The Munger Residence Hall Project. Let's talk about it

In My Humble Opinion
81

I was wondering about the $300,000 cost per bed. It seems way too high, though I expect that construction costs in a California earthquake zone are going to be higher than in other parts of the country.

So I Googled. This page is an eight-page PDF from 2014 talking about per-bed dorm costs in public and private schools. The article says cost per square foot on the West Coast is $360 while the highest per bed cost was $115,000, for Northeastern dorms. So I still have no idea why this project is so expensive; it sounds like it should only cost $500 million or so and in that case, his $200 million goes a lot farther.

82

There are some structural requirements that come into play in high seismic activity zones, and some analysis about soil and foundational substrate that come with commercial housing but honestly I’d expect all of the environmental impact and the logistics of construction in an already congested area (which should theoretically be mitigated by the prefabricated components, although exactly how much is prefabbed is unclear) are probably the driving factors in construction cost. The US$1.5B seems high for the square footage but without more details that is just an impression.

Frankly, despite all of this business about how it has to be built just-so to accommodate the donor’s social theories about dorm life, it is a very conventional looking building, and my first mental note of the artist’s rendition is that it looks like any Embassy Suites hotel built in the last fifteen years complete with the crown-molding-esque false ledge below the top floor, weird little insets in the sides, and the non-functional pergola. It is an extremely generic-looking building, which I guess is better than making another Frank Gehry-inspired Strata Center-type architectural monstrosity, but you would think that UCSB would want to reflect the kind of Spanish Colonial-type architecture of classic Santa Barbara rather than in the style of the faux-Tuscan Modern or whatever architects who design nondescript multilevel office buildings call it.

Stranger

83

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.

In a 2016 interview with the Independent , Munger called the “house” concept “a minor revolution.” And in a 2019 interview with the Wall Street Journal , he said he was confident that students would rather have single rooms and comfortable communal areas than windows. “The minute I saw that, I realized that was the correct solution,” he said. “And everything I thought before is massively stupid.”

Hrm.

I guess he’d never heard of East Residence at the University of Guelph. It’s essentially this concept, just on a smaller scale, and with windows.

https://housing.uoguelph.ca/our-communities/east-residence

Short video tour here:

Looks like they’ve updated the kitchens since last I visited.

East Res was always pretty popular when I was there, although I only ever stayed there myself after I graduated, when they were used as hostel accommodations in the summer. The fundamental concept is sound, but perhaps the execution needs work.

Certainly only two entrances is a bad, bad idea. Concerns about fires aside, what about the traffic jam for the elevators every morning and afternoon?

84

The Umich Munger grad residence mentioned above had similar high numbers.

Which I calculate at $407 per square foot and 246,000 per bed. And Ann Arbor, while nice ,is no where near the land value of Santa Barbra.
Just playing with some numbers, since I can’t figure out how the money(" provided a $110 million gift to fund construction of the residence hall and fellowships for graduate students") was apportioned if we put all 110 into the building. This leaves 45M on the university for a much more reasonable $118 per square foot and $71,400 per bed optimal case for the university.

85

I think I’d like to have some questions answered, like about

(1) fire and crowd safety. How quickly could you really evacuate.

(2) hygiene and health. With that density of living, you would have to ensure adequate air circulation and regular cleaning. In institutions so densely populated, they have to be very rigorous about regular cleaning. What’s the plan?

(3) energy efficiency—realistically, what are the numbers?

(4) Noise control.

(5) none of the plans I found online clearly showed the bathrooms or toilets. With that many people I hope they are plentiful. (In my freshman dorm we had prison-style gang showers. That wasn’t great but we all survived the year without significant psychological damage.)

(6) Adequate oversight and security. How are we going to handle hazing, harassment, etc.?

On the other hand, I see some hyperbole and overreaction here. There are plenty of humans who live in such circumstances. The “towers” at Ohio State, if I recall correctly, have similar density per unit.

(1) I personally wouldn’t like to live in this dorm but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily horrible.

(2) these are college students. How many hours a day do we expect or want them to be hanging out in their dorms anyway? They have class, library, hangouts, campus activities, parks quads and gardens, etc. I recall many people only going back to their rooms to sleep or eat and not even always then. They’re not being locked in. If the campus overall has nice amenities and places for students to study, hang out, etc., having a small and crowded form shouldn’t necessarily be a big deal.

(3) if you need or want alone time, you do have a bedroom. Granted it is small, but it’s there.

