The University of Arizona has a dorm built into its stadium and the rooms to the seating side, which do not have windows despite being large, are no longer used. They were associated with higher suicide rates or something like that.
Interesting collision of the idea with the covid era. During an outbreak you’d want students to have a private airspace to go to and the possibility of ventilation.
Update: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews!
But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate.
No kidding! We just went through 2 years where this building would've been the absolute worst to grapple with. Imagine those 4,500 being told to sit out the pandemic in their rooms.
How can they miss the problem when the worst case scenario for some idiotic design like this happened last year!
Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent? I mean I agree it would be a miserable place to shelter-in-place for COVID, but with COVID in the rear-view mirror for the vaccinated, I'm not sure it's a major concern.
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
Please elaborate on how that's responsive to my comment. Again, not really sure a possible 2 year pandemic is especially significant in the 50 year design life of a building. Even if it sits empty for 4% of its life with 100% probability (generous), you still get 96% (48 years) of use out of it.
First, you take an arbitrary probability number that depends on man-made models that are likely much more wrong than right. We've had a lot of hundred- or thousand-year events in the last two decades.
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
You can’t just apply extreme value theory to spectacular events because it supports your argument. Yes, there was a hundred years between the 1918 influenza outbreak and Covid. No, that doesn’t mean you can say that pandemics probabilistically occur once in a hundred years. The world is changing at an extraordinary pace, populations are exploding, humans and animals interact more than ever, and international travel is trivial.
Covid is not going away. Get your vaccine and move on with your life. In another year nobody will even remember the damn thing (at least for most places… some don’t seem to want to let this go).
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
It's easy to find better explanations with a quick search, but the general idea is that as habitats change, animals will move toward the poles and come into contact with other species that they historically haven't, creating lots of new opportunities for diseases to jump between species and mutate and do all the things they love to do.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
> Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent?
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
I wouldn't say the housing market in Ann Arbor has a fair bit of choice. The vast majority of undergrads live in frat style 7+ bedroom houses. There really aren't a huge number of 1 or even 2 bedroom apartments available, and what does exist is either incredibly run down or 2k+ a month in a high rise building that grad students can't afford.
North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
Is your claim based on the assumption that it has to be within walking distance of campus? It's been awhile since I lived in the area, but I never had issues finding a reasonable student apartment if you were willing to bus/bike/commute in
It's super frustrating when people take a phrase, change its meaning by removing it from context, and then nitpick it.
That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
I've met several MBA's, and they are more 'partially literate' in that they can write huge quantities of stuff, but each paragraph has nothing to do with the last paragraph.
Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
The most highly educated person in my extended family has the worst spelling and grammar of anyone I've ever seen. Getting a hand written note from them is always a guessing game.
God, this annoys the crap out of me. People say I write novels in my emails, so I tried breaking things up once for an MBA. It resulted in a dozen or so emails that when concatenated would equal the "novel" they'd have originally complained about.
Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
My goal wasn't to represent the link. People can click on the link, and the person I replied to already said it had great reviews. My goal was to pull out quotes I thought interesting.
>Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal
This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
> This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air.
Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag.
Looks like that's actually been accounted for directly:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
Reading the comments feels like everyone went to college in bizarro world. The dorms I lived in always had shared bedrooms. In one 4 people across two bunk beds. Having a room to call my own in a dorm would have been an extraordinary improvement. Wouldn't have cared in the slightest bit about a window.
What I can't get from this article is price. When I was student, reason why students shared those rooms with bunk beds was mainly because that was the thing they(or rather their parents) could afford and renting proper flat was out of their capabilities.
Nowadays, in the city I live in 20min distance from university my rent for flat might be cheaper than what students are paying for their dorm room(with windows).
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Isla Vista is the closest community to UCSB, and the students get packed into the private housing there as well (monthly cost of renting a house is about $1200 per bedroom, and you often have to sign a lease for 12 months even if you'll only be there for 9).
Nobody said anything about not wanting windows. It's the choice between a window and sharing a single room with 4 people. No window is the easy choice.
For you, perhaps. And maybe I would have said the same thing in college, when I paid approximately zero attention to my health. But I learned in the years since that light levels make a huge difference. A room like that could easily have pushed me into severe "seasonal" depression.
Exactly. These days, I know that the pain of 3 obnoxious "same-room" roommates may still be worth the price vs sunlight, which will dramatically affect my overall mood. I can easily complain about the roommates, but the light will have a greater real effect on my mood.
They claim to address health effects of light with dynamic "virtual windows." I agree it would be useful to study how well this works. If nothing else, it would inform how we design long haul spacecraft eventually...
“All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
There were cholera epidemics in the 19th century, until we realized we shouldn't drink contaminated water. In cities such as London, this required major infrastructure investments.
We're just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air, and we're just realizing that we need to make infrastructure investments.
CO2 is a good proxy for infectious disease transmission risk. We breathe out CO2 as we spread pathogens. Outside air is just above 400ppm (higher with auto exhaust) and architects aimed for 600ppm before the pandemic. As one approaches CO2 levels closer to outside air, infectious disease transmission plummets.
