No shit, Sherlock! This is Wurster Hall, the Architecture Building at U. C. Berkeley, allegedly designed by the architecture students there:
(Spoiler: It’s every bit as ugly on the inside too.)
It looks like a cruise ship built on Soviet Brutalist lines that crashed into the East Bay during the king tide.
Stranger
Call me crazy, but brutalist architecture actually makes me feel calm and at ease. It gives me the impression that the building is well-engineered, sturdy, and built to last, and that I’ll be safe inside.
Well, it will protect you against the nuclear flash, although I doubt it will stand up to the blast wave. Maybe build underground instead, then you can save money on windows or exits, as well as get a lead in the valuable mineshaft race:
Stranger
This whole thing is insane. Everybody is going to be going in and out every day to attend lectures, 2250 people through each door. At one person a second, it will take 40 minutes to clear the building, and that assumes all the residents are able bodied. Given a three hour window that means one person every 5 seconds. The congestion will be unmanageable and for what? Some billionaire’s idea of a joke?
If you want to do an experiment, at least halve or quarter the number of residents!
Simple solution: They will all have to march in step, four abreast.
That building being designed by architecture students makes perfect sense. When you’re designing using foamcore, you add the kinds of details that are easy to add using foamcore.
I think there are any number of reasons not to build this overpriced thing, but I’m very unconvinced by the idea that a power failure that shuts off the HVAC is going to suffocate people.
If the HVAC fails, what will move air through that massive edifice?
You know that buildings aren’t airight, right? A huge building will be full of air, and the air will move through it like air normally moves through large spaces.
How will air move through an enclosed 8 student area, with a single doorway leading into a long hallway?
What about all those tiny rooms with the doors closed at night? If the power goes out, there could be a dangerous CO2 build-up in a few hours.
Yeah I am not an HVAC technician, but is there any example of large office buildings where people have suffocated from the HVAC system not working? There are people in the Federal government, in one of the big records departments, who literally work in a giant cave underground in Pennsylvania, for example. I’ve never heard that their safety was at serious risk down there.
My brief post-retirement foray into State government, there were several state offices where huge numbers of workers were multiple walls removed from natural light or windows, rooms inside rooms inside rooms, the inner most room being a small sized cube farm. One State office building I’m familiar with had hundreds of offices below floor level well removed from any outside window. Were these people all at risk of suffocation? I just am highly skeptical a normal building that hasn’t tried to create anything like an airtight seal, is so naturally air tight you would suffocate just from breathing in and out inside of it.
Now if there was something going on that did more to affect oxygen levels, like a fire or something, that’s a different matter, but yeah, I’m very skeptical this building would suffocate people just because you turn the HVAC system off. I’d be very interested to know if I was wrong, because it would also mean there are a great many buildings I’ve spent time in where suffocation was likely a risk, but one I never considered.
You’re not serious. Those doors aren’t airtight. Buildings aren’t airtight. The entire building is full of air. Air moves by itself.
I have just done some cursory research and it looks like in some parts of the world it is not uncommon for fairly large office buildings to have minimal HVAC systems, and I note there aren’t mass suffocation events going on.
It also looks like a few people have done tests and found oxygen levels basically barely move in an office, regardless of windows open/closed, doors open/closed etc.
What is found to concentrate higher in enclosed office buildings is CO2 levels, sometimes upward of 2500 ppm in the air, and there are some studies suggesting that in certain people this may lead to irritation of the nasal passages, respiratory ailments etc…but absolutely nothing like “suffocation” which could only be caused by a precipitous decline in the oxygen level in the air or something like carbon monoxide build up.
Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance. The results were unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces with high occupant density.
“In our field we have always had a dogma that CO2 itself, at the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn’t have any direct impacts on people,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives online last month. “So these results, which were quite unambiguous, were surprising.” The study was conducted with researchers from State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University.
While @puzzlegal did ask, I think somewhat rhetorically, about suffocation, I don’t think anyone in this thread is saying people are going to literally suffocate. I think I may have been the first to bring up ventilation issues, and I certainly didn’t have visions of students gasping for breath. However, just because you don’t faint from oxygen starvation doesn’t mean the air quality is going to be good. This structure seems like a candidate for sick building syndrome if there ever was one.
Plus, unless I dreamed the whole thing, I did hear a lot on the news (NPR is my only source of broadcast coverage, and they’re pretty trustworthy) about how the pandemic highlights the need for ensuring good air flow as a public safety measure. Somehow I doubt this building was designed with epidemiological considerations about airborne pathogens in mind.
As to the people in this thread scoffing about the claim that no natural light in bedrooms is an issue, sensitivity to light does vary from person to person. I’m guessing all those who don’t see the problem either aren’t especially light-sensitive (in terms of circadian rhythms and affect on mood) or have never been in a situation where they’ve felt the effects of trying to do without. But for a lot of people, it’s very disorienting to wake up from a sound sleep with no natural light cues. (I’m one of them - I never use the blackout curtains in hotel rooms when I travel as I need the incoming sunlight so I can wake up.) There’s a reason that the Navajo people traditionally built their hogans opening to the east.
Actually, air doesn’t circulate naturally very well in enclosed buildings, and especially modern multi-story buildings with not window ventilation and that don’t have open vertical space. Without an operating HVAC system, most modern office buildings become pretty miserable within a few hours even at moderate ambient temperature. That being said, there is enough air volume that the failure of the HVAC system overnight isn’t going to cause a fatal buildup of CO2, and probably wouldn’t reach minimum occupational hazard level if the building were sealed shut. You’d notice the increase in warmth from body heat and humidity from exhalation before CO2 got to dangerous levels, and modern HVAC systems are self-monitoring for failures. There are many reasons why this design is absolutely terrible but the hazard of occupant suffocation isn’t among them.
Stranger
So, you are worried that if the HVAC fails, then the students will be locked in their rooms for so long as to be impaired by rising carbon dioxide levels. You know they can leave, right?
Indeed, in warm, sunny Santa Barbara, if the air conditioning fails in a high-occupancy residential institutional building, I expect that’s considered something that would be either repaired quickly or the building emptied.
So many of the comments here seem to be based on a presumption that college students are confined to their dormitories and prevented from leaving.
Those common areas are meant for 64 people. They’re nowhere near big enough for that.
I spent plenty of time in my dorm room when I was a freshman. Sophomore year I lived in university apartments which were kinda similar to this, but not shitty - four rooms connected to a common living space with two bathrooms and a kitchen, one person per room. And the building was laid out in wings, so that all 4 rooms and the common area had windows. Rather than this monstrosity…
And I went to “study” at the library (IE hang out with friends while our laptops and books were open in front of us). I actually studied in my dorm room.
Speaking of ventilation issues, how long before some kids hotbox a whole floor?