Room 65’s Potential

A Third Place

In his opening address to incoming Yale students, Dean Peter Salovey encourages incoming students to find a third place.  Salovey’s model differs slightly from Victor Gruen’s more widely known model for a third place, which defines home as a primary place and work as a secondary place and states that third places should be areas where communities gather and converse, hang out and connect with others. Gruen’s vision is of an idealistic space where people congregate to and feel comfortable with others around.  Salovey starts with a similar idea, that a third place should not be somewhere that you would regularly spend a good amount of time , it should be a separate escape. Salovey’s interpretation, however, stresses the importance of feeling creatively and intellectually comfortable in a space, whether that space is in a populated or isolated area (Salovey 2).  He goes on further to say that finding a proper third place increases the chance of success, so designating a space as a third place defines its potential for being a useful space.


The creative design of Room 65 gives it a comfortable and welcoming vibe, and this vibe allows it to be used flexibly and become a third space.  Some aspects of the room that support this appear below.

The collection of colorful old posters behind the piano brighten the space and offer contrast with the bland white walls.

Piano and Posters

View of the front of the room from the back

The focal point of the room is the programmable electric piano that sits in the front center.

Paino Player (2)

Musical Practices Often Center Around the Piano

The large variety of seating options allow large groups to gather and transform the space to better collaborate on whatever artistic endeavor they are pursuing at the moment.

Wide View of Back

Just a few of the mobile seating options in Room 65

If you happen to be working while another person practices, you may even hear some soothing sounds leak through the walls, like this piano melody.

A Good Space For Collaboration

The best thing about Room 65 is its creative potential.  Many critics, like David Fleming, agree that a space needs to be open and foster collaborative discourse in order to be successful, as productive rhetoric is a key aspect of good places, whether that place is as large as a city or as specific as a practice room.   When talking about places, Fleming says that “the design of the built world is always, implicitly or explicitly, the design of the discursive world (162*).  Another important aspect of successful spaces are flexible design features that can support a wide array of activities within a single space.  Spacial critic and architect Buzz Yudell contests that a good room “generates variations in scale and type of space, and accommodates program diversity with highly particular responses to campus context and topography” (Yudell 1).

Room With Bros

Room 65’s design allows groups to have productive creative collaboration

In room 65 both of these critical ideas are in effect, the space is designed and laid out to promote discourse, specifically of the musical variety.   The room contains a variety of cozy furniture pieces that normally face in and focus on the piano at the center of the room, and the piano tends to be the focus of a lot of musical practice.  The furniture however, is not fixed in position, and this lets the users of the space determine how they want the layout of the space to dictate its function.  The room’s sheer size allows larger groups, like the one pictured above, to spread out and comfortable use the space for whatever purpose they need, whether its an a capella practice or planning out a group skit for a talent show.   Basically, Room 65 is ready for whatever challenge, musical or collaborative, that gets thrown its way. The only problem is now is raising awareness of the space and connecting it to the larger building, and ultimately the campus.  The way I propose that this happens is with a new name.

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*Acknowledgment

Fleming, David (1998). The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the Dream of the Good City. Argumentation 12 (2):147-166.