New residence hall slated for campus

College of the Atlantic is adding a new, highly sustainable residence hall on campus with space for nearly 50 students, with funding made possible by the recent, $55 million Broad Reach Capital Campaign. Credit: OPAL Architecture The approximate 12,000-square-foot building will comprise double- and single-occupancy rooms, a fully outfitted, multi-stationed community kitchen, large common area with exposed mass-timber beams, and a covered outdoor area. The building is slated for the south end of campus.

The new dorm is part of a large and diverse set of solutions the college has been engaged with to alleviate housing woes among its student body, COA President Darron Collins ’92 said.

The new College of the Atlantic residence hall will be designed to Passive House principles, which include airtight construction, a high-efficiency envelope, and heat-recovery ventilation Credit: OPAL Architecture“As the rental and real estate markets have evolved over the past several years, creating more student housing has become one of our top priorities,” Collins said. “The COA student housing plan greatly increases our capacity on campus, and, along with other recent developments, should go a long way toward helping us provide a productive and beneficial living and learning environment.”

The new hall is designed to Passive House principles, which include airtight construction, a high-efficiency envelope, and heat-recovery ventilation. The 39-foot-tall building features mass-timber construction and wood-fiber insulation, and would use one-fifth of the energy of a similarly sized, code-compliant structure. The dorm would achieve net-zero energy usage with a 36 kW, rooftop solar array.

OPAL Architecture executive partner Tim Lock and his team designed the dorm through a collaborative effort with COA committees and the weekly All College Meeting. The project has been on an accelerated timeline since September 2021, and the college hopes to have students into the facility by fall 2023.

The new residence hall at College of the Atlantic will include spacious indoor and outdoor common areas for the 46 students who will live there. Credit: OPAL ArchitectureCOA is building housing to meet the needs of its students, and has no plans to increase the size of the student body, which is now at its capped level of 350 full-time-equivalent students, Collins said. The new residence hall is part of a bucket of solutions responding to an increasingly limited, increasingly expensive rental market in Bar Harbor and beyond, he said.

Current on-campus housing at COA provides space for 168 students, which is nearly half of the student body. The proposed residence hall would bring the number to 215. Off-campus purchases in recent years added a further 60 beds to the school’s roster, and the Mount Desert Center in Northeast Harbor, slated to open this summer, will add another 15 beds. In total, the purchases and plans represent housing for 290 students, or 83 percent of the student body.

The new College of the Atlantic residence hall will include a large, fully outfitted, multi-station kitchen. Credit: OPAL Architecture Nearly all of COA’s housing purchases, construction of the Mount Desert Center, and construction of the proposed new residence hall are funded by the college’s successful Broad Reach Capital Campaign.

The project will displace the faculty village, which comprises several small, shingled offices just off the south parking lot. The buildings will be moved to another location on campus.

OPAL Architecture, of Belfast, ME, designs buildings exclusively following Passive House principles. They established their leadership role in the Passive House movement in North America with a string of landmark projects, including the first Passive House-certified residence in Maine, the first Passive House-certified college residence hall, and the first Passive House-certified research laboratory. OPAL designed COA’s recent 30,000-square-foot Center for Human Ecology academic center in collaboration with Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture ● Design.

College of the Atlantic is premised on the belief that education should go beyond understanding the world as it is to enabling students to actively shape the future. COA is a leader in experiential learning and environmental stewardship, and has been named the #1 Green College in the U.S. by The Princeton Review since 2016. Every COA student designs their own major in human ecology—which integrates knowledge from across academic disciplines and seeks to understand and improve the relationships between humans and their natural, built, and social environments—and sets their own path toward a degree.