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Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm

• deleted 5y ago
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• devwastaken 5y ago
  If it has a kitchen with actual cooking, this is exactly how dorms should be designed. I don't care about having a window if there's ventilation. I care about affording it and not having another dumb kid to share that space with.
• Vaslo 5y ago
  “Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate.” Ever wonder why housing in communist countries is dark and small but subways are grand and built with marble?
• dqpb 5y ago
  Munger Hall, more like Munger Hell! I feel claustrophobic even if I’m in windowed room where the windows don’t open. You basically have to cross your fingers and pray that the HVAC system is superb and will remain superb indefinitely and without fail. Oh well, I guess this is fitting on many levels - it’s a reflection of the psychological boxes universities shove their students into, it’s an extension of how California promises utopia and then delivers dystopia, and it’s an example of the weakened minds and resolve of Santa Barbarans.
• wirthjason 5y ago
  This story brings back memories of my college days studying philosophy and reading about Jeremy Bentham’a Panopticon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon Philosophy classes should have a field day with Munger’s design and these kinds of social experiments.
• amarant 5y ago
  Huh, here in Sweden you can't include rooms without windows as living area. If this building was sold in Sweden, it would be listed as a pretty tiny house with huge storage/accessory areas.
  • mbg721 5y ago
    To a university, undergraduate students are kind of accessories, so it fits. The real money is in research grants and maybe athletics (although nobody seems to agree whether they cost more than they bring in).
  • musingsole 5y ago
    Much of the US has similar requirements, that any bedroom has 2 egress points. One of those points is usually a window, the other the door to the rest of the building. Idk how real estate works for large-scale dorm-blocks, but in my town, this would have to be listed as effectively a building full of storage closets. Starting to smell misinfo on this...
• theroqwpeo 5y ago
  As a previous comment pointed out this isn't the first of the Munger residence. You can read the student reviews here: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduate-residences-ann-arbor?reviews_page=1 https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
  • danso 5y ago
    Munger also helped fund (though not design, AFAIK) the Munger graduate residences at Stanford (which, AFAIK, weren't hated): https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-residence https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-resi... But a key thing at Stanford and UM is that these were graduate residences, with 1 to 1 bedroom and bath ratio, and full sized bedrooms. Not 8 undergrad pods per bathroom. [0] [0] https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-details-on-munger-mega-dorm/ https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-detai...
    • danso 5y ago
      as someone pointed out in another thread, and based on this other rendering, the bathroom-to-person ratio looks like 2 to 8 https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dorminset1.jpg https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dormi...
• bsanr2 5y ago
  >The dormitory’s nine identical residential floors would be organized into eight “houses” with eight “suites” (shown here) with eight bedrooms. Sounds unironically like something Scientology-adjacent.
• csours 5y ago
  OT, but don't you miss the Action Architect movies like Towering Inferno and Death Wish.
• black_13 5y ago
  Corona corners
• alabamamike 5y ago
  IDK, maybe letting your Gganbu design the mega dorm is a bad idea?
• AlexandrB 5y ago
  Can't wait for this to be featured on "eyesore of the month"[1]. [1] https://kunstler.com/featured-eyesore-of-the-month/ https://kunstler.com/featured-eyesore-of-the-month/
• Ajay-p 5y ago
  I do not have a problem with 4,500 students in a dormitory, it reminds me of a large resort hotel, but each room must have a window. Not just for sanity but safety.
• mikestew 5y ago
  I'm absolutely serious when I say that the second illustration of the "suites" bares a striking resemblance to the layout of the county jail I briefly stayed in in Anderson, Indiana. There a few differences I'll note: 1. The rooms in the jail were larger, but I did have a roommate, so I'm not sure which has the larger amount of personal space. 2. In jail, at least there were windows. 3. In jail, I only had to share the toilet with one other person. The dorm has eight people, and one pooper and shower? I'll take jail, thanks. 4. Jail didn't have a fridge and kitchen sink, however.
  • tinalumfoil 5y ago
    I think people you're underestimating how poor the conditions in most jails are. Maybe at Riker's island you share a toilet with less people, but it's dirtier, the healthcare will take 20 years off your life and there's good chance you'll get murdered before you get out.
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    Said jail wasn't located in Santa Barbara, situated in arguably one of the best climates in the world, and inmates aren't allowed to leave at their leisure to go enjoy said climate.
    • salawat 5y ago
      If your answer to a claim of crappy building is "go outside", you've admitted defeat in an architecture fight. Architecture is about making enclosed spaces work for you to obviate the need to go/have somewhere else.
• rainpain 5y ago
  8 people and one bathroom. WTF! Lotta people gonna be shitting in bags
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    My dorm freshman year had the same ratio. Didn’t seem to be a problem.
  • geodel 5y ago
    Perhaps there will be super pooper in common areas where 50 people can take dump at same time.
• mindcrime 5y ago
  From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this: A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: deathtrap. Building this is setting UCSB up to be the site of the next Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], Station Nightclub fire[2], or Hamlet Chicken Processing Plant fire[3]. At a first glance, based only on the information provided in the article, I'd say that there is basically NOTHING good about this idea. But I'll allow that there are other details that could change the dynamic. Still, the weight of history suggests the importance of taking a somewhat skeptical position towards any measure of hand-waving when it comes to fire safety. At the moment, color me skeptical. Edit: Let me add this... the linked article doesn't go into any real details about the fire safety aspects of this, so there's a lot of info we don't have without digging into other sources. One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories and this building is properly sprinklered, that would assuage some of my concerns, as a working sprinkler system is basically the single most important thing you can have to save lives in the event of a fire.[4] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plant_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plan... [4]: https://nfsa.org/2020/12/15/sprinkler-saves-proof-that-fire-sprinklers-save-people-and-property/ https://nfsa.org/2020/12/15/sprinkler-saves-proof-that-fire-...
  • giarc 5y ago
    As point out elsewhere, 2 entrances doesn't mean 2 egress points. There are likely lots of one way doors out of the building.
    • mindcrime 5y ago
      History suggests that the primary ingress/egress points are the only ones worth considering. Emergency doors have a nagging tendency to be obstructed, hidden, barricaded or even flat-out locked even when they're not allowed to be. And that's assuming people will know where they are. When they're half-drunk, half-stoned, half-asleep, and wandering around in a smoke filled corridor at 2:00 am.
• londons_explore 5y ago
  I'm going to depart from the norm here... And announce I'd actually like to live in that building. I really value communal shared space, and very few types of housing provide it - usually dedicating 90%+ of space to individuals to live a gloomy existence mostly alone requiring Netflix for company. Shared space should be 'tiered' - Ie. Personal space, space shared with near neighbors, space shared with a wider neighborhood, and everyone's space. And that's exactly what this development provides. If I were the university running this place, I would make 'room swaps' super easy to enable people to move near their friends and to allow communities of like-minded people to form.
  • IggleSniggle 5y ago
    Are you considering the scale of the building and the lack of access to outside? Imagine, the pod next to your's, deep in the interior of the building with only two entrances/exits, accidentally starts a fire. Or houses a crazy person who keeps defecating in their waste-bin. Just imagine the CO2 levels and lack of oxygen, even without the other environmental issues! I, too, value communal shared spaces. A giant block with no natural light or fresh air, for $300k per tiny unit, is not the way to do it.
    • londons_explore 5y ago
      As a new building I assume it will have proper air supplies to each room... And lighting can totally be artificial if it is sufficiently bright to be akin to sunlight. If I can't get sunburn off it, it isn't a suitable sun-substitute. These people will still have access to the outside, where there will hopefully be a large park all around.
