UO Yasui Hall and New Residential Hall

Yasui Hall and the (as yet unnamed) New Residential Hall is phase two of the Hamilton Walton Transformation Project, a three-phase, three-building residence hall and student life project.

Constructed on a single site, the two buildings work together to form shared courtyards. The 163,000-sf New Residence Hall contains academic spaces, a service center, a package locker delivery center, and residences for 705 first-year students. The 138,000-sf Yasui Hall contains micro studios and quad apartment layouts, equipped with private bathrooms and kitchens, for 400 upper division students.

For the new residence halls, many design elements were carefully weighed: massing, materials, sun angles throughout the year, creation of outdoor space, portals, campus pathways, street frontage, and more. Each façade, for example, responds to other parts of campus—the use of brick reflects the traditional style of the central campus while metal panels are a nod to more recent campus buildings. The façade treatment is also in dialogue with Unthank DeNorval Jr. Hall to introduce bond patterns that create a vertical gradient from dark to light and a gradient across the buildings from earth tones in the east to more traditional red tones nearer the campus core. There are also localized contextual responses, such as the southern façade of Yasui Hall that faces Hayward Field with bold, green and yellow, metal window trim.

Indoor and outdoor spaces are knit together throughout the buildings. The ground floor of the New Residence Hall has two active sides: street-facing classrooms and study spaces; views and doorways to access the interior courtyard. A key interior space is the Commons on the ground floor. Layered and inviting, the Commons features ample windows connecting students to the courtyard outside, while vivid graphics on select walls create surprising vantages. The University of Oregon color palette is both boldly and subtly woven into the space. Thematically, the colors and finishes relate to the overall building metaphor of movement from the forest (south) to the meadow (north).

Shared student lounges on every floor overlook outdoor spaces. In Yasui Hall, the exposed Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) floor/ceiling structure provides a warm atmosphere to welcome students into the central social space on each floor. Against full glass walls at the east and west sides of the lounges, the CLT serves as a backdrop for indirect lighting and becomes highly visible at night from surrounding courtyards.