Cartoonish, very respectful. Look, to me the intent of this sort of architecture is quite self-evident, especially when considered in the context of a larger social dynamic. I might categorize propositions to the contrary as “cartoonish” and dismiss them as “hyperbole” were I a different sort of person.
Dorms don’t typically have much in the way of backup anything. I mean, ours had temporary generators that kept the fire alarms, emergency lighting and electric doors working, but that was it.
Then again, they’re usually not 4500 student cities-in-a-box either.
Anywhere I have ever lived it was illegal to rent a living space to someone in which the bedrooms did not have windows. Indeed, there are usually laws saying the windows must be a minimum size.
Old saying: Universities are impervious to their own studies.
Or should that be oblivious?
Seems to me to be a bunch of dorm buildings strung together with overhead walkways and called “wings”. It’s a far cry from what Munger has envisioned, that’s for sure.
The Munger dorm in Michigan apparently has something like an 8.5/10 rating, but no idea the veracity of the ratings. It also is somewhat different than this building though–there are no built-in window replacements, and I think the “pods” are less students, and there’s a bathroom for each student, the overall dorm is smaller too. I think every common area in the Michigan dorm has windows, while not all do in the UCSB proposed dorm will.
FWIW my initial and current reaction to this dorm is it’s badly designed and I wouldn’t want to live there, but I find myself in the weird position of wanting to defend its design from a lot of the posts in this thread. Like yes, it’s a bad design. No, I don’t think most people would enjoy living in it. However, I also think a few things should be stated:
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Most college dorms suck bad in various ways, and many colleges it is very typical for students to leave the dorms after Freshman year for the very reason the students prefer to live in off campus housing
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While natural light is important for human health, there’s a lot of people who situationally get deprived natural light for long stretches of time, and they make lights you can buy that simulate the same spectrum as light as sunlight. You can also usually rig them to gradually turn on and off at wake / sleep times to simulate natural sunrise / sunset and promote circadian rhythm. Have we actually looked at how well these work? (And I don’t mean anecdotes, but actual studies.) Because assuming such things “work pretty well”, I think the lack of windows may not be as dire as thought–again, most students would probably spend 30 weeks of their life in these dorms and that’d be it. These aren’t designed for an individual to spend years and years of their life in.
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A huge, huge % of the population works (or pre-covid anyway) worked in big offices that have the same ventilation concerns as these dorms, not to mention huge swathes of urbanized Asia. While most high-rise apartments in the United States have some ability to open windows to get outside air, not all do. Since we’ve corrected the falsehood that people would be in danger of “suffocation” in these dorms, I think it’s worth pointing out that many millions of people live and work in structures that don’t have windows that you can open to the outside, and don’t appear to raise a huge row about the quality of the air. Maybe someone is a sensitive butterfly, and if so you shouldn’t live in these dorms, but it seems asinine to act like lots of people don’t live like this just fine already, in terms of ventilation.
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The idea this is some weird billionaire “social control experiment” seems incredibly silly and conspiratorial, with absolutely no evidence to support it. The much simpler explanation would be a billionaire who likes architecture, who thinks a few complaints he heard from his kids about their dorm life equipped him with superior knowledge for knowing how to make college dorms, and he wants to act on it. It’s a rich man’s silly hobby effort, it’s not some plot to control people’s brains.
It’s physically possible to survive an academic year in a windowless room. The question is, why deliberately build the dorm that way? Why put thousands of students through that each year? Just because one rich donor wants to try it? There’s no good reason the university shouldn’t instead spend its $1.3 billion on building a dorm with ample natural light and ventilation.
Even in the most impoverished developing nations, rooms in residential buildings – including dormitories – almost always have windows!
I linked to an article in post #183 - here it is again:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/munger-residences-michigan-windowless/index.html
I don’t see how that’s relevant. If the power goes out in my office building, everyone will leave. There are always waking people paying attention, too. There is no scenario where people spend hours packed into an unventilated office building.
I’m not convinced it’s actually safe for people to spend the night, asleep, packed into a box with no passive ventilation.
So if this is correct, and little use 100 gallons of oxygen per day, and the building
Or, for another scale
You’d die in about an hour in a coffin.
The building isn’t perfectly sealed, of course, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot of openings. And of course those bedrooms are a lot larger than coffins.
So i don’t think anyone would outright die on a single night, unless there was a fire or something else chewing up often, too.
But fires happen. And people get sick from bad air a while before they die. This seems like a poor design from a safety standpoint.
I’m dubious of the bad air argument. Windows are a matter independent from air circulation, as evidenced by the fact many buildings have windows that don’t open, and they don’t make you sick.
But… I just don’t see WHY you’d build a residence with no windows and an approach to fire safety clearly not well thought through. It is not an unreasonable thing to give people a fucking window in their homes, and if this 97-year-old fool wasn’t rich, his stupid idea would have been laughed down in milliseconds.
Munger’s not doing anyone any favors with this, and his money is doing no more good than Bezo’s spaceflight is. Even after his contribution to the project, the cost per bed of this monstrosity is still higher than any normal dorm. If the university turned down his money entirely and just built a dorm designed by a sane architect, from their own portion of the budget, they’d save money. The fact that the university is even giving Munger the time of day is evidence that they’re not planning based on their students’ best interests.
At the schools I went to, those would be prohibited in the dorms as a fire hazard, because any lamp that actually simulates sunlight is going to get really hot.