    • raldi 5y ago
      There are ten emergency stairwells on every floor: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
  • hnxs 5y ago
    The toilet:person ratio is 1:4 It’s like sharing a bathroom with 4 people, but worse no thanks
• mrtranscendence 5y ago
  There’s a podcast I love — the Magnus Archives. Highly recommended. Spoilers for that, but … A character aligned with an entity that feeds off loneliness at one point describes a failed attempt to architect an apartment complex, designed to maximize loneliness and associated despair (prior to a sacrifice of the residents). Life imitating art, I guess.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Kudos to this architect for standing up to this, but my question is, why does standing up to completely obvious monstrosities like this take any courage at all? Perhaps this is nothing new and just exactly what "The Emperor's New Clothes" is all about. That is, any non-affiliated person could easily say "You want to house 4,500 students in a windowless prison because some billionaire gave you about 14% of the financing?" but somehow the administrators in charge of this are pushing, pushing, pushing. I think I'm just a little depressed thinking of all the recent cases that seem to me like they should be easy, clear cut moral questions where assumably smart, good people throw out their morals in a heartbeat because $.
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  The part I don't get is that the total project will cost over 1.5 billion USD and Charlie Munger, the value investor, will get his building and name on it for only 200 million. The art of the deal for him for sure. But the school is screwing themselves and the students for such a measly donation in terms of the totality of the deal.
  • bell-cot 5y ago
    With the reputation & nicknames the place may soon have with students - "Mungertraz", "Gulag Munger", "Black Hole of Chuck Munger", "Bergen-Munger", etc. - the naming rights aspect may at least be a "better" deal for the University.
• g051051 5y ago
  I love parts of it (the small single occupancy rooms), but I'd hate having those common areas right outside every door (especially that TV), one bathroom for 8 people, etc. The odds of at least one inconsiderate jerk (not cleaning, stealing food, being loud, etc.) in every "pod" is probably close to 100%.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    The dorm I lived in undergrad had a variant of that common area arrangement--though rooms had windows and they weren't all singles. I definitely preferred it to the anonymous corridor approach. Not to defend this particular design for a number of reasons, but having a variety of rooms clustered around shared spaces is pretty common: https://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/new-residence-hall https://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/new-residence-hall
• rg111 5y ago
  I see other concerns being voiced which I agree with, like the lack of windows and having only two entrances. Other than these valid safety concerns, and in an ideal world, I find myself in support of the project. I absolutely abhor sharing a bedroom with total strangers. To me, it is totally unacceptable. I would rather live in a physically constrained space rather than share it with a stranger, or even a friend. But I would like a window that I can open. And I mentioned ideal world because this should drive down cost of college for students. As they are all stacked up in a smaller place eating up less space horizontally, their accommodation cost should be down. But I don't think that this would realistically happen.
• meristem 5y ago
  Hm. I'm thinking of it as training for long range spaceflight or tight LEO or other type of space station---crowded, microscopic personal space, no view or just darkness of space, light engineered to support circadian cycles. Will this be good for students in SB? Based on psychological research in last few decades, nope.
• VortexDream 5y ago
  $1.5b for an apartment building seems insanely high to me. Is that what they usually cost?
• bogomipz 5y ago
  For those not familiar with UCSB, it's basically a beach campus. The campus itself has two beaches located within. The idea of creating windowless dorm rooms in a location blessed with natural ventilation is as dystopian as it is absurd. Further Santa Barbara being located in Southern California, is quite hot much of the year. It's interesting that Charlie Munger is essentially designing dorms for "other people's" grandchildren. There is no way Munger's grandkids would ever have to live in windowless rooms as they would likely be renting houses off campus. NYU in NYC has a similar self-made housing problem - how to grow the business by growing the number of students year or year in perpetuity. And doing so in areas that already have affordable housing shortages for their regular full time residents.
• lqet 5y ago
  Compared to this [0] dorm in Skopje, the UCSB project looks like a palace. [0] https://imgur.com/gallery/VKnTn https://imgur.com/gallery/VKnTn
• foolfoolz 5y ago
  ucsb has a small housing problem and a bigger party image problem. there’s great dorms, probably some of the best in the country. not because they are nice, they are old and small, but they are close to the ocean. you can hear the waves crash from your room in most dorms there’s only space for freshmen and some upperclassmen. the upper class dorms are reserved for honors or scholarships. everyone else moves out to isla vista (iv) after freshman year. iv is adjacent to ucsb iv is a fucking amazing place. high density shitty housing that costs insane amounts. home to good parties. iv is so famous for partying it has lots of students for santa barbara city college too even though that’s a 20 min drive away. and people come from all over the country for this community college just to party ucsb wants to shake its party image. halloween is so nuts in iv they do id checks just to enter, have mounted police, close down roads, etc. so getting more student housing away from iv will let them say we have options for students who don’t want to party. but holy shit that dorm complex looks horrible to live in
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Looking at this design, I feel like Munger should team up with Zuckerberg. You could probably fit 45,000 students in this if, instead of tiny windowless rooms, you just dipped all the students in a nice nutrient electrolyte broth and hooked their heads up to the metaverse. Think of all the collaboration that would happen!!
• flerovium 5y ago
  I believe the word is "neo-penal" University architecture: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=999 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=999
• alabamamike 5y ago
  IDK, maybe letting your Gganbu design the mega-dorm wasn't the best idea?!?
• noyeastguy 5y ago
  Munger obviously cares for young people and education if you read or listen to him. I feel like the people complaining about economical living conditions are going to turn around and propose erasing college debt, without ever addressing the cause. This is one way to make college more affordable and allow students a better chance of meeting people.
  • ciabattabread 5y ago
    By that logic, we should all be living in prison cells.
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    There are a lot of elitists on this thread that apparently cannot fathom the indignity of not living with their aesthetic preferences. Well, that and a lot of armchair PEs that think they know more about the NFP code than the AHJ reviewing the plans and the architectural firm that’s proposing them. It’s doubly funny given that this building is situated in perhaps one of the best climates in the world, right next to a beach… and all residents have to do is go outside for some sunlight. This thread must be dominated by east coast Ivy league grads, where going outside in the winter is unthinkable and an extra 10k/ month rent is a triviality. Given the comments referring to natural light as a human right … must be Yale.
• proteal 5y ago
  I think I understand where they’re coming from by designing such a large, on-campus dorm. There’s limited space at UCSB to physically house kids nearby. If you look at the map, there’s only one walkable community to UCSB and that consists of rented single family homes (2,000 sqft shacks) that you cram 20-30 students in. I would argue that living in the dystopian mega dorm might make more sense for lots of students who want to be on campus but can’t afford nearby rentals. However, after living in a windowless apartment during lockdown, I would strongly suggest they revise their proposal. The toll on mental health that no natural light takes is an insidious threat and should be avoided.
  • foolfoolz 5y ago
    iv is not many single family homes. it’s most duplexes. there’s some larger buildings in the back. it’s a highly dense party town. it scares parents and donors. ucsb has one of the lowest rates of greek life attendees in the entire uc system. why? because maybe you need to pay to join a frat if you want to party elsewhere. at ucsb you will have more than enough parties to attend even if you never set foot in a greek house
  • animal_spirits 5y ago
    Why does UCSB admit so many students it obviously can't support? That seems to be a big issue. I saw it happen when I was at Purdue too. They started putting bunkbeds in the _public_ dorm lobby because they couldn't support all the students they admitted. Its ridiculous that universities are doing this to their students.
