Cushing House

Cushing House is a four-story co-ed dormitory on Vassar College's campus in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York. A response to freshmen overcrowding, the college's Board of Trustees hurried the Allen & Collens-designed building, named for college librarian and alumna trustee Florence M. Cushing, to construction and completion in 1927. Cushing was originally designed as eight smaller houses with euthenic principles in mind, but ended up as a single U-shaped dormitory in the Old English manor house style with Jacobean interior furnishings. Students of all grades may live in the house which houses up to 202 in single, double, and triple rooms and are referred to as "Cushlings". Throughout Cushing's history, various proposals and plans have incited controversy among the building's residents, including designating one of its wings as all-black housing and converting one of its common areas into eight single rooms. Contemporary reviewers have looked favorably upon Cushing's aesthetic qualities, declaring it to be one of Vassar's most beautiful buildings.

Before Cushing House's construction, Vassar College in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, faced a surplus of students and too few available rooms, a situation deemed an "emergency" by the Board of Trustees. For the first quarter of the twentieth century, one third of the college's freshmen were housed off campus due to rising enrollment over that period. The Board voted in 1925 to move all students to on-campus housing, acknowledging the lack of adequate space for the move but pledging that they would swiftly build more. The following year, the Board voted to begin construction on the new hall without first securing funding for the building, trusting that the "friends of the College" would meet the financial demands of the project. In the meantime, the house was built using loaned funds, with the total project cost coming to $400,000.

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