Another point that nobody else has mentioned: Buildings in California need to comply with earthquake codes, in addition to all of the other building codes of the sort you find anywhere. Now, real architects (at least, those working in California) know how to comply with these codes. Does an out-of-state amateur like Munger? Because it seems like a giant cube like this would be the absolute most difficult structure to earthquake-proof.
But let’s forget about disasters (even relatively common disasters like power outages). Let’s just look at a perfectly ordinary day where everything works right. Probably about half of these students will have their first class at 8 AM (students don’t like classes that early, but they often don’t have a choice, just like they often don’t have a choice of dorm building). So you’ve got over two thousand students, all wanting to leave the building at once, through two exits (we’re not using the six emergency exits, because this is a normal morning). How?
So let’s be clear–I am saying there is no evidence to support the idea that you are at any risk of suffocation from simply being inside a very large office building, that has sealed windows, and that normally has a running HVAC, simply because that HVAC has shut down for some reason.
I think we’re firmly in Carl Sagan “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory, or in fact just any evidence at all. Comparing a coffin to a large building that is not at all hermetically sealed, doesn’t quite cut it…remotely.
As stated, there is good evidence that sealed high rise buildings frequently accumulate very high concentrations of CO2 in their air as compared to the outside. However the effects of this are basically semi-speculative and posited to result in chronic issues over many years of exposure, that is a dramatic difference from a claim of suffocation.
For someone to suffocate in a building like this, the O2 would have to go so low in the air it could not support life, or alternatively some gas that poisons human respiration–like CO, would have to accumulate in sufficient quantity to kill. So we already know CO won’t just naturally accumulate in an office building with its power shut off–but CO accidents absolutely can and do happen, they require a CO leak. So putting aside CO, we’re looking for some example that a typically constructed office building has ever in history had its O2 levels reach such a low saturation, simply from having its power shut off, that human life could not be sustained inside. I am skeptical one can find such an example because I spent over an hour looking (don’t worry, I was multitasking so that was not all I was doing.)
Again, I’ve already said I think this is a shitty billionaire’s pipe dream building, that shouldn’t be built and is a bad idea. What I’m objecting to is the loose claim that modern day buildings are so hermetically sealed that without outside ventilation, they are akin to being in a submarine and you’d suffocate.
I agree with what some said above: The idea of having an enormous dorm isn’t necessarily bad in itself, but this dorm is badly designed.
AFAIK the reporting suggests the building’s plans are actually being drawn up by professional architects, not Charlie Munger himself. In fact I’m highly skeptical based on the video interview of him, he remains in good enough health even if he had the knowledge (which he does not) to draw up detailed architectural plans on his own. Munger sets the direction and tone of the building, but like he isn’t the one making sure building and fire codes are being followed or that various safety features are implemented, again, at least from what I’ve been able to glean.
Since the UV lights / “virtual windows” mentioned are actually built into the building itself I think you could easily design the rooms to handle them with no fire risk. Not all forms of heat are an unmanageable fire risk. Otherwise, things like steam radiators would be deemed an unacceptable risk in NYC apartments, when they are in fact quite common. Same for gas fireplaces which are also not unknown in hire rise apartments. It’s all about how things are designed and what is expected. The reason fire marshals often don’t like various “plug in” devices that give off heat is that’s a source of unexpected heat that isn’t part of how the building was designed. Even then there’s often safe ways to use them–for example it was mentioned in the review of the Michigan dorm that Munger built (which did not have the virtual windows), that most of the students bought “light therapy” lamps, and that’s been fine.
I believe the Munger Hall design was chosen in a competition. Here are the two other designs.
“It’s just that we wanted a block of flats and not an abattoir”
Most modern light therapy lamps are fluorescent or light-emitting diodes and don’t get hot like halogen or incandescent filament lamps. That being said, they are intended to be supplemental light for people with seasonal affective issues and how well artificial light works as a replacement for natural sunlight is questionable at best.
Seismic-resilient design is mostly an issue of having the correct foundation structure and substrate preparation, having correctly designed column and shear wall connections that don’t overload any one element and cause cascade failures, and having other safety features to prevent earthquake damage from causing secondary problems (accessible and automatic gas shutoffs, electrical overload protection, secondary egress) that are pretty easily integrated into existing designs without requiring radical changes. You’ll find commercial office and housing construction in California isn’t all that different in outward appearance from similar buildings elsewhere, and unless you know what you are looking for you probably won’t even know whether a building is built to seismic standards.
How that works with the existing prefab elements, however, is a question; presumably professional structural engineers would review and recommend changes to comply with California building codes but it doesn’t seem like the committee did much in the way of evaluation or any comparison with other design proposals so who knows. It isn’t as if they are going to get approval to go build this thing without satisfying building standards, but this wouldn’t be the first time a university or corporation got itself wound around the axle getting invested in a build without doing their homework. It sure seems like Munger threw a couple hundred million at the school management and they got excited about having anything even though they still have to make up 80%+ of the estimated costs.
Stranger
Well, the second one explains Grenfell Tower. I do not think, however, that anyone would seriously propose an entryway with “rotating knives” in this modern environment of hygiene awareness. Naturally, high power lasers would be used for precision butchery and to cauterize tissue, with any blood immediately vaporized by a charged plasma grid underneath the permeable grating.
As for the Spanish Inquisition…
Stranger
What’s the heat output on those lasers?
And do they generate light with the range of color you find from sunlight?