    • leafmeal 5y ago
      I think part of it could be the 9% guarantee[1] which mandates that the top 9% of California high school students be offered a place at at least one UC. [1]: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/statewide-guarantee/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
      • 5y ago
• HPsquared 5y ago
  To quote Zoolander: "What is this, a school for ants?!"
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I appreciate the architect being willing to resign in protest over what he believes is an irresponsible action that will damage the students' well-being. We need people willing to put their reputation and finances on the line when they think something is dangerous. Personally, I'm not convinced by the argument he's making though. I'd like to see some evidence that not having a window in your sleeping quarters is psychologically damaging: I suspect it's not been uncommon in many places in the world, and throughout history. On the other hand, I'd like to see evidence that Munger's idea, that the students will spend less time alone in their rooms and more time in a shared environment, will play out. I saw the reviews of the existing dormitory he'd built, but I don't consider that rigorous. In general, I'd just like to see evidence once way or the other rather than knee-jerk speculation. Maybe I should get out of this thread.
• pphysch 5y ago
  Sad that economical living spaces are considered so radical on HN. I lived in a small dorm with a crappy roommate (actual roommate, not flatmate). So I didn't spend any unnecessary time in my room outside of sleeping. I hung out at the library, cafeteria, etc and went to random talks/activities on campus (there are a lot of them on a big campus). No windows? Sunlight alarms exist. They're great. Modern AC is also great. I would definitely trade the privacy and security of private quarters for a tiny window that would probably be facing another dorm building. University campuses are not prisons or suburbs. You can move freely and there are fantastic amenities in walking/shuttle distance. Affordably living in the thick of it, with private quarters, is an incredible luxury for most students.
  • vladharbuz 5y ago
    The point is not that extremely small living spaces, which you flatteringly describe as “economical”, are intrinsically bad. The issue here is the imbalance of power. I can say with near certainty that very few of the students who would be living in this space would opt for such a layout (extremely small rooms, no windows). Obviously, the students have absolutely no say in the matter, and neither does the university staff who is supposed to take care of the students' well-being. Rather, the power dynamic here is completely unilateral. Every detail of the space 4500 people will be living in will be prescribed and commanded by one guy, based on no other credentials than the fact that he's paying for it. This is the issue: the imbalance of power, and the unilateral ability of an investor and “hobby architect” to make generations of students live in conditions they would not themselves choose. The fact that people on HN seem to be against this building only serves as evidence that most people would not choose to live in it.
    • pphysch 5y ago
      What an incredibly dramatic comment. Are you being serious right now? HN is not remotely representative of the general population, much less undergraduate student population. And most students aren't going to let their anti-authoritarian angst/daddy issues get in the way of an easy commute and good night's sleep.
• MR4D 5y ago
  I would like to ask Charlie Munger 1 question: "How do you expect students to live in this place during another Covid-like lockdown?" Yeah, this is insane.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  OK hold up, density is good. Let's not do some laundered CA-loves-housing-crunch here. But yes, the thing needs more entrances, windows, and also the floorspace needs vastly more street interaction. There is this sick thing where if you compare old and new buildings, and the streetscape is vastly less compact than it used to be. My favorite comparison is in Long Island City: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7487041,-73.937889,3a,75y,205.75h,84.45t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3M32jmST6T3qxvzNWfb4Tg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7487041,-73.937889,3a,75y,20... and https://www.google.com/maps/@40.742877,-73.9540354,3a,75y,76.67h,84.41t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snJdGz5mwtzuIn4EoyZf_pg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.742877,-73.9540354,3a,75y,76... Now, sure maybe schools aught not to have commerical tennants for some reason (though frankly I think that's kinda romantic/naive) but the density of ammenities should be no less. There should be cafeterias, corner stores, etc., all spilling out onto the street. It's not a fortress or mall.
  • helen___keller 5y ago
    Strongly agree. I feel very lucky, personally, for the dorms I had in university that were basically on city streets intermingled with private homes, businesses, and so on. After growing up an incredibly cloistered childhood in an inescapable car suburb, living in walkable (while suburban) Pittsburgh was incredible by comparison and really let me grow into a functional adult if I'm being honest.
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Reminds me those cage houses in Hong Kong or iso-cubes in the Judge Dredd universe.
• helen___keller 5y ago
  Putting aside any specific complaint, it's crazy to me that an amateur architect designed this building and donated with the stipulation that the blueprints can't be altered. That has to be peak Dunning-Kruger
• notjustanymike 5y ago
  The smells. The noise. The single shower.
• pxc 5y ago
  If this thing gets built and then abandoned, it has the potential to be the most haunted building on Earth
• zucker42 5y ago
  One piece of context that people might not realize: the student housing stock around UCSB is extremely limited. I've heard stories about students living in Ventura (40 minutes away by car), some students (who presumably are guaranteed housing) have been placed in hotels[1], and students living out of cars[2]. So this may be the reason that administrators feel pressured to accept this building. Still taking $200 million dollars from an eccentric billionaire to build his ideal building is a bit of a strange decision to me. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/pfvasz/housing_thread_fall_21/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/pfvasz/hous... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/p91gjl/how_to_live_in_your_car_in_iv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/p91gjl/how_...
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    To be fair the current housing situation is significantly worse than usual due to COVID.
  • foolfoolz 5y ago
    the ventura example seems extremely unlikely to be 100% supply or cost related. housing is limited but there’s cheaper places than ventura that are much closer
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    I lived both in my car and in Carpinteria when I was a grad student there, so I'm 1.5 for 3 on your list and I wouldn't touch this place. What happened to the San Clemente apartments on El Camino?
• mchusma 5y ago
  I love this building concept. Affordable housing is critical, and the structure of grouping the rooms together is a great fit for the college lifestyle. Having your own room is pretty awesome versus bunk beds (my college experience). There is nothing bad about this that I can see. If you don't want to live there, don't do it. But describing this as some kind of hellscape is way off the mark.
  • advisedwang 5y ago
    > If you don't want to live there, don't do it There are going to be some students with no choice. With 4500 units there, it's going to be an essential part of UCSB's housing.
• b20000 5y ago
  The cost of housing needs to be brought down in California via regulation. This could be done by no longer permitting commissions on the sale of real estate for example and by only allowing for a small fixed fee in a transaction, e.g. $500. One of the main problems with the rising cost is the realtors who constantly jack up the price artifically.
  • foolfoolz 5y ago
    one reason the cost of housing it’s so high is regulation. building a 4 unit apartment will cost you about 400-600k in city and permit fees
    • b20000 5y ago
      4 unit building?
  • helen___keller 5y ago
    > his could be done by no longer permitting commissions on the sale of real estate for example and by only allowing for a small fixed fee in a transaction, e.g. $500. One of the main problems with the rising cost is the realtors who constantly jack up the price artifically. Nonsense, the sellers' agent does not own the property and the buyers agent does not put up the money to purchase it. They are facilitating a large transaction of money between two wealthy parties. Those two wealthy parties still exist, and still want to transact properties, even if you take out the middle man that facilitate the transaction.
    • b20000 5y ago
      removing the realtors removes 6%
• kristjansson 5y ago
  Good to have everything under one roof in Santa Barbara, a city where you famously can't go outside 9 months of the year
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• LegitShady 5y ago
  This building does look like a miserable place and that's before it gets used - just from renders. It looks like the work of someone designing a low security jail who thinks it's art. Give the cheap furnishings a couple years of abuse from students this will be Pruitt igoe or a jail with actual jail blocks but at least the idiot who designed it is paying for it himself.
