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Charlie Munger, a Warren Buffett crony, donated two hundred million dollars to a university for a gigantic new dorm. The catch: no windows. How did guinea pigs in a similar Munger housing experiment fare?
By Charles Bethea
November 13, 2021, New Yorker, November 22, 2021 Issue
In 2016, Charlie Munger, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s holding company, announced his intention to donate two hundred million dollars to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to be used to build a dormitory. There was “one huge catch,” as Munger, an amateur architect, put it: no windows.
“Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another.
Last month, Munger’s plan was formally accepted by U.C.S.B. without apparent alteration: a nearly two-million-square-foot structure, eleven stories tall, that will house around forty-five hundred students in a hive of tiny bedrooms—the vast majority of which will indeed be windowless. Instead of the real thing, there will be Disney-inspired fake windows, of which Munger has said, “We will give the students knobs, and they can have whatever light they want. Real windows don’t do that.” A consulting architect named Dennis McFadden subsequently announced his resignation from U.C.S.B.’s design-review committee. In a letter, which was later leaked, he wrote that “Charlie’s Vision” was “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”
McFadden called Munger’s U.C.S.B. building a “social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Having no natural light was a problem. So were stale air and tight spaces. McFadden noted that the structure had just two main exits and would qualify “as the eighth densest neighborhood in the world, falling just short of a portion of Dhaka, Bangladesh.” Nearly all of Yale’s undergrad population could fit inside.
Munger, who is now ninety-seven years old and lives in a house in Los Angeles with plenty of windows, was unfazed by McFadden’s critique. “When an ignorant man leaves, I regard it as a plus, not a minus,” Munger said. He called McFadden an “idiot” who did not “look at the building intelligently.” In a follow-up in Architectural Record, McFadden countered, “I understand the plans well and in detail.” He added that a famous architect had e-mailed him “about the horrors of the project and asked what he could do to help.” Munger, meanwhile, said that he expected the concrete structure, inspired by a Le Corbusier building in Marseille, to “last as long as the pyramids.”
Dormzilla, as the building has been nicknamed by the local papers, is not Munger’s first windowless lodging. A few years ago, he donated a hundred and ten million dollars to the University of Michigan, his alma mater, to build the Munger Graduate Residences, which opened in 2015. McFadden decried the “unknown impact” of windowless living on students, but thousands of students in Michigan have already been guinea pigs for several years.
Matthew Moreno, a computer scientist, joined his partner in the Munger Graduate Residences last March. It seemed nice at first. There were slate floors and fancy fixtures. The basement had massage chairs, along with a movie theatre that didn’t seem to play movies. A rooftop garden offered views of Ann Arbor, but when it rained water ran straight into two stairwells. Moreno said, “There was abundant seepage, along with tons of dead crickets.”
There were other technical problems: Errant fire alarms went off constantly. A trash-chute malfunction resulted in someone getting bombarded by falling waste. Moreno described poor ventilation and even poorer sleep. “Lots of talk of sunlamps and melatonin,” he said.
Some residents adapted. Wilson Chen, a former pharmacy student, said, “The windows thing was a big bummer, but after a year I kind of got used to it. It got super dark.” A few rooms had a single real window, but, Chen said, “you had to submit, like, a waiver stating your need for a window.”
Eventually, Moreno moved from his sleeping cubby into his suite’s communal area. (In another such area, he’d once watched a scantily clad fellow-resident train for a triathlon on a stationary bicycle set up over a tarp, to catch his sweat, as students played beer pong around him.)
After Moreno moved out, he tweeted a message to Munger. “If you think you can make people make friends with randos just because u didn’t put a window in their bedroom,” he wrote, “u are wrong my man.”
Chen, during four years without windows, never thought to question the philosophical underpinning of the design. “There was a window theory?” he said, of Munger’s notion. “Everyone I knew just kept to themselves.”
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-of-the-windowless-dorm-room.
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Prior posts on this blog have covered this issue. The most recent is at:
https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/11/more-on-overenrollment-munger-hallhell.html.
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