Those are beautiful photos, but if I were a comedy writer, I would feel a skit coming on … something to do with the lovely posed photos that the parents see, and then they go visit their offspring at college and the room looks nothing like the picture. Same room, same size, same furniture…but instead of tasteful plants, a carefully smoothed bedspread, and clear sufaces, they see an unmade bed, dirty clothes, a pizza box, etc. 'Cuz you KNOW the rooms don’t look anything like the pictures when actual college students are living there!
This place sounds more like a prison than a college dormitory, and how could it even come close to meeting standard fire codes?
That was my issue with the windowless hotel room. I had a clock, of course. I set an alarm. But i had no sense of what time it was. It was very disorienting.
Munger needs to read Oath of Fealty and go back to the drawing board.
That’s the movie I was trying to remember - thanks.
Expanding (or downsizing) on this idea: too bad the university can’t buy a bunch of surplus U-boats and moor them in the harbor. Compared to the Munger dorm, the sub crew quarters look positively spacious, especially if you get rid of the torpedo in the “common area”.
The articles I’ve seen said that he’s done similar projects at the University of Michigan and at Stanford. So how did those work out?
And why not build a much smaller version of this along with more conventional dorms?
But you got paid to live and work in those conditions. With a college dormitory, the money is flowing the other way.
There’s been a lot of discussion about this in the Santa Barbara subreddit, virtually all of it negative. I read there that there are two large entrances and many exits. Of course, you could leave through one of the entrances.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the exit doors get propped open (or if keycard readers are added) so they could also be used to enter the building.
They’d almost certainly be alarmed to prevent that like at my last few jobs. It’s a security thing.
Even if students need to use their keycard to enter at an emergency exit door?
It would alarm if it wasn’t latched for more than a given amount of time. And there would be security guards and 24/7 camera monitoring.
I’ve worked in some university buildings without windows or without windows that open–“climate control!” Some of the problems become evident as soon as
- Someone throws up
- The power goes out (especially in blocks with no exterior windows)
- It’s 85F due to “climate control”
- A fire
This building also evokes Roshwald’s Level 7 in that I picture residents scampering ever-lower in the structure with no good way to evade a pathogen or other danger.
Maybe Munger is a fan of Neal Stephenson’s The Big U.
An idiotic billionaire’s vanity project. UC Santa Barbara should have told him to keep his money.
This. The problems with Cabrini Green had little to do with the buildings themselves, though maintenance was an issue for sure. But this place promises to be a real nightmare. I’m thinking more like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in a fire. Or, heaven forbid, lockdown in a pandemic. Total nightmare.
This tweet shows a drawing of a typical floor in this building. There are, of course, the main entrances and stairwells at the middle top and middle bottom, but there appear to be three exit stairs on the left side and three on the right side, presumably leading to exit doors. There also seem to be eight elevators in the middle.
I was in a 25-story office building once during an evacuation due to a small electrical fire above the floor I was on and what I was surprised at was how the stairwell filled up with all of the people. What’s going to happen in this building when the 4,500 students all try to leave by the eight stairwells? How long will that take? What is the expectation in the fire code for the amount of time that should take?
One thing I’ve witnessed is that there’s almost no limit to what university administrators will do to please a wealthy donor. Presidents and senior administrators are judged largely based on how much donation money they bring in. They will bend over backward and throw out any consideration of students’ interests if it brings in some of that sweet donor cash.
Unfortunately, what’s happening at UCSB is emblematic of a larger trend with donors insisting on having a high level of control over how their dollars are used. While that’s understandable at some level, things like specifying curricula requirements and having a role in hiring faculty and staff infringe on academic freedom. And these donation agreements are usually negotiated in secrecy, so the larger university community usually doesn’t know what’s been agreed to until the ink is dry.
That’s an excellent point and highlights a huge problem in collegiate education; universities in particular are supposed to be centers of independent thought and engendering and testing novel ideas and insights; the production of well-educated graduates to enter the workforce is actually a secondary objective to being an incubator for new ideas, and testing and challenging existing dogma. Of course, this is dangerous in and of itself for any society which has an entrenched resistance to challenge, and so universities have largely been downgraded to vocational institutions teaching very standardized curricula organized into specific disciplines into which students are pipelined, especially in the undergraduate level in sciences and technical disciplines. (What people learn in “business school” I cannot say except that it seems to reflect practical ways to defy and subvert principles taught in the separate and often completely firewalled discipline of economics, itself a suspect area of academic study.).
That universities should also give over promotion of specific areas of study, foci of research, and particularly control over curricula, faculty, or the promotion of certain ideologies is essentially a death knoll for academic independence, and it is happening across the board, even in schools with substantial endowments or hefty state support, all in the effort to be “competitive”, as if most first- and second-tier universities don’t have far more applicants than they have openings for students. It is one thing to build and modernize facilities and especially housing to make students comfortable (and in many cases buildings built decades ago no longer meet modern standards and need to be replaced) but the pandering to supposed philanthropists eager for a building named as a monument to them simply for putting up some portion of the funds is little more than sports stadiums being named for the sponsoring corporation.
In this case, I think this is a bad deal for UCSB; despite the need for high density housing, this particular architectural “design” is ill-conceived, and the fraction of funding coming from Munger along with his requirements to implement the design without sensible modifications just doesn’t justify everything else the school would have to put into it. It seems that if the school could raise the estimated $1.3B required to complete it, they could build the same capacity of student housing more sensibly designed.
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