• aurizon 5y ago
  I see a lot of criticisms by people with a long history of wood buildings(which burns), painted(which burns), wooden furniture with foam(which burns). Is this building made totally out of non combustable components which will not create toxic fumes if intentionally doused with gasoline. This means all furniture, floor covers, lights etc simply will not burn. Then they have sprinklers as well. Windows, Bill Gates has some rooms with no windows at all, but they do have huge screens on which lessons, movies, travelogs, and even the view from any place on the property at any time of day or date. How would you like to have a screen of a warm sunny day in June to look at on a dreary January day? We have seen the result of aged construction codes unable to adapt to this modern age. This dorm looks to have been well thought out as an experimental future habitat, with fire safety and access thought out, exits, air exchange, heat exchange all dealt with adequately
  • salawat 5y ago
    How would you like to have a screen of a warm sunny day in June to look at on a dreary January day? It'd drive me nuts tbqh. Just one more way to become unhinged from reality.
• oefrha 5y ago
  > The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly. Huh, just so happens Munger Graduate Residence is one of the nicest residences, or maybe the nicest residence at Stanford (or at least was when I was there).
• yyy888sss 5y ago
  For $1.5 Billion, why don't they just build 1000 luxury 5 bedroom mansions? If they had the land area, they could even build 5000 individual detached homes for that budget. They could even splurge and give each bedroom a window!
  • mikeg8 5y ago
    The do not have anything close to that amount of land area.
  • mdavis6890 5y ago
    That's a great way to think about it! If we're spending $X on Y-thing, what other things could we have instead for the same $X? That said, I'm guessing the reason is that there is not enough land, close enough to the University, on which the City of Santa Barbara will allow them to build. Also, including the assumed cost of the land, you may not be able to build 1000 of them. Also, also, the university may have authority to build on-campus 'dorms' but not 'houses.'
• p1mrx 5y ago
  Our collective obsession over "natural" light is the main driver behind things like open-plan offices. The sun isn't magic; why don't we define natural light by its spectrum as a function of time, and then replicate it with LEDs and a bit of software? This wouldn't even cost much to run, because the demand curve matches the supply curve of solar energy.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• JeremyNT 5y ago
  The "windowless dorm rooms" sound terrible at first, but the rendering shows what's described as a "false window." Is this a problem we can solve with technology? I'm intrigued by this idea a lot, since I am moving to a house with a small finished room in the basement. Does anybody know the current state of "false window" tech? It seems to me you really need several things for a true false window: first, a large amount of light production that matches the color temperature of a typical outdoor environment at the given time of day, and second, something that displays some kind of plausible outdoor-seeming scene. You'd also need physical depth and movement to facilitate adjusting the directionality of the light source to replicate the changes that occur as the sun traverses the sky. This sounds really difficult to me - is there an example of a device that can pull this off well?
• chasing 5y ago
  Alternate plan: Raise taxes on the wealthy. Use that money to fund the University of California. Spend money on dorms that actually adhere to modern standards and are designed by actual experts and innovators in architecture. Frustrating that universities have to rely on the whims and quirks of wealthy individuals like this.
  • supperburg 5y ago
    This place cost 1.5B. If you want to give everyone more space and windows then it’s only going to cost more, and that’s before it’s goes over schedule. This is one dorm building for one college. If you play it through, which you have never done, then you would see that even if we took every penny from the rich we wouldn’t be able to do what you said. And by the way, you are in the top 1% wealth bracket globally, so why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and empty your bank account and send it to a family in Myanmar? Then you will be living the redistribution dream you always blather about.
    • chasing 5y ago
      I am, relatively speaking, wealthy. And, yes, I do think my taxes should be higher so other Americans can have access to basic resources like food, shelter, healthcare, and education. I’m sorry this idea angers you. Nothing else in your comment makes enough sense to respond to.
      • supperburg 5y ago
        Tax yourself all you want, it won’t solve the problem. The numbers simply don’t work. A wealthy man but not a learned man.
        • chasing 5y ago
          Apparently I’m not learned enough to know to avoid debating random doofuses on the internet. I’ll give you that.
• tweedledee 5y ago
  My primary concern would be the noise. I can deal with small rooms, no windows etc. but I assume students crammed that close together would be crazy noisy. I have ADHD so I’m much more noise sensitive than most, but even for normal people I would expect better sleep and study outcomes from a quiet environment.
• jefftk 5y ago
  Lots of uninformed reactions hiding the important stuff in this thread: * Munger did something similar at the University of Michigan, which residents review positively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038730 * The building plans include sprinklers and have multiple escape stairs their own exits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039893 * There are lots of windows and natural light in the per-suite common areas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038874
  • elihu 5y ago
    The per-suite common areas don't have windows. It looks like there's a large-ish common area with windows per "house" shared by 64 people.
• keyanp 5y ago
  While it appears at first glance to be terrible, it is a tradeoff that is possibly worth making. My first year of undergrad was spent living in a "forced triple" (3 people in a dorm room meant for 2). I would have much preferred a single room even if it meant no windows. Certainly would have led to more productivity and sanity.
• jtlienwis 5y ago
  I haven't trusted Charlie Munger at all since reading a paper he wrote about how wonderful an investment in Coca-Cola stock is. He told all about their great growth rate, cash flow etc but never once mentioned if drinking caffeinated sugar water on a regular basis is good for you (its not, its very unhealthy).
  • mikeg8 5y ago
    He was giving investment advise, not nutritional advice. Just because you don’t agree with the morality does not mean he was incorrect or dishonest.
    • diogenescynic 5y ago
      I think OP is just pointing out how that's kinda anti-social behavior and amoral. "So what if I gave millions diabetes, I'm a billionaire!"
• xg15 5y ago
  The reasoning for this architecture is supposedly to encourage socializing, but my suspicion is it will actually do the opposite. The tiny rooms are perfectly compatible with the "antisocial 4channer" lifestyle. Internet addicts will probably be thankful because there is less space they have to keep clean. What it seriously discourages is inviting someone into your room, doing sports, caring for plants or pets or inviting your own group of friends for a boardgame night. It also takes away any agency over when or with whom you want to socialize by forcing you through the common area when you want to eat or just have to use the bathroom. I've been in a dorm with single-occupancy rooms but shared kitchens. I can say it can get extremely awkward if some other group is having a party and you just want to cook something for dinner. And that design had an ordinary shared kitchen, separate from the floor. I can only imagine how awkward it gets if the only way to your room is through the common area. The forced socializing (but only with your housemates) reminds me of something out of The Crimson Rivers. If that billionaire guy demanded exclusive authority over room assignments next, I wouldn't be completely surprised.
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    So what type of dorm encourages any of those activities? A shared double or triple, like what most students deal with?
    • xg15 5y ago
      In my dorm (in Germany), we had singles I'd guess roughly 2x to 4x the size of the rooms in the plan. Additionally, a neighboring dorm had a small conference hall in the basement, which could be used for activities. I think a dorm should absolutely have large common areas, however they should be separated from the apartments so you can choose when to spend time there.
• benzible 5y ago
  This couldn't make the case for a wealth tax any clearer. Leaving the question of which large-scale social projects should be undertaken and how they should be carried out up to the whims of billionaires clearly ain't it.
• DevKoala 5y ago
  You will live in ze pod.
