Charlie Munger defends windowless dorm rooms for California students
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first mostly-windowless dorm he’s built. His previous work at UM has generally very good reviews and was built without much (if any) protest.
Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
It sounds to me like the evidence so far is that Munger is correct, and on average people (or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this) 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. I’m not sure why this particular structure has provoked so much more outrage than the previous one.
Edit: I previously mentioned the Stanford Munger Graduate Residence as well, but it appears that one is of more “traditional” layout (and is relatively expensive). Thanks dkarp for pointing this out. I've edited it out of my comment as to not mislead.
[0] https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-resi...
Maybe Munger didn't have much input there.
[edit] downvoter is maybe unaware that I'm referring to the Stanford Munger building and not the proposed windowless building
In reality half the people get a massive debt burden and the other half live off-campus, but the complainers don’t really see that part.
See also: people who are vehemently opposed to building more density, because a detached house with a large yard is better for mental health
But I draw the line at windows. They are a basic human necessity and a fire hazard mitigation. I stayed in a hostel underground once in Liverpool, and it was aweful... I was not rich at college and shared crappy houses all the while, but I would not take this up under any circumstances.
The options can't be perfect or nothing. The options should be perfect, good and bad.
Certainly. The problem comes when you present something that is bad as something that is good or perfect.
This design isn't because students can't afford buildings with windows, it's because a billionaire has a fantasy that it's the optimal design for such a building, thinks architects who disagree are "ignorant", and is making his donation contingent on it.
You have to admit that there is at least a chance that this is a good idea and Mr Munger has good advice on the subject? It isn't like the students are confined to their cell, they just need to sleep there. A lot of them may not consider a window important, particularly in the face of saving some money.
Months can go by without me raising the blind in my bedroom. While I certainly want a window there, I don't think it is essential.
Not every one. But it does seem likely that Munger has access to people with more experience building windowless bedrooms than anyone in the UK. I've heard from a source on the internet that it would be illegal to have such experience in the UK, so I doubt anyone does.
It is a trivially obvious one. You won't have people with experience in a technique available if it has been banned. It is a safe guess that the US architects will be better at this than UK ones.
Permanent accommodation which is multiple doors away from the nearest natural light source, relies on artificial means to circulate air and has a distinct lack of exits might find a few more supporters than child labour, but funnily enough the laws ended up in place for similar reasons. We saw what happened when we assumed that people must know best because they were rich enough to pay people to agree with them (and others were too poor and uninformed to have much choice)
What is trivially obvious is that you won't have a building design with windows in bedrooms if the person funding the design makes funding contingent on the building not having windows in bedrooms, as Munger states he's doing. In all probability the experts hadn't built masses of windowless cells backing onto windowless kitchens connected via windowless corridors to the outside world before (the reason the design is controversial, after all, is that its not exactly standard building practice in the US either) and probably had plenty of ideas on how to maximise floorplan whilst guaranteeing natural light to inhabited spaces, but they detailed this design because the person cutting the cheques told them to. Your implicit argument that a design constraint imposed by the ego of a billionaire design dilettante is likely to yield better advice than a design constraint imposed by regulators based on decades of built environment research is far from trivially obvious...
And if Munger had some insight the regulators missed, it's not exactly evident from the bizarre set of contradictions he offers up in the interview..
Can you demonstrate that this is true. AFAIK UK regulations consider fire-safety, and they have nothing to do with banning windowless-rooms outright.
There's something that feels off about this statement. It reads much like the articles that talk about how young millennials are "choosing" to live in pod houses/tiny homes when in reality they can't afford anything better. They are forced to live in these conditions which are then normalised by authors framing it as a free choice.
And to be honest, we’re always going to have to “force” people into some sort of living condition. There are more people than ever going to higher education, so people will have to accept either smaller living spaces, denser construction, higher costs, or longer commutes to school - space is (unfortunately) a rival good, and giving everybody a large dorm is likely not viable.
I think as long as you get out during the day, and as a student, that’s probably likely, this sort of arrangement seems to make sense. But still offends me.
Everyone with their own money. The university with its own, the donors with their own.
The parent post makes no sense: Charlie Munger does not decide "what to build", he decides whether to participate.
Sure, this is a convenient way to look at this particular situation. Yet I google "strings attached donation university" and see many instances of this crap: Koch brothers, John Allison, etc. It's serious enough that Harvard recently issued a "Gift Policy Guide" discourage strings-attached giving. Ironically, only the elite private universities have enough cachet to make such a policy stick.
