And could they be used to create an impenetrable matrix to keep inhabitants from accessing the fire stairways?
I claimed there’s a significant risk it would make people sick. I agreed it wouldn’t outright suffocate the students overnight. I think you are offering evidence in support of my position, now.
I’m still not seeing why UCSB needs this high-density housing in the first place. There are several spots around campus they could locate a much better dorm and still be close to campus facilities like dining halls. Munger already gave them a Physics building. Call that good and tell him to take a hike.
Not really, no, people would be living in these for 30 weeks, not their entire lives. We’re talking about a situation where the HVAC cuts out for the night and you’re thinking “people will get sick.” There is no evidence to support that claim either. There is some evidence to suggest a poorly ventilated space, if someone works/lives in it for long periods of time might cause some chronic conditions. But we aren’t assuming this dorm would be poorly ventilated when the HVAC system was actually running. You can’t really say your concern is valid if the best proof you have is a scenario that at worst would last a couple days, has only ever been shown to be problematic in sustained, chronic cases.
The real shame of a building like this is that it doesn’t take into account the climate. Santa Barbara has a naturally benign climate, cooled by the worlds largest swamp cooler in the summer and warmed by copious sunlight in the summer. The great thing about the California coast is that you can pretty much spend most of the year controlling your house’s environment simply by opening and closing windows (if you have them, of course).
The good news is you get your daily dose of sun from the lasers. The bad news is you get it in a 4 ns pulse that punches a hole straight through you.
How does it NOT require a variance to a building code? Do not codes, in this location, include minimums for space and windows required in bedrooms? It’s standard where I live, and, I assume, required most everywhere. Does the code not include such specifications at this location? Anyone familiar?
And used on masse to simulate sunlight, they would use a hell of a lot of energy.
I had thought that numerous bad experiences had made super high-density high-rise housing a thing of the past.
Apparently not.
The cranky architect speaks:
“Windowless bedrooms are not an innovation. The New York Tenement House Act of 1901 was put in place in response to the unhealthy living conditions of the poorest residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn, where some 350,000 dwelling spaces existed without any opening to outside light and air. The act outlawed windowless quarters; modern building codes that evolved from it still require windows for natural light and ventilation to all habitable rooms.”
“The California Building Standards Code, though, allows building owners to apply for “Alternate Method of Compliance,” which in this case means using mechanical ventilation and electric lighting as a substitute for windows.”
You can’t accurately simulate sunlight without getting very hot. If you’re producing the same spectrum as a 6000 K blackbody, then you’re at 6000 K. Maybe you only have a very small element at that temperature, and maybe you can shield it away well enough that it’s not a major fire risk, but it will be hot.
Apparently housing and building restrictions, especially in the City of Goleta, where the university is located, along with the associated skyrocketing property “values” is putting the squeeze on the university (UCSB’s Munger Hall windowless dorm is the logical endpoint of privatization of public space.):
How could this unappealing project get so far? The school’s stated reason is UCSB’s housing crisis. UCSB is located not in Santa Barbara, but one town north, in Goleta, where the average house price has increased 17 percent in the last year to $1 million, according to the real estate website Redfin. (According to realtor.com, the median listing home price in Goleta is $957,000.) UCSB has also increased enrollment, beyond the terms of a legally binding Long Range Development Plan co-signed by the city of Goleta and the county of Santa Barbara. This year, due in part to COVID-19, many UCSB students struggled to find housing; UCSB has housed some in local hotels. The official UCSB press statement about Munger Hall framed it as delivering on the Long Range Development Plan’s goal of 5,000 additional beds.
In general, the country needs cheaper housing and cities and neighborhoods designed for shorter commutes. That all adds up to a huge need for denser residential housing. Now, the Munger building might represent a very poor implementation of design principles, but, in general, restrictions on building density imposed by local governments is creating a series of huge cascading problems in this country.
Just how much energy does a light therapy lamp draw anyhow? I’d think it would be a hundred watts or so. Everyone in that dorm is going to have a laptop computer that draws fifty to a hundred watts, along with a smartphone, Bluetooth speaker and other electronics. I expect the building will be designed to allow for all of this. Although the rooms are supposedly going to have “virtual windows” to simulate daylight, so would that effectively be light therapy lamps?
