Incredibly successful, and yet a penny pinching tasteless bore until the bitter end. At least "robber barons" of the past built things that looked good.
That he's worshiped around these parts of the internet is truly embarrassing and sometimes makes me question how I ended up here.
Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.
You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.
As a person who hasn’t paid any attention to his corner of the finance sector, this horrible dorm was my introduction to the man. My immediate conclusion was that he rose to the level of his incompetence. I may yet read his speech on decisionmaking biases, but it will be with a degree of skepticism about whether it is cooked in its own juices.
Alexander and his team absolutely expected people to adapt the patterns to individual preferences, and so stated right up front. As a matter of general preferences, “light on two sides” was found through diligent research to be a “deep and inescapable property of a well-formed environment”. So if you’re designing a habitation for thousands of people, maybe lean heavily that way.
e.g. Active college students, so also mostly young, mostly unmarried, freshly liberated from the parental household.. And of course the main activities of the building and its rooms, like sleep vs work, should be considered more strongly before applying a general pattern. I don't mean to assert that form should always follow function, though, or that architects don't already consider inescapable tradeoffs, which by their nature some people won't like the decisions because they would have traded differently all else equal.
On a tangent, I was reminded of a funny architecture crime. CS students at MIT got a wacky Gehry building (the Stata Center) while the architects have and keep a very normal and tasteful building (the Rogers Building). Gehry was even sued at some point because the building had functional issues. That goes back to the point about windows: frequently it's actually not enough to just block a window. They change the environment more than just letting in light or not, they affect things like temperature (sometimes for the better! Ability to open one for a breeze or window AC is a blessing in many rooms), humidity, structural soundness, and ease of mold growth. When you have a window or two in the bedroom that you block out, it still affects where you can place things because of those other concerns.
You rent a different apartment. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept with regard to his building and the need for some people to call it a hellscape. He's trying to offer a less expensive place for people to live for a couple years while they go to school.
A dorm room is not a habitat. It is just one room that someone will occupy for part of their day, mostly while asleep. He hasn't blocked out the sun.
The egregious thing is it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. It’s like if you wanted to make a safer car by building it out of 500mm thick concrete. Oh, it’d be safe alright, but slow, wallowy, dangerous for others, poor gas mileage. Fast downhill, I guess. Wouldn’t be any better as an EV. It might be good for a few people, apparently.
Your argument is:
> it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect.
But it does solve the problem? And unlike your concrete car example, the only downside here is that students won't have natural light in their dorms, which as many people in this thread have suggested probably isn't as big of a problem as having to share a room for many (perhaps most) students.
I think it's fine to say you don't like it and perhaps in most cases are better trade-offs that could be made, but it seems to me that for some people who just want to use their dorm for sleeping this trade-off does work. Would you not recognise this?
It's not just a couple of rooms, it's thousands (iirc).
The overweighting is out of all proportion and doesn't reflect common experience. Further, students tend to lack money and choices. Here is a choice between bad or worse. Even I would choose a windowless cell over sleeping rough. I would choose to eat bugs over starving. Must it come to this on a university campus?
Why not make the coffin-rooms half height too? People sleep lying down, right? All that wasted space.
Why doesn't a billionaire like Charlie Munger want to be remembered for building the most lavish building with the most incredible experience ever on the campus, instead of the one that optimizes for a problem with constraints that are mostly made up ("it might cost too much money for Charlie Munger")? It's just straight up dumb.
especially a couple thousand people?
If you're wondering how the kids are going to hook up - well, window or not, single-occupancy beats the hell out of literal room-mates, which was my dorm experience. And we sure as hell found a way.
If you ask students whether they'd rather have a windowless private room or a shared room with a window, what do you think the breakdown will be?
Ideally the common areas are plentiful enough that you can enjoy some solitude outside of the sleeping room (at least for some of the day).
My dorm room was windowless when I went to university and I didn't notice because I was only there when it was dark anyway. But I remember I got the flu once and was inside for a while and I very distinctly recall that the lack of natural lightcycle began to take its toll. Still, cheaper room and board would be my preference.
Not every college student is an outgoing, life-of-the-party, loves hiking type. And the trend thanks to the ubiquity of screens means more and more teenagers are shut-ins. In which case, the deleterious effects of no sunlight and no fresh air are even worse, especially at a developmentally-important age.
But what is worse is the hubris of billionaires who think they know best. It's what Maciej Ceglowski calls the lack of imagination at the top. What do the billionaires of our society, our overlords, want for the rest of us? What are their hopes and dreams, their utopia? Elon Musk wants to terrorise Mars with nasty bacteria from Earth. Bezos wants to run driverless cars around the city to replace public transport. And copy Musk. Page and Brin want to cure ageing, cowards unprepared to die both of them. Dipshit billionaires want shitty things like AI assistants who see and hear everything, lithium cars instead of walkable cities and trains. They want us to have Tide buttons in our houses so we can order it like a Pavlovian monkey. Dipshit billionaires convinced we're living in a simulation. Assholes buying bug-out bunkers in New Zealand. Or fuckers like Altman hoarding gold by the tonne, and gas masks from the IDF, while they pillage and rape San Francisco and its former residents shit on the streets and then sleep there.
And now, they even want to take away our sunlight and our fresh air. Even though the architects telling them otherwise railed against the idea, and resigned. Hubris like this gave us open offices. They want their chattel to be well-behaved and do what it's told. Sit in your privacy free 1m2 'office', drowning in the din made by your fellow plebs, during the day, and sleep in your windowless prison in the night.
I don’t think I had a window that wasn’t immediately blacked out until my mid twenties. And I always went for cheaper accommodation to have more cash on hand over luxuries I didn’t use nor value.
Oh wait, you thought that just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
Illustrating heterogeneity.
> just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
Yes. Nobody is converting every building to a windowless room. Just providing choices.
Also, few opposing these plans care about the air quality in actual dorm rooms, nor quality of life of the people for whom they're making decisions with N = 4 studies sporting error bars the height of the Empire State building. They’re looking to win awards with illustrations. Or score brownie points on an adjacent class statement. (Consider the context within which this debate is occuring.)