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.
"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.
>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.
> 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.
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."
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.
What I can't get from this article is price. When I was student, reason why students shared those rooms with bunk beds was mainly because that was the thing they(or rather their parents) could afford and renting proper flat was out of their capabilities.
Nowadays, in the city I live in 20min distance from university my rent for flat might be cheaper than what students are paying for their dorm room(with windows).
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Isla Vista is the closest community to UCSB, and the students get packed into the private housing there as well (monthly cost of renting a house is about $1200 per bedroom, and you often have to sign a lease for 12 months even if you'll only be there for 9).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
My goal wasn't to represent the link. People can click on the link, and the person I replied to already said it had great reviews. My goal was to pull out quotes I thought interesting.
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.”
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.
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.
This is exactly the type of information that gets lost between generations that makes past decisions make sense. It's why I ferverently collect older academic/engineering literature. Not necessarily for the equations, but for some of the context around the problems and challenges of the time we no longer think about because they are "already solved".
Everyone moans about radiators once you start sealing up windows to be more green. Surprise! They were designed with the inefficiency of having an open window in mind for health and ventilation purposes since the turn of the century! Of course you end up with problems when you violate a functional invariant!
> Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
Apparently it will:
"[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."
> if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb,
This blows my mind too. I expect it's coming, though: the cables would be cheaper, and if there's one driver of change in construction, it's cost.
Another question is, would it be a straight improvement? I think transformers are typically very efficient, and I could imagine the losses from running a lower voltage through a long line might be greater.
Running DC typically requires much higher gauge wire. To keep under a 10% voltage drop (which is a _lot_), our current 15A branch circuits on 14g wire would be limited to about 10ft away from the transformer.
You could make it to ~30ft on existing wiring as long as you kept draw under 5A. That’s ~60W and enough to power all of 5 pretty anemic 12V bulbs.
If you actually need something like a 60ft run from your transformer and 15A to play with, you’re going to be looking more towards something like 6AWG. If you want to keep under 3% voltage drop you’d be looking towards 2AWG.
14AWG 2-wire is something like $0.35/ft. 6AWG 2-wire is like $0.75/ft. 2AWG 2-wire is coming up on $3/ft.
There’s a reason we use AC for power distribution rather than DC.
Does AC differ significantly to DC when it comes to wire gauge? If so, why? I thought wire heating was simply a function of amps?
While I think 12V would be too low, I think there's also a happier medium than 120/220V. Something like 50V is nice because you're very unlikely to get an electric shock, while taking advantage of the fact the average LED current draw is like 1 fifth of an incandescent.
Is this assuming that you keep the voltage low? Say at 12V? Wouldn't we push the voltage to maximise the power pushed and minimise the resistive losses?
The comment about powering a few anemic lightbulbs on 60W was assuming 12V, but otherwise it's all pretty independent of voltage.
You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
If you wanted to run 1800W DC as we run current power (14/2, hundred foot+ runs, etc) you'd be looking at something like 720VDC at a couple amps.
There's three main things I see as limitations to really pushing DC up to those levels:
1. Safety, plain and simple.
2. Switching. You generally require larger contacts and bigger gaps to switch DC because you don't get the benefit of it crossing over a 0 point several times a second. This gets worse the higher the voltage goes. This requires much more involved switching equipment. E.g., it's common to see a relay rated for switching 120VAC/30VDC.
3. Economies of scale. This one isn't some law of physics, but most current equipment you can find is 12/24/48VDC outside of very expensive industrial stuff. Also you're gonna need some pretty big transformers to step this stuff back down to usable voltages since everything we need it for is generally running at single-digit voltages. (Efficient, but just another big thing on the BOM for every single device.)
That said, I'm just a hobbyist so I may be missing something fundamental here.
Ohms law plays a big part in all this. Resistive losses are governed by the square of current multiplied by the resistance of the wire. As such running higher voltages minimises these losses. We use this all the time with our power transmission lines which generally run at 500kV AC if I recall correctly.
1. Safety is relative. 10-20mA is enough to kill a person. In AC voltage we measure it as root mean square, the actual peak to peak voltage is greater than Double that.
2. There are such things as solid state switching. Solid state relays and field effect transistors come to mind. This is also how we down convert DC power to lower voltages, very fast switching giving an average voltage that is the target (see buck converters).
3. DC power is everywhere and it is easy to do DC to DC conversion. Single chip solutions exist. Hell your car is entirely 12V (if ice powered, EV's are a different matter)
> You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
15A at 120VDC wouldn't require massive wires. I'm not sure why you think it's drastically different from 120VAC for wire sizing. If dropping 10% of the AC voltage is OK, dropping 10% of DC is presumably OK, too, and either is I * R. About 96 meters to drop 12V, or 48 meters out and back.
It's not a good idea for plenty of other reasons, but...
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!
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.
There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
It's easy to find better explanations with a quick search, but the general idea is that as habitats change, animals will move toward the poles and come into contact with other species that they historically haven't, creating lots of new opportunities for diseases to jump between species and mutate and do all the things they love to do.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
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.
First, you take an arbitrary probability number that depends on man-made models that are likely much more wrong than right. We've had a lot of hundred- or thousand-year events in the last two decades.
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
You can’t just apply extreme value theory to spectacular events because it supports your argument. Yes, there was a hundred years between the 1918 influenza outbreak and Covid. No, that doesn’t mean you can say that pandemics probabilistically occur once in a hundred years. The world is changing at an extraordinary pace, populations are exploding, humans and animals interact more than ever, and international travel is trivial.
Covid is not going away. Get your vaccine and move on with your life. In another year nobody will even remember the damn thing (at least for most places… some don’t seem to want to let this go).
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
> Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent?
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
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".
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.
*edit: I did just realize, however, that the floor plan for this dorm might make an excellent layout for a large number of bedrooms in a game of Dwarf Fortress.
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Agreed. His assumptions seem questionable... the whole design is built around the idea that forcing students to interact is objectively good. Even ignoring the pandemic, there's no justification for this other than his assumptions that it's somehow "good".
He's a Billionaire Republican, and that alone is enough to condemn him in the present day. He does also seem to be one hell of a narcissist.
This guy is 97... he was 16 years old at the outbreak of World War II. If he has any idea what it's like to be an undergraduate, that knowledge is dated 1946.
But UCSB can't seem to turn money away, even for an obvious vanity project, because Billionaire Republican.
It would be actually an interesting challenge to build dwarf housing where everyone does get a window into a skylight or even, gasp, somewhere where Sun might shine!
I had a friend living at Munger at Umich and visited a few times.
The vibe of the building is similar to an hotel. As you enter, there is a foyer with elevators. The upstairs floors have windowless corridors where you enter the suites.
Each suite has a long corridor with doors to the rooms (4 on each side, if I remember correctly). Each room is on the "inside" of the building, so they don't have windows, but they have private bathrooms.
The living quarters have a shared double kitchen (two fridges, two cooking ranges, etc) and a double living room (two couches and two tvs). This room also has a wall of windows so there is plenty of sunlight there.
The suite I visited was coed and had graduate students from different schools living together. It was definitely an interesting vibe.
As any dorm, there are other amenities that are shared with everyone like a patio on the roof, a gym, rec room, and study spaces. Also, all the rooms are furnished, so it might be a good set up for someone that doesn't have furniture or doesn't want to worry about it.
When compared to other grad student housing options (Northwood 1-3 for single students or a shared room in Northwood 4-5), Munger is definitely an improvement (mostly it's location and the fact that is a new construction, to be honest) but it is a little bit more expensive than NW offerings.
Hm interesting, except hotels are very dense and I’ve never been in a hotel room without a window. I believe it’s illegal. If it weren’t, then the market would show that people want windows.
Not illegal everywhere, and not uncommon, either. I was a little late booking a trip to Stockholm the other day, and of the few remaining quality hotels, most rooms were sadly listed as "No windows".
> I’ve never been in a hotel room without a window
You might not be able to extrapolate your own experience over all hotels, there are countless of hotels without windows, and it's surely not illegal everywhere.
It houses 96 suites, 6—7 bedrooms each. Each bedroom is 16x9 with their own private bathroom. In one of the blueprints in the UCSB article, there appears to be 1 bathroom per 8 suites [1].
To be fair, graduate housing is supposed to be a bit better than undergrad dorms — especially in regards to not having to share a bedroom with a total stranger. And maybe the UCSB's tiny single room design (windowless or not) will be a good tradeoff for not having to have a roommate as an undergrad.
That looks like two bathrooms per 1 suite, or 1 bathroom per 4 rooms. I never shared a bathroom with less than 3 other people in my four years at college, so that doesn't seem particularly out of the ordinary for an undergraduate dorm.
The difference in size of rooms seems significant, though.
Looks like it's might be 2 bathrooms based on this tiny floorplan image [0], I thought from the isometric image it was 1.5 (2 toilets, 1 shower). And it looks like there's maybe 2 common area toilets. The ratio seems fine in theory...I think my undergrad dorm floor had 2 communal bathrooms with 8 toilet stalls and 8 showers for 30-35 residents. I'm assuming intersuite sharing would become normal.
The podsize also isn't that bad in theory — they aren't much smaller than I remember the single rooms in my dorm being. The big difference is that the single rooms had windows, but also allowed for lofted beds — e.g. you would put your desk under the bed, and there'd be enough room to have a small couch where the desk would normally be. The UCSB pod furniture appears to be fixed (but again, it's just an architect drawing)
Residents seem to like it overall but reading though them, most qualify them as "great except the rooms don't have windows".
It feels mean, for lack of a better word. Maybe particularly in Santa Barbara with its beautiful sunny days. There's something dystopian about putting young students in windowless rooms and figuring "they'll get used to it". Next step is to save money by getting rid of windows in apartments, office buildings, etc. and everyone will spend their day under artificial lighting. There will be social clubs for people who want to see the outside world once a week.
