good model for other colleges.” Most importantly, Stegman says, the alcove units address the way art students live, with a need for more open space than most but the same desire for privacy.

All of the housing styles have a spare but warm feel, with large windows, unfinished birch ply cabinetry, Tyvek multipurpose drapes, heavy-duty carpeting and custom furniture from the new Sage line designed by RISD faculty members. “The interior aesthetic is very RISD,” Stegman says; “it's more spare and minimal than at other colleges, which really allows the students to create their own spaces.” Due to the H-shaped configuration of the building and the desire for variation, each housing module is carved out of the overall floor plan differently: some have more walls and smaller rooms, and others have larger, open spaces. “Wherever you are in 15 West, it doesn't have that barracks feel of so many traditional dorms,” notes Janes.

As a convenience to residents of 15 West and anyone else who frequents the west side of campus, a new full-service café has also opened on the ground floor of the building. Designed by ADD Inc in Cambridge, MA and featuring the work of several RISD alumni - who designed everything from wallpaper to lighting fixtures - the portfolio café offers a wide variety of light fare, a coffee bar and extensive cold foods either to go or to enjoy on site, where seating is available for close to 100 people. “15 West is a fabulous project,” Stegman concludes. “It's kind of like kismet, with everything coming together - the donation of the library space, the developer's willingness to give RISD what it wanted, the faculty members who designed a new line of furniture, the café. Everyone went out on a limb to create something students would really appreciate.”