(4) if you want sunlight, you can go to the common room, or you can leave the dorm. It’s not that far.

86

I don’t think you normally delete the donation amount to arrive at the per square foot cost. I believe it’s normally calculated on the total cost.

87

Two bathrooms for 8 students:

From this document.

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I know, but that was just to calculate the university’s “opportunity” cost for the dorm which was highly favorable, IMO

89

The common rooms in the center do not have windows.

Wait, wait. Let the university build this. Then, let the city condemn it for noncompliance with fire and other codes. Then the university claims Force Majeure and turns it into a combined classroom/library/student housing building - with the student housing on the outside (window) walls, classrooms in the center, and library on the ground floor (on other floors if the structure can handle the weight).

90

Back in the '60s, Ohio State built two huge dorm towers to accommodate all the incoming boomers. They were commonly called silos. I was in one of them one time, and I couldn’t wait to leave. Sure, there were windows, but they were similar to airplane windows and didn’t open. The claustrophobia was overwhelming.

Since then, those silos have been mercifully torn down.

91

(quoted by, not written by, Horatius.)

So 64 students are going to be sharing that larger kitchen?

Does the university intend to hire people to clean those kitchens, daily or more frequently, including doing the dishes and cleaning moldy crap out of the refrigerators? Because I can pretty much guarantee you that out of 64 students at that stage in their lives there are going to be some who aren’t going to clean up after themselves, some of them not soon enough or well enough to avoid arguments with some of the others, and some who won’t clean up after themselves at all.

This is going to be a problem in some of those eight-person kitchenettes, as well. The suites I remember from college were lived in by self-selected groups, who could select among other things for similar standards of cleaning; and stlll occasionally ended friendships instead of consolidating them.

What if you need them both at once?

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Also the kitchenette suggests the students will be making their own meals, which I think means these will be upperclassmen or maybe grad students, rather than freshmen. Still, many might prefer eating in a dining hall/cafeteria.

93

By the way, is this university space constrained? In other words, if instead they wanted to build “conventional”, smaller dorms, spread out over a larger space, could they?

94

My undergrad housing was 160sqft for 2, so I had a shade more space per person, but it was a shared space. We also had 1 bathroom shared with 4 students. Basically the bottom of your plan BRs 34, 35, 39, 40 with the in between area a bit smaller as a bathroom.

It was acceptable, and really we didn’t spend much time looking out the windows, but to have 3/4 of the suites with no windows is complete insanity. I could work with a windowless sleeping area, but no windows until I walk down a couple of halls is too much. One of the houses could work as a stand alone building, or with a central building for a few houses.

95

It’s not looking out the windows that’s necessarily the issue; though even a small window giving a long line of sight can massively reduce feelings of claustrophobia. It’s also that, if there’s no natural light, it always feels like night to me; and the longer I have to stay in artificial-light-only, the more it feels like it’s two in the morning and I really ought to be in bed. Trying to stay awake and functional takes more and more effort and my temper gets shorter and shorter.

96

I believe that at Ohio State’s towers the ratio was 16 residents to one bathroom. So eight to two doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve seen plenty of living situations with that ratio. However, as I stated above, regular cleaning would be needed.

97

You can leave the dorm and be alone. I’ve spent a lot of time on college campuses. There are a lot of place where you can do that, say, outdoors—a lot of campuses have parks and wooded areas—or in rarely visited locations in various buildings. I spent a lot of time hanging out in cozy, sometimes beautiful, well-lot corners of libraries, academic buildings, etc.

98

I see eight large, windowed common rooms on each floor.

This is a dorm, not an isolation unit. You don’t have to spend so some set number of hours there. I assume most residents won’t even be eating most meals in the dorm. I would assume the kitchenettes to be lightly used. Does Santa Barbara not have dining halls and cafeterias?

99

Libraries aren’t always the best place to study, due to limited carrel space and noise. Beyond use as a private study area, dorm rooms (at least it was the case in my Pleistocene era) are used for, um, private socializing, which may not be enhanced by living in a beehive.

Living in windowless rooms deprived of sunlight could have health consequences.

Having even a few houseplants on your windowsill is also cheering. But I suppose the Munger dorm could have giant plastic cannabis in tubs in the common areas (according to the N.Y. Times, it’s the latest decorator craze).

100

I wonder if they’re going to strictly ban microwave popcorn, just because overcooking it will trigger fire alarms?