^1 For some time German universities had to require higher fees from students, officially to provide an improved learning experience. Seeing that universities now had an alternative income source some states cut public funding, they didn't care about the specifics, the courts did, some universities ended up not heating their buildings during winter because they couldn't legally touch the money.
What other «way[s] to look at this» are there? Point of view or practical proposal, I do not get what are the other options.
But my more extreme view is that individuals should not be able to amass so many resources to begin with. It's absurd.
Furthermore you are dismissing the fact that there still is a market, with choices.
There's nothing hindering students from renting an apartment, they don't have to use the 200$ million building.
I don't live in the US and don't know the local market, but a quick google says you need at least $2000 a month to get a basic apartment in Santa Barbara: https://www.apartments.com/santa-barbara-ca/. Who has that kind of money, especially combined with a full time education?
Your elitism is showing.
No one will be forced to live there, but that location is a much better alternative than homeless or not.
The ridiculous expense because of the acute housing shortage in SB. Which building the largest dorm in the country would help alleviate.
> they don't have to use the 200$ million building
1.5$ Billion Building
It's actually the opposite... It creates an option with different tradeoffs.
> They are forced to live in these conditions
I agree that the choice between crippling rent rates and having no access to windows is not a good one, but it seems a function of where we are economically. Base rents everywhere I've ever lived are much higher compared to minimum wage than they've been for past generations.
They are absurdly high and I think the people who are put in that position are doing what they feel is in their best interest. What worries and frustrates me is that many publications/people seem to be seeking to normalise the situation we're in rather than thinking about how we could provide a better standard of living to people.
"conditions"? 1 in 20 UC students is homeless [1] and they want to a build a 5,000 single occupancy rooms for 1.5 Billion. But somehow everyone and their mother finds a reason to veto new development.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-02/what-crit...
I don't why they cannot build simply longer buildings with each room having a window instead of big square one with most rooms not having window at all? Both such buildings would occupy the same amount of squares per meter.
A decade ago I was exchange student in Umea, Sweden and dorms were really good. In every corridor there where 8 rooms. Everyone had their own room + own small bathroom. Room was like 3x size of those in the article. Corridor had big shared kitchen and living room. Rent per month was like 450 euro. Campus was really big - it was basically a student city so there was a space for everyone. Those buildings were just simply longer. Building student campuses/universities outside of big cities also helped.
It is expensive.
> I don't why they cannot build simply longer buildings
It's not simple. They have to deal with zoning laws, land owned/available to the university, costs (which you already think are too high) and maximizing occupancy etc, etc.
> Everyone had their own room + own small bathroom. Room was like 3x size
Sounds nice in Sweden... meanwhile in the UC system 1 in 20 students are homeless.
No, it's effectively 300k per room, not per person. This structure will be up for more than 1 semester and certainly up for more than than length of one person living in it.
That being said, I have no frame of reference for the cost of similar structures. It definitely sounds fairly expensive considering the size of the room + common area.
The Michigan one doesn't have windows in the bedroom, but does have windows in the apartment (shared kitchen/living room of 7 bedrooms, i.e., common area.).[1][2]
The 3d render of the apartment in this article doesn't have any windows at all, anywhere! The windows in common areas they seem to be talking about are study spaces outside the apartment.
[1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iRaug6kB14 [2] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtkALW6Q2_A
But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.
Yeah this thing is insane.
[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu... [2] https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer...
My initial reaction was to react against a windowless dorm room layout. But you make some good points.
What I still don’t get is why insist on such few egress paths and emergency exits?
Do you know if they are piping in some natural sunlight to the interior?
Nobody heard about the building in Michigan, so nobody talked about it. Also, in Ann Arbor it's very likely that the CoL is not so high that students are de facto forced to tolerate these conditions.
It's not really Munger who's the villain here, he instead plays the role of an enabler. There's no inherent reason that housing costs should be so high that students have to live in these awful boxes, it's because of the policies chosen by the City of Santa Barbara. For context, the population density in SB is about a quarter of that in SF.
What's outrageous is that students pay the price in mental health and fire safety for housing policy that benefits the well-off and well-connected seeking aesthetics and investment returns. What motivates people to comment is the implied risk of this callous abuse of construction restrictions ("zoning") being extended to other vulnerable populations.