• jedberg 5y ago
  It's like getting an inside room on a cruise ship. The difference of course is that on a cruise ship you're on vacation and usually not in your room except to sleep. But I guess that's what they want to college kids to do...
• dirtyid 5y ago
  >Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly. Blueprints translate to reality exactly zero times in any large scale building projects. Plenty of billionaires richer than Munger learned this lesson, including crown/royalty that literally rule countries. That said, I am facinated by what Munger's house is like if he's this obessed with socially engineering others via architecture.
• xputer 5y ago
  It always strikes me as odd that many houses and apartment buildings in the US west coast will have entire walls with zero or nearly zero windows in them. Apartments and houses here are so much darker than in Europe.
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  Let's just call it Suicide Hall from the start, because that's going to be its name in the future.
• newbie789 5y ago
  I’m surprised that an 11 story building would be considered in that area. There are very, very few tall buildings in Santa Barbara. Then again, “rich old people doing outlandishly ridiculous bullshit” is pretty much what that town is all about. (I lived there for 20 years)
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    While part of Santa Barbara due to some weird zoning quirks, the majority of off-campus housing is actually in Isla Vista/Goleta. Santa Catalina already has 11 stories.
• bregma 5y ago
  Warehousing is not housing.
• hemloc_io 5y ago
  Hijacking the thread a bit, but I'm not sure people understand how predatory student housing is in aggregate. At many colleges you don't even have a choice to live in the dorms or not as an undergrad, living on campus for 1-2 years is tied to enrollment. On top of this lots of financing for college housing is wonky, because some colleges do not pay property tax. (So you can have the college hold the land and some third party company finance/build the building students are forced to live in.) This is a significant part of ACC's business model.[0] Student loan money is used to pay rent on these buildings, so it's indirectly funded by taxpayers. The power colleges have over students lives is concerning regardless of if this dorm design is good or bad. If UCSB put in one of these requirements students could be forced to take part in a social experiment designed by a billionaire. UCSB, or another campus w/ a Munger dorm, doesn't have this requirement today but could have it tomorrow. 0: https://www.americancampus.com/ https://www.americancampus.com/
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > If UCSB put in one of these requirements students could be forced to take part in a social experiment Well nobody needs to go to UCSB. The US is fortunate that it's got such a huge and massively diverse range of options for university. I guess if the results are bad they'll suffer for recruitment and the problem will hopefully correct itself.
    • selimthegrim 5y ago
      The grad programs at UCSB are not to be sneezed at.
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        I'd sneeze at them if they tried to make me live in a window-less room.
  • slownews45 5y ago
    To be crystal clear, at least in California on-campus housing is generally where students want to live. With berkeley on campus housing can rely on FA awards, much more flexible in terms of reasons to cancel (ie, you withdraw from school), big issue with group leases off campus when one person flakes. What's interesting is that there is a view that we can't try out things like this in the US. There are so many critics, and so few doers. Be worth seeing what students think of the housing. I realize that may not align with some of the NIMBYs and critics, but ultimately they should have voice as stakeholders. And why not try something out? For those not familiar, there is a big shortage of on campus housing, many schools are waiving requirements to live on campus in year 1
• khazhoux 5y ago
  Yikes, there's hardly space to keep even a guitar in those tiny rooms! Depressing. Is it common these days that dorm rooms are so small?
• lnanek2 5y ago
  He seems kind of spoiled to me. My apartment has two windows. The one in the bedroom is always closed because my wife works the night shift and needs to sleep during the day. The other window always has the shades drawn because I'm too lazy to put on clothes and don't want to bother my neighbors with kids when I get up at 6:30AM each morning and do my VR boxing practice in the living room. Pretty sure plenty of college students would be OK with the false window shown in the article for reduced cost. The ones that want the outside rooms with windows could pay more. Upgrade the false window to a free OLED TV and students would probably pick interior over that for the same price. Plenty of office buildings have windows that don't open, and college kids with windows that do open tend to throw TVs and the like out of them, so I doubt exterior rooms with windows would even have openable ones with a building that tall.
• trhway 5y ago
  Who needs real windows in that ant city if one can have all the windows the one may want in the metaverse. The building is designed for maximum security, a Hogwarts North Korean style. In our future ant civilization the punishment will be not the physical isolation, it will be taking your Oculus away and disconnecting from the metaverse.
• paganel 5y ago
  > 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms. I've lived until relatively recently (~5 years) in a communist-built, collective-housing unit which had hundreds of studios, if not more (I was unit number 700-something), and even there an access to windows (for the actual room and for the kitchen) plus a small balcony were taken as a given, any other option would have looked like prison. Also, I'm pretty sure the studio-apartment potentially not having an window would have broken even the communist-era building regulations, how does the building from the article pass those regulation, are they really that lax when it comes to access to windows?
• vincnetas 5y ago
  Regarding windowless rooms, this could be helping a bit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw Artificial skylight
  • AlbertCory 5y ago
    You're joking, right? I stayed in a hotel room in Hong Kong with no windows. It sucked, but being a tourist I was never in there. It's different for a student dorm. There's a lot of blather about "human rights" but I think "access to the outdoors and natural light" might well BE a human right.
• xbar 5y ago
  Good to know that I shouldn't recommend UCSB to my daughter.
• fencepost 5y ago
  Sounds like if they choose their materials properly they can easily repurpose into a supermax prison....
• docmars 5y ago
  Not sure if dorm or... prison. Wtf UCSB, really?
• some_random 5y ago
  Watching old people solve the "problem" of young people not socializing enough by turning their living quarters into a prison is exactly the sort of thing I've come to expect.
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    Munger is more interested in figuring a way to not heap mountains of debt on students. The cost of building everyone’s dream college experience is one of the reasons people are paying 50-70k/ year for college. If this design shaves off 10k/year in costs that’s a down payment on a condo. Maybe that tradeoff seems unreasonable to people. But the ability to see and make those kinds of trade offs is… just maybe… one of the reasons Charlie is a billionaire.
    • diogenescynic 5y ago
      300k per room for living conditions worse than jail cells. This is just dumb and not economical.
    • some_random 5y ago
      As someone else said, universities now require one or two years of living in dorms. These dorms vary wildly in quality, but from what I've seen prices are usually about the same, and I have no reason to think that it would be any different here. For context, here's a summary of the last three years of uni for me: 1: Lived in a dorm without AC, crammed in with three other people, sharing a bathroom with the male half of the floor. This was the most I paid in rent. 2: Lived with those same three people in a townhouse with AC, my own room, a kitchen, sharing two bathrooms between four people. About half the price of the dorms. 3: Lived by myself in an apartment with AC, a kitchen, and my own bathroom. Still a bit cheaper than the dorms. Even if students are given a cut in rent that reflects the reduced price of the dorm, I sincerely doubt that the university will pass up another opportunity to bleed students dry.
• balozi 5y ago
  I like the idea of increased density for environmental and economic benefits it produces. But I hate the idea of "social and psychological experimentation" by some do-gooder billionaire. I like the idea of experimenting with uncommon modes of provisioning housing resources. But I hate the idea of skirting a competent review process by rubber-stamping a donor's designs.
• dependsontheq 5y ago
  Interesting, just to give some perspective from the other side of the pond, I think in most EU countries it would be totally illegal to build this because you need to have windows.
