UC-Santa Barbara Giant Dorm Proposal Makes the New Yorker Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Maybe these folks can help. Although some say there is no such thing as bad publicity, the giant dorm proposed for UC-Santa Barbara seems to be a magnet for it. From the latest New Yorker: Amateur Hour: Nightmare of the Windowless Dorm Room Charlie Munger, a Warren Buffett crony, donated two hundred million dollars to a university for a gigantic new dorm. The catch: no windows. How did guinea pigs in a similar Munger housing experiment fare? By Charles Bethea November 13, 2021, New Yorker, November 22, 2021 Issue
In 2016, Charlie Munger, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s holding company, announced his intention to donate two hundred million dollars to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to be used to build a dormitory. There was “one huge catch,” as Munger, an amateur architect, put it: no windows. “Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another. Last month, Munger’s plan was formally accepted by U.C.S.B. without apparent alteration: a nearly two-million-square-foot structure, eleven stories tall, that will house around forty-five hundred students in a hive of tiny bedrooms—the vast majority of which will indeed be windowless. Instead of the real thing, there will be Disney-inspired fake windows, of which Munger has said, “We will give the students knobs, and they can have whatever light they want. Real windows don’t do that.” A consulting architect named Dennis McFadden subsequently announced his resignation from U.C.S.B.’s design-review committee. In a letter, which was later leaked, he wrote that “Charlie’s Vision” was “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.” McFadden called Munger’s U.C.S.B. building a “social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Having no natural light was a problem. So were stale air and tight spaces. McFadden noted that the structure had just two main exits and would qualify “as the eighth densest neighborhood in the world, falling just short of a portion of Dhaka, Bangladesh.” Nearly all of Yale’s undergrad population could fit inside. Munger, who is now ninety-seven years old and lives in a house in Los Angeles with plenty of windows, was unfazed by McFadden’s critique. “When an ignorant man leaves, I regard it as a plus, not a minus,” Munger said. He called McFadden an “idiot” who did not “look at the building intelligently.” In a follow-up in Architectural Record, UCLA Faculty Association Blog: 4th Quarter 2021
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