The bedrooms are much larger. They have individual bathrooms. And a number of reviews said at least the suites have windows. UCSB's wouldn't.
> or at least the kind of people that would sign up for res in a building like this
You added this later. It's tautological. And often undergraduate students don't get to choose their building.
Looking at the layout it is positively dystopian.
People will say they feel a private room is better, but that’s no guarantee that it actually is.
Conversely, we have a lot of research showing that natural light brings all kind of benefits.
Even in the UK, which is a lot poorer than the US, every undergraduate has always gotten an individual bedroom.
The idea of making adults share bedrooms is very bizarre. How do you have a relationship living like that?
Remember that people having sex while not married has only been acceptable for perhaps 50 years to society, which post-dates many colelge buildings. There might be lots of people who want to dissuade people from "illicit liasons" by pairing them up in rooms to make things harder ;-)
Learn with, challenge, and help you… in the bedroom?!
You don’t need to sleep and get undressed in the same room as someone to study with them.
> I doubt the powers that be are worried about you wanting a long-term relationship.
When I was at Uni they made a big deal about how many people met their future partners there.
Btw some of the London unis do make people share. At least one friend plus my wife were having to share. Drives people nuts, especially if the other person has some issue like snoring or excessive partying.
I actually found it formative to be forced to share that space and resolve (inevitable) tensions that arise. And since it's usually randomized, you end up with someone you might not have normally met. Of course some people have bad experiences, and can request re-assignment.
When I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s, Freshmen had to share dorms but after that one could pay extra to not share the room, although the bathroom was still shared. However, when I was at USC for my MS housing was extremely limited and while there were a handful of single-person dorms, almost everyone had 2+ person setups and even then it was like winning a lottery ticket to get any on campus housing at all. Later during my PhD at UCSD, it was again enormously difficult to get any on campus housing and I had roommates in campus housing for 6 years. There wasn't another option. Maybe things have changed, but when I was an undergraduate in Oklahoma in the early 2000s
My undergrad experience: by policy, freshmen had roommates, sophomores and above lived alone unless they wanted a roommate.
[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
And US university education itself is much more expensive. Genuinely bizarre how when something often costs six figures, shared bedrooms are the norm and eliminating windows is seen as a viable alternative. Still, you have better college sports teams I guess...
I've heard these are actually normally a net income source, not an expenditure!
I would have absolutely hated it if I'd had to share a bedroom with someone else! Aside from generally wanting my own space with privacy, how the hell is that supposed to work when you're bringing sexual partners back to your room?!
I did four years in shared rooms, and basically everybody figures out how to cooperate and work things out.
This is mostly true but not universal - when I was in UG accommodation in the mid-2000 it was indeed mostly individual, but there was also some small fraction of shared rooms available, that were a little cheaper than my (probably somewhat subsidised) £50/week individual room.
My children each suffered in different ways from being forced to share a bedroom with someone when they entered college as well.
In my completely layman opinion, I think that the shared living space with private bedroom (even windowless) is a sensible compromise that will result in a better quality of life for the students there.
True, but if you're asking why anyone would put up with that -- it has something to do with money.
With that said, I did hear that after I graduated they added dorms for freshmen, but I also heard that the dorms all had single rooms, with the only difference between the dorms and the apartments was that the dorms had communal bathrooms.
For what it's worth, I would not have gone to any school where I would've had to share a bedroom. I'm an intensely private person, and if I couldn't go to college anywhere I wouldn't have to share a bedroom I'd just have entered the workforce at 18 and continued living with my parents till I could afford to move out.
> Obviously, it would be better if every student could have a penthouse with perfect views in all four directions. But we don't do that because we can't get enough students to live conveniently close together.
This is a logic fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. "We all agree that all students can't have a penthouse. So why do you care if we stuff them in windowless rooms?"
He wants to compare windowless rooms to a cruise ship. You spend a WEEK on a cruise ship. I had an openable window in my dorm room (in the days before every room in a university was a hotel suite). I cannot imagine living 9 months of my life in a room with no actual window.
False dichotomy
> Exaggerating (sometimes grossly exaggerating) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version.
The claim in this case being, "residents should have reasonable access to sunlight in their rooms." And the exaggeration being penthouses.
It's as if there aren't options in between and this isn't just optimization and greed run amuck against the human condition. It reminds me of one of the newer plane seating layouts I saw with alternating seats.
You know, it would be even more optimal if they didn't actually live in the building at all and just sent him money every week, wouldn't he like that even more?
