CHATTING ROOM

The Academic Village was isolated from African Americans in the early days. The life footprints of African Americans are hidden outside the academic village and buried underground. So black students started using the black bus stop as a place to gather, and the BBS became popular again.

In the design of the BBS, a series of small chatting rooms are shelters for private use and stages for the public as well, mainly to encourage interaction and communication between different races. Inspired by the pattern of quilts created by a group of women who lived in the African-American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, the rectangle chatting rooms offer compositional flexibility unchallenged by other multi-piece patterns.

Two kinds of rectangle patterns, 10ft×10ft and 20ft×20ft, are used in the design. These rectangle patterns are used either directly for chatting rooms or planting and sitting edges that enclose a chat room and finally create four kinds of chat rooms, including secret squares, Chessboard corners, concentric squares, and reading blocks.