It's probably better in SB than just about anywhere else, since you can quite literally always just go outside. I think that's almost part of the "point" here. To try to demotivate students from sitting in their rooms. I don't like that approach at all, but I actually don't think windowless bedrooms are the worst thing in the world.
I had a windowless dorm room for a year in a very cold northeastern city where I couldn't realistically spend time outside for most of the year. It was attached to a windowed suite common room and I liked my roommates, so it was no big deal. I think I would have suffered a lot had I been a real social recluse, though.
Trying to demotivate students from sitting in their dorms by making it a sad cramped place doesn't seem to gel well with the modern idea of psychological safety helping people get more done and take more risks.
Its a stick instead of a carrot in your most personal place, your home.
I don't think anybody is saying that the lack of windows is itself a good thing, even the "forced socializing" line of reasoning clearly uses the lack of windows as a stick to get people out of their rooms. It's just an acceptable tradeoff for a sizable subset of students.
This is a graduate residence hall and graduate students tend to be a much higher mix of foreign students — looking at the reviews, many are praising that it’s pre-furnished and they didn’t need to do a whole lot to get set up. It’s also been my experience that foreign students (particularly from Asia) are just used to cramped, windowless accommodations like this for student housing so it’s not as dystopian-feeling to them.
Note that many of the positive reviews are from pre-covid times and the two that coincide with the pandemic note how ill suited it is to such conditions.
The reason old NYC buildings have radiators that are so hot, you need to open a window to let in the winter air, is because they were purposely designed that way. Because of the 1918 flu pandemic.[0]
Also, there are a bunch of things that we consider
normal that were born of crisis: [1]
Well….designing a building to be good for pandemics also means making it be good for respiratory viruses in general.
You do, in fact, want to have 100 year water systems that would work in a cholera epidemic. Designing buildings for good airflow will probably not go out of style either.
I view it as exactly the other way around: if you're building barracks in any normal year, sure, don't care about pandemics.
But for any long-lived building, thinking how it will work in various disaster scenarios is crucial, as your design will affect the life or death of thousands living there, even if it's "just" for one-two years. And given everything we know about the recurrence of pandemics, it's virtually certain that at least another one will come around within 100 years.
It can help against radiation sickness (with thick enough walls providing shielding) or possibly agains drowning or vacuum exposure (if sufficiently pressure tight). ;-)
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).
A lot of the reviews amount to "well at least it's cheap" which is not really a ringing endorsement. When you build living spaces that are terrible to live in, they become inexpensive relative to the horror that is the current rental market.
But that seems like a bad solution to rent inflation.
Well, if they are better considering the cost, then they are better considering the cost...
Maybe someone else can design a building that has similarly good/better reviews and gives students windows. But to just assume that there are unproven better cost/benefit options at the needed scale... Well, does not seem justifiable either
Not sure what the point was of you bringing this up.
Are you saying that you liked only having 2 toilets and 1 shower per 16 people? Are you saying that since your experience was that, others should have similar?
Just trying to understand the purpose of you bringing up your anecdotal experience.
edit: Also looking at the link it looks like two students get 1 private room with a window, and some even get balconies. There's outside courtyards as well. Not sure how this is similar to the design mentioned.
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]
A lot of charming naïveté here along the lines of "surely the city has fire regulations, and surely the building will be reviewed for those!"
You forget the power of money. I live near the Apple Spaceship, where they have the city of Cupertino completely cowed and afraid to even ask a question about their stupid plans. An entire useful east-west artery (Pruneridge) was permanently taken out of service for that.
It's so cute when you assume that Santa Barbara is going to say No to this.
> From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this:
> A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances?
I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances.
The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of additional first-floor exit doors.
> One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories
State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.)
If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the argument “this building will either get everyone killed in a fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code requirements”, they probably would have led with that rather than fuzzy social and psychological concerns.
I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you’d know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset of) entrances.
Yes, I've already addressed that point multiple times in this discussion. Emergency exits are a factor, but not a be-all / end-all.
State building codes in California have for new construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade, required them for new single family homes, too.)
Thanks for sharing. I'm not a California resident, so I'm less familiar with the particulars of their regulations out there.
Interestingly, NC's requirement for student housing is actually done internally by the UNC System rather than by any code authority. The last unsprinklered dorms at UNC were torn down a few years ago.
As far as I know, building codes do require sprinklers in new residences just judging based on the 2010s era complexes around campus. I had assumed this was standard everywhere now, but maybe not. The place I live in now is from the 60s iirc and so of course does not have any. Interestingly, the entire buildings fire panel and smoke heads seem to have been retrofitted rather recently, but the old continuous bells are still in use with no strobes. Surprisingly, many residents do not seem to understand the significance of not having sprinkler protection and do not evacuate with any urgency, if at all.
Interestingly, NC's requirement for student housing is actually done internally by the UNC System rather than by any code authority. The last unsprinklered dorms at UNC were torn down a few years ago.
Interestingly enough, I believe at least some of that was in direct response to the UNC Phi Gamma Delta fire back in 1996.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate "thing" about automatic fire alarms - the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Many automatic alarms go off a LOT and more often than not the reason is either a straight up fault in the system, or at best, a "real, but non fire" reason like smoke from cooking. I listen in on Chapel Hill FD dispatch a lot and I can tell you, CHFD goes to the various dorms around campus all the freaking time for alarm activations, and rarely is the cause any kind of actual active fire. So people get conditioned to treat those alarms as "nothing-burger". It's unfortunate.
There's a lot of nuance to that, because "requirements" vary based on building type and other details. And TBH, I'm not 100% up on the latest details even here in NC, as I've been away from the fire service for some time now.
What I can say with some confidence is that sprinklers are widely required in commercial buildings, and I think it's safe to say that's fairly widespread across the US. But even there, I wouldn't say the requirement is totally ubiquitous.
Getting into residential structures is where it gets murkier. For single family homes, I think something like 46 states don't require sprinklers for new construction. For multi-family, and things like dorms, I'm less clear on the details of what is / isn't required around various parts of the country.
> For single family homes, I think something like 46 states don't require sprinklers for new construction.
Also, just to add on here, a number of states have adopted statewide rules prohibiting local codes from requiring sprinklers for new single-family homes.
Oh, I was meaning for multi-family dwellings. I haven't seen them in single family homes either, though it is interesting that requirements are starting to increase there too.
TBH, I just wish there were stricter rules for smoke detectors and equipment in garages. I feel like this is a big gap with the current rules, at least in my state.
I'm curious - reading this makes me depressed at how stupid HN and reactionary HN seems to have become.
Do people not realize that in California we build residential buildings that are MANY MANY stories tall.
The LACK of operable windows in a bedroom is generally a REQUIREMENT on a skyscraper / residential condo tower for safety reasons. They worry about kids falling out etc.
The safety plans involve other measures - including much better building codes around fire control (ie, sprinklers). Fire hardened emergency exists (ie, these students may be moving out of historic all wood tinderboxes if my old CA school is any indication).
There is a difference between not having windows that can be fully opened and not having windows at all. As others have said, windows have other psychological functions, such as giving orientation, providing daylight, etc.
> The safety plans involve other measures - including much better building codes around fire control
We could all see at Grenfell Tower in London how well that worked.
>The LACK of operable windows in a bedroom is generally a REQUIREMENT on a skyscraper / residential condo tower for safety reasons. They worry about kids falling out etc.
Can you explain more on this point? Because tall buildings not having windows that open because children might fall out of them sounds completely ridiculous to me. Some of the Soviet commie blocks were 16 storeys tall and obviously the windows can be opened.
What are the other reasons why this restriction would be in place? I'm genuinely curious.
One issue is that for tall buildings a fair bit of thought goes into things like aerodynamics of overall building, ventilation / HVAC control, and internal pressures.
A tall building has an issue with its core / utilities usually, the taller the go generally the worse the ratio of non-livable space to livable. So things that mess with for example HVAC efficiency may be seen as a negative.
If everyone opens a window on one side of a building, over building surface areas and wind speeds at heights, you can get pretty crazy pressure issues. You can also get aero issues. You an also run into HVAC issues (ie, volume of air from 3 open large windows on the 40th floor may overwhelm HVAC system capacity).
Let me ask you, you are building a skyscraper to rent.
If you allow folks to open their windows and the wind blows something out that kills someone on the street - who will be sued? If someone drops something out (trying to put a plant in window or stick a telescope out) and kills someone - who pays. If someone falls out that window, who will be sued (see a cruise line that had a stupid idiot hold a kid through the window and drop them).
Other issues are around maintenance and weather proofing etc etc. Again, environment at height can often be harsh, and now you may have to have someone on side of building to replace a window or related mechanisms. Easy in a house at ground level, a pain at height.
BTW - I like windows that open and would NOT live in a tall res condo. My key point was that all the folks talking about how window exists are required - it's so weird seeing people speak with such certainty on something so easily disprovable.
I think up to 30 floors or so and older places it was common for windows to open (they were also built differently, more open space / daylighting / shallower footprints (ie, H shape buildings vs full block buildings).
I live in a tall (>30 floors) residential building in Texas, and all of our windows open. I wouldn’t want to use one as an exit in a fire, though. Even going down the stairs during an alarm took ~10 minutes.
It's all good. Just because I have experience as a firefighter and have some domain knowledge that the average joe lacks, doesn't mean I'm always right. And my comments above were based on, as I've said, limited knowledge as there are a lot of areas that TFA doesn't touch on.
I think this is a good discussion though, as maybe it exposes some members of the public-at-large to some thoughts on fire-safety that they haven't considered deeply before. If so, that's a win in my book.