This building is a huge improvement over that baseline.
Why can’t we try different combinations of that and let people self-optimize? One of the big trade-offs here is that putting every room on the exterior means making a long narrow building, which means “dead” space between builds (less density) and more exterior walls (construction cost). Light wells could maybe give you “windows” in that you could have some real sunlight, but they have zero view, privacy concerns, aren’t exits, and are much dimmer than true exterior windows. Courtyards have to be big enough to not be glorified lightwells, and they basically have the same problem as narrow buildings. We could try to build up for more density, but that comes with several more axes of trade-offs.
If everyone is saying no other building does this, maybe we should stop relying on emotion and get some actual data. It’s definitely possible that a sun-lamp window (and good ventilation, which he mentions) are fine for people. UCSB should just get a clause saying he’ll pay to tear it down after 10 years if psych studies of residents are damning, and then we have a billionaire really betting on his vision and funding an honest attempt at proving a viable alternative.
In an ideal free market, this would work fine.
This is not an ideal free market. Many of the students coming to UCSB will be relatively poor—as in, can't realistically afford to pay any extra for a better living situation. So rather than being able to choose whether they value a better living situation or a cheaper one more highly, they will simply be forced into the worst—ie, cheapest—living situation available to them short of a cardboard box.
Stop trying to apply idealized free-market logic to real-world problems with much, much stricter constraints on the real, living people involved.
Why would you be spending a literal nine months of year in your little windowless dorm bedroom, though? Were you a shut-in in college? The whole point is you sleep there, maybe occasionally get a little privacy there, and otherwise live your life in the rooms that do have windows. Or alternately, venture outside occasionally.
I understand why people want a window, but people make this out to be hell on earth or something.
People are different. Some students I lived with only showed up to sleep in the dorm, you could hardly see them around. Some like me preferred to study at my own desk.
I would go crazy if I had to stay there, others would not notice lack of a window.
I am not 100% critical of the windowless room, however this should be an option and not the only option (I strongly believe that once adopted this would quickly become the de-facto only accommodation option for average student)
I live in Tokyo, where they solve housing crises by just building more stuff. Zoning restrictions are minimal. I pay 1300 for a 700 square foot 2 bedroom 15 minutes from a major shopping area by subway, no parking. You can also live right downtown in a 200sqft 1room for as little as 600 if you look around. There are even 100-150 sqft apartments in the trendiest areas.
Maybe the idea of a room that small doesn’t appeal to you. But by letting the option exist, Tokyo keeps rents low. All the people that do take those places stop bidding on the bigger ones, which helps prevent your rent from raising too. More apartments and more Choice is good. 11,000 new units should have a big impact on supply there.
A big market has hundreds of thousands if not millions of housing units of all different stripes that are more or less on a continuum. Individual units are added or removed all the time. Colleges can't tear down dorms or build new ones as quickly, they are stuck with four big dorms and the next one ain't gonna be built for another 30 years.
So it just makes a lot more sense to build dorms that 95% of your freshman class is fine inhabiting, so that no one is stuck in a dorm they really don't like, because you do not have the variety of housing options on a college campus as you do in the city of Tokyo. With these smaller scales, fixed investment requires more of a one size fits all approach, or at least a minimum bar approach.
1. People can and do get places off campus.
2. The University already has lots of conventional dorms with windows.
3. This building costs the school nothing to build and adds massively more units than a conventional design would.
The dorm has 11,000 beds. It’s hard to overstate just how cost-effective that is.
From what I’ve heard, the plan is to rent these out for $1000 a month, which unfortunately still counts as a bargain these days in that area. But they could likely rent them out for a lot less. 11,000 dorms at 1000 a month is $11 million a month and $132 million a year. Even if the university was paying for the cost of the building themselves, which they are not, they could still get a return over the initial 200 million in less than two years anyway! They could likely rent these out for $500, cover all their maintenance costs and utilities and still manage to make a solid profit each year.
That’s how you solve a housing crisis: you just build lots of apartments. But no matter how bad the housing crisis gets in California, nobody ever seems to consider that. All anybody ever looks at is the downside of an unconventional building design, without stopping to consider the massive opportunity cost of not building all of these places.
> Well, no, but I've been building buildings all my life, and I've hired a lot of the very eminent architects for over 70 years.
This sounds like a manager with no technical skills says they hired a lot of programmers before.
