The dream of a U Cal Santa Barbara mega-dorm, built to the specifications of a billionaire donor. with thousands of students living in single-occupancy windowless rooms, appears to have died with the donor, Charlie Munger. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story.
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A UCSB mega-dorm
[In truth the rooms wouldn’t have been windowless. Ninety-percent of rooms were to have “virtual windows” with a “circadian-rhythm control system” to simulate daylight. Munger also described the faux windows as faux portholes, likening them to what those on a Disney cruise ship, where a “starfish comes by and winks at your kid.”]
Monday, December 4, 2023
Munger mega-dorm nixed?
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comments: 13
As a Gaucho, I appreciate the update. I was up there using the library a few months ago and was trying for figure out where they were gonna put the damn thing. There is already a Munger "physics residence" on El Coligio, and its actually pretty nice. If you've never been, the campus is a delightful architectural mish-mash, leaning heavily into every fad through the decades. Brutalism, low-slung wooden so-cal hippie modern, pink and blue corporate postmodernism (colors thanks to the '84 Olympics), sleek postmodern-modern, and Spanish revival all thrown together. My favorite of course, is the Old Little Theater, a charming 1930s bungalow theatre that houses the Collage of Creative Studies, and where I was fortunate to stage several productions.
There’s a book, of which I’m fond (which is not to say I’m recommending it), The Heap, by Sean Adams, about a mega apartment building, which is so huge and has television screens in the apartments which serve as windows. It is so huge, that to avoid traffic congestion, the window-television screens portray differing daylight-times. It is also so huge, that as the title suggests, it collapses.
I had to look up that (beautiful) theater:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Little_Theatre,_UCSB.jpg
I wonder if the Munger dream might have something to do with The Heap. Munger was pitching the building as early as 2016.
From the Wiki history of my alma mater, "Incompetent long-range planning both on- and off-campus squandered the magnificent architectural possibilities afforded by the only UC beachfront campus location, which is why today, both the campus and Isla Vista are notorious for a hodgepodge of architectural styles and disorganized layouts".
Indeed.
I searched for university of california santa barbara ugly architecture and two opinion columns from the student paper were at the top:
https://dailynexus.com/2001-10-11/ugly-exteriors-hide-the-hidden-beauty-of-ucsb/
https://dailynexus.com/2004-02-23/ucsb-suffers-from-some-serious-ugly-issues/
If you do an image search for the same words, it’s renderings of the Munger dorm that dominate.
It's not all ugly, quite the opposite. It's just that literally 20 campus buildings and older residence dorms are "Mid-Century Civic", and then one-each of every fad style since 1965. Some are lovely, some are brutalism, some are embarrassing. Nothing is cohesive and the landscaping is palm trees, eucalyptus and barely contained sand and dirt. Isla Vista is charmingly beachy, and 80% students, so ya, it was a party town in the day. It's the most California place to study I guess, grind hard by day, play hard by night.
No offense meant to your school!
One of those columns mentions the landscaping — eucalyptus and rocks.
No offense taken! I'm seriously happy that Disneyfied sci-fi nightmares are not one of the approved architectural vernaculars. Next time I visit I will make a picture of some rocks for you.
: )
At least your campus doesn’t have a Death Star:
https://theaggie.org/2021/11/26/students-discuss-theories-about-the-rumored-social-sciences-and-humanities-building/
That is hilarious, and considering Davis is our Ag school, immediately made me wonder if the architect was influenced by Temple Grandin.
Yikes!
For anyone who doesn’t get the joke: it’s about Temple Grandin’s innovations in humane methods of animal slaughter. Briefly, non-technically: think ramps and tunnels.
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