• elihu 5y ago
  I agree with the architect's criticism and I don't think I'd want to live in a room without windows without some compensating factor. It is interesting, though, from the point of view of exploring ways for people to live. One of the main objections to human habitation on Mars is that people will have to live in radiation-hardened bunkers, probably underground. A lot of people consider lack of windows to be an absolute show-stopper. I don't think that's the case, but I do think that in order to go without windows you at least need to pay a lot of careful attention to creating natural light conditions and simulating wide-open spaces. Maybe you'd have to have more floor-space per person than you would otherwise, and maybe you'd need to have a few very large rooms with walls and ceiling painted a flat color that's hard to focus directly on and looks like sky. It doesn't seem like the designer of this dorm is doing much of that; it seems more like they're just running the "let's take away windows and see what happens" experiment. People are adaptable and some of them won't mind, but still I don't think it's going to be very successful on average.
• everybodyknows 5y ago
  Strong-arming of the California Coastal Commissioners looks to be part of the plan: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PRC&sectionNum=30251 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... https://www.coastal.ca.gov/roster.html https://www.coastal.ca.gov/roster.html
• ropable 5y ago
  The floor plan reminds me of how my Dwarf Fortress bedroom floors always end up looking.
• bmitc 5y ago
  People are discussing this design as if it is an actual design worthy of discussion. What it is is the product of a bum amateur "architect" wanting to feed his narcissism and legacy who just happens to be a billionaire. That and universities that have become slaves to money and fundraising. Charles Munger is apparently one of Buffet's cronies at Berkshire Hathaway. It's telling that the committee was basically not involved at all and the complaints and resignation of one of the senior architects on said committee was basically dismissed without a second thought. Why even have the committee at all? This building is an abomination about everything that is known about architecture and living spaces and flies in the face of increasing rates of student mental health issues and disorders. It's nauseating that the answer to "you're not happy inside?" is just "go outside". Here's an except from another article I found: > "Everybody loves light and everybody prefers natural light. But it’s a game of tradeoffs,” Munger said in an interview. “If you build a big square building, everything is conveniently near to everybody in the building. If you maximize the light, you get fewer people in the building.” Munger is off his rocker and seems to follow a principle of maximal packing in his "designs".
  • donmcronald 5y ago
    I’d give everything I own and everything I’ll ever earn if we could make the 4500 richest people on the planet live in that building.
    • bmitc 5y ago
      I'm right there with you. That's a great suggestion that highlights the disconnect these people have with reality. Munger also believes that wealth inequality is basically just an accidental byproduct of apparently necessary policies and that it will eventually just go away by itself. I suppose in that light, it's not hard to believe why he thinks this building is a good idea.
  • tim333 5y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere Munger has already built one of these things and it has proved pretty popular.
• boublepop 5y ago
  > Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas Looking at the floor plan, the living quarters are not small, they are microscopic, and the common areas are not large, they are extremely small. If two people are sitting opposite at the table it becomes impossible to move past them. This is the stuff of nightmares. 4500 students packed in windowless closets sharing a room too small to breathe. People are going snap. > Munger Hall […] is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances This sounds like a novel building up to the most horrible school shooting massacre in history.
• diogenescynic 5y ago
  Pretty gross that a billionaire is using his wealth to force a university to build something that is designed to be hostile to those who live in it. Disgusting display of control over others. Why not pay to give them all a beach view? I don't understand why someone with so much wealth would force this--the induced socialization scheme is just dumb. Someone should have told grandpa his idea sucked.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  While I was home from college, one summer night I noticed a two-story downtown building (with low-rent apartments upstairs) had a fire on the ground floor. The firetruck arrived within minutes. A few minutes later a fireman brought the body of a 13-yo boy downstairs from the second floor. He was laid out on the ground. No sprinkler system on any floor. The second floor had one fire escape, but it probably wouldn't have helped - the youngster was completely unburned but dead of smoke asphyxiation. Never to be forgotten.
• concerned-CAian 5y ago
  I’m concerned about only 2 ports of access to ingress and egress. What happens in a fire? What about when the inevitable earthquake hits? Think mass casualty on the order of the triangle shirtwaist factory or the surf side collapse. In any case, how long are we going to let idiot sociopathic billionaires run/ruin our lives, and that of our vulnerable children?
  • concerned-CAian 5y ago
    Also, if you’re concerned, don’t just yell into this or any other void. Call the office of the Governor—he’s a UC Regent who is SUPPOSED to be looking out for the best interests of UC students, the lieutenant governor’s office, and your state assembly person.
• Glyptodon 5y ago
  The University of Arizona has a dorm built into its stadium and the rooms to the seating side, which do not have windows despite being large, are no longer used. They were associated with higher suicide rates or something like that.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    Being in a room with no windows seems like a great way to get seasonal affective disorder all year long.
• graeme 5y ago
  Interesting collision of the idea with the covid era. During an outbreak you’d want students to have a private airspace to go to and the possibility of ventilation. Update: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews! But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate. https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduate-residences-ann-arbor?reviews_page=1 https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
  • wpietri 5y ago
    Wow, some of the quotes here: "Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW" "It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down." "Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers" "The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet." And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice. What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
    • shawndrost 5y ago
      You're really misrepresenting the information from the link. Munger is the top-rated residence in the area. https://www.veryapt.com/Apartments-L7646-ann-arbor-central-campus https://www.veryapt.com/Apartments-L7646-ann-arbor-central-c...
• Saint_Genet 5y ago
  "The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly." Absolutely amazing
  • lozenge 5y ago
    And the university has to stump up the other $1,300 million. And the investor will probably be dead before anybody can see the effect on students.
  • sireat 5y ago
    This is almost like a living will version of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby which at least had some crazy/funny provisions. This Munger monstrosity is positively distopian. What happened to Charlie's wisdom?
  • dejawu 5y ago
    I'm convinced that when you reach a certain level of wealth and the people around you stop saying "no" to you no matter how fucking disastrous your ideas are, your brain just turns into a soft foam
  • 542458 5y ago
    To be fair, his previous works at UM and Stanford (confusingly, both called "Munger Graduate Residence") have generally very good reviews. Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduate-residences-ann-arbor https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat... Stanford: https://g.co/kgs/TbYAFH https://g.co/kgs/TbYAFH Honestly, it sounds like he just "optimized" the heck out of a residence, and part of the tradeoffs is that on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. His Michigan building houses twice as many students in the same footprint as competing plans, and the competing plans used shared rooms. Admittedly, these aren't really ideal for COVID though. As an aside, one of his other interesting architectural quirks is that any shared women's bathrooms are generally much larger than the men's, to deal with differences in how they're used.
• krembanan 5y ago
  Are there no laws against this in the U.S? In Norway there are building codes that prohibits bedrooms without a real window.
  • macinjosh 5y ago
    Building codes, at least in my part of the US, dictate that in order for a room in a home to be a bedroom it must have a window. Public buildings probably have different rules.
  • ctdonath 5y ago
    Are such laws necessary? if you want to not live there, don't.
    • finnh 5y ago
      This thread is full of people discussing a topic. Your comment here and elsewhere in this thread doesn't add much - "hey anybody with anything critical to say about anything, just don't use it" applies equally to ANY topic, and isn't the great insight you seem to think bears repeating. [EDIT: sorry, that probably comes across as harsh. My point is that this whole site is for people to discuss things, and your comment(s) seem to advocate that people stop doing exactly that]
    • depaya 5y ago
      We need laws to save people from themselves and from being taken advantage of. If fire codes were not a thing, developers would build terrible fire traps and people would rent them. There would inevitably be many deaths; this has happened all throughout history prior to modern building codes (and of course still happens today[1]). The free market is a lie and impossible; you cannot expect the common person to be an expert on everything. We need (and you should want) baseline standards to ensure a reasonable quality of life for our society - think automobile safety standards and building codes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
      • 5y ago
• ghaff 5y ago
  That seems spectacularly awful--although there's probably been an overall trend in US college dorms (not that I've made a real study of it) towards small single rooms with common areas in general.