I think this is a fundamental human flaw, rather than a personal one, because I easily make the same mistake if I’m not careful.
Of course, this belief is based on the assumption on how frequently I see it. Could be confirmation bias or me trying to write off my own problems as not being mine. :)
I'm interested in hearing more about that, particularly whether there's a difference between windows and natural-spectrum light (the latter of which can be mimicked).
However, an architect has no particular authority on this subject. I can't give his opinion here any more weight than the manager who's hired architects before.
Briefly, the article is an opinion piece crafted to stoke outrage. It is crafted to make you stupider. It does not give you full access to all the information for you to make your own informed opinion about what's going on. It is clickbait, and not worthy of your attention.
More to the point: I followed their link to the proposal, saw what a typical residential floor plan would look like (page 59), I contrasted them with the reasons the guy gave for this design, and I now agree with the "prison for students" comments. So they did provide me with full access to all the information for me to make my own informed opinion.
Content: Quotes from billionaire defending his windowless dorm design
How is that clickbait?
However it's not an article. It's a transcribed interview that you can listen to at the top. I listened to it and their editing doesn't change the sentiment of his responses in my opinion.
I don't know who "this billionaire" is, but he is definitely 100% right here. Dorms in Asian cities are like this and they're a godsend for students, workers, etc. for inner city, affordable and temporary living.
[1] https://www.buildingincalifornia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014...
[2] https://up.codes/viewer/california/ibc-2018/chapter/10/means...
From your second link, that window requirement does not apply to type R.2 buildings (apartments) where there is an automatic sprinkler system.
From what I understand you're not even allowed to have an interior room that's a sleeping quarters that doesn't have a window, and if anybody found out that you were doing that it would get shut down immediately.
In following this story someone raised the comparison to University of Cincinnati's Sander Hall [1], which was actually less crowded than this. This now demolished building had problems from criminal offences to evacuations caused by people intentionally setting off fire alarms.
Evacuating this dorm in such cases is going to be a nightmare given the ratio of students to fire stairs and you know that's going to happen.
Architecture matters. The experience matters. Common areas, such as they are, with this many students will undoubtedly turn feral almost immediately. Putting people in windowless cells but defending it as "everyone gets their own room" is not the solution.
Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything. It's why there are so many concert halls, colleges, etc named "Carnegie" (after Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel industrialist). You don't have to take their money. I'm sure UCSB isn't struggling for cash.
[1]: https://medium.com/@spncrtckrmn/the-rise-and-demise-of-ucs-s...
This comes off as hyperbolic and biased, and more likely, some combination of thoughtlessness and arrogance which makes the opposing view seem more honest.
Your reference to a 50 year old dorm in another state, with a completely different layout and a culture more informed by the film Animal House than Instagram hardly bears up. The building is shorter with more space for emergency exits. It may well have integrated fire suppression and active monitoring. And each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Moreover, touchy feely points like "Architecture matters. The experience matters." only raise red flags for me, especially when considered with your next point:
"Billionaires reach an age when the only thing they value is putting their name on everything."
This particular billionaire clearly has an enthusiastic engagement with the details of the project and a vision for solving the problems he's mentioned in the article, namely removing the need for freshmen to lodge with a stranger.
A billionaire that just wanted to "put their name on everything" would pay the money, let the architect do their thing and never consider what it would be like to live in the results, right? This guy seems to be trying to fix the complaints from his eight(!) children, so future generations don't face the same.
You might have a point buried in your post somewhere, but in your rush to slam this whole thing without backing it up, you've lost me.
This is supposedly the floor plan: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer...
> each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Yeah, but not quite. First, these "sleeping spaces with no windows" are apartments, a cluster of 7 single-occupancy bedrooms, with a common area in the middle, with kitchenette, shared bathrooms, etc. It's a self-contained unit. And most of these units have no windows at all.
8 of these units form a "house", with a large common area and real windows, as you see. But it's a space shared by 56 people, and their guests. Calling it private is rather stretching that term.
It's strange how this interview with Munger completely focuses on the windows, the one concern that's both unavoidable in the design and addressed in the planning (by putting in fake windows)
Are shared bathrooms really that big a deal?
Sharing bathrooms is fine in principle, but with more than one per two people you start coordinating who has to wake up when to use it, and it gets worse the more people you have that want to go to class at the same time.
1: https://www.dfss.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/docs/dcs/DRC%2...
