www.livejournal.com/users/nibot/175102.html
I don't know if I would want to live there myself, but I think it's the sort of place we need. You can spend hours there just absorbing the drawings on the walls. Unfortunately Chateau is the biggest headache for the 16 USCA as well, with twenty-two neighbors banded together in an 17 evil conspiracy to take Chateau off the 18 map. Some of the proposals are patently ridiculous -- such as to convert it to grad student housing or women-only housing. This would destroy Chateau, and there are already too many female vacancies in the USCA. Better plans involve various plans for "revitalization," which might or might not work. Another proposal is to split the house -- which is physically three houses, side by side -- into three distinct co-ops, which would have the advantage of boosting personal responsibility in any given house. But I have not gone to any of the meetings about the Chateau situation, so I don't know what is being seriously considered. I can't help but think this might be a good opportunity to put one of my pet project ideas into the general consciousness: designate one of the Chateau houses as a DEL: hacker house :DEL engineering theme house. We have a 20 grad student house, two 21 women-only 22 houses, an 23 african-american themed house, a 24 queer house, and a 25 vegetarian house. I think an engineering house could be particularly interesting. We 26 don't have one (although 27 CZ might come close in spirit). Engineering/tech themed houses have achieved considerable success and notoriety at other schools. An engineering themed house would provide an environment (a 31 great place) in which the housemates would collaborate on their assorted crazy projects. This could even be a resource for the USCA, as such a house could be a development center for useful co-op technologies, such as 32 solar energy, or the planned co-op to co-op 33 wireless network. The main resource at the house would of course be the collaborative powers of the residents, but I am sure the ensuing accumulation of equipment (tools, components) would also be very handy. Combining the house with an arts theme could have particularly interesting results. I think that it would be great to have such a house in Berkeley, and as part of the USCA in particular, and perhaps the situation with Chateau is a good opportunity to begin talking about this idea, even if it's not implemented at Chateau. Check out this 35 awesome directory of bay-area cooperative housing. On another note, why don't we have any kind of inter-coop electronic bulletin board / mailing list, so that we can correspond easily with the coopers at schools nearby (UCSC) or far away ( 36 UMich co-ops)? Ridge and Cloyne are as close to engineering theme houses as you're going to get. Now, the Cloyne nerd spirit is pretty cool, but they already have a house, and it's 30 seconds from where they need to be. The other problem with Berkeley is that there is no engineering spirit. Most of the cool and creative engineers (you excepted, of course) to go real schools, like MIT and Caltech. An engineer house here would look like Cloyne and be as interesting as Foothill. We're full of physicists who like to think they're engineers, I guess, because we do have the reputation of building cool stuff. Most nerds would probably not appreciate being so close to People's Park either. I lived in Cloyne for 4 years and was part of the "nerd crue" and I have to say that Cloyne and Ridge are as close to a nerd house as the USCA gets. It's bad enough "hackers" think they're better than everyone and use complexity to hide their laziness at designing decent computer interfaces. If you isolate engineers away from (face it) their CLIENTELLE, you're going to get issues like unusability of products, sociopathy, 52 which could have disastrous results. Also, you're on the wrong side of campus to snarf free wavelan from Soda. Kidd hall is your best chance, if you move in 9 ppl into kidd hall you have majority bloc.
|
http://csua.com/feed/