9 ms·

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 ventilat

• 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...
    • nuerow 5y ago
      > Munger is the top-rated residence in the area. Does this mean Munger is great or that every other sizeable offering in the area is even worse?
    • daun 5y ago
      Either several of those positive reviews are fake, or those MBA students are functionally illiterate.
      • willcipriano 5y ago
        That's how you know they are real.
      • craftinator 5y ago
        I've met several MBA's, and they are more 'partially literate' in that they can write huge quantities of stuff, but each paragraph has nothing to do with the last paragraph. Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
        • elpatoisthebest 5y ago
          The most highly educated person in my extended family has the worst spelling and grammar of anyone I've ever seen. Getting a hand written note from them is always a guessing game.
        • salawat 5y ago
          God, this annoys the crap out of me. People say I write novels in my emails, so I tried breaking things up once for an MBA. It resulted in a dozen or so emails that when concatenated would equal the "novel" they'd have originally complained about. Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
    • 5y ago
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    >Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
    • nuerow 5y ago
      > This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome
      • pbronez 5y ago
        Looks like that's actually been accounted for directly: "[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    I wouldn't say the housing market in Ann Arbor has a fair bit of choice. The vast majority of undergrads live in frat style 7+ bedroom houses. There really aren't a huge number of 1 or even 2 bedroom apartments available, and what does exist is either incredibly run down or 2k+ a month in a high rise building that grad students can't afford. North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
    • bumby 5y ago
      Is your claim based on the assumption that it has to be within walking distance of campus? It's been awhile since I lived in the area, but I never had issues finding a reasonable student apartment if you were willing to bus/bike/commute in
      • deleted 5y ago
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    • wpietri 5y ago
      It's super frustrating when people take a phrase, change its meaning by removing it from context, and then nitpick it. That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • treis 5y ago
    Reading the comments feels like everyone went to college in bizarro world. The dorms I lived in always had shared bedrooms. In one 4 people across two bunk beds. Having a room to call my own in a dorm would have been an extraordinary improvement. Wouldn't have cared in the slightest bit about a window.
    • wolverine876 5y ago
      > Wouldn't have cared in the slightest bit about a window. Of course you're entitled to your preferences, but we can safely say that the vast majority want windows in their living space.
      • treis 5y ago
        Nobody said anything about not wanting windows. It's the choice between a window and sharing a single room with 4 people. No window is the easy choice.
        • wpietri 5y ago
          For you, perhaps. And maybe I would have said the same thing in college, when I paid approximately zero attention to my health. But I learned in the years since that light levels make a huge difference. A room like that could easily have pushed me into severe "seasonal" depression.
          • IggleSniggle 5y ago
            Exactly. These days, I know that the pain of 3 obnoxious "same-room" roommates may still be worth the price vs sunlight, which will dramatically affect my overall mood. I can easily complain about the roommates, but the light will have a greater real effect on my mood.
            • treis 5y ago
              But you're not confined to your room during the daylight. There's plenty of common spaces to go to that have windows.
  • pbronez 5y ago
    They claim to address health effects of light with dynamic "virtual windows." I agree it would be useful to study how well this works. If nothing else, it would inform how we design long haul spacecraft eventually... “All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
• deleted 5y ago
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• Syzygies 5y ago
  There were cholera epidemics in the 19th century, until we realized we shouldn't drink contaminated water. In cities such as London, this required major infrastructure investments. We're just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air, and we're just realizing that we need to make infrastructure investments. CO2 is a good proxy for infectious disease transmission risk. We breathe out CO2 as we spread pathogens. Outside air is just above 400ppm (higher with auto exhaust) and architects aimed for 600ppm before the pandemic. As one approaches CO2 levels closer to outside air, infectious disease transmission plummets. To balance ventilation with energy costs (and avoid accelerating global warming) one needs heat exchangers that can't easily be retrofitted into an existing building. Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks. In my experience sitting on building committees, architects are better at original visuals than original engineering. When a Spanish village restores ancient stone huts for tourists, they run DC wiring for LED lights. When I ask if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb, architects just stare back at me, deer in the headlights. So I'm not hopeful that a radical reworking of our infrastructure will originate with architects. Our building wasn't going to have windows that opened, till I suggested the building would be usable parts of the year even if the central air failed. I was assured it would never fail. The central air in the previous building failed the next week; I was never implicated. Then our administration overruled the architects and put in office windows. People teased me that I cost us a "this building pees spring water" green certification. Then the pandemic, and I was a hero.
  • sbierwagen 5y ago
    >Outside air is just above 400ppm In 2015 it was, sure. We'll probably hit a seasonal peak of 420ppm next year. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ RCP8.5 has us at 1000ppm by the end of the century. By then outside air ventilation will mostly be needed to keep people in meeting rooms from putting themselves into a coma.
  • kixiQu 5y ago
    > just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air Well.... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curious-history-of-steam-heat-and-pandemics https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...
• everybodyknows 5y ago
  >similar building The Michigan building has separate, private baths. Looking at the UCSB rendering, single toilet, single shower for eight. The plan view OTOH, shows two baths. One or the other is wrong.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  What if someone snores? edit: apparently it isn't about hundreds of students sharing one room.
• musingsole 5y ago
  No kidding! We just went through 2 years where this building would've been the absolute worst to grapple with. Imagine those 4,500 being told to sit out the pandemic in their rooms. How can they miss the problem when the worst case scenario for some idiotic design like this happened last year!
  • loeg 5y ago
    Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent? I mean I agree it would be a miserable place to shelter-in-place for COVID, but with COVID in the rear-view mirror for the vaccinated, I'm not sure it's a major concern. I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
    • musingsole 5y ago
      Gamblers fallacy. Not sure what you're contributing besides.
      • loeg 5y ago
        Please elaborate on how that's responsive to my comment. Again, not really sure a possible 2 year pandemic is especially significant in the 50 year design life of a building. Even if it sits empty for 4% of its life with 100% probability (generous), you still get 96% (48 years) of use out of it.
        • musingsole 5y ago
          Nah, you're right. Nothing to learn from the events of just a few hours ago, so go ahead and board them up. What do I care? They're only humans.
          • dang 5y ago
            Please don't break the site guidelines like this, or like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038609. We're trying for something quite different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html