I believe my house at Caltech has on average maybe 7-10 people per shower room, with each shower room having 2 or 3 shower stalls.
However, in four years there of showering at least once a day I only once ever had someone come in and use one of the other stalls when I was showering. People tended to try to avoid shower rooms that already had a stall in use and were almost always successful at this.
For the first two years, most people who lived in the parts of the house that I did and so would be competitors for the showers I would most likely use were in most of the same classes as me, because (1) the first two years of Caltech had a lot of core classes that everyone had to take, (2) room picks in my house were mostly by seniority, (3) rooms tended to be near other rooms of similar desirability and so people tended to have rooms near people in their year.
The complainers are only considering an imaginary ideal alternative, not realistic trade offs.
I stayed in a room without a window for a week a few years ago. I wouldn't recommend it.
if the trade off is that I can't afford alternative housing I'm finding housing in a turn that I need to commute from. I went to ucsb and knew a few people who commuted from Ventura which is 45min away and much cheaper than Santa Barbara.
And, incidentally, I don’t need to accept the challenge to block my windows. I already have blackout curtains that I never open because the only time I’m in my bedroom is when I'm asleep or it’s too bright/hot to open. And I can’t use the natural light to wake up since where I live sunrise varies from about 4:00 to 6:30am, which doesn't work with my schedule at all. I've considered buying an automatic curtain opener to make use of the light as an alarm, but haven't gotten around to it, so for now the curtains just stay closed.
Also, I sleep with blackout curtains too! It's a much different experience than waking up in a pitch black room.
Small slivers of light make it through the edges of the curtains and that makes a HUGE difference in my own experience. Even in the winter when it's dark in the morning is a different experience than the pure pitch black. I know what I'm describing sounds silly and ridiculous but it's hard to explain how unsettling it is to wake up in a room like that.
Consider I had to wake up before sunrise and got out of classes after sunset, there wasn't much sun to deal with in my dorm.
I feel pretty strongly that data would back up my anecdotal experience though... not willing to take the time to look it up though so i'll stay out of the conversation from now on.
Isn't California trying to switch to permanent DST? In Santa Barbara that will move winter sunrise to as late as a little past 8 AM. That's going to limit how effectively a lot of people can use natural light to help wake.
In the winter I wake up before sunrise; however, there is still small slivers of ambient light out there(from the moon) that makes it through my blackout curtains which makes a world of difference.
Again, all anecdotal evidence but I'm inclined to join the rabble on this building given my personal experience.
??? I spent a fairly significant amount of time in my room studying, sleeping, and doing schoolwork when I was in college. I only went out for recreation, meals, and classes. I would argue that I spent the majority of time in my bedroom at college, including sleeping.
...and removes windows to force people outside, thinking somehow that'll solve the problem?
It only shows that everyone who's sharp in one way is utterly clueless in another. My guess is that people will end up spending more time depressed (e.g via SAD) as a consequence of getting no exposure to nature and daylight in their own rooms while cramming as opposed to making themselves go outside, as Charlie intended.
I wonder if these outcomes will be measurable once a generation of students has made it through?
https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
https://i.imgur.com/8o7TnoL.png
Wondering if it's an odd outcome of media exposure or if it's a consequence of bought reviews. It'd be interesting to compare the reviews of the building to other graduate residences elsewhere.
It's also grad student housing, which means students actually have some measure of choice in it, rather than just being assigned to live there when they arrive as a first-year.
That should be an unofficial motto of HN.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/uc-santa-barbara-mega-dorm-mung...
Choice quotes:
> In an Oct. 24 resignation letter to the committee that leaked on the image sharing site Imgur, [former lead architect Dennis] McFadden described the project as a "social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development" of students
> McFadden, however, is doubtful of the building's effectiveness. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, he wrote that the building "attempts to engineer social experiences" by placing communal spaces at the perimeter of the building, which would receive natural light.
> "It is meant to build community, encourage peer-to-peer interaction, promote engagement and relationship building, foster an environment of learning and support, and provide necessary resources and amenities to support a 24/7 on-campus living experience," [University spokesperson Andrea] Estrada said.
I wasn't pulling it out of thin air; it's the foundational ethos for the design. Everything else is just an added layer of PR.
Wanting to donate to people in a poor country but not to the local regime, for example.
Keeping 4500 students in a single 11 storey building is pretty efficient. And using all the natural light space for common areas and classroom is pretty novel.
