Nicholas Chrapliwy

Articles

OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

QuadEx could be great. Here’s how (Part II)

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | March 6, 2024

Between the smallest scale of roommates and the largest scale of the whole 250-to-500-person Quad, there is a fundamental need for a scale of community that is structured around the natural social niche of thirty to sixty people for QuadEx to be successful at building and sustaining real communities within the model.

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

What QuadEx needs to be great

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | February 13, 2024

My hope is that Duke will have the bold leadership and creative vision to grow these seeds of belonging into some mature and flourishing evergreens, so that QuadEx may one day be a name for something beloved and lasting. Until then, students, alumni, and other university stakeholders should continue to be critical and insist that we can do better. I know I will.

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

The Bryan Center is anti-human

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | January 31, 2022

If you happen to love the Bryan Center, then I can only applaud you for what amounts to building a house on the side of a steep mountain and making the best of poor circumstances. My aim here isn’t to make everyone hate the BC, just to expose some of the implicit ways its structural arrangement fails to foster the kind of integrated, collaborative, equitable environment that Duke’s current values align with. Your emotional reactions, attachments, or rejections of the building are your own to cherish or abhor, but in either case my aim is to provoke a closer, more critically engaged look at the built spaces that make up Duke.

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

Redesigning Duke: why QuadEx is good, actually

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | October 22, 2021

Another perspective, however, has been absent from the stream of discussion, one which I’d like to make a gentle but thorough case for; that QuadEx is a seriously good idea that will unequivocally improve the student experience of living at Duke. 

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

A glimpse into the rich architecture of West Campus

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | September 23, 2021

The built environment generates stories, and the stories attach flesh to stage, script, choreography, actors, performances, and reviews. Three intentions and three actions, three forms and three interactions of content — all six a standard set to understand design at Duke. 

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

Moving image

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | April 24, 2021

Written as gerunds to communicate their ongoing and perpetual nature, these categories overlap and fracture into smaller ones and so are inexhaustive, but nevertheless serve to illustrate the story of the past few years.

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

The university in their forest

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | April 16, 2021

Next time you take a walk around campus, notice the trees that compose the forest our university sits within.

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

Holding the stakes: archetypes of the Duke community

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | April 2, 2021

Duke is composed of several categories of people who hold a stake in the university and care about what it does and what happens to it. Like an urban mural or a ceiling fresco, I want you to picture them all arranged in a close group how they’re normally not pictured: right next to each other, sitting around a table, talking in earnest about the place they all love.  

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

The bus ride: A scene for the breadth of knowing

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | March 23, 2021

Remember that your world at Duke is full of very deep thinkers besides yourself, and consider often the benefit of entering into others’ ways of knowing. 

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OPINION  |  STUDENT VOICES COLUMNS

Gait: The theater of personal movement

By Nicholas Chrapliwy | February 8, 2021

There’s so much we can’t perceive in the social interactions we have with each other due to the necessary restrictions of a global pandemic, but from at least six feet away and even beneath the veil of a face mask, a person’s gait can communicate their very self through the mundanity of getting from one place to another. 

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