> A windowless room with a community bathroom doesn't sound appealing, but at a certain price point it's better than nothing.
Last November, HN briefly discussed [1] Munger Hall at the University of California Santa Barbara, which will be just such a building. Housing 4,500 students, only 32 of 512 single rooms on each floor will have physical windows. The remaining 95% will have virtual windows that simulate sunlight.
The HN linked article [2] includes a floor plan and a rendering of an 8-room cluster with shared kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. UC Santa Barbara has more information on the project [3].
> While the dorm rooms themselves don’t have windows, the exterior of the building does, which lets natural light into the communal living spaces.
The reasoning was too encourage people to hang out in common areas to create more of a community feeling. Whether you think that's necessary or a good idea (I went to college long ago, but there wasn't any need to have architecture diving our community), it's not the same as a dorm without windows.
> Internal space without windows can't legally be made into residential.
Residential: Bah; Dormitory: Yay!
In brief: [Charlie Munger—billionaire vice chairman of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway] has offered UCSB more than $200 million to build this dorm to his designs, which will cost an estimated $1.2 billion. The structure is a giant block in which almost none of the rooms have windows.
Are you referring to a UCSB dormitory proposed back in 2021. Here are the highlights of the design. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether the students and faculty were right to shut this project down.
"Charlie Munger, a 97-year-old billionaire and Warren Buffett's right-hand man, gifted UCSB a casual $200 million to build the dorm under one condition: he gets to make all of the design decisions."
"Because it's Munger's way or the highway, he has decided that 94% of the bedrooms (which, by the way, are only 7x10") will not have windows. Instead, only some of the common areas will have windows, in an attempt to get students out of their bedrooms to socialize."
"In addition to the whole no windows thing, Munger's design requires eight students to share one bathroom. The entire building also only features two exits. For 4,000 people."
> each of these sleeping spaces with no windows is said to attach to a 'house' with a private common area and real windows. Nothing like the isolated skyscraper dorm you link to.
Yeah, but not quite. First, these "sleeping spaces with no windows" are apartments, a cluster of 7 single-occupancy bedrooms, with a common area in the middle, with kitchenette, shared bathrooms, etc. It's a self-contained unit. And most of these units have no windows at all.
8 of these units form a "house", with a large common area and real windows, as you see. But it's a space shared by 56 people, and their guests. Calling it private is rather stretching that term.
OK, I found an article with a floorplan[1]. This thing is not at all comparable to the Michigan dorms. Recall, in the Michigan dorms you have an apartment housing 7 people with a spacious, well-lit living room (6 windows, but the count isn't important.) Sure, you don't have a window in your bedroom, and that sucks, but to see the sun you just go through that one door.
But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.
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.
> Building codes adopted by the city do not require natural light in apartment bedrooms, and developers have been designing and constructing windowless bedrooms since at least 2002. The majority of these rooms appear to be in student housing
Charlie Munger donated most of the money to build his horrific namesake dorm at the University of Michigan:
> 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.
There are windows at the ends, so not entirely windowless[1]. The layout is brilliant to be honest and I would have preferred my own space (especially as an introvert) than a traditional dorm room.
The difference between Munger Hall [2] and the new UCSB dorm [1] is vast. For starters you go from a 7 person common room being your nearest real light to a 60-70 person common room being your nearest indoor natural light. The Michigan dorm has a fraction of the people living in it total, larger rooms and amenities that would be hard to include in the UCSB simply because there's so many more people in that doom.
You expect a quality difference between graduate apartments and undergraduate dorms but saying one is well received (with complaints about the lack of windows and lights in the bedrooms btw) so this different design must also be secretly ok is stretching things.
> amateur architect designs for dorm rooms (basically prisons) on universities
I hope UCSB backed out of building one of these monstrosities.
"Public policy graduate student Luiza Macedo didn’t see the sun for a full week when she had to isolate in her room at Munger Residence due to a Covid-19 scare."
> but better for the people who would live in them ... . You built a dorm just like this one 10 years ago that people love.
It caused UCSB's design review committee architect to resign:
> A consulting architect named Dennis McFadden subsequently announced his resignation from U.C.S.B.’s design-review committee. In a letter, which was later leaked, he wrote that “Charlie’s Vision” was “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”
> a “social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Having no natural light was a problem. So were stale air and tight spaces. McFadden noted that the structure had just two main exits and would qualify “as the eighth densest neighborhood in the world, falling just short of a portion of Dhaka, Bangladesh.”
> Dormzilla, as the building has been nicknamed by the local papers
> Moreno described poor ventilation and even poorer sleep. “Lots of talk of sunlamps and melatonin,” he said.
> “you had to submit, like, a waiver stating your need for a window.”
I know that a lot of people here on HN are enamored with CM but I feel differently.
In October 2021, Munger's insistence that the university follow his design compelled architect Dennis McFadden, who had served the university for two decades, to resign from the university's Design Review Committee. McFadden stated that the windowless, 1.68-million-square-foot dormitory would be "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being ... An ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light, air, and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants ... The Munger Hall design ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn't matter ... [T]he building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves."[48] In August 2023, after widespread backlash to what critics called the "windowless dorm," UC Santa Barbara abandoned the project and began to solicit alternative housing proposals. Munger also withdrew his pledge of support.
It is not in the same mould at all. Reposting my previous comment:
OK, I found an article with a floorplan[1]. This thing is not at all comparable to the Michigan dorms. Recall, in the Michigan dorms you have an apartment housing 7 people with a spacious, well-lit living room (6 windows, but the count isn't important.) Sure, you don't have a window in your bedroom, and that sucks, but to see the sun you just go through that one door.
But in this proposed building? Look at that insane floor plan[2]! It looks like a maze! If you're in one of those inner rooms, you exit your bedroom (no windows) into your apartment's common area (no windows), exit that to a long corridor that eventually leads to your "House's" common area, which finally has windows. But is the opposite way from the building's exit.
Perhaps Charlie Munger's enthusiasm for this sort of inverse reasoning explains his (now cancelled) plan for the windowless dorm building he designed for UC-Santa Barbara -- he was creating the worst possible dorm building in order to get insights into what a good dorm building would be.
>Munger’s $200 million donation to the university is contingent on the structure being built to his windowless specifications.
Reason being:
>“Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another.
It seems to me encouraging university students to spend more time alone would be more conducive to getting work done. Overall Munger seemed to have had this notion a lot of old people have that the youth need to suffer because
of-course they suffered more.
The building he wants to build in UCSB already exists in Michigan and it has the highest ratings of any student dorm there. "In fact the building has a rating of 8.8 out of 10 on veryapt.com. Reviewers praise the building's amenities, including study rooms and a fitness center."
My quality of life at college improved a lot when I switched from having a roommate to getting a single room.
Last November, HN briefly discussed [1] Munger Hall at the University of California Santa Barbara, which will be just such a building. Housing 4,500 students, only 32 of 512 single rooms on each floor will have physical windows. The remaining 95% will have virtual windows that simulate sunlight.
The HN linked article [2] includes a floor plan and a rendering of an 8-room cluster with shared kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. UC Santa Barbara has more information on the project [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29096773
[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu...
[3] https://sam.ucsb.edu/campus-planning-design/current-projects...
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