It’s hard for me to know Munger’s mind, but I think his donation is intended to improve how dorms are designed beyond this single building and school. So his investment is not to just house these students, but to help colleges better house students.
That said, I don't understand why even the boring version is confusing. Someone can want to help an institution achieve one of its goals, but not others of its goals.
Donating money with floorplan layout stipulations is weird though, especially when it's the recipient saying "no, that layout of the building that'll bear your name is so mean it'll reflect badly on us"
[0] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/eight-levels-of-charita...
In fact it feels wrong to cast the matter in this light. At worst it is more akin to Maimonides' concept of Utilitarian Friendship, and the current furor perhaps serving as the “When the benefit vanishes, love vanishes” moment.
It puts the university in a no-win situation of either foregoing the best practices of design review, or foregoing $200 million.
If it’s actually a good design, it should stand up to scrutiny like any other building design does. The most famous buildings you’ve ever heard of passed through a design review and made revisions. It’s absurd to think that Frank Gehry gets design-reviewed but Charlie Munger does not.
By exempting a design from review and revision, you get what they are getting now: a shitload of bad PR. If stakeholders can’t weigh in internally, they will attack externally. Left to fester, this could affect the university’s acceptance rate. Publicly disregarding the concerns of parents and students is not generally a great look in higher education.
Well, define scrutiny?
There's technical criticism from the standpoint of safety, for example. If it's not possible to evacuate this building in the event of a fire, that's an overriding concern.
There's also criticism from the standpoint of tradition or aesthetic. If the building is ugly or nontraditional, then that's a social problem. The university will need to choose between the taste of the donor and its own aesthetic.
The "natural light is necessary for mental health" argument is somewhere in between. A lot of the reaction seems to be a knee-jerk one about tradition and imagining life in a light-free (not just window-free) room, or rooms with poor ventilation. On the other hand, the article here at least alludes to studies on the matter.
> By exempting a design from review and revision
I think you're over-reading things? As I understand it, the building isn't exempt from review and revision, but Munger retains co-final approval with the university. It's not a one-shot "build these exact blueprints or nothing" deal.
To reflect on your earlier example, Frank Gehry gets design-reviewed, but if the clients want him to do something unacceptable he can still walk away.
This guy isn't just a "billionaire." Munger, through his involvement in Berkshire Hathaway and his law firm MTO, is the "billionaires' billionaire." This tone-deaf nonsense just shows what he thinks normal people should be grateful for accepting, as a gift from his tax write-off account... And if you think Munger is some sort of architectural genius, I look forward to your defense of "Mungerville." Because, you know, Santa Barbara is totally where you want to put a bunch of French Normandy crap:
https://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/image.cgi?image=...
…
Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”
I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”
Just tell me what place that is and I will sell it to you so you can own it :)
No it isn't. The economy isn't zero sum.
>is it possible to build and own our life instead of being forced to labor until near the end of life?
By "forced to labor", are you talking about having to work for someone else, or having to labor at all? It's clear that the former is possible (ie. start your own business), and the latter is a pipe dream as long as we're not in a post-scarcity economy
Im not talking about post-scarcity economy Im talking about trying to get there, right now it feels we only moving away from it, and the labor we do is not constructive to us or valued very little.
From the pictures in the linked article at least two people per unit can only leave their rooms through the shared kitchen. So I wouldn't bet on it, seems to me as if they optimized for size with little to no thought on anything else. Even without the fire hazard having to go through the kitchens working area to get in and out of your room just asks for problems when it is in use.
Housing many people while providing windows and decent living conditions is a solved problem. Just look at ex Soviet-block housing. Everyone got their own modern flat while still being pretty space efficient. Sure they wont win you an architecture price and some consider them "ugly" but they are still the best option to provide decent housing for a lot of people in a very short time.
Wow. For the sake of its reputation, legacy and future funding from other sources, which, over time, will utterly dwarf the dollar amount of this toxic "gift" that this crank billionaire is trying to twist their arm with --
Let's all hope that UCSB comes to its senses, and cuts all ties with this bully as soon as conceivably possible.
1 in 20 UC students are homeless and SB has an acute housing crisis [1]. They are building a dorm for 5,000 students and also need to deal with cost, zoning, etc.
Personally I would have been glad to give up a window to not share a room when I lived in the dorms. I also lived in an effectively windowless (against a brick wall) apartment in NYC, you just spend less time in your room.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-02/what-crit...