What makes a firefighter an expert on building egress requirements? The building must meet NFPA code (or whichever fire code the AHJ has selected) or it can’t be built, period. Whoever their insurance company is will not insure the building if it doesn’t meet life safety requirements.
Dismissing someone who isn’t a fire code expert who is making claims about fire safety is just fine to me.
If we were discussing how to safely fight fires, then by all means defer to the firefighter.
The building must meet NFPA code or it can’t be built, period.
To be pedantic, that may be the case for this specific building, as CA may be a state that simply adopted the relevant NFPA model code wholesale and with no changes; but it's not a true statement in the most general sense, as not all localities adopt the various NFPA codes verbatim (or at all).
The architect didn't resign over fire safety. The fire safety discussion isn't really relevant. There are a lot of sprinkled buildings with rooms without direct exits or Windows. Most office building and many dorms etc even.
That's not a statement of support for the building just that it isn't why this architect found issue.
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.
> Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows.
> Various historians have also ascribed the exit doors being locked to management's wanting to keep out union organizers due to management's anti-union bias. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route.
> Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape – which city officials had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third staircase
> The toxic smoke, heat, and the resulting human rush toward the main exit killed 100; 230 were injured and another 132 escaped uninjured.
> By this time, the nightclub's fire alarm had activated, and although there were four possible exits, most people headed for the front door through which they had entered. The ensuing crowd crush in the narrow hallway leading to that exit quickly blocked the exit completely and resulted in numerous deaths and injuries among the patrons and staff.
> Twenty-five workers were killed and 55 injured in the fire, trapped behind locked fire doors.
> The majority of those who escaped unharmed were workers in the front of the building who left through the unlocked main entrance,
It seems clear that two entrances/exists are not enough, even if there is numerous of extra emergency exists. People will, in panic, return to the point they came from, even if emergency exists are highlighted.
"Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked – a common practice at the time..."
Your quote is from a fire in 1911. This is no longer at all common practice, and would get the university in serious trouble during regular inspections.
Yes, the quotes are all from the linked articles, one of the event happened in 1911. It's not unheard of that schools also disconnect fire alarms and block fire escapes because students "abuse" those from time to time.
So yeah, maybe one of the quotes is less strong, but the sentiment still stands, that fire exists are not a replacement for main exists, as people tend to go back to where they came from, instead of seeking new exists.
2019 - a set of building exit doors with panic bars for egress gets locked closed at work presumably because those using them were letting in too much cold outside air in the depth of winter.
Reported the "locked" status to the local fire inspector, the panic bars were unlocked the next day.
So it is not just in 1911 that folks with the key to the lock get the bright idea to lock a door that is meant to serve as an emergency exit in the event of a fire or other emergency.
I'm sure all egress doors would have crash bars. Think of any tall building, they typically only have one or two major entrances but then many one way egress doors. This building wouldn't be any different.
Most US downtown skyscrapers generally have the one main entrance and then a fair amount of secondary stairwell exits as well. Some of those are even residential buildings.
Indeed. The "devil is in the details" though. You can "get away with", for example, fewer entrances/exits if you compensate by requiring fire proof construction, sprinklers & standpipes, fire rated interior partition doors, etc.
We don't know yet how many (if any) of those things will apply to Munger Hall. I have reached out to SBFire to ask some of these questions, and hope to hear back from them.
Dormitories typically have a terrible problem with their one-way doors getting mysteriously blocked. In my college dorm, they were chained shut. This was to prevent people from opening up an egress door from the inside and getting alcohol from the people on the outside. Also the hatch on the top of the elevators was nailed shut.
Oh that sounds so great. I walk out the door to class, realize I forgot a pen, then get to take a 15 minute walk all the around the building just to get back up to my room. Wonderful
I don't think either of us is qualified to express fire-safety-analysis statements with absolute certainty, but I would think the prior likelihood would be very small that plans would be drawn up with glaring fire-code violations, or that fire code would be written to allow the possibility for dangerous queueing hazards.
FWIW, I am intrigued enough by this that I decided to reach out to SBFD and inquire as to their position (if any) on this proposal. I just sent the following email to several of their fire prevention / inspections / public info people. If/when I hear back, I'll update you all. Or heck, maybe one of them will sign up for an HN account and post something. That would be interesting.
----
> SBFire:
> Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. I
> stumbled across an article about the proposed UCSB "Munger
A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances? There's a word for that: deathtrap.
For more than just reasons if fire in my opinion. I'm surprised nobody has said the word gun yet. Are they going to be scanning people and checking their backpacks art he door? That sure would make it feel more like a prison.
Where I went to school we got lots of strong opinions from outsiders. But some of the "worst" dorms were the most popular for reasons that are not always obvious to outsiders.
And yes, some students like to live close to others. UCSB may be doing double and triple bunking in rooms (my school did 4 to a room for a while, when the "crappy" new space opened it was first choice in the housing lottery).
Folks talking about sharing a bathroom meaning that people will be pooping out of windows are idiots who either went to some elite school where you are waited on by butlers. It would not be uncommon for a hall with 15 rooms to have two bathrooms.
Other things that offended folks that students gave no craps about. We had some coed bathrooms, was never an issue. I'm sure now they are called gender neutral.
What does a building with 10 emergency exists, lots of individually lockable suites and rooms have to do with guns?
Santa Barbara has strict anti-gun laws already. CA has a lot of anti-gun laws already. The UCSB system has anti gun laws already.
Santa Barbara issues something like 50 permits a DECADE for concealed carry. It's a "may" issue jurisdiction, and they don't issue.
And if metal detectors are implemented, I'm not sure students will care. They already exist for large sporting events and other areas of concern, so if there was a concern you'd want fewer main entrances so you could staff them.
Bigger issue is normally non-students in student housing, so security can be good in terms of setup. This means the newer buildings often do things like keycard access to suites only for suite holders, and some even do keycards for your room separate from suite, again, all logged and tracked. I visited a friend at a school where I had to sign in my car with a guard, had to be escorted to their room by a front desk staffer etc. That's extreme - no way UC is going that (this was a small elite place).
The major student issues in terms of safety are stranger access to dorms / bathrooms at night, theft issues (bikes / bags etc), and nuisance issues (noise, weed smoke, parties etc).
Those are factories, so it's a bit different, but I agree with you. In my state every room in a home that could be used as a bedroom or for regular occupancy (ie not a closet) has to have a window large enough to get a person out. For damn good reason.
How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code?
I don't even understand how this was seriously considered in the first place. Apparently the project has a $1.5B pricetag and this old coot is tossing in a seventh of that? WTF.
> How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code?
UCSB employs 10k people in a town of 90k. This is a $1.5 billion project that the University is desperate to have. It seems totally plausible to me that they could find a compliant inspector and/or get a variance for the building.
Whether or not it's actually safe, you can bet that the companies making millions off this will have a plausible story about safety. With lots of documents and presentations and software models. What's a small-town fire safety inspector got to put against that?
Many if not all UC campuses need only respect state regulations. City and County building codes need not apply, and fire codes, hopefully would, but University administrators have room to push that.
Given that he is donating $200 million towards its construction, presumably he spent a substantial amount of money on getting qualified people to design it. It's not like he's short on money.
As promised, here is the response I received from Santa Barbara County FD:
Thanks for reaching out to us. While the Munger Hall is not our review responsibility, we are working very closely with the UCSB Fire Marshal in his review. We have a great working relationship with the Fire Marshal. We have had numerous meetings on this project and the Fire Marshal is open and willing to suggestions when it come to fire and life safety issues. We will continue to meet on this project and it is our hope that all fire and life safety issues will be addressed. I am available if you have any further questions or concern. You can also reach out the University Fire Marshal.
So, not a lot of detail (I expected that) but it is interesting that they do seem to allude to there indeed being fire safety issues which need to be addressed.
Maybe so. This article elides a lot of details... in fact, they don't touch on fire safety aspects at all as far as I can tell. So maybe there are sufficient accommodations made in terms of fire safety. It's hard to say.
But... if the design really was done by an amateur architect who probably has little or no background specifically related to fire/life safety issues vis-a-vis building design, and it truly hasn't been modified from his design... I don't know. I'll just say "color me skeptical" for now.
If I'm ultimately proven wrong, then I would actually be very happy. I'd much rather suffer the indignity of having to admit I was wrong about something on HN, than watch a news report detailing hundreds of student deaths on campus.
Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test.
My alma mater had to go back and redo a building based on fire marshal concerns.
Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves permits without checking if they‘re valid for the local fire code? That just doesn‘t pass the smell test.
I would hope not. The article describes this as a "proposal" and I'm not sure how far along they are with it. Maybe they haven't even gotten as far as submitting a design for fire safety inspection yet. Or maybe they have, got feedback, and made adjustments in response, and the article above glossed over that. It's hard to say based only on what we know from TFA at the moment.
The problem with the Station wasn't the lack of egress, it was the lack of identified egress, a choke point at the main entrance which triggered a crowd collapse, pyrotecnics and combustible foam.
My first reaction was the terrible danger this design presents as well. Doesn't code require each room to have two means of egress? Usually the second one is a window.
That's by way of a reddit post about the dorm that I stumbled across trying to find the answer to whether there were fire code concerns with the project.
Hard to understand how the new dorm meets these standards, though the article is from 2000, and the question was about a private home:
To begin with, the Unified Building Code states that every bedroom is required to have at least one window opening to the exterior of the dwelling, not an adjoining room. The purpose of this requirement is threefold:
A bedroom must have a direct source of outside light, provided by a window that is at least 10% as large as the floor area of the room.
* A bedroom must have a direct source of outside ventilation, consisting of an opening window at least 5% as large as the floor area.
