Quality of campus life, a windowless dorm room. What do you think?

[melmichigan]

"This is 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."

https://housing.umich.edu/residence-hall/munger/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__cfVWiAxSU

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by melmichigan

[regentrude]

OTOH, Munger also financed a beautiful building to house participants for the UCSB physics institute workshops. There, too , is a big emphasis on communal spaces, but the bedrooms are spacious and have windows.

[Terabith]

Why does this man hate undergraduates so much?

[Shoeless]

No no no, this is a terrible design. This is a hazard in the event of a fire. 

My son's kindy classroom had NO windows. It was awful and I couldn't figure out what the plan was in the event of fire or active shooter. So awful. 😞

[SoCal_Bear]

I have PMLE (sun allergy). I used to get SAD when I lived in the Bay Area during the winter months. The only reason why I am ok living with PMLE and SAD is I live in SoCal and there are large windows or French doors all over the house so it is always bright and light.

[Arcadia]

39 minutes ago, MissLemon said:

My son's kindy classroom had NO windows. It was awful and I couldn't figure out what the plan was in the event of fire or active shooter. So awful. 😞

That’s weird. My son’s kindy classroom had three doors and a row of windows, and is air conditioned because of being near the freeway. His 1st grade classroom had two doors and a row of windows. His 2nd grade classroom had a door and row of windows. The windows can be “yank” open if the need arises. 
For active shooter situation, kids were supposed to shelter in place. However it is easy to look into the classrooms and see if anyone is in there.

[Harriet Vane]

Appalling and unacceptable. Ugh.

[Carrie12345]

Fire, fire, fire.  
At the very least, crap window design in other buildings can be smashed by firefighters.  
IN a fire, the limited options for a firefighter to bail out are just as bad.

Also, didn’t see anyone else mention... Are those two regular/open bathrooms per 8 people? Like, not separate toilet-sink-shower spaces? I just don’t see that working out well for a pod with 8 8am classes. My family of 7 didn’t do well if everyone had to be ready early with 2 bathrooms and a plan made the night before!  
Separating toilet areas from other functions accommodates hectic mornings much better. 4 toilet stalls, 4 shower stalls, and 4 sinks worked *almost flawlessly for an entire floor of girls in my dorm.

[ktgrok]

After the descriptions of prison like I'm now wondering how lack of natural light effects prison populations. 

[Faith-manor]

2 minutes ago, ktgrok said:

After the descriptions of prison like I'm now wondering how lack of natural light effects prison populations. 

A man I gave piano lessons to years ago was a guard at a state prison, maximum security. We talked some about his job, and one of the things he said was it is really hard to get people to understand that the best and also cheapest investments for prisons to keep the rates of violence way down are landscaping - edible gardens that could be cultivated by prisoners, flower gardens that could be worked, etc. - plus pets, more time outside, and full spectrum lighting indoors. He said it was remarkable the effect these minimal interventions had on the prison population. But, legislators balk at such expenditures because "punishment" is the aim which makes prisons more dangerous than they have to be, and by extension, more dangerous to the staff.

Seems pretty dumb to me. Give them horticultural hobbies, dogs and cats to care for, and good light. Less violence is good! Being able to someday reenter society as a non-violent person is good, very very good. Punishment for the sake of punishment may feel good to the outsider, but so what. Society needs to take the long view on this, not the short.

[ktgrok]

16 minutes ago, Faith-manor said:

A man I gave piano lessons to years ago was a guard at a state prison, maximum security. We talked some about his job, and one of the things he said was it is really hard to get people to understand that the best and also cheapest investments for prisons to keep the rates of violence way down are landscaping - edible gardens that could be cultivated by prisoners, flower gardens that could be worked, etc. - plus pets, more time outside, and full spectrum lighting indoors. He said it was remarkable the effect these minimal interventions had on the prison population. But, legislators balk at such expenditures because "punishment" is the aim which makes prisons more dangerous than they have to be, and by extension, more dangerous to the staff.

