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Comment by xboxnolifes | Hacker News Reader

> See Munger's dorm buildings that he pushed upon universities that make prisons look like hotels.

I've seen them, and they look preferable to the dorms I actually lived in. Getting a room to myself instead of 2-4 people sharing a (what felt like) 100sqft space.

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Were your dorm rooms brand new and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and forced upon the university and city via throwing money around?

Also, there are plenty of reports of just how bad his designs are: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/munger-residence...

> Also, there are plenty of reports of just how bad his designs are.

There's also plenty of great reviews of it. [1] 8.3/10 seems hardly catastrophic, especially if it gives people an affordable place to live.

I feel like the vast majority of the criticisms come from people who definitely didn't live in them.

[1] https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...

the bad ones are in Santa Barbara

The "bad ones" in Santa Barbara never got built, no? So people definitely didn't live in them.

> Were your dorm rooms brand new and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and forced upon the university and city via throwing money around?

Irrelevant to whether or not I would enjoy being in them.

It's not really irrelevant. If someone spent all that money and effort on a building and you had no windows or exposure to outside light until you left the building, you don't think that would affect your enjoyment of the building? Especially knowing that perfectly serviceable and better alternatives exist but that's what they went with?

So I take it you lived here?

+1 these looked great, I would have much rather lived in this than the triple with zero privacy I lived in during school.

I lived in my own room with a shared living room in a dorm room decades ago. And it had a window and opened to the outside. The point is that better designs exist, but people will defend Munger just because his design could be worse.

I think my opinion and reaction is based upon his reaction. He rejected all criticism outright and refused to listen to anyone. It was his design, or he would take his money away.

Better designs exist, but they are rare, often due to circumstances like costs.

I too would have welcomed a private windowless dorm room versus having a forced roommate with no privacy. I specifically chose to commute an hour+ from my parents home because I couldn’t stand the lack of privacy offered by any of my school’s dorm options.

I saw more of the opposite - people dismissing him because of identity politics and just because he's a billionaire.

My impression was he had strict requirements because part of the design is about tradeoffs and cost and the reason this kind of thing takes forever and gets expensive is because of all of the arguing that happens during it. You end up with a design by committee and worse outcome.

I'm skeptical of the 'better designs' not having these tradeoffs.

It could be worse, sure. But those rooms (at least some of them) don't have any windows. Why would you build something like that?

My dorm room did not have windows. Honestly it would only be a problem if I never left it. But I was out and about every day to classes and friends and other typical university things

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