Billionaire insists on windowless rooms project in UC Santa Barbara Dormzilla
Billionaire Charlie Munger is bankrolling the design of a massive dormitory at UC Santa Barbara. The $1.5 billion project comes with a major catch — 94% of the dorm’s bedrooms are in the interior of the building and have no windows.
A consulting architect on the university’s Design Review Committee quit in protest of the project in a resignation letter obtained by CNN Business and reported by the Santa Barbara Independent.
“The basic concept of Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being,” California architect Dennis McFadden wrote in the letter. McFadden declined to comment further to CNN Business.
In the letter, he said Munger Hall doesn’t reflect the beachfront location as an integral part of campus culture and identity.
“Even the rooftop courtyard … looks inward and may as well be on the ground in the desert as on the 11th floor on the coast of California,” he wrote.
In addition to being Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, Munger is an amateur architect. He has no formal education in the field.
“Architecture is a field where tastes vary, and everyone thinks he’s an expert. And no two architects ever agree on anything,” Munger told CNN Business.
Of McFadden’s departure, he said: “When an ignorant man leaves, I regard it as a plus, not a minus. He’s just plain wrong.”
The 97-year-old vice chairman of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Munger previously has donated money to build graduate residences at Stanford University and the University of Michigan.
He donated $200 million to UC Santa Barbara, of which his grandson is an alumnus, to fund the dorms, with the caveat that his designs are followed. He wanted the dorm rooms to be tiny and windowless to encourage residents to spend more time outside in the common areas, meeting other students.
Munger Hall is planned as an 11-story building that would provide more than 4,500 beds for undergraduates. The floor plan shows rows of pods, or suites, each with eight bedrooms, two bathrooms and a common area with a kitchenette.
“While the bedroom may be ‘just good enough,’ the entirety of the experience makes it exceptional — ‘our town in the sky,’ ” the October UC Santa Barbara design review committee report said.
That didn’t sit right with McFadden.
“As the ‘vision’ of the single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves,” McFadden wrote.
The rooms do have artificial windows, which Munger said resemble the Disney cruise ship’s artificial portholes where “starfish come in and wink at your children,” the Santa Barbara Independent reported. The publication has taken to calling the project Dormzilla.
UC Santa Barbara said in a statement that the project and design of the building will go forward as planned.
“When this thing goes up and becomes an extreme success, which is absolutely inevitable, I think there will end up to be more buildings like it on the UCSB campus,” Munger said.
McFadden wrote in the letter that the population density of Munger Hall would be slightly lower than a portion of Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. There are only two points of entry and exit.
“The project is essentially the student life portion of a midsized university campus in a box,” McFadden wrote.
“Munger Hall is an experiment in size and density with no precedent in student housing at that scale.”
The plan was designed by architect Navy Banvard, a principal at Van Tilburg, Banvard, & Soderbergh. Banvard said Munger Hall is a collaborative process between UCSB, Munger and the design team.
UC Santa Barbara, like other universities, is facing a housing crisis.
The Daily Nexus reported in August that UCSB ran out of spaces in university housing and had a waiting list of over 1,000 students who were searching for a place to live.
“I’m a product of education, public education,” Munger said. “And I know how important schools are and the architecture of schools is, so naturally I drifted toward giving dormitories.”
The project would be slated to open in fall 2025 pending approval and certification in 2022 by the California Coastal Commission.
It’s not Munger’s first venture into dorm architecture. Munger Graduate Residences at the University of Michigan follows a similar concept. The high-density dorm, which also has mostly windowless bedrooms, was funded by a $110 million gift by Munger.
Public policy graduate student Luiza Macedo didn’t see the sun for a full week when she had to isolate in her room at Munger Residence because of a COVID-19 scare.
“That was probably the low point of my experience here. It was being stuck in my room,” Macedo said. “A lot of people are incredulous that this was even a thing before all these articles came out about UCSB … like, how is this legal? How are they doing this to us?”
Many students use sun lamps to create an artificial sense of daytime, and some say it’s not hard to get used to windowless living.
“I wasn’t sure how living in a bedroom with no window was going to work out but for me, at least, it’s really no big deal,” Michigan graduate student Sabrina Ivanenco said. “I think that once you exit your bedroom, you have a very beautiful living space.”
At Stanford, the fivebuilding Munger Graduate Residence provides housing for approximately 600 students. Those residences, the first of which were completed in 2009, have a more conventional floor plan, and the bedrooms have windows.