Seems pretty dumb to me. Give them horticultural hobbies, dogs and cats to care for, and good light. Less violence is good! Being able to someday reenter society as a non-violent person is good, very very good. Punishment for the sake of punishment may feel good to the outsider, but so what. Society needs to take the long view on this, not the short.

I know that lack of light makes me ANGRY and mean, and I would think that would be the last thing you want in a prison. And yes - landscaping skills if nothing else would be fantastic for reentry!

[regentrude]

22 minutes ago, Faith-manor said:

A man I gave piano lessons to years ago was a guard at a state prison, maximum security. We talked some about his job, and one of the things he said was it is really hard to get people to understand that the best and also cheapest investments for prisons to keep the rates of violence way down are landscaping - edible gardens that could be cultivated by prisoners, flower gardens that could be worked, etc. - plus pets, more time outside, and full spectrum lighting indoors. He said it was remarkable the effect these minimal interventions had on the prison population. But, legislators balk at such expenditures because "punishment" is the aim which makes prisons more dangerous than they have to be, and by extension, more dangerous to the staff.

Seems pretty dumb to me. Give them horticultural hobbies, dogs and cats to care for, and good light. Less violence is good! Being able to someday reenter society as a non-violent person is good, very very good. Punishment for the sake of punishment may feel good to the outsider, but so what. Society needs to take the long view on this, not the short.

Society needs to realize that a for-profit prison industry has no incentive to reduce prison population and won't take any measures to make people less violent or address mental health issues because that goes directly against their business model.
The whole notion of for-profit prisons is absurd.

[Faith-manor]

Here is an updated article with interviews of a few students who have lived in them at U of Mi.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/munger-residences-michigan-windowless/index.html

[PaxEtLux]

I can't imagine being quarantined in a windowless room for a week. 

[Terabith]

10 minutes ago, Faith-manor said:

Here is an updated article with interviews of a few students who have lived in them at U of Mi.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/munger-residences-michigan-windowless/index.html

This article says that the plan at the California school is to install FAKE WINDOWS?  That simulate the portholes on Disney cruises?  You live in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, and he wants to put in fake windows?  

What the heck is wrong with this man?  Why is anyone listening to him?  

[mom2scouts]

I respect the architect who resigned over this absolutely horrible design. I would not allow my child to live in the building. The school should give the money back to this "amateur architect" and tell them a real architect will design their dorms. (BTW, it's illegal to practice architecture without a license.) There are so many problems with this design I don't even know where to start and it's infuriating that the school would even consider it. (And, yes, I have the training to evaluate building design.)

ETA:  I read about this in a different article. The fact that this article says they found an architecture firm to collaborate with Munger (probably just stamp the drawings) is even worse.

Edited November 2, 2021 by mom2scouts

[Faith-manor]

55 minutes ago, Terabith said:

This article says that the plan at the California school is to install FAKE WINDOWS?  That simulate the portholes on Disney cruises?  You live in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, and he wants to put in fake windows?  

What the heck is wrong with this man?  Why is anyone listening to him?  

Right. Fake port holes. So.darn.stupid. 

[kiwik]

On 11/2/2021 at 5:38 AM, YaelAldrich said:

Just looking at the recent past - what would be when (not if sadly) students have to isolate again and not be able to congregate in public spaces?

Yes imagine isolating for weeks in a tiny, windowless room.

[Dmmetler]

One thing I noticed-they could pretty easily put the rooms on the perimeter, and put community areas and bathroom/shower areas in the middle. One of the undergrad dorms I lived in was like that-it had two large banks of toilets/showers and community rooms, as well as elevators and stairs, in the middle of each floor. Usually there was one community room set up as a lounge and one as a study room. The entire outside area was double rooms with windows, with a couple of singles on each floor.
 

 

Even a small window would let in natural light and improve ventilation. 

[Murphy101]

14 hours ago, Faith-manor said:

A man I gave piano lessons to years ago was a guard at a state prison, maximum security. We talked some about his job, and one of the things he said was it is really hard to get people to understand that the best and also cheapest investments for prisons to keep the rates of violence way down are landscaping - edible gardens that could be cultivated by prisoners, flower gardens that could be worked, etc. - plus pets, more time outside, and full spectrum lighting indoors. He said it was remarkable the effect these minimal interventions had on the prison population. But, legislators balk at such expenditures because "punishment" is the aim which makes prisons more dangerous than they have to be, and by extension, more dangerous to the staff.