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    At my college, people fought tooth-and-nail to live in this environment rather than continue with double occupancy dorm rooms. At my school, groups of people claimed a suite (with "points" assigned weighted towards older students). So seniors and some juniors had their choice and they 100% (literally all of them) preferred suites to dorms. It was a fun place to hang out during the day and at night, and you actually have a private space to sleep. No listening to your roommate snore or getting sex-iled when their SO comes over.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      The dorm I lived in undergraduate had a suite system and it would be my preference though not all rooms were singles (and they generally had usable windows). The dorm was recently renovated. Curious what they did to the interior design.
  • daniel-thompson 5y ago
    > small single rooms with common areas in general This is fine; the problem with Munger's design is that most of them don't have windows.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      The challenge is that as you shrink individual room size, it gets harder to give every room a window. It can be done--though you may have to have smaller windows. And you basically need to have a more linear design or something that otherwise has a lot of outside surface.
      • TillE 5y ago
        You really just need to stick a courtyard in the middle of it, an extremely common design pattern in such buildings, including one SUNY dorm I lived in. Or on a slightly larger scale, you stick a courtyard in the middle of several buildings, as is the case with most blocks in Barcelona or Berlin.
• curiousgal 5y ago
  [Laughs in Paris]
• praptak 5y ago
  "Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances" Is it even possible to make it fire code compliant?
  • macinjosh 5y ago
    Entrances != Egresses. Do you ever notice those doors that say emergency exit only?
    • spyspy 5y ago
      They clearly forgot to count the windows..
      • moralestapia 5y ago
        "Don't worry, there's plenty of fake windows you could use, oh wait..."
      • mindcrime 5y ago
        A lot of deadly fires happen at night when people are in bed sleeping. And most of the "bedrooms" in this building would not have windows, per the article. an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms. "Ah", but you might say, "just use someone else's window!" To which I say "bullshit." If it's 3:00 in the morning, and you have a bunch of sleepy, probably hung-over (or still buzzing) college kids, and a building full of smoke and superheated toxic gases, the odds that these kids will successfully locate and utilize another window strike me as so low as to not even be worth considering. Drunk college kids don't do well with dormitory fires, or at least that's what a lot of historical evidence suggests.
    • mindcrime 5y ago
      Which history shows us tend to be locked or barricaded when they're not supposed to be, or obstructed in some other way, or otherwise unavailable. Sure, there are other egresses available in principle. Hell, you can sledge-hammer your way through a wall in a pinch. But in any practical sense? Having two primary ingress/egress points is a horrible idea.
• VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  > an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms. > Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate. That seems unlikely.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kodah 5y ago
    Yeah this doesn't work. The Marines stuffed me into a very small barracks room and gave me a room mate. It doesn't make you leave any more often, it just makes you fight.
    • raldi 5y ago
      But in this case, every student will have a single, on a campus where the lack of singles is one of the biggest student complaints. Especially loathed are triples, which would be eliminated campus-wide once this building opens.
      • toast0 5y ago
        Every student will have a single when the thing opens, and then later they'll put in the bunk beds.
        • kodah 5y ago
          Spot on. The barracks this happened in was built in 1945, and was single Marine occupancy. Now up to three Marines share the same room, depending on rank.
  • ansible 5y ago
    I lived in a rather small double occupancy dorm room for a couple years of my college career. It was common to leave your door open if you wanted to socialize, but then close it if you needed some quiet to study. And there are all types. Some really do need the quiet to concentrate. Some apparently like having others around while studying, like the folk who were in the 24-hour study lounge of the main library at midnight. The accommodations should cater to all kinds who have different needs. I do wonder if the tiny bedrooms will have sufficient sound insulation, in the walls, ceilings and floors, and especially the doors. And I wonder if the AC will be sufficient, individually controllable, and always working so that it is feasible to shut yourself up in your room to study. And also... sometimes you just get tired of your roommates. All it takes is one guy to chews his food loudly to mess things up for everyone else. (No, that didn't happen to me, but my freshman year roommate regularly stunk up the place with weed. Or incense to cover up the weed. Which didn't fool anyone.)
• quercusa 5y ago
  The individual rooms look a lot like prison cells.
  • mbg721 5y ago
    When your primary design priorities are housing a lot of people you don't care about and preventing suicides, you tend to get to the same final product.
• exabrial 5y ago
  Wow that's terrifying.
• outside1234 5y ago
  I had an apartment bedroom without light when I was a student - and then are right - you will definitely not want to spend a lot of time in there. But for me the biggest problem was oversleeping since there was not light to wake me up! :)
• notRobot 5y ago
  No windows? No natural light whatsoever? That's gotta have a serious negative impact on the mental health (and possibly sleep patterns?) of the students. Not to mention that in case of a fire, all the people rushing to the two exits will get into a stampede, and those who remain in their rooms will suffocate, with no windows to open for fresh air or to be rescued from? This is the most dystopian thing I've heard of in a while.
  • raldi 5y ago
    There are tons of windows and natural light in the common areas; the design is meant to encourage congregation there. The bedrooms are just for sleeping, dressing, and sex.
    • Gare 5y ago
      I count 64 bedrooms per "house". That's a lot of people for a single common area that doesn't seem that big.
      • raldi 5y ago
        There's a small common area for every eight bedrooms, and larger ones shared between groups.
        • Gare 5y ago
          Yes, but the small area is also windowless.
    • em-bee 5y ago
      i don't like to sleep in a room without windows. i like to see the night sky or signs of life outside my room, and most importantly i hate waking up in the dark. i would switch universities or sue if forced to accept a windowless room.
      • raldi 5y ago
• baggy_trough 5y ago
  I’d rather have no roommate than a window.
  • aristophenes 5y ago
    You’d have seven roommates and would also have no window. Looking at the layout, it’s like sharing a tiny apartment with 7 other people. This is the worst part, if you have one disruptive person out of eight, they are going to make everyone else miserable. Hard to get sleep, hard to study.
    • danso 5y ago
      Having your own "pod" (within a shared common suite) may be preferable than the standard situation of sharing a standard-size bedroom with a stranger. One bit of context is that UCSB has had a profound housing shortage (since at least 2010), and students have had to triple up in rooms: https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-details-on-munger-mega-dorm/ https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-detai...
    • pphysch 5y ago
      No, actual room mates. Not flat mates. Like sharing a bed room or bunk bed with a stranger, hostel style. That's what this is competing with.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      The dorm I was in undergrad had a suite type of arrangement. (Though the rooms were not all singles and they mostly had usable windows.) IMO, it's preferable to the long corridor with rooms coming off of it. The lack of windows seems not great and perhaps the massiveness as well. But the basic idea of groups of rooms sharing a common area is fine by itself.
• dsauerbrun 5y ago
  as someone who attended ucsb and has also spent a week in a bedroom without a window I really hope this doesn't happen. it'll really mess the kids up. I felt awful waking up in that room. not having any natural light to cue you in to what time it is forces you to turn on the light to wake up. waking up to artificial light is an absolute miserable experience and if I had to do it for a year I would leave... of course all of these kids would have already signed a lease for the year and can't just afford to call that money a loss and live somewhere else.
