As an adult, I adore windows. As a teenager and young adult, I wanted to sleep in after drinking too much or pulling an all nighter. (I passed this to a friend, an architect in Arizona. They think Munger’s spot on.)

It’s not a windowless building. It’s a building with windowless units. If someone really wants a window, they can get one. (Also, it’s UCSB. Most students move off campus after freshman year.)

Manzanita and Barrett. The latter, new. (And everyone had hacked the air conditioner controls to override the limiter on week one.) Still had foil. It’s hot and bright and even with dark skin I was frequently sunburned.

Most windows end up with coverings because it gives easy optionality.

Close the shades when you want it dark. Open them when you don’t.

Removing windows gives zero optionality.

https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...

The top review is titled “No windows, no way”. The second review says it was great until COVID hit and they had to actually spend time in the windowless rooms.

Most of the positives seem to be about things like location and convenient access to other things, which has nothing to do with the architecture. The architecture is listed as the downside.

Seems to me that HN users in this thread and UCS students aren't able to look past those tradeoffs.

As a student, I'm perfectly happy to have my own room with no windows. This is because (at least pre-covid when the facility was built), there's tons of stuff to do on campus and I won't be in my dorm room all that much anyway. The location is amazing. Even as an antisocial person, you get your own private space, which is something that many dorms don't provide on a budget. Yeah the lack of windows sucks, but I can live with it if it means I get my own private space and easy fast access to all the other things I need.

It seems like HN users (and architects) aren't even considering that those tradeoffs exist. It's like they want to design a building without any regard to land use, cost or how many students it serves.

I see no acknowledgement that:

1. UCSB is located on a narrow coastal plain, where land is at a premium.

2. Giving every bedroom a window implies blowing up the surface area/volume ratio of the building (so build it taller or build 2x or 3x as many buildings).

3. A bunch of long, skinny buildings requires more land (and probably more $) to house the same number of students as one borg cube.

Additionally, much of the criticism fails to acknowledge the actual design of the building.

Yes, each bedroom does not have a real window, but bedrooms are grouped into suites of 8, with a study area, kitchen and bathrooms... and that common space does have real windows!. An additional common area on each floor, shared among 8 suites, spanning the width of the building, has a wall covered with real windows!.

I agree that the borg cube is ugly, but I'd like to see the proposed alternative. The alternative needs to house the same number of students on the same amount of land and cost roughly the same amount. I don't think you can do the first two without building something 35 stories tall (more than twice the height of Storke Tower). And then you'll get the predictable comments about the "Manhattanization" of SB.

https://images.app.goo.gl/9s77YAvZXuEwEYaM6

This is the floorplan I could find. Where are the windows on the suites of house 4?

> The alternative needs to house the same number of students on the same amount of land and cost roughly the same amount.

Why? Did god gave us the number of students this university must accept? Sometimes the correct answer is that the question is wrong.

I stand corrected! I was going by the floorplan on the original article, which apparently didn't show the full building. You'd think that someone trying to make the point that it's a bad design would show the parts of the design that are actually bad.

> Why? Did god gave us the number of students this university must accept? Sometimes the correct answer is that the question is wrong.

Sure, that's a fair point, but then the problem isn't the building or its patron, so the criticism is misplaced.

It would also be more expensive and have fewer rooms. In all likelihood, that would result in multiple people per room. All that makes the result unclear.

The proposed building looks like a Borg Cube (maybe that's why architects don't like it?), but that's only possible because most bedrooms are not on exterior walls. Instead, each bedroom is part of a suite that opens to a common area that does have a real window!

If you take a look at the footprint of residential buildings, you'll notice that they are almost never square. In fact, they have a fairly high aspect ratio.

In the case of Santa Barbara, the major constraint is land. If you wanted to house the same number of students, you'd either need to make the building 2-3x taller or use 2-3x as much land. Otherwise the buildings would be so close that the real windows would get no natural light (but, hey, at least you'd have a real window).