* Every bedroom must have a means of fire escape, directly to the exterior of the building, by way of a door or window that opens. Fire escapes to adjoining rooms are not acceptable. In the advent of a fire, that second room could conceivably be filled with smoke or engulfed in flames at the moment when escape becomes imperative. The only permitted means of escape is to the outside.*
It's hard to imagine how it would, but fire regulations vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The article doesn't go into whether or not there has been any review of the plans from that perspective, so it's hard to say.
Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation design. There are clearly aesthetic complaints many people will have here, but realistically safety shouldn't be a problem. This is simply not a "large" building by skyscraper standards, and those can be built safely.
Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah, no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall".
I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached garage owners tend to remember.
Former firefighter cautions we should be skeptical of the safety of this plan, and your rebuttal is "surely building codes mandate..."? A zero-evidence rebuttal concerning the safety of 4500 students.
I don’t find it unreasonable to assume that the building will comply with government fire safety regulations and that those regulations are at least somewhat adequate.
You might be surprised. Fire regulations are very much a local issue and there can be a lot of variance (although many local municipalities base their codes on standards put out by bodies like the NFPA, etc.).
There are quite frequently things that one might intuitively expect to be in the regs, that aren't. Requirements for sprinklers, for example. As surprising as it may seem, there are still lots of places where sprinklers are not required in many buildings.
I don't know the situation in Santa Barbara, but I did email their fire department earlier with an inquiry about this topic. Hoping to hear something back.
I don't find it unreasonable to think that government regulations around fire safety are based on current building trends. Nobody in the US stuffs 4500 people into a single building with almost all of them in the interior of the building. Nobody would voluntarily live that way, even the "projects" were/are more humane.
Just looking at the proposed floorplan, in an emergency it would be a nightmare to get out. 7 kids trying to get out that one door with a giant table in the way while likely panicking? It screams deathtrap.
You know who was violating fire regulations for decades? Nuclear Power plants! You would things that's the one place where safety would be taken seriously, right?
If you were an architect who was concerned enough with the design to quit, wouldn't you both know about and publicize potential (or real) safety concerns?
Not having natural light is one of the best way to attack your mental health. This building is just a bad design, and human are not made to live without natural lights.
...and I am working in a warehouse-style building at a Silicon Valley startup. All the windows have been blacked out, to keep the IP safe. It's a little like being inside a Borg Cube.
I wish architects showed the same level of concern for office workers!
Kidding aside... given the size of the bedrooms, I get the impression that the students aren't meant to spend much time there aside from whatever amount of sleep college students are getting these days. The rest of their time would probably be spent in common areas that actually do have sunlight. Recalling my personal experience in college, where most of my time was already spent in common areas anyways, I don't see the lack of bedroom windows as that huge a problem.
This particular dorm design also seems to allow for more privacy than a traditional dorm does.
Modern office buildings have flipped the private offices from the perimeter to the core precisely so that the open office has all the windows. You might not have any privacy or quiet but they do design for natural light now.
Basically forcing people to live in common areas is horrible. Many people find public spaces distracting at best and uncomfortable or worse. Thank God I had my dorm room to escape to where my roommate and I only had to ignore each other to get some peace.
The design looked like rooms inside a pod inside a building. Seems like a fire in front of a single door could in theory kill everyone in the pod based on the image in the article.
Honestly, this looks like a low security prison to me. Small cells and a day room for activities and socializing.
If they lofted the bed, the desk could be moved under the bed. And if they had everyone just wear house uniforms, they could reduce the need for storage space and reduce the size of the rooms by 1/3
Preparing/conditioning today's young adults for the dystopian future, where all our jobs are being done by robots, and the elite class needs to warehouse the rest of us safely away in 2mx2m cells in gigantic concrete honeycomb dormitories, where we're given a TV and one Soma per day.
If anyone is interested, this is basically the first half of the speculative fiction story, "Mana" (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) which has been posted here on HN a few times.
Yea, it seems every year we are moving closer and closer to some dark mixture of Manna, Fifteen Million Merits [1] and Elysium [2], where regular people no longer serve any purpose, and are simply warehoused somewhere to keep them out of the hair of the few rich elite.
I don't see automated everything becoming possible in our lifetimes, instead I see dystopian societal collapse due to climate shifts being much more likely.
To be fair, that sounds like any of the cookie cutter "luxury" apartment complexes I see coming up all over the place, right down to the inability to see anything other than your neighbors out the window.
How many "cookie cutter 'luxury' apartment complexes" do you know that house 4500 people? Let's forgo the absolute number, what about the population density?
94% of the residents won't have windows. Can you list any of these apartments that have that characteristic?
"Cookie cutter" apartment complexes are waaaaay nicer than this, including literally about 10X the square footage per inhabitant, and way more windows. Dunno what you're talking about.
this only betrays a deep misunderstanding on your part of the challenges in construction and issues with Sub grade stability in coastal zones and how different those things are to having enough fire exits.
Your comment is not making any point but your of lack of understanding.
"deep misunderstanding on your part of the challenge"
A citizen doesn't care about challenges in construction or software or food contamination, it is our professional responsibility not to be negligent in our work.
the standard for negligence for an engineer isnt that "something bad happened", and talking about a building with foundation issues due to unstable local soil is far different than "didn't meet fire code" from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about the issues at hand.
Just an FYI it's unlikely an architect designed those foundations - there were probably engineers who tested the soil and gave its properties to a designing engineer who designed the foundation and both of those things are going to be tempered by what was common engineering practice at the time, and if the unstable soil situation was known about. My understanding is this situation is common in the area due to building practice at the time.
All a layman knows if that he should not die in his sleep because the building caved in, you can't expect a homeowner to debate you on the exact details of structural engineering.
However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.
Of course in every job, there is constant pressure from management to cut corners, junior colleagues or peers that mess up, deadlines to meet. It is very easy to say to avoid inspecting troubled areas, to say 'I've done my job' and avoid headache. Often it is not in anyone's job description to police this. The 'client' is typically none the wiser, and when problems arise 10 years down the line, often they can't be traced to anyone personally. The fact that we've replaced entire careers with gig economy, and people stay in one job less and companies now invest less in training that ever in the past 40 years means that there is even less accountability and more opportunity for mistakes.
Cases of unpredictable 'something bad happened' are extremely rare. Soviet government was warned that reactors used in Chernobyl were dangerous, Tepco was warned that sea wall protecting Fukushima was inadequate, Robert Lund warned that Nasa should not launch Space Shuttle Challenger, residents of Grenfell Tower warned about fire safety before they burned alive, same goes goes for Bhopal disaster, subprime loans and 2008, 737 Max and every other major event. It is also extremely rare that the consequences of these decision ever catch up with the top brass. Hence we have culture of negligence.
> All a layman knows if that he should not die in his sleep because the building caved in, you can't expect a homeowner to debate you on the exact details of structural engineering.
If said homeowner is trying to 'score points' by pointing out things they don't themselves understand, then they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.
>However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.
>If said homeowner is trying to 'score points' by pointing out things they don't themselves understand, then they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.
The hell kind of attitude is this? Someone goes through the effort of doing research to wrap their head around something with which many people don't even bother to acknowledge, and challenge you with a question that you as the professional are reasonably expected to be able to answer, and that's your response?
I hope you never work with me. We would not get along at all.
It's clear the donor purposefully designed the rooms to be unpleasant to get people up into common rooms. It's just... weird. It doesn't matter if it looks good or bad but uncomfortable design like this is bizarrely aggressive to students, who are already living away from home and at-risk for depression and suicide.
Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.
> Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.
Designing 100 year buildings around our current hysterical reaction to covid is just silly. Covid is over, time to move on.
History will harshly judge our reaction to covid and we will hopefully never repeat this awful public health policy again. The idea that we should be designing building with covid in mind is just a symptom of how much parts of society has lost the plot.
"Covid is over" is inaccurate and is at best very US/EU-centric.
There is a reason though that I specifically called out all contagious illnesses. I can tell you that I got colds and the flu much more often in college than I do even in an open office. What's more, is students don't get sick days or time to catch up after an illness except in the most serious cases. I don't think it's illogical to think students (and their parents) don't want a dorm hotbed for contagions.
As you note, students are at-risk for depression and suicide in today's existing student living quarters.
We don't know whether or not a community focused living design would help or hurt in this regard.
The covid/contagion question is interesting, because we DO know that designing for contagion safety is seemly inherently at odds with designing for social/emotional safety.
I think there's no clearly superior solution here, which tells me that building both types of systems would at least help further our understanding of the issues.
False dilemma. They could make the first floor have food courts and gyms, while having windows or simply not having a 97 year old billionaire donor dictate taste with zero input just because money.
You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs exist, or are adequate.
> You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs exist, or are adequate.
Uh, yes. Because there are laws governing how we can construct buildings in a safe way, and on the whole (c.f. the number of deaths in building fires over time) they work well. So I trust them.
As far as the putative logic flaw, I don't see it. Everything is a tradeoff, even "because money". Saving money on the dorm means lower tuition, more scholarships, more facilities elsewhere, maybe a few new endowed professorships, etc...
This design came from an amateur architect, someone who has never designed ANY building before and is surely clueless about safety laws and even basic physical structural limits. To imagine the design has seen anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what they're doing is assuming a lot.
All this just to save $200/1500 (13%)? You can get a better discount than that at any retailer.
> This design came from an amateur architect, someone who has never designed ANY building before and is surely clueless about safety laws and even basic physical structural limits. To imagine the design has seen anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what they're doing is assuming a lot.
This is false statement. The architectural design was provided by Van Tilburg, Banvard, & Soderberg, AIA.
While the story was about the architect's resignation, there's got to be a story here. Why would the school spend a billion dollars and tie its hands like this (circumventing its own review process and providing input for needed changes) to get a 200 million "gift"?
Did the university believe it couldn't otherwise house 4500 students for a billion dollars? Were there considerations involved other than student housing?
The norms of architecture that mandate e.g. windows for living spaces are here being violated so extremely someone's stepping down over it. This is therefore not an average project.
