New dorm expected to ease housing crunch at Bar Harbor college

Courtesy / College of the Atlantic College of the Atlantic's new dorm, shown here in a rendering, is being built to alleviate housing woes in an expensive and tight market.

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By Jessica Hall

College of the Atlantic, the private liberal arts college in Bar Harbor, plans to help alleviate housing woes for students with construction of a 50-person residence hall.

The 12,000-square-foot building will include double- and single-occupancy rooms, a community kitchen, large common area with exposed mass-timber beams, and a covered outdoor area. The building is proposed for the south end of campus, in an area just off the south parking lot that now holds several small, wooden buildings, which will be moved.

“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,” COA President Darron Collins said in a news release. “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 college aims to have students in the facility by the fall of 2023.

The 39-foot-tall building features mass-timber construction and wood-fiber insulation, and would use one-fifth 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 input the weekly meeting with students.

OPAL, based in Belfast, also designed the college’s 30,000-square-foot Center for Human Ecology academic center in collaboration with Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture and Design.

The college is creating the housing to meet current needs of its students, and has no plans to increase enrollment, which is now at its capped level of 350 full-time-equivalent students, Collins said. The new residence hall is in response to the limited and increasingly expensive rental market in Bar Harbor and beyond, he added.

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% of the student body.

Nearly all of COA’s housing purchases, construction of the Mount Desert Center, and construction of the proposed new residence hall are funded by a recent capital campaign.