Seems pretty dumb to me. Give them horticultural hobbies, dogs and cats to care for, and good light. Less violence is good! Being able to someday reenter society as a non-violent person is good, very very good. Punishment for the sake of punishment may feel good to the outsider, but so what. Society needs to take the long view on this, not the short.

 

14 hours ago, ktgrok said:

I know that lack of light makes me ANGRY and mean, and I would think that would be the last thing you want in a prison. And yes - landscaping skills if nothing else would be fantastic for reentry!

Then add in fluorescent lighting which also causes mood swings, headaches and blood sugar changes. 

it’s awful. It’s awful in prisons and it’s awful in schools and it’s awful in work environments. I don’t think such buildings should be allowed to pass building and health codes unless they can prove it’s required for some industrial manufacturing or some such similar. 

[brehon]

On 11/1/2021 at 2:33 PM, Terabith said:

Yeah, my husband can get sunburned walking from a parking lot into a store.  All of us have been known to hiss at the sun.  We are a family that would love night shift life, but it's hard to get the rest of the world on board with that.  I've often wondered if we have a bit of vampire blood in us.  

Ooohhh!!!! So, that’s your real issue with Dean and Sam….

 

🤣

Edited November 3, 2021 by brehon

[Corraleno]

Bumping this thread because there was an interesting article about "Dormzilla" in the New Yorker today, which includes a description of some of the issues that occurred with a similar dorm at UM. There were significant problems with the building, like leaks and poor ventilation, and it didn't force interaction as Munger claimed it would. The fact that Munger explicitly says he wants his concrete monstrosity in Santa Barbara to "last as long as the pyramids" — with his name on it — makes it pretty clear that this is just a huge vanity project for an old man who wants to use his billions to build monuments to himself rather than actually help people.

"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.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-of-the-windowless-dorm-room

Edited November 13, 2021 by Corraleno

[PaxEtLux]

4 hours ago, Corraleno said:

This 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.

Ignoring, for the moment, whether this is humane or effective, is there actually a problem of students never leaving their bedrooms in college dorms today?  We live relatively close to a large state school, and when we drive by, we frequently see the students outside when the weather is nice, playing games, socializing, studying, going places in groups, etc. And if a student is introverted, and wants to spend the majority of their time in their room studying, is that so awful?  Sure, sometimes study groups are effective and needed, but if you are taking a Russian lit class, and need to spend hours and hours reading the great Russian novels, why not read them in your room?

[Corraleno]

42 minutes ago, PaxEtLux said:

Ignoring, for the moment, whether this is humane or effective, is there actually a problem of students never leaving their bedrooms in college dorms today?  We live relatively close to a large state school, and when we drive by, we frequently see the students outside when the weather is nice, playing games, socializing, studying, going places in groups, etc. And if a student is introverted, and wants to spend the majority of their time in their room studying, is that so awful?  Sure, sometimes study groups are effective and needed, but if you are taking a Russian lit class, and need to spend hours and hours reading the great Russian novels, why not read them in your room?

Exactly. Most college kids get plenty of interaction — with friends they choose, in clubs/sports/activities they choose, and in classes and study groups they choose. The idea that college students (especially at UCSB!) just don't socialize enough and spend too much time studying in their rooms, and therefore their rooms should be made as cramped and cavelike as possible so they'll be forced to spend every other waking moment socializing with whatever random people happen to be assigned to their dorm floor, seems like a rather dystopian "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist. But this 97 yr old billionaire investment manager, who thinks he's an architectural genius and wants to prove a pet theory that has no evidence behind it, is getting his ego stroked and his fantasies indulged because he wrote a check for $200 million. 

[Faith-manor]

So it is even worse than I imagined because the buildings are not just dark and depressing for lack of sunlight, but also lacing in other types of ventilation and crappily built so they leak. Sigh.