The concern is especially strong here because of the nature of the building.
In an ordinary apartment building, if you build it stupid, people won't want to live there. Then the landlord won't want to build it that way to begin with and if some fool does it anyway there will be a profit incentive to knock down the building and do it again.
This is a dorm. At at state school. The normal market forces aren't there. The landlord isn't going to be motivated by losing money. The tenants aren't in an ordinary market because dorms are often subsidized or have unique zoning that allows for lower cost than is legally permissible in other available housing and are likely to be closer to the school than other available housing. So you have to exceed a higher threshold of terrible before people will abandon them.
In the event of a fire, "opening" the window is not necessarily a function of if the window is MEANT to be opened ... but CAN it be opened. Eg: throwing a chair through it, or firefighters breaking window from outside, etc.
Residential is different, due to generally higher ventilation requirements (e.g. bathroom & kitchen).
YMMV, but I live in Seattle, where there has been a residential boom with plenty of towers, and I have never seen a residential apartment with non-functional windows. Every room will have at least one that can open (though for efficiency reasons they're usually casement windows, which are annoying in their own right)
I'm in a Seattle tower and the extent to which our windows open is a joke. You can't actually get any ventilation from a 16 inch wide window allowed to open up to twelve degrees. I like the idea of being environmentally friendly but we definitely lost the plot where airflow is concerned.
Lol - I have yet to see any cost savings passed through as lower tuition. More budget for sports, more administrator salaries, MAYBE an endowment but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
This is just squeezing the undergrads to feed the rest of the machine more efficiently.
You're assuming those laws are adequate. I wrote that the first time. It's a bad idea, you trust them just because the catastrophes haven't happened. For the next few weeks in your day to day, look at how many emergency exits are disarmed or blocked or locked, look at how many other inspectable things just aren't inspected, like when the last elevator inspection occurred on the ones you use.
We're trying to save people that trust the system too much. Let me know if you know any people like that.
This is getting toward conspiracy theory territory. It's... a building code. Yes. Yes, I tend to trust building codes that have been keeping all of us safe in our homes and offices for the better part of a century. If building codes don't work, then where are the disasters in all the other buildings? You're saying that every other building in the USA in the 20th century "just happened" to be built safely, despite a thousand year history of terrible urban fires, and that regulation had nothing to do with it?
Nothing conspirational about it. In the follow up to the Grenfell fire[1], my development was reviewed and the cladding in use on several buildings was found… less than ideal. The homeowner’s association is currently drafting a plan to have it replaced.
This isn’t some theoretical, conspiracy-laden issue. It’s an actual problem.
> In the follow up to the Grenfell fire[1], my development was reviewed and the cladding in use on several buildings was found… less than ideal.
Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are "government regulators", and "they made sure it was fixed". And now it's being fixed.
You're literally citing the fact that safety regulation worked correctly as evidence... that it doesn't? Without the regulators you'd still be living in a deathtrap!
Which means one should not trust that new and existing buildings are safe because of the mere existence of code or that there are competent people that exist to review and report.
The safety regulation did not work because of the 71 people that died in Grenfell. What would you say if you lived there yourself "ah thats just bad luck for me"? what would you say if you lived there yourself and were one of the people that was reporting to the regulators about the problems in advance "I trust this system, I'm glad this system is based purely on trust, trust works so well, all should trust building codes because they are CODES, I like codes, they are infallible, its so cool that people exist to review the codes as well. This happens so rare due to the codes and not from simply being an uncommon occurrence that challenges building standard."
I don't really understand what your perspective here is to be honest. Not being wrong?
"Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are "government regulators"
I think you misunderstood the poster - 100 people burned alive because the regulators were asleep at the wheel. That tragic disaster is the only reason his building was checked for adequacy, and it failed, along with thousands of others.
Right now there are thousands of buildings which were built and sold in breach of fire regulation, and the apartment owners are being saddled with 100% of the bill even when they own 25% of the apartment. In some cases the cost of repair exceeds the value of the property.
My point is that regulation is necessary, but not sufficient. Saying "It complies with regulation" isn't enough to deflect criticism — compliant buildings can still have serious safety issues.
That's correct. I don't appreciate your willingness to invalidate what I and others are pointing out to you.
Building codes are state and municipal level laws. There is no harmonization. There are varying degrees of compliance based on competency, actual corruption conspiracies, and budget all of which changes decade over decade, building by building.
Many other regulations and individual behaviors have helped keep people safe. The way electronics work, the way people are educated, the public service announcements, the response times, and sometimes the building materials. Some things have actually become more flammable over the years.
Regarding building codes, 98 people just died in a literal building collapse in the Miami area. Your standard, if I understand correctly, is "that was just 1, where are the city wide Chicago fires", when the counterpoint is that this collapse prompted reviews of many properties and many more structural issues have been found in just that one municipality that threaten hundreds and thousands of people.
You shouldn't trust this process. You should root for the process to work decently since the probability of a disaster is low - this is the only area we agree! the incidents aren't happening! - but you should know that this is all luck. Continual luck in a system that barely works.
I don't see any conspiracy. I think it's obvious that the situation vis-à-vis fire safety has improved, and improved tremendously over the past 100 or so years. But I also think it would be a mistake to think that the answer to the question "are we there yet" is "yes". That is to say, don't assume we've reached some final, end-goal state where safety regulations are ideal.
Large, multi-fatality fires are less common now, but they do still occur. I'd argue that we can always aspire to get better with regards to fire safety.
Zoning and building codes set forth by a municipality do not necessarily have to be followed by the state government (presuming the UC system counts as part of the state government).
No, it's just the money. It's just the perverse disconnect between the wealthy, and those just trying to get by.
It's Mr. Burns hanging a "you're here forever" sign, or Kanye West ranting about his napkin design for the iPlane in the Oval Office while dropping a few "motherfucker"s.
yes, I understand the perverse incentives that led to greenlighting this. its also not an excuse. they should reject the $200 million donation and hope Munger sends another with no restrictions. that's where we are at.
Yeah, but there is nothing guaranteeing that the common area amenities (rec room, multiple food options, libraries, etc.) won't be reallocated to additional dorm rooms or storage.
I remember sitting in my dorm room in FT (at UCSB) and watching the Tea Fire flames jump closer and closer. Fire is a huge threat in the area, even that close to the coast. This seems like insanity.
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.
My office building is inspected a couple times a year. They flip out if you get anywhere near blocking the operation of an interior fire door (like auto closing metal doors), much less egress doors. Hell, until recently they wouldn't even let us have fans because of the possibility it could impact the design of the air handling for the building effectively removing smoke.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century
Yes, we have to some degree. That doesn't mean we should be complacent now.
And major fires that kill lots of people because bad decisions were made are not a phenomenon that stopped happening after Triangle Shirtwaist. Things got better, but we still have room to continue to improve.
You know that the world has progressed since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, right?
I know that its hard to to believe that there has been progress in the last 100 years, as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc.
You know that the world has progressed since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, right?
Of course I do, duh. The question is "how much has it progressed?" Note that the Hamlet fire I mention was in 1991, and the Station Nightclub fire was in 2003, so it's not like Triangle Shirtwaist is the most recent example of a mass fire tragedy. And there are other examples, those three just happened to be "top of mind" for me.
as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc
Sure, but most of those things are orthogonal to fire safety.
I can't recall the last time I saw a fire exit blocked... Feels like one of those things people keep repeating because of a handful of newsworthy events a year...
Go to your nearest grocery, hardware, or department store, head to the back on the day that a truck comes, and look around.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it exists. You fell into the argument from ignorance fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
Feels like one of those things people keep repeating because of a handful of newsworthy events a year...
People keep talking about that handful of newsworthy events because we don't want there to be more of them. Or at least we want them to become less frequent, and less deadly when they do occur.
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.
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.
NYC has a law that for a room to be legally called a bedroom, it must have a window that's not on a lot line. I can't believe California doesn't have a law like that.
The NYC law doesn’t actually accomplish much though. The last time I lived in NYC, probably 4 years ago, I was in a $3k/month studio and my legally mandated window faced into the interior well of the building, maybe 50x50’ wide and probably 40 stories deep. No plants, only the palest hint of sunlight.
That's a pretty common building code across the US for typical residential units. Hotels and the like get around it by offering multiple avenues of escape in the event of an emergency.
I once got a deal on a 1600sqft apartment in a Maryland row home. It was listed as a 1-bed, even though it had 2 more rooms that were as big as the bedroom, but couldn't legally be called bedrooms because no windows. I believe the codes required you couldn't have more people living there than could live in 1 bedroom.
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.
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.
Do you understand how how housing selection works ?
There is zero requirement to live in their housing. So what the hell are you going to sue them over?
There is a shortage of on-campus housing - do you understand that? That is what this project is trying to solve for in part.
If you live off campus - go for it! In fact, even if you WANT to live on campus you'll have to enter a lottery after year 1, they only usually can prioritize first year students. So trust me, if you don't like this housing, no one is going to make you pay for it, and they'll be happy to have you out.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends. And as someone who didn't get a single until senior year, being able to get it on without having folks walking through or in room will be seen as a MAJOR positive by students.
i would sue them if i was forced. if there is a choice, i'll of course take that instead.
but i am expecting that noone should want to live in a room without windows, so some people are going to get the short straw.
of course i may be wrong and there are enough students who actually don't care, or even prefer it over the alternatives.
however i fear that most of those are not aware of the downsides of a windowless room.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends.
that is not the point.
i like working with others too.
but waking up in complete darkness every day is not healthy.
even if most students won't be harmed by it, some will.
sure, i understand the tradeoff you are making. and i expect many will if that's the only way to get some privacy. that is understandable.
but as a parent i would be worried sick if my kids would make that choice.
there is no reason a building has to be designed that way. it should be entirely possible to give everyone a small room with a window. how much personal space do you need to sleep? 4m² should be enough.
