A consulting architect on UCSB’s Design Review Committee has quit his post in protest over the university’s proposed Munger Hall project, calling the massive, mostly-windowless dormitory plan “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being.”
“Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances,” McFadden said, and would qualify as the eighth densest neighborhood on the planet, falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It would be able to house Princeton University’s entire undergraduate population, or all five Claremont Colleges. “The project is essentially the student life portion of a mid-sized university campus in a box,” he said.
Before I read the article, I was potentially sympathetic to the concept from an environmental standpoint. One vision of more energy-efficient future is where humans live and work in a compact area, obviating the need to expend energy on so much daily travel by car or even public transit. (With all the surrounding space devoted to nature.) So something that works toward that idea doesn’t strike me as automatically a bad thing.
However, after reading the article it does seem pretty horrid. It’s one thing to encourage a sense of community but another thing entirely to create an unnatural environment without access to fresh air and light, where the only escape from one’s fellow humans is into a claustrophobic little cubicle. It has a faint whiff of Cabrini Green about it.
It sounds like a great experiment for what it would be like to live on Mars, jammed up in windowless cubbies and enforced, prison-like socialisation. However, I think it needs more tunnels leading to rebel mutant hideouts and a secret alien reactor. Pitch it to Elon Musk while he’s on a psychedelic bender and you could probably make up most of the $1.3B deficit.
I like it, especially with the idea of getting students out of their room and into a common area to socialise. That way they won’t spend their entire free time playing video games or binging Netflix.
I still think it’s good to have a roommate but this is an acceptable compromise.
I find it extremely creepy. It sounds like the setting for a post-apocalyptic movie where people are living underground because the Earth’s surface is a radioactive wasteland. One critic describes it as “a jail masquerading as a dormitory,” which is misleading given that jails generally have windows.
I’m also repulsed that this is a nonagenarian billionaire’s vanity project, and his funding was contingent on his designs being followed to the letter. Who does he think he is—Howard Roark?
I’d be interested in hearing about the building’s amenities; surely it isn’t tiny, windowless cells all the way down to the sub-basement. Will it have recreational facilities, coffee shops, movie theaters, swimming pools, etc.?
I’m guessing that “amateur architect” Charles Munger never lived in a dorm himself. If he had, he’d know that dorm residents love to pull fire alarms for the lulz. The idea of 4,500 residents evacuating at once boggles my mind.
My student job when I was in school gave me a chance to enter nearly all of the dorms on the Oregon State University campus. All of the rooms had a window, zero exceptions. It wasn’t just a matter of being able to see outside, being able to open the windows for some ventilation was important too. A third, perhaps far less important, use of the window was that it provides residents with a space to express themselves to the campus at large by putting up signs or making shapes with post-it notes.
It looks like even the main area has no window too? Yikes.
“Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances,” McFadden said, and would qualify as the eighth densest neighborhood on the planet, falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Is a building of that size even allowed with only two entrances? I feel like the fire marshal would have something to say about that. I wonder how moving day would be handled. It’s bad enough in a normal dorm, I don’t want to imagine how it’d be handled here.
The rectangular building’s nine residential floors, the plans show, would be organized into eight “houses” divided by a single interior corridor branched by smaller hallways. Each house would include eight suites, and most suites would contain eight bedrooms, a common area with tables and chairs, a small kitchenette, and a television. Each house in turn would have access to a large kitchen, a common dining area, a game area, and a laundry room.
<><> OK, my take on it. Windowless cubicles with a bed, a dresser, a desk and a closet. Prison cells at least have a real window. Not to mention the sheer horror of a real fire occurring, if you look at their illustration, there are 8 blocks of 8 windowless cells before one gets tot he great room with windows. I also notice a lack of freaking elevators - so much for handicap access. Hm, communal room and kitchen. Are they going to have a janitorial staff? When I went to school, my dormmates were fucking PIGS, my half of the room was spotless, and it took a month of letting the other side turn into a disease infested pig stye to get my roommate thrown out of the room. I refused to clean for her, now imagine 64 pigs and nobody cleaning - imagine the horror of the toilets and kitchen? The unwashed/vacuumed floors? Who takes out the communal trash? Will there be an enforced rota? 64 laundry bins of unwashed sports clothing marinating …
Attica _
Agreed. I am an introvert, being forced to hang out with 63 other people that don’t have any common hobbies would be my own special hell.
No fire exits; it will have a network of pneumatic tubes that, upon activation, will suck up all residents and eject them from the building and eject them into a big pile out front. Also used for move out day or whenever it would be comedically appropriate.
Making dorm rooms more unpleasant and claustrophobic so that you’ll feel compelled to escape to common areas to mingle? Sounds bad at first, but how much room and fresh air do you really need for social media use and web surfing?
It also sounds like a great admissions recruitment tool, and could serve as a model for solving California’s housing shortage.
*any idea how dorm room square footage compares with that of single occupancy cells in the state prison system?
Santa Barbara, one of the most scenic cities in the U.S. Where even the ugly part of town overlooks mountains. Where the UCSB campus goes right up to the beach. What better place to tell students to live in a windowless 8x8 cubicle!
Or, you know, to take a break from studying and have something to look at besides the wall two feet from your face. Scenery is overrated. Especially in Santa Barbara, which is basically a featureless slum that doesn’t get any sun anyway.
Why on earth would being in a common area stop them from playing video games or watching Netflix?
Can that possibly meet state fire codes?
– half the students living in that windowless plantless box are going to be going right up the walls. And most of them won’t know why. I’d be interested to read a report a couple of years after this gets built and inhabited – presuming that happens, of course. “Interested”, I suspect, in the sense of its being interesting to read about disasters.
Also, how’s the air circulation going to be in a structure like that? Earlier during the pandemic, I seem to recall hearing a lot of talk about ensuring good air flow in public facilities like schools.
I haven’t heard as much about that lately, but I don’t know if that’s due to scientific consensus that air flow isn’t that important after all, or if it’s because the need for circulation is now agreed upon as an unremarkable truth.
Even if the structure does have good air flow, it’s bound to be artificially created through an HVAC system. Not sure how energy efficient that’s going to be in such a dense warren, and if there’s a prolonged power outage it could get stale really fast. (I assume - I’m no expert, I’m just speculating.)
@aruvqan - you raise an interesting point about kids being sloppy/irresponsible about caring for common areas, but surely most current living situations for students have common areas and everyone manages somehow. When I lived in college dorms we had common hallways, laundry areas, bathrooms, and a big living room with a fireplace. Decades later my son experienced the same kind of set-up. There must have been cleaning fairies of some sort … hired staff, possibly work-study students? Anyway, I don’t think that is a problem unique to the design of this building.
Speaking of ventilation: You’ve got a half a megawatt of heat being dumped into that building just from the body heat of the residents, plus lighting, computers, TVs, kitchen appliances, etc., and very little surface area to pump that heat out through. What the heck kind of air conditioning system are you going to have that can keep up with that?