The issue is not the aspect ratio. The issue is that Charlie is obsessed with having every room connected to a common space which is the one with natural light. It would be trivial to have a slightly higher aspect ratio, maybe one or two more floors, and have the common areas in the center.

Apparently the original article included only 1/8th of the building's floor plan. Another commenter linked me this floor plan: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/11/02/architect-resigns-grotesqu...

As you can see, the surface area problem even worse!

Each bedroom is 8x10 feet, but the building is only 87 * 4 by 200 * 2 feet. That's 1496 linear feet of exterior wall. That's only enough for 187 exterior rooms per floor, while the design calls for approximately 512 (8 rooms per suite * 8 suites per house * 8 housed per floor).

> It would be trivial to have a slightly higher aspect ratio, maybe one or two more floors

You'd need to add not just "one or two" more floors, but increase the residential part of the building from 9 floors to 24!. Even if you made very narrow (6 foot) rooms, it would still require 18 floors.

> You can make a not so tall building with a budget of 330 000$ per room

And they're paying over $1 million per bathroom! I consider this a fairly disingenuous comment because the article is clear that the building includes space for other things like convertible classrooms and rec areas.

https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2021/11/03/heres-what-its-like-...

I'm going to trust actual people quoted over an anonymous out-of-five rating site as being accurate and representative.

and, for myself an essential differentiator, the University of Michigan's are for older grad students.

[1]https://www.mlive.com/resizer/er_cS_IEhTFMCZrSWuLnRZtwMEc=/8...

I'm not sure how I would respond if I were considering living in a windowless room for a bit less than a year. I think I might not like the idea, but I probably wouldn't make the lack of a window the only consideration.

> Munger said he based the dorm’s design on the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille by Le Corbusier. [0]

> Given that the concrete housing block [Unité d'Habitation] in question has also been known as ‘La Maison du Fada’, or the ‘House of the Crazy’, by local people and even residents with a sense of humour,[1]

> During the long phone interview, Munger said that with a large brood of children and grandchildren, he is “intimately familiar with university housing.” [0]

Local Nonagenarian billionaire, raised through the great depression, serving in World War II, somehow still allowed to make decisions concerning others. Whole world shocked.

[0] https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20130423-design-icon-or-...

And in typical LeCorb style: it’s a top-down design for little people who have no souls, to live like the people in charge think they ought. Personal space is unimportant; privacy is an afterthought, because your life is not important except as part of a unified collective, which we, the elites, will manage to our own ends.

Glorified common areas — dark and puny individual cells.

Not necessarily. You are confusing social graces with rationality; rationality is optimized pursuit of one's own utility, not politeness.

He has done so by maintaining an absolutely-no-fucks-given-get-straight-to-the-goddamn-point attitude.

“It’s okay actually because he always talks like this” is one of the weirdest arguments in this thread.

Why can’t we call out bad behavior just because it comes from a specific person?Bad behavior is bad behavior. Being consistent about being bad doesn’t make it good. I don’t understand why anything thinks this is okay just because it comes from a specific personality.

> If you think he has "been surrounded by yes-men for so long", I have some news for you. He doesn't manage anyone.

He’s dangling $1.2 billion dollars in front of people to get them to do his bidding with this construction. I really don’t understand how you think that’s less of an incentive than giving someone a paycheck a fraction of that magnitude.

If he did invest in yes men, he would be broke, because they say yes all the time.

His way of saying "You'd better be nice to me"?

https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2021/11/02/ucsb-says-its-stickin...

This and more recent articles mention the 200M out of 1.2B.

We need more of that.

Munger is an asshole, but that's not something that's happened over time - he's always been like that, there's the entire BRKB shareholders meeting records as tangible proof.

yes

Although, yes, that «Everybody who sees the models goes ape-shit for them» sounds a bit odd, off expected statistics.

I have seen dang react to a poster named "Mick Jagger", and I thought posts considered that it was not impossible Daniel could have later received the surprise of a mail with a passport scan and a signed portrait with autographed greetings. In this case, there is little doubt.