Even in the US having living quarters with no windows must be illegal. It’s dumb enough that people are allowed to work in offices with no windows, but this has to be illegal.
Yes, many buildings are shaped in interesting ways to allow it as well. For example, this building could have an interior courtyard and then have windows facing both out and facing in. Or even a few courtyards.
True. But there are exceptions, including the presence of fire suppression which this building will most definitely have. And dormitories fall under different codes than residential building codes which is where the egress window rule comes from.
> 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.
I lived in a building like this at Cornell University. The building was a converted mental health asylum prior to its purchase. Tiny rooms, with tiny slit windows, common areas, and doors that automatically swung shut in every room.
Every year, students did their best not to get stuck living in that building. The only ones who considered it voluntarily were the engineering students (due to proximity to the eng campus). The "bolstered" social communal area did not make up for the additional anxiety and mental pressure of the jail-cell like rooms, and the feeling of isolation and no-escape that the layout fostered. The only thing it did do, was make a notable increase in the school suicide rate.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Cascadilla Hall, but this seems like a lot of exaggeration. For others who want to see what these dorms look like, you can see images of the Cascadilla rooms alongside more modern campus dorms like Mews on this page: https://conferenceservices.cornell.edu/planning/accommodatio....
Mews looks pretty unfortunate, yes. It's bad when the realtor taking a picture from the extreme corner of the room to make the room look big style photos still make a room look like a prison cell.
That would be in accordance with much the rest of UCSB's architectural motif. Something of a Mission-Brutalist aesthetic: oppressive concrete blocks topped with Spanish tile.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Why not provide adequate living facilities and those that want to venture out and socialize will, and those that want to hang out in their room will do so. Seems odd to try and force them out of their room.
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.
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
Because there is no other choice, so if it is a bad one everyone will be stuck with it.
But most importantly, because the ones that are pushing for it do not get to suffer the consequences of its choices. If Munger was the first in line saying "I believe that this design is so good that I want to live there myself", I would at least say that he has the right to try.
I'd more than willing to hear about Munger's investments, where he has Skin in the Game. This project though is just plain bullshit.
If you're going to try something out, better to do it on a small scale first. Build weird housing for a couple hundred students before scaling up to 4k+.
That's a big fast 'citation needed' for the initial claim.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it's wholly false, at least at the myriad of colleges I've worked with, and generally true in urban settings [0]. Housing is often a loss for the university (hence the explosion of PPP to try and recoup those losses). Instead, especially at places like UCSB, it's landlords in the area that are a large financial burden for students. At my last university, rental occupancy within a 5 mile radius was at 98%, which exerts a huge upwards pressure on rent. Students were BEGGING for more housing, because campus housing was on-par or lower than the area, and comes with many other benefits related to travel and campus resources. Furthermore, college housing often provides a 9 or 10 month lease option, which can save a lot of money over an annual lease.
Additionally, there is regular evidence [1][2] that living on campus helps with retention rates, which is critical to avoiding the 'spending money, never getting the credential' problem plaguing higher ed. In this light, even if campus housing were somewhat more expensive, the benefit in completion could easily outweigh those costs.
Munger looks terrible, but there's a HIGH demand and LOW supply for housing at UCSB, and at urban colleges in general. It's not a cash cow for many, if any, campuses. Certainly not public ones.
0: "'When you look at the metros that have exceptionally high cost of living expenses like New York, Boston and San Francisco, there has been research done that those areas can be significantly cheaper for a student to live on campus,' says Amy Glynn, vice president of financial aid and community initiatives at CampusLogic, a firm that advises higher education institutions."
Definitely is the case at Northwestern. Forced to live in dorms the first 2 years which cost the same as a full year of a 1 bedroom near by and is much, much lower quality. And the force you on to the dining plan which comes out to being as expensive eating every meal at a legitimate restaurant.
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 ?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that was the problem then the UCs could just cut down their international student admissions to compensate. No, the problem is that the UC system as an organization is fundamentally broken, corrupt to the bone, and has all but lost sight of their intended purpose of creating and proliferating knowledge.
This is a strong claim, without any evidence to back it up. There may be some truth here, but against most metrics, UCs are among the top research institutions in the world with amazing contributions to science, medicine, etc. etc.
I thought the poster was quite clear. If the UC system can't support the top 9% of their high school population in-state, and exacerbate the problem with overadmissions, then it seems clear there is a systemic failure somewhere that someone doesn't want to admit.
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
It varies from place to place but, typically for a room in a single-family home to be considered a bedroom, it needs 2 egress points, the second usually being a window. I imagine similar codes are in place for multi-unit buildings.
This proposed building has 2 entrances for 4000 people. I cannot imagine it will pass fire code, or could effectively be evacuated in an emergency. Astounding that someone thought it was a good idea.
This design isn't even in the same field as American fire codes. I don't know any jurisdiction in the country in which this could get permitted, certainly not California.
The usual expectation is total time for a fire to cause an alarm, all occupants of a building to respond to an alarm, and make their way to a fire rated area, usually a stairwell, is 2.5 minutes.
Fire code exit requirements depend on the construction style, materials, suppression equipment and use.
You can have a bedroom with only one exit (the requirement you reference is for a second exit, not a window) if walls/doors are rated high enough and you have sprinklers.
This building is being built in an area with some of the STRICTEST fire codes in America - just in case folks reading get the wrong idea. In fact, condo skyscrappers are in my view much more risky (the time to exit a 50 foot skyscrapper can be very long).
Compounding this, historic building in CA was sometimes very poor by modern standards (all wood tinder boxes). So this may very well be a major upgrade in safety over existing housing stock.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Authority doesn't have to be bad, as long as it's justified, or at the very least as long as the authority exists to meet the needs of those under authority.
If you design a student dorm for example, the best design will take into account what is best for the students, according to the students. Okay, we can introduce authority into it, and assign some staff to decide what would be best for them. But either way, the "input" to this process would be the needs of the students.
I don't think it should be controversial to say that constructing the dorm based on plans from a rich hobby-architect donor is not in the best interest of the students, and that it is impossible to consider this justified or beneficial authority towards the students. The argument of "some discomfort will do them good" does not convince me, unfortunately.
I find it difficult to see this donor's story as anything other than self-congratulatory megalomania, but if you see it differently, I honestly hope you're right!
And I'm guessing pretty much any new dorm built today will have central air in any case.
My initial reaction was pretty negative and not sure how I'd feel about the overall size and the lack of windows in rooms. On the other hand, in a lot of designs even if you have a window it's often facing a wall.
However, I actually favor optimizing for the common space. I liked that kind of design. And the rooms being discussed here don't seem much if any smaller than the smaller singles I remember.
The rooms seem a little bit smaller than usual singles, but I'd gladly take the size downgrade if it meant I didn't need to share a room with 1-3 other people.
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]
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.
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.
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.
I’m with you, but I’d go one step further. I’d like this setup for a work environment. Small, individual offices with doors, connected to a shared team room with a dedicated conference table. With such a setup, you can opt to isolate for some distraction free work, or socialize, working together around the shared conference table.
If I were UCSB, I’d build a scale dorm with the layout - (32-150) rooms, with real windows (that could be painted over initially to mirror the planned false window). Surely Munger’s donation doesn’t require the full size building to be completed in X years. Take his money, build the test - validate that it causes no psychological harm, calm the critics, and then build the full sized one.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 $.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see anything wrong with small rooms and common areas. It's the no windows and warren-like density of this that is disturbing.
That students expect to live multiple years without any private space at all in the US has always struck me as very odd. I'm very glad I had a small private room (though, as is common in the UK, I only lived my first year in institutional accommodation). If course it had a working, opening window, a large house common room, a basement pool and games room (in terrible condition of course) and lots of open space outside...
Oh I agree with you. I certainly didn't have a roommate in school any longer than I needed to and, yes, I have somewhat mixed feelings about having multi-person rooms as a design goal as opposed to a space tradeoff (which I think it more commonly is.
And certainly no windows is awful. Every now and then I've had a hotel room that wasn't windowless but effectively got no natural light. Not a fan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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%.
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
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is how you get to a place where college education is triple the cost of the rest of Europe (and much worse in quality), healthcare is double the cost and much worse in quality, and housing is skyrocketing.
"But I thought subsidizing these things would make them cheaper! Here, take more of my money!!"
Here's a life pro-tip:
When you are spending too much on something, the solution is to spend less, not more.
The idea that a solution might not require an increase in taxes truly drives people nuts. It's a shame because it explains why the US government spends so much more on education and healthcare than other nations, yet we have such terrible outcomes. But when the only button you are willing to consider is "spend more!", then that's what you end up with -- a broken, bloated, system that is massively overfunded and that massively under-delivers.
I bet you're the type of person that sees a massive, broken software project and just declares "we need to spend more on this to deliver it ontime! Hire more people!"
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. 20% of the nation is employed in delivering healthcare, so if we increase that to 40%, maybe then we'll solve the problem. We must spend more, it's the moral thing to do! We spend triple the OECD on tertiary education, but hey, we really should bump that up to 6x and then we'll finally fix it!
Taxing people won’t make housing cheaper, it has nothing to do with the healthcare crisis and it won’t fix political corruption. Limousine liberals such as you are disconnected from reality and think that the solution to everything is to throw money at it.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.'
> 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?
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So little privacy? The first three of my four years in college I had shared rooms; only had a single my senior year. I think that's reasonably common? This is much more privacy than that.
(Lack of windows is much more of an issue from my perspective)
As long as the ventilation is good, I don't care about the windows -- the idea is that you should use your bedroom for sleeping at night, and go socialize and learn about things elsewhere.
I suspect that a lot of night-owl students will actually appreciate the lack of windows and roommates -- they'll sleep better.