Light therapy lamps approximate the visual spectrum of the Sun as seen at the surface of the Earth being filtered by the atmosphere. They obviously aren’t producing a blackbody spectrum at 5770 K including microwave, infrared, and ultraviolet components of the spectrum, which would take incredible power and would be very hazardous to unprotected users.
The thesis that higher and higher densities to achieve theoretically better economies of scale and reducing the physical footprint has resulted in the extreme population densities found in many cities such as Tokyo, Jakarta, Karachi, Macau, Seoul, et cetera that have not demonstrated better quality of life, lower total carbon or ecological footprint (when considering all of the resources that have to be transported to support them) and on top of that tend to compound socioeconomic inequalities, because the demand for such properties in such a constrained space drives up the cost of real estate and rent even if the housing is cheaper to build.
The Soviet Union proceeded with the social experiment of enforced urbanization by jamming large numbers of people in huge, self-contained blocks of apartments, and the same is done now for the rapidly populating urban centers in China (and to a limited degree in the United States in the form of “housing projects” such as the afformentioned Cabrini Green to ‘accommodate’ the mass of blacks fleeing overt persecution in the South), and in all cases is essentially a fulfillment of dystopian prophecies; far from encouraging social bonding and cooperation, or increasing utilization of space, these constructs create emotional stress, a sense of disconnection from wider society, and actually reduces social mobility since only a privileged have access to significantly more space.
We do not need to remove “restrictions on building density”, which were largely imposed because of all of the health and safety hazards that came in high density city “slums” prior; what is needed is a better utilization of space with intermixed residential and commercial development such that it is possible to live near employment and shopping in walking or cycling distance without suburban commutes and the mass of wasted real estate that are enormous parking lots and pedestrian-unfriendly ‘stroads’. Most of urban Europe outside of certain areas of Paris and London have very livable conditions with moderate population densities and manage to keep housing costs reasonably in line with incomes without resorting to giant megablocks of apartments jammed up tight against one another with little natural sunlight or outside ventilation.
In any case, the Munger ‘design’ optimizes efficiency as measured in terms of optimal density and some autocratic ideal of enforced socialization over actual habitability and livability criteria that an architect studied in effective urban design would use. This is just some plutocrats ideal of how to most efficiently pack ‘intellectual resources’ into a box to sustain their life functions rather than any consideration for how actual people—yes, even college students who, in the biggest amount of hyperbole thus demonstrated in this thread, “spend their entire free time playing video games or binging Netflix”—care to live.
Stranger
It’s worth noting architect Denis McFadden’s statement in the LA Times article that
the building is not passively habitable: In the event of a power outage the entire building — all 4,500 residents — would have to be completely evacuated.
If that happens we can just cram them asshole-to-elbow into shipping containers on the Rec Center fields. As long as they get some artificial Disney lights and some liquid nutrient solution every four hours they should be fine. Just fine.
Stranger
Soylent Green obviously.
Yes it exists IRL! But these days, by the power of modern technology, it comes in more colors than green.
Just like in the movie, they claim it’s made from plant-based protein…
Considering that it’s southern California, any kind of natural disaster sufficient to cause a total and extended power outage would probably require the building to be evacuated anyway (e.g. a major earthquake). It’s not as if Santa Barbara gets hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, or snowstorms very often.
Fires?
Preparing for a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) in Santa Barbara County
Local power utilities (Southern California Edison/PG&E) recently developed plans to shut down power during critical fire weather in order to reduce the risk of wildfires. The Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) could lead to multi-day power outages in many areas during periods of extremely hot, dry and/or windy weather.
Residents need to be prepared to endure a power outage lasting 5-7 days.
Just last month:
Seems to me like a planned multi-day power cut would cause major problems for any kind of dormitory, regardless of its design.
You can still live in a dorm with natural light and ventilation, even during a power outage. Perhaps not comfortably, but you don’t have to move out completely.
Hey, great idea! Maybe UCSB can hire the Fyre Festival organizers to setup student housing!
I’m not buying UC’s arguments about this in the least. In no particular order:
-
Increased enrollment is irrelevant. Just put a cap on it, like every other campus in history. If you can’t house them, don’t enroll them.
-
Property values are also irrelevant, as UCSB already owns enough land in Goleta to erect standard student housing.
-
Housing has to be “livable” without power in that area because the grid can be cut by wildfires as far away as Oregon.
-
If they build it, it will stay empty. Students who apply to UCSB aren’t the type to tolerate the conditions in that building. They’d rather suck it up and go to another campus. Even Riverside.