Collective, sweet collective
Collective, sweet collective
This December marks the beginning of the legendary renovation and expansion of Pentagon I. The plans have been made, and according to them we will get an extended row of Palisade-buildings in Nedre Pentagonvei while Pentagon I is expanded and renovated. This is amazing! The housing market in Ås is crazy (in August, up to 400 students were waiting for accommodation from SiÅs) and Pentagon is in dire need of renovation. But in the midst of all these good news, there is one thought bothering me: How will these new collectives and rooms look?
To present you with my big bias, that can be very relevant for this conversation, I live in the collective named Bohemen, and I have a love for unconventional decorating of house and home. There’s one thing you notice when you enter Bohemen for the first time, or rather, there is absolutely not one thing you notice. It’s easy to admire all the different objects decorating both ceiling, walls and floor. Bohemen is a great example of the students’ wish to make the collective theirs and into a proper home. You don’t need to travel far to find other such places among the students, with creativity flowing inside the four walls of the home. At Pentagon you have Hun- and Hankattloftet, (or Qulturens Høiborg and Faderloftet respectively), and a bit further away you find IVARinn, BEde and Sætra. This creativity does not only apply to the association homes. There is a bunch of creatively decorated, named collectives that do not belong to associations, like Kringla Badeland, Origo or Nonneloftet. TT cribs in Tuntréet last semester really shows the students’ wish to put their own twist on their homes.
With this in mind, the evolution of the construction of the student housing is a real shame. Everywhere, in both Tromsø, Trondheim and Ås, student housing is built in a way that does not support the students’ need for pictures or hooks on the walls. It seems Pentagon, that was built in the 60s, was designed with the student’s dance with the hammer in mind. The walls are covered in wood that is as easy to hammer a nail into than to swap out when needed. You can, with good will and clean conscience, paint your own sign and hang it on the wall, and in this way give your collective a special artifact to gather around and feel like a community. Now, the trend has changed and moved towards grey, sterile walls with furniture giving institution-vibes. In Ås, this is exemplified in Palisaden and Skogveien. Where all you get, if you’re lucky, is a pitiful, thin strip of wood in which you can hammer a nail so small that it barely supports its own weight. You can see that in practically every student home you visit, they try their best to decorate, given the circumstances. Even in Skogveien, you can find named collectives with special decorations, like Den Brente Baguette. Both Multi Tack, Scotch tape and countless other creative solutions are used to hang up pictures, drawings, semester programmes and other necessary (student) decorations.
It's good to have varied student housing of good quality, and there is a bunch of students out there who want to go from their room to a spotless shared space where pragmatism is king. But for everyone else’s sake, I beg SiÅs to think about the students’ creative soul when you plan the inside of the new Pentagon I. Support us, give us wooden walls into which we can hammer nails, give us an inside that doesn’t look exactly the same after ten years, but can be easily replaced and renovated when needed. In short, give us a clean canvas where we can paint our dream home.
Hoping for a future filled with creativity.
Radosław Dworak
Translator: Eva Weston Szemes