I lived in a four-bedroom apartment with individual bedrooms (and three common rooms) my first two years and a rented house with a couple of housemates my last two. From the rendering shown, these kids will have less space by something like a factor of ten. The amount of living space per student proposed here is by no means common and really does look like a prison block.
My college dorm room (150 sq ft[1]) wasn't much bigger than these rooms, and I had a roommate. Privacy isn't something dorms have had in a long time, and a tiny solo sleeping room actually affords more privacy, I think? My roommate often stayed up late at night playing videogames with voice chat, which sucked in a double. Also a (tiny) single room gives you more privacy for sex, which is another important part of college.
I don't love this building, but I don't think (1) privacy is an actual problem with it, or (2) that the concerns of a sober living facility are necessarily the same as a college dormitory.
In one of my years at a top 5 rated undergrad university I was in a ~100 sq. ft. windowless room as part of a 6 person suite with a decently large common room. That was a slightly unusual situation at my school (the windowless part, I mean), but remarkably like what is being proposed here. The overall building was quite a bit smaller and most of the rooms had windows and all that, but it really was almost the same from my perspective.
It was absolutely fantastic. I had a private space to sleep in and retreat to when necessary (a single is a major luxury for most undergrads!). I had a semi-private space shared with my suite-mates for work, socialization, etc. There were larger common spaces I could utilize around campus. It was my favorite housing situation I had while at school.
I could see it being a major problem for those who are highly socially reclusive, though.
"There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy."
I lived in Stanford for four of its most overcrowded years... as a junior I lived in an tiny two bedroom apartment that had three people in it, because the university needed to get extra people in and didn't have the space.
Obviously a ton of things wrong with this building, but the idea that this will cause people to have "so little space and so little privacy" ignores the fact that UCSB is in a tremendous housing crunch right now. Adding more housing isn't going to suddenly create a space with little space and privacy... that's the current state of affairs, and more housing will alleviate it. You have to examine this in the context of the university, not in a vacuum.
> There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy
I feel like you haven't been in a college dorm in at least the last decade. These look far better than most dorms I know of.
I'd much prefer this setup than the dorms I had to be in freshman year. Small rooms fitting 2, 3, even 4 people in one bedroom is crazy. At least I'd actually have a room to myself. They call the living quarters small, but they look roughly the same size as what I had if you subtracted my roommate's space out of the room.
Thank god I got an off-campus house with friends years 2-5.
There's no rule against profanity on HN. It's maybe loosely correlated with breaking the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - for example the one asking people not to fulminate), but obviously not always. We're not Bowdlers here.
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.
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
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.
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-detai...
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.
"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."
The solution to this is for someone else to offer a more compelling vision of the future that is also practical and achievable.
Take Elon Musk for example. His vision of the future is more compelling than anything I hear any politician of any political party in the USA (or most other nations) putting forward. I find the standard issue right-wing vision of the future repugnant and the standard issue left-wing vision completely impractical and divorced from reality. (Aspects of it are repugnant too, but much less so than the right.)
What other non-billionaire visions of the future does humanity have? Xi Jinping's smile-or-die panopticon? Putin's theocratic mafia state?
The billionaires are leading humanity by default because they're on balance the only class of people offering practical workable visions of the future that are at least incrementally better than the present.
If he wasn't sucking at the US Government's teat for funding for SpaceX, tax breaks for Tesla, and evading income taxes then I might admire the guy, but as it is, he's the same corporate grifter in a new set of clothes.
There wasn’t the political will in Congress to make SLS a success because it’s not a voting issue for most of their constituents. This is the fate of any ambitious tech development unless that technology can be used to incinerate half of the world in nuclear-fueled hellfire (moon race), spy on the American people without a warrant, kill brown people in the third world, or be give secondhand to the police to fight the war on drugs.
However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.
SpaceX seems to have quite a bit of accountability; I'm a big fan of how Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo projects were run (fixed costs, especially, which is biting Boeing in the ass right now...), and hope NASA uses it as a baseline for future projects.
A successful SLS would have been a failure. It costs far more per launch and is not reusable.
NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.
Even if that is his vision, it won't work. You can't be king of a frontier for very long unless your rule is very competent, minimal, and low-cost. The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Everybody likes to imply that Elon is going to make some sort of shit new society in space. Perhaps they'll get as far as trying, but the odds of it working out are questionable on social grounds alone.
In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.
Elon hasn't talked a lot about the social aspects of a Mars settlement. Maybe he doesn't care and figures that's up to the people who go there and his mission is just to get people there. Maybe he would agree with you and that's the point. Who knows.
I highly doubt he's naive enough to think the social outcome of a Mars settlement would be some standard issue Earthly political outcome or one that would exclusively favor him. If he is that naive he will be disappointed.
Do you have any idea how criminally expensive housing is in SB??? This will provide low-cost accommodations nicer than any Ivy league dorm I've ever seen and enable 4500 people/year (or roughly 15% of Goleta CA) to live on campus. Good luck building that much housing off campus with CA Nimbys...
The easiest way would be to do it like in most of Europe and fund universities properly with tax money so that they do not need to waste half their professors' time chasing grants and depend on wealthy donors to fund basic operations.
What are they doing? Giving money to public educational institutions? The horror! If a donor is as unreasonable as this one seems to be the university should not accept the money. Nothing is being forced on anyone here. Calm down.
You have a way: freedom. You're free to not associate. You can choose alternatives to UCSB, Apple, Facebook, lousy jobs, high tuition, etc. Sure you won't get the benefits those offer, but nobody is compelling participation. That's why Americans (at least some of them) are so fiercely adamant about their rights, to a degree that puzzles many: the right to choose differently, however foolish it may seem to others, is the right to choose and is the right "to protect ourselves against what the rich are doing to the rest of us".
Sorry, that's like saying that the people of Flint, MI were free to move somewhere else when their water was polluted.[1]
No, the university is responsible for providing safe housing for the students, and if they accepted this lunatic's plan, they would be breaching that trust.
When parents and students look for colleges, they assume a certain level of due diligence has been done for them, and they will be leaving their teenager in a minimally safe environment. You can't let people off the hook because of some right-wing idea of "freedom".
[1] In April 2014, during a budget crisis, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River) to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
They are. The alternative to “move” is toxic water. My area is developing its own problems, so I’m looking to get out. I certainly wouldn’t send my kids to live in an oppressive uberprison dorm.
>with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.
How is this even allowed from an engineering perspective? Unless his design and blueprints are perfect, which I highly doubt, it’s insane that no changes could be made. Is this common practice in architecture? I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s probably shorthand and doesn’t mean literal blueprints accurate down to lowest level of detail, but rather adherence to the project plan as a whole (windowless rooms, size, etc).
The worst part is: "The entire proposal ... is budgeted somewhere in the range of $1.5 billion.". So the guy is covering only 13% of the cost and gets complete control.
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.
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
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.
Why am I not surprised that Charles "The-most-important-thing-is-getting-your-first-100000-dollars. Work-multiple-jobs-skip-meals-do-what-you-have-to-that's-the-investing-entry-fee-to-wealth" Munger architected a large prison for students?
I was curious about this as well but can't find any concrete sources.
A blog [1] says the argument goes something like this: “The first $100,000 is a b*tch, but you gotta do it [...] I don’t care what you have to do—if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.”
Classic example of somebody becoming rich and thinking that makes them an expert on everything and the most qualified to solve any problem they cast their mind to. See also: just about every other billionaire on the planet.
Warren Buffet himself calls it the "Shoe Button Complex"
Apparently from his youth, his Dad had a friend that ran a shoe button factory and managed to corner the entire market of shoe buttons. Then in his personal life went on to be a know it all about everything else on the planet.
Munger and Buffet both are pretty transparent about being so didactic though. If you don't want the strings attached to the money, say no.
I think this is a general problem that's common among people with specialized expertise. This kind of problem is common among engineers, lawyers, and doctors as well.
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.
Would you please follow the site guidelines, including these ones?
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Eschew flamebait."
Comments that consist only of denunciatory rhetoric and add no information are the opposite of what we're hoping for here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
Just in case anyone is worried, I have no opinion about the building or any of the people involved. Moderation like this is purely concerned with comment quality on HN.
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.
You do not need to be an architect to see that living in windowless boxes (not rooms) will damage young adults psychologically. Just put yourself into this room and try to study for 6 hours a day. It looks worse than a prison cell.
This old fart probably has his own ideas about how poor students need to work and live in order to "earn" an education. Not to mention anything regarding virus spreading...
I actually lived in a room remarkably similar to this one year in college. It was marginally bigger than what is pictured, but the space was used far less efficiently (lots of annoying free-standing furniture) so functionally it was probably smaller. Aside from the lack of a window making it awfully hard to wake up in the morning, it was no big deal. It was actually my favorite dorm room I had in college. The single-room-in-a-suite model is amazing.
The big thing was that I had a common room shared with my suite-mates which was large-ish, comfortable, and naturally lit. I spent my time at home there, but it's college so I spent most of my time out of the dorm anyway.
My big concern with this UCSB dorm would be for students who are significantly asocial. For the many who crave an isolated personal space, it could be majorly depressing. I get the idea that the entire goal of the design is to try to get people to not behave that way, but I doubt that will work.
I'd guess this dorm would be a great experience for a very significant majority of students, but basically a torture chamber for an unfortunate minority. Ergo it's probably an extremely bad idea.
Yeah, I feel like most folks here are wildly out of touch with what it's like to be a college student, including the architect. I, and just about everyone else from my college, would trade just about every creature comfort for a private room to sleep. In fact my college had suites like these and they were fought over tooth-and-nail in the room draw process.
I think one of the most bizarre things we accept in life is college kids being forced into doubles and triples. College "kids" are adults, not little kids in camp.
