The United States is currently in the throes of a housing shortage, with an estimated shortage of more than 5 million homes. This housing shortage also extends to colleges and universities, which have seen a growth in enrollment without the dormitories to properly house their students.
In an effort to address this, billionaire Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger donated $200 million towards student housing at UC Santa Barbara. The massive donation, which was announced in 2016, came with a caveat: Munger would only donate the funds if his design was followed.
Many wondered what the 97-year-old investor had in mind for his proposed Munger Hall. The answer is a mega-dorm that could house more than 4,500 students. It also closely resembles a prison. Munger Hall is an “11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot building [that] would include rooms occupied by up to eight students, many in interior spaces. About 94% of the units would not have windows, with no access to sunlight or fresh air.”
I’m murder podcast levels of invested in this stupid UCSB Munger Hall nightmare dorm, which a very smart friend dubbed “Triangle Shirtwaist University”. I think it’s because the whole thing is a mega-crossroads of issues and regulation failures pic.twitter.com/9WBY5GZcEp
— Liminality Novel (@AberrantWhimsy) October 30, 2021
Because fresh air and sunlight are overrated, am I right? People have been quick to criticize the prison-like conditions of the dormitory, including longtime UC Santa Barbara consulting architect Dennis McFadden, who quit in protest. In an op-ed for the L.A. Times, McFadden writes,
For students assigned to bedrooms in the center of the building, the experience would be comparable to living at second base and being forced to walk to the center field wall to find out if it’s cloudy outside. Or, another analogy: living in a janitor’s closet buried in the center of an Ikea warehouse, with the closest window somewhere back at the entrance.
He continued,
Munger Hall is an answer to the housing shortage and growth pressures currently facing the university. It is also an alien and destructive presence out of tune and out of scale with the rest of the campus. Worse, the building is a misguided experiment that will affect the health and safety of multiple generations of undergraduates who will be forced to negotiate the design’s gross miscalculations and unintended consequences — long after the story of how and why it came to be is forgotten.
And while university officials have praised the building, many people are calling out the callousness and cruelty of the design. The proposed building evokes turn-of-the-century tenement housing and dystopian fiction simultaneously. It’s also a chilling reminder of what happens when we allow privatization to take over public spaces and put our public resources at the mercy of billionaires.
What’s truly bizarre is that Munger’s $200 million donation is a drop in the bucket for the proposed mega-dorm, which is estimated to cost $1.5 billion. So, the guy who pays for 13 percent of the building gets to dictate exactly how it looks?! Make it make sense, UC Santa Barbara.
Can’t repeat this enough: “The true horror of Munger Hall is not its layout, but a billionaire’s power to determine how a public university spends its money—and how natural that would seem to us, if we liked the building more.” https://t.co/lh3fklNJQI
— timothée dudlamet (@t__________duds) November 3, 2021
Who wants to be neighbors in Munger Hall? pic.twitter.com/rv40ByqGLb
— Riley (From Corporate) 🏥 (@RileyDarth) November 2, 2021
Throw in a few turbolifts that go sideways and Munger Hall could boldly go where no dorm has gone before: pic.twitter.com/pClniNIV5T
— Paul Rudolph HF (@PaulRudolphHF) October 29, 2021
let me get this straight: a 97 year old billionaire hobbyist drew a mega dorm w no windows and 2 entrances for a small city of students and said you can’t change one thing… AND UCSB SAID YES!?! This guy built a prison! https://t.co/ecpGg5fNIr pic.twitter.com/nN8looKPHS
— kang (@jaycaspiankang) October 29, 2021
new photos of planned communal spaces at munger hall pic.twitter.com/VdAYQ4xXqO
— peter (@0alexander) October 29, 2021
The Munger Hall prison block just shows how evil billionaires inherently are. Imagine sharing 1 toilet and 1 shower with 8 people pic.twitter.com/b2AXxpnuKC
— Comrade Cowboy (@TommyDeLaVoid) October 29, 2021
move-in day at the new UCSB dorms pic.twitter.com/wcBbCLk9yO
— Charles Louis Richter (@richterscale) October 29, 2021
(via L.A. Times, image: Van Tilburg, Banvard & Soderbergh)
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