  • rfw300 5y ago
    Not that there aren’t other issues here, but there are imitation windows (portholes?) that would provide that light cue in the morning. It wouldn’t be a totally windowless cell.
  • em-bee 5y ago
    i'd sue to try to get that money back. but i'd also expect to know before signing that i'd get such a room. but i would not stay. my mental health is not worth it.
  • diogenescynic 5y ago
    100% agree. Living conditions are already brutal at UCSB. This will just force students to live like prisoners. I can't think of anything more shitty to do to a student. Weird way to be a donor...
• Gravityloss 5y ago
  In comparison, this is some cool student housing: https://copenhagenarchitecture.dk/tietgen-student-housing/ https://copenhagenarchitecture.dk/tietgen-student-housing/ It's a ring. The personal rooms have views to the outside, and the communal spaces open to the inside.
  • abledon 5y ago
    wow, thats beautiful. Just copy paste that ffs
• daniel-thompson 5y ago
  Munger also did the same thing for the University of Michigan's graduate residence building^; 95% of the rooms have no windows. ^ https://housing.umich.edu/residence-hall/munger/ https://housing.umich.edu/residence-hall/munger/
  • testplzignore 5y ago
    That building holds 630 residents. The proposed building holds 7x more.
  • theroqwpeo 5y ago
    Reviews of this residence: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduate-residences-ann-arbor?reviews_page=1 https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
    • zz865 5y ago
      Interesting, most reviews are fine with it.
    • pepperonipizza 5y ago
      Thanks, it seems very well liked.
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        Not really - looking through the reviews, it's cheap and newly furnished, but almost everyone is concerned about the windows (even those who say they personally don't mind it seem to be well enough aware that it's a problem).
    • awillen 5y ago
      Wow, did not expect those to come in at an 8.8.
    • raldi 5y ago
      Students seem to love it. It's a shame that this sole piece of actual data is buried so far down underneath piles of speculative naysaying.
• chubot 5y ago
  Wow this is an idea by Warren Buffett’s business partner? I thought he was widely respected but this indeed seems like a monstrosity. Why would he put his name and legacy on it? There must be another side to the story, though it’s hard to imagine what. Wikipedia mentions that he has done this at University of Michigan too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_w... https://observer.com/2019/05/warren-buffett-vp-charlie-munger-design-college-dorm-ucsb/ https://observer.com/2019/05/warren-buffett-vp-charlie-munge... It's hard to imagine what "windowless" has to do with encouraging new ideas. It feels more like a cost-cutting measure.
  • starlust2 5y ago
    His money has made him an "expert" in all things.
• gt565k 5y ago
  Glad he had the balls to step down and call them out. The other committee members and people in charge of the project should be embarrassed as they failed to represent the best needs of the university and its students. Windowless dorms, crazy 97 year old billionaire amateur architect and a bunch of corrupt university staff and committee members who would do anything to save a few bucks. What could go wrong? Humanity at its finest.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • yashap 5y ago
    100%. Sure, the billionaire is probably an asshole, but he’s also 97 and not an architect. The real problem here is the leadership at the university deciding to move forward with this monstrosity just to get a big donation.
    • goodcanadian 5y ago
      I am pretty sure Charlie Munger is far from being an asshole. He is also pretty far from being an architect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_efforts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_e...
      • clintonb 5y ago
        Using your wealth to forcefully prop up your fledgling(?) career seems like an asshole move. Donating funds with some strings (e.g., put your name on the building/school)? Fine. Donating and forcing your amateur designs be used? Asshole move. At that point you're not really trying to benefit anyone but yourself.
    • exhilaration 5y ago
      But money! I agree that this is a pretty crazy project, but that's a lot of money to turn down for a public university.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  8 people, 2 cans, and a kitchen sink. Guess what happens next! Answer: you pee out the window (because someone is already using the sink)
  • quercusa 5y ago
    Sorry, no windows!
    • gorgoiler 5y ago
      There's one at either end of the canteen/open plan toilet.
• danso 5y ago
  FWIW, this is the university’s press release, titled “Absolutely stunning”, about the dorm: https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning
  • macinjosh 5y ago
    I mean, they aren't wrong. It's just not stunning in the way they perhaps meant it to be.
  • IggleSniggle 5y ago
    Oh, it's stunning alright.
• pseudolus 5y ago
  How did this pass any sort of litmus test? Putting 4500 stressed out kids, for whom many this dorm will represent their first extended away from home experience, in small windowless cells? Modern building codes were created, in part, precisely to avoid this type of design.
  • mola 5y ago
    It passed the test of "being a billionaire with a vision in the US"
• satya71 5y ago
  And we are subsidizing this hubris project with a massive tax break for Charles Munger.
• adenozine 5y ago
  Jesus FUCK that's a horrible idea. My neighbor is a maintenance guy for a sober living complex and he has talked to me about maintaining these kinds of high density environments, and this seems like a nightmare scenario just waiting to happen. Also, just emotionally, this can't possibly work. There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy. This reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where they ride the exercise bikes and earn credits and watch advertisements 24/7.
  • ctdonath 5y ago
    Your point is good, but the profane is inappropriate.
    • mrtesthah 5y ago
      Perhaps profane words are appropriate and suited to naming a profane architectural concept.
    • Espressosaurus 5y ago
      No it's not.
    • throwawayninja 5y ago
      I find the profanity nicely limited and appropriate; if the comment had gone on to curse institutions in general / not share a constructive anecdote that's where I'd call it inappropriate.
      • ctdonath 5y ago
        You don’t even see the problem. Try using “Mohammed” in the same context.
    • dang 5y ago
      There's no rule against profanity on HN. It's maybe loosely correlated with breaking the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - for example the one asking people not to fulminate), but obviously not always. We're not Bowdlers here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20bowdler&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• Ekaros 5y ago
  Could be acceptable for few years if rent was extremely cheap. There is lot to trade if living like this would cost less than a hundred a month.
  • ctdonath 5y ago
    Problem is: those "cells" cost ~$300,000 each. Assuming a break-even at 10 years, that's $2,500/month - more than my mortgage for a 2400 sq ft home on .75 acres with a small forest. At $100/mo, would take 250 years to pay off.
    • loeg 5y ago
      Is your mortgage in Santa Barbara?
      • ctdonath 5y ago
        Why would I live somewhere so expensive? Many seem to not understand that real estate is not unlimited-supply like most manufactured goods. Just because you want a particular home doesn’t mean expect it will go for MSRP like common retail goods. You’re bidding on a strictly limited supply, vs others willing to bid more. At some point reconsider what you’re actually trying to get, and that better is far more affordable elsewhere.
        • loeg 5y ago
          Your datapoint was only interesting if it was comparable to building housing in UCSB. Since you don't live in Santa Barbara, I don't know why you brought it up. Your choices are completely irrelevant here. UCSB students have already determined that what is best for them is not what you describe as "better." Your mortgage rate in some cheaper locale is totally irrelevant to the cost of building a dwelling in Santa Barbara.
• mmcconnell1618 5y ago
  Reminds me of the below the waterline cabins that cruise ship staff share. Has anyone looked into the mental health of people already living in similar conditions?
• rglullis 5y ago
  Have I misread it, or is TFA claiming that this building is going to cost 1.5 Billion Dollars to house 4500 students? Over $300,000 for each "nice looking" prison cell ?!
  • HPsquared 5y ago
    California markup, I guess.
• throw7 5y ago
  No windows, no natural light... this is hilarious. Why not go the whole nine yards and construct one of those capsule hotels like in Japan? :D