Plus, even with my window in my single suite room, my sleep cycle was so messed up half the time due to the occasional all-nighter that having no window might have actually been easier for me to deal with.
> I think one of the most bizarre things we accept in life is college kids being forced into doubles and triples.
I went to uni. in the 70s in the UK. I never had to share. A few students at the same uni. did but it was almost always possible to move to a single room later in the year.
Do so many US students really have to share rooms, and if so why?
Yes, it's extremely common to share, especially in the first couple years. Many many colleges require students to live on campus freshman year and the provided housing is forced doubles (or even triples) and sometimes even temporary housing. As for why -- it's cheaper to stuff 2 or 3 students into 1 dorm room, obviously.
You do realize that like, 10% of the student population at UCSB is offically homeless right? Right now they sleep on friends couches, in their cars, or in transient weekly rental situations
The goal is to get the students out of their bedrooms. There's plenty of common space, and lots of really nice places to go study and socialize out of your bedroom. This is intended to promote real-life socialization, which is the only real reason to go to in-person college these days.
Plus, everyone gets a single!
My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
Sure, we get the goal. It could even be an interesting experiment. Maybe some people would like it. Maybe lots of people. Or maybe it causes lasting psychological harm. But this is going to get built and used for decades regardless of the results of the experiment.
> My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
You and your college roommates had a choice. Did everybody in your dorm do that?
If you want to talk about "choice", this is not the hill that matters. So many colleges force their students to live on campus, and then squeeze them into forced doubles or even triples in conditions far worse than what's being built here.
Which is great except 50% of people are introverts and need space to recharge. How many people live like this in real life? That speaks to the choice of hanging out followed by "leave me alone".
It sounds like an experiment but it could probably have been done slightly further "away from home" if it was about collaboration. Just have places to encourage people to hang out if they want to and not if they don't. Forcing them just feels like mental breakdown waiting-to-happen.
Living like this is actually pretty common both at universities and as a young adult. You have private space, a shared kitchen/dining room, and the building has lounges and other public amenities.
Your room is for sleep, and possibly study, though there are other places on campus with fewer distractions. You can choose to eat and work together in groups in your dining room. You socialize away from your suite so you don't annoy your roommates.
The dorms that I used had all sorts of unpleasant features:
-- giant shared bathrooms had gang showers, or required you go go down 2 flights of stairs and along a hallway for 100 yards
-- shared larger rooms with multiple beds and desks, creating issues around differing schedules
-- no kitchens or cooking facilities
-- no food storage facilities, creating unsanitary conditions
etc.
As an example, a fairly common layout that I've seen is a 3-room quad -- two very small rooms with two bunk beds, two dressers and maybe a close adjoining a not particularly large 'common' room with 4 desks, perhaps a mini-fridge, and a beat-up couch.
I detest architectural coercion. Who is this old rich fuck to force "socialization" (a dystopian word if there ever was one)? That's my business. Buildings and urban environments should be built to allow various degrees of social interaction based on one's own personal needs and determinations as you see fit, not some megalomaniacal lunatic's tyrannical and dehumanizing designs. This is the tyrannical streak running through modernist architecture. For some reason, some people with money see everyone else as rats or cattle that they can heard around as they please, for their "own good".
In an environment that respects human persons and their individuality as well as their social nature, the environment is structured according to subsidiarian principles. The town square is where anyone can socialize with anyone in town. Next the building courtyard is where anyone in the building can socialize with anyone else in the building. Next, the living room or common area of an apartment is where anyone can socialize with anyone in the apartment (analogously for single family homes). Individual bedrooms are for total privacy. I don't need to be coerced out of my bedroom if that's where I need to be because some crazy billionaire high on his own flatulence says so.
Be very wary of so-called "philanthropists". They are in love with their power to control and coerce, not the actual good.
To quote C. S. Lewis:
"My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
Or, you force socialization on a population that's increasingly turning inward, to the detriment of society in general.
It's hubris that on one hand HN can bitch about how egomaniacal companies like Facebook and Google are, and yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
Where do we think those social-deaf, micro-optimizing engineers come from?
> Or, you force socialization on a population that's increasingly turning inward, to the detriment of society in general.
College kids living in dorms are turning inward? Do you have proof of that or that is just a hunch?
> ... yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
The goal of making architecture promote socialisation is great. The complaint is not about the aim. The complaint is about how it is achieved.
Bedrooms with no natural light or natural air circulation suck. We don't build houses like this because it is not a good idea. Saying that your aim was to promote socialisation doesn't change that.
Among other things, architectural design makes decisions about how space is allocated and how it will probably be used. Of course, architects get things wrong. The dorm I lived in undergraduate did a fair bit well--and also had some common space that was sort of out of the way and was hardly ever used.
But one way or another, an architect is going to design things in a way that (they think) optimizes for certain behaviors and use whether that's socializing/collaborating or the maximum privacy/anonymity.
>Which is great except 50% of people are introverts and need space to recharge. How many people live like this in real life?
The vast majority of students? I don't think I knew a single person who lived without roommates when I was a university student. Freshman year nearly everybody shared a room with 1-2 other people, this new dorm would provide far more privacy than that.
The goal is to get the students out of their bedrooms. There's plenty of common space, and lots of really nice places to go study and socialize out of your bedroom. This is intended to promote real-life socialization, which is the only real reason to go to in-person college these days.
But there's zero evidence this building will actually accomplish this. And, according to the architect who resigned, plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Achievement: kids lying on their beds doomscrolling because the common space in the room is dominated by a massive table with exactly enough room for everybody to bump elbows.
Sure, but the school can't justify spending triple per student than standard dorms cost. Even with the gift, the school needs to be financially responsible, and making a huge leap in quality of life would seem financially irresponsible when thousands of other colleges squeeze kids into forced doubles and triples. This is a step towards giving students both privacy and spaces to socialize, with some drawbacks that are a consequence of not having infinite funding.
I could assume that they would have those amenities also, but we have no way of knowing, and isn't that a concern in and of itself?
In the article linked below, the artist renderings look more like an open concept market place like a mall or Boston Public Market. Fine spaces to eat, shop, and socialize, but not so good for study.
https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning
Your college roommates had the option to black out their windows. People in this dorm won't have the option to open the curtains. That's the difference.
I worked in this office where there were windows, but I was really far away from any of the light they emitted. I'd get these pounding headaches every day until I moved to a different floor where I was closer to the window. It was a miserable place to work.
Millions of people ( billions?) live in windowless boxes (not rooms) and there is no evidence they're damaged psychologically. I'm not saying I don't prefer windows but this kind of statement strikes me as privileged bubble thinking.
There's also an incentive for them to make buildings as large and as expensive as possible as they it affects their income. Certainly I'd argue self interestedly that all living quarters should be as large and extravagant as possible as I'd like to live in a large extravagant place. But, millions (billions?) of people are doing just fine in much smaller places than these self interested architects are suggesting.
That's not really how architecture works. There is a client supplied budget and site that multiple architecture firms submit proposals for. Suggesting a needlessly large and expensive building will do nothing but leave you without any work.
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.
What I don't understand is how this shithole costs so much? 1.5 billion for 4,500 residents comes out to 333,333 per resident. It feels like they could probably build normal dorms for that price.
This looks so insane to me, I wonder how much building a normal apartment would cost in that area. I'm building a 7000sqft high-standard house in South America for around 200K USD.
A new small apartment in San Francisco cannot be built for less than $800k these days, so coming in a $333k per resident is not too surprising to me in a similar high-cost city with a building with a ton of amenities.
An apartment for $800K is understandable. A small bedroom @ $333K is not.
If they already own the building, it is only construction costs whereas buying an apartment is possibly extortionate land or property prices from the current owner, which is purely demand-driven.
Looking at the blueprint, it seems like 7 of the 9 floors will be solely suites. I assume one floor will be dining hall which I wouldn't count as an amenity, which means only 1 of the 9 floors actually has amenities beside the small common space each suite has.
It does sound like a lot of money but that is also a huge dorm. I couldn't find numbers on a more recent dorm project but MIT's Simmons Hall was completed in 2002. (Which also has sort of a weird window thing going on.) It "only" cost $78 million--so presumably something in excess of $100 million today. But that's for a dorm only housing 350 or so students vs. 4500. But, still you're looking at about 2x the cost per student housed.
But the thing is Simmons Hall is practically a work of art. If you asked students if they wanted to live there or in this place pretty sure every single one would say Simmons.
Like Stata, it's grown on me a bit looking from the outside. It's certainly not boring. Never been inside though so no idea how well it works as a dorm.
In addition to the window thing, the sheer scale of 4,500 students gives me pause. It's something like 10x the number of students of any dorm I've ever experienced.
Ya I've been thinking about this too, that personal shame needs to play a bigger role today.
For example, if I designed a cell phone that wasn't waterproof, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an engineer.
If I took a campaign contribution and voted against the people I my district, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an elected official.
And so on and so forth. This lack of transparency, accountability, critical thinking, personal responsibility, professionalism, etc has given us this bizarro world 21st century reality where one rich guy can soil the lives of countless others in a seemingly impeccable way. To name one undesired outcome of this local optimum in the multiverse of possible realities..
Edit: $200 million is nothing to sneeze at, so nothing against Charlie Munger for that. I do wish though that philanthropists would donate without strings attached, or else it ends up being an extension of their egos.
Not to dispute any of your arguments, I'm really surprised at your referring to the consideration of whether to accept a gift of $200M as "save a few bucks".
I completely missed that in my first pass. This crazy donor negotiated absolutely authority over the design by covering less than 20% of the cost. That's both impressive and alarming.
If someone is donating 15% of project costs but with strings attached that make the project more than 15% worse (which arguably might be the case here), then that's not a good deal and should be rejected.
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.
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.
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-graduat...