Owner Woningcorporatie Woonbedrijf plans to add another 93 of the furnished units this summer. These new space boxes will also be stacked in two blocks of three storeys high in the grass between the Corona building and the bicycle road next to the Dommel in the neighborhood of the existing boxes. What is it like to live in a space box?

On a Monday evening extra chairs are put round the table of Firat Gelbal, a Master student of Business Information Systems from Turkey. He has invited about seventeen people in his space box for a Dutch ‘stamppot’ party. “How many people fit into a space box? Hopefully we break the record this evening”, he jokes. Two Dutch friends will do the cooking and let the international students try typical Dutch winter food. “Last month we got together for a sushi party”, says Önder Uzun, one of Firat’s neighbors.” These gatherings of the space box students are fairly rare. Most of the time the students eat alone. “The small kitchen is reasonably well-stocked, but cooking for more than four people is awkward”, Önder explains.

Red and green
Gosia Perz, doing her Master’s in Human Technology Interaction and coming from Poland, thinks it really cool to live in a space box: “You have your own bathroom and kitchen and you don’t have to clean after one another.” She points out a striking feature of the furnished units. The carpet and the chairs come in five colors of which green and red are the most popular. Master student Melike Bozkaya from Istanbul, who has been attributed the dark blue version, would prefer the more lively green chairs too.

“In the beginning I felt quite isolated here, but that’s better now, because I have got to know more people. Although I like living alone, the campus can be very quiet especially when the TU/e is closed. Sometimes it is boring that you don’t see much of the city here, but it is nearby”, she adds. Still, Melike misses a shared living room where you can meet and get together.” This remark is heartily confirmed by the other people present. They sum up: “a shared living room with if possible a television set, a pool table, play station, game computer, swimming pool and, why not, a Jacuzzi.”

Dommel
What are the best boxes to live in? “You can best live downstairs if you don’t like climbing stairs, but you have more privacy, meaning fewer people looking in, if you live on top”, explains Derya Sever, a Master student of Operations Management and Logistics from Ankara. She is glad with her red furniture, but she doesn’t like her view of the parking lot. “The view of the Dommel is better.” She also likes the small platform in her room by the window and the round table: “The rooms are nice and comfortable.”

The open metal floors on the outside of the boxes are “functional, but they don’t keep you dry when it rains”, according to Gosia, “and you shouldn’t drop your keys. The other night I saw someone with a flash light looking for his keys under the units on the ground floor. He found them eventually.”

But those are small drawbacks, thinks Gosia. “When something is broken, you can ring Vestide and they send someone to fix it within two days and it is quiet enough to study here”, adds Derya. “Although you can hear loud noise from your neighbors and the cabins can become quite hot in summer.” In the meantime plates with hodgepodge made by Thijs are passed on. There is ‘vlaflip’ as a dessert followed by many cakes brought by the visitors. “Just like home, when everybody brings a lot of food”, sighs Arya Adriansyah, a Master student of Computer Science and Engineering from Indonesia./.