To Chopra, increasing 24-hour access to student spaces around campus—like dining halls and libraries—would ameliorate crowding.

“We need to extend hours on all of our space,” he says.

Thinking outside the box may be key to maximizing the few—and often unusual—spaces available in the Houses.

“Kirkland House is a small House with very little space, so we have to be creative,” says Kirkland House Master Tom Conley.

Conley created a weight room two years ago for Kirkland residents, and this year he and his wife are offering a basement study room for Zen meditation.

Looking to the Long-term

But creative conversions of small basement rooms and beefing up of House gyms can only help so much, students and administrators say. At some point, the University will have to undertake significant renovations and construction projects to meet the ever increasing demands for student space.

Harvard’s purchase of the Hasty Pudding building in 2000 holds promise for helping to reduce the strains on the theater community, says Associate Dean of the College David C. Illingworth ’71 and others. A proposal to renovate the building, which is in serious disrepair and has awaited renovation for several years, has already been approved by the Harvard Corporation.

But that project comes with a pricetag of $23 million, a host of logistical and community-relations difficulties and will likely provide only a small increase in usable space to the arts community.

The prize that many students have their eye on is a larger and better-planned student center than Loker Commons.

Chopra says the College does not do enough to provide informal social spaces, a need which he says the high attendance at Council-sponsored movie nights made evident. He and others have suggested that the solution to the space problem may lie in locations that had not previously been used for students at all.

Most undergraduates will never venture above the ground-level shops of the Holyoke Center, as the skyscraper has houses administrators in some of the University’s important but obscure offices, such as the trademark licensing division, student receivables and planning and real estate services.

But the 10-story building with a gorgeous view of Harvard Yard is one of the most prime locations in the Square, and some wonder why its status as an administrative building is such a given.

“I hope the Holyoke Center could have uses more directly related to students of all kinds, but undergraduates especially,” Illingworth says. “Does the payroll office need to be in Holyoke Center? Many employees, myself included, seem to get paid without ever having to go there.”

He adds that the building could house a number of seminar rooms and classrooms, or even an entire department.