For two decades, UT Austin professor Juan Miró has given his undergraduate architecture students an assignment: Draw the window in your bedroom. The

Developers have built thousands of windowless bedrooms in Austin. Now, the city may outlaw them.

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2024-04-18 13:30:07

For two decades, UT Austin professor Juan Miró has given his undergraduate architecture students an assignment: Draw the window in your bedroom. The task for a class called “Architectural Detailing and Materials,” Miró says, is to get students thinking about the details of a room. The dimensions. The window. The windowsill.

When Miró gave this assignment in January 2022, several students raised their hands. They told him they couldn’t complete it. They didn’t have a bedroom window to draw.

It’s not illegal. Not in Austin. Building codes adopted by the city do not require natural light in apartment bedrooms, and developers have been designing and constructing windowless bedrooms since at least 2002. The majority of these rooms appear to be in student housing, tucked into buildings throughout West Campus, the neighborhood immediately west of the university.

“Windows should be a human right,” Miró says, arguing that the health benefits of natural light should outweigh the need for more student housing. “A lot of students went through the pandemic in those windowless rooms. … They were telling me, ‘It’s horrible.’”