The proposed student dormitory at the University of California Santa Barbara campus has drawn national attention and criticism, especially after consulting architect Dennis McFadden resigned from the university's design review committee almost three weeks ago. McFadden called the building a "social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves." McFadden stepped down after a presentation on October 5, when the dorm's plans were set in stone.
The rendered images and floor plans of the 11-story building called Munger Hall erupted across social media, and the structure has been dubbed "Dormzilla" by the Independent and likened to a "human rights violation" by many others. It has also been compared to the dorm for the guards in the show, Squid Games.
According to the Architectural Record, Munger said that his building's design was based on modernist architect Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation project in Marseille, France. The amateur architect claimed he improved Le Corbusier's design because the building was "too narrow to make the spaces interesting. So the whole thing didn't work worth shit. I've fixed that. " He also said, "We took Corbusier's errors and the errors in the university housing and eliminated them one by one."
Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation
The proposed building has quickly become one of the world's most controversial architectural projects, pitting a nearly 100-year-old and partly blind billionaire who probably hasn't set foot in a college dormitory since the late 1940s against a student revolt.
In 2016, Charles Munger, an eccentric billionaire and vice-chair of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, donated $200 million to build an experimental block. He doesn't believe universities should usually let donors choose the architect of their buildings. "If you allow the donor to pick the architect, which has been done in many places, the buildings look like shit," he said.
The proposed design is weird; the plan is to house around 4,500 students in a 1.68 million-square-foot building, making it the largest college dormitory globally. It would transform a singular corner of the University of California Santa Barbara campus into the eighth-densest neighbourhood on the planet. Most of the building is reserved for dining and recreational areas. Students would get small bedrooms with eight units, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Rather than providing windows and natural light, most (94%) interior rooms would be lit only by porthole-like fixtures. There is also a lack of proposed vehicle parking as it is currently strictly limited to bicycles. For these reasons, the building has drawn harsh criticism from architects, students and the greater public, for the size and density of the building do not align with the conditions of the surrounding neighbourhood.
When McFadden resigned from his position, he wrote a letter, in which he addressed the questionable living conditions that were presented. "An ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants," he wrote.
Munger took the time to criticise the architect, saying that McFadden "reacted with his gut like an idiot. He didn't look at the building intelligently."
Munger explained that the idea to replace windows with artificial windows came from Disney Cruise ships. "We had a window shortage," he said. "So we just copied what Disney Cruises did. The way Disney does it, the window is really a television set. Those work beautifully on the ships."
"But I wanted to have a spectrum of sunlight, so with a curtain hanging over it you couldn't tell if it was artificial or real," he added.
"I figured out how to do that. Programming the lights to copy the sun was too expensive. So we will give the students knobs, and they can have whatever light they want. Real windows don't do that."
I’m not sure a vacation on the Disney Cruise is either the same experience or a similar living condition to spending at least three years studying in college. That’s a pretty low bar for an architectural precedent.
McFadden resigned as he said he was "disturbed" by the design of the building.
Billionaire Charles Munger believes his dormitory is a cutting-edge student residence that will maximise the use of space and encourage social interaction. I respectfully disagree, the design is primitive and unsophisticated. The project is equally similar to failed public housing projects from the last century.
Windowless bedrooms are in no way innovative. The New York Tenement House Act of 1901 was enacted in response to the unhealthy living conditions of the poorest residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where around 350,000 dwelling spaces existed without any opening to outside air and light. The act was one of the first laws of its kind to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in New York. However, the California Building Standards Code allows building owners to apply for "alternate methods of compliance", which means using mechanical ventilation and electric lighting as substitutes for windows.
Windowless rooms disrupt sleeping patterns and decrease mental health due to the lack of ability to see green spaces. The lack of windows makes it harder to escape fires and can cause cold or carbon monoxide to build up.
Single-occupancy bedrooms would be arranged around common dining areas
Munger Hall will be the largest dorm globally that ignores natural light and air as necessities to our physical and emotional wellbeing and even as fundamental principles of environmental sustainability. It is also hard to understand why one would think reliance on an energy-consuming artificial environment is sustainable in any way. Energy consumption for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year is a pretty clear indication that the building is not passively habitable. So in the event of a power outage, all 4,500 residents would have to be completely evacuated.
The building presents fourteen entrances and exits, a number that has raised eyebrows. Munger said the design follows safety regulations. "I'm a nut about safety," he said. "There are enough exits to satisfy all of the codes, and they're way bigger than normal."
A good precedent for comparison is Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy: it is currently the largest single dormitory globally and houses 4,000 students. The dormitory is composed of multiple wings wrapped around numerous courtyards with over 25 entrances. Munger Hall, however, is a single block that will house 4,500 students with only 14 entries.
Additionally, he told the Architectural Record that the material used for the dormitory has its own safety advantages. "It's a sprinklered concrete building," he said.
"Do you know how much loss there has been to fire in the history of sprinklered concrete buildings? Approximately zero."
The concrete building will be fabricated off-site, which Munger says will make it "last as long as the pyramids."
Though Munger has no formal architectural training, he believes that buildings similar to Munger Hall will "sprout up all over America."
This is not the first time Munger has funded architectural projects of his design. In fact, Munger Hall is a larger and more extreme version of the Munger Graduate Housing at the University of Michigan.
Munger views the earlier project as proof of concept – a position which some students who have lived there obviously reject. On Reddit, one student commented, "Lived in Munger. It was terrible. Too many roommates = no cohesion or standards. The lack of windows was depressing. Munger is about as out of touch as billionaires come."
Another wrote, "Honestly, the only two things about living in Munger that I hated were the lack of windows and the fact that you just couldn't get moisture out of the bathrooms...but those were things I hated enough to leave. Also unfortunately the floor plans for the rooms at UCSB look far worse than what we have here."
Munger seems to celebrate the University of Michigan dorm as a success, but the lack of proper lighting through windows emulates a prison vibe more than it does a dormitory.
“When an ignorant man leaves, I regard it as a plus, not a minus. He’s just plain wrong,” Munger told CNN, referring to McFadden's departure. “All I can say is that I have been doing this for a long time, and no building has failed yet.”
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