This windowless thing is just a bunch of crazy suppositions by an ignorant man.
At the end of the day, this just isn't the kind of person you want to sit down and do business with. No matter what dollar amount he's trying to jerk you around with.
The architect caused a media-circus because he didn't agree with a tradeoff they made and he called him ignorant. You are here also making personal attacks calling him; a "Crank", "Toxic" "Bully"...
> this just isn't the kind of person you want to sit down and do business with.
Charlie Munger would probably top "a most desired business partner" lists...
"Crank", "Toxic" "Bully"
Accurate and justified, in light of the aforementioned unprovoked attacks.
He just thinks that because he's a billionaire, he can get away with it.
I see so when you make ad-hominem attacks they are ok, but if you don't agree with someone & they make ad-hominem attacks they are a "toxic bully"
As long as air quality is healthy and filtered, it would make a great place to sleep or quietly study. Meals and all other items force you out of the room into a common area, and honestly the lack of windows would motivate me to get outside and meet people, which is what you want in college. No reason to make a single dorm comfortable enough that you never have to leave or use another study space on campus.
I lived in a single one year, and the window looked into other windows, so it was closed most of the time. I might have preferred windowless if it meant I could get black out sleeping conditions.
The two entry ways are also good for bumping into people / making conversation. It’s good for socialization, which is important.
COVID makes all of this very weird, and isolating in place due to COVID exposure in a windowless pod with 7 other people and two shared bathrooms and no natural light for 2 weeks would be awful.
I know it's in Santa Barbara, but even still - that seems like an excessive amount of money.
Housing 4500k students it is about 333k per student. Which does seem incredibly expensive given the tiny and low-quality space per student, but I have no idea about building costs in general.
A mortgage calculator suggests that, unsubsidized, the price is $1146 / mo for each student. Given that it won't be full occupancy, particularly during the summer, plus add in an "HOA fee" for the building services (gym, etc) and I could see this rising to $2000 / mo per student, maybe.
Is this reasonable? Can we do better? I'm not sure. I'll bet it's appetizing compared to current prices that students pay in Santa Barbara, but I wonder if it's really the best they could do.
All the students were hanging out and partying on the rooftop of the building.
The rooms were barely larger than the bed. The project of Munger seem to have larger bedrooms and nicer common spaces for each flat.
Since my day that option has been removed because the government have decreed everyone have their own toilet and shower. But the result is kids in vastly more debt.
Let there be light
The irony! (I suppose Mr. Munger would note that artificial windows are, light-wise, more flexible; some would add that this way light is effectively, literally (artificially) "done".)
TVs are cheaper per unit area than insulation windows, could be providing a view of exactly what a windows would with streaming cameras, but could also let you travel the world by providing votes from other locations. They would also let you up the r value of the walls easily :)
However in fifty years we might not want to open the windows anyway.
There is no need for a TV to REPLACE the window
Even bird cages have openings. Trapping a student in a hole is rather miserable.
It is potentially an issue for long-term eye health. If your eyes spend most of their time within a small range of focal distances, the muscles you use for focusing essentially fall out of shape. This can cause a person to need multi-focal glasses sooner than otherwise.
It also limits the mental health benefits of looking “out a window.” Your brains knows whether a scene is real or fake based on focal depth, regardless of resolution.
This is why I moved from Barcelona to DR—to avoid this kind of thing.
I can't believe some are saying "i would have accepted a windowless room"
I lost faith personally, we are doomed..
Well, to be honest, I'm a bit speechless about this phrase. Way to educate the future generation that it's fine to live in small, confined, window less environments.
Somehow, real windows are feasible in any other residential building.
And what's with all the diversion on single-occupancy rooms? Those two aspects have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
There is logic behind the words of Charles Munger and also on his opposition. Frankly though if Charles Munger is financing the project they should let them do it. It might work out great or terribly. We'll find out and Charles Munger will pay for it.
https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
> It was great up until the covid started, staying in an apartment with no windows and no access to other facilities within the building isn't worth it.
The issue is that 4500 students will also have to pay for it
It seems they will pay less for it.
Your comment changed my mind. Thank you!
It only makes sense that his architecture style would also favor brutalism. He probably repurposed some of the designs of the old commie-blocks from eastern europe.
China inprisons successful entrepreneurs and takes away their property. The concept of private property in China is there just to show.
So no, Munger is far from being a real proponent of a Chinese-style capitalism.
It would make a great sci fi movie.