To balance ventilation with energy costs (and avoid accelerating global warming) one needs heat exchangers that can't easily be retrofitted into an existing building. Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
In my experience sitting on building committees, architects are better at original visuals than original engineering. When a Spanish village restores ancient stone huts for tourists, they run DC wiring for LED lights. When I ask if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb, architects just stare back at me, deer in the headlights. So I'm not hopeful that a radical reworking of our infrastructure will originate with architects.
Our building wasn't going to have windows that opened, till I suggested the building would be usable parts of the year even if the central air failed. I was assured it would never fail. The central air in the previous building failed the next week; I was never implicated. Then our administration overruled the architects and put in office windows. People teased me that I cost us a "this building pees spring water" green certification. Then the pandemic, and I was a hero.
RCP8.5 has us at 1000ppm by the end of the century. By then outside air ventilation will mostly be needed to keep people in meeting rooms from putting themselves into a coma.
This is exactly the type of information that gets lost between generations that makes past decisions make sense. It's why I ferverently collect older academic/engineering literature. Not necessarily for the equations, but for some of the context around the problems and challenges of the time we no longer think about because they are "already solved".
Everyone moans about radiators once you start sealing up windows to be more green. Surprise! They were designed with the inefficiency of having an open window in mind for health and ventilation purposes since the turn of the century! Of course you end up with problems when you violate a functional invariant!
> if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb,
This blows my mind too. I expect it's coming, though: the cables would be cheaper, and if there's one driver of change in construction, it's cost.
Another question is, would it be a straight improvement? I think transformers are typically very efficient, and I could imagine the losses from running a lower voltage through a long line might be greater.
Running DC typically requires much higher gauge wire. To keep under a 10% voltage drop (which is a _lot_), our current 15A branch circuits on 14g wire would be limited to about 10ft away from the transformer.
You could make it to ~30ft on existing wiring as long as you kept draw under 5A. That’s ~60W and enough to power all of 5 pretty anemic 12V bulbs.
If you actually need something like a 60ft run from your transformer and 15A to play with, you’re going to be looking more towards something like 6AWG. If you want to keep under 3% voltage drop you’d be looking towards 2AWG.
14AWG 2-wire is something like $0.35/ft. 6AWG 2-wire is like $0.75/ft. 2AWG 2-wire is coming up on $3/ft.
There’s a reason we use AC for power distribution rather than DC.
Is this assuming that you keep the voltage low? Say at 12V? Wouldn't we push the voltage to maximise the power pushed and minimise the resistive losses?
The comment about powering a few anemic lightbulbs on 60W was assuming 12V, but otherwise it's all pretty independent of voltage.
You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
If you wanted to run 1800W DC as we run current power (14/2, hundred foot+ runs, etc) you'd be looking at something like 720VDC at a couple amps.
There's three main things I see as limitations to really pushing DC up to those levels:
1. Safety, plain and simple.
2. Switching. You generally require larger contacts and bigger gaps to switch DC because you don't get the benefit of it crossing over a 0 point several times a second. This gets worse the higher the voltage goes. This requires much more involved switching equipment. E.g., it's common to see a relay rated for switching 120VAC/30VDC.
3. Economies of scale. This one isn't some law of physics, but most current equipment you can find is 12/24/48VDC outside of very expensive industrial stuff. Also you're gonna need some pretty big transformers to step this stuff back down to usable voltages since everything we need it for is generally running at single-digit voltages. (Efficient, but just another big thing on the BOM for every single device.)
That said, I'm just a hobbyist so I may be missing something fundamental here.
> You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
15A at 120VDC wouldn't require massive wires. I'm not sure why you think it's drastically different from 120VAC for wire sizing. If dropping 10% of the AC voltage is OK, dropping 10% of DC is presumably OK, too, and either is I * R. About 96 meters to drop 12V, or 48 meters out and back.
It's not a good idea for plenty of other reasons, but...
Ohms law plays a big part in all this. Resistive losses are governed by the square of current multiplied by the resistance of the wire. As such running higher voltages minimises these losses. We use this all the time with our power transmission lines which generally run at 500kV AC if I recall correctly.
1. Safety is relative. 10-20mA is enough to kill a person. In AC voltage we measure it as root mean square, the actual peak to peak voltage is greater than Double that.
2. There are such things as solid state switching. Solid state relays and field effect transistors come to mind. This is also how we down convert DC power to lower voltages, very fast switching giving an average voltage that is the target (see buck converters).
3. DC power is everywhere and it is easy to do DC to DC conversion. Single chip solutions exist. Hell your car is entirely 12V (if ice powered, EV's are a different matter)
Does AC differ significantly to DC when it comes to wire gauge? If so, why? I thought wire heating was simply a function of amps?
While I think 12V would be too low, I think there's also a happier medium than 120/220V. Something like 50V is nice because you're very unlikely to get an electric shock, while taking advantage of the fact the average LED current draw is like 1 fifth of an incandescent.
> Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
Apparently it will:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
"The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly."
>with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.
How is this even allowed from an engineering perspective? Unless his design and blueprints are perfect, which I highly doubt, it’s insane that no changes could be made. Is this common practice in architecture? I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s probably shorthand and doesn’t mean literal blueprints accurate down to lowest level of detail, but rather adherence to the project plan as a whole (windowless rooms, size, etc).
The solution to this is for someone else to offer a more compelling vision of the future that is also practical and achievable.
Take Elon Musk for example. His vision of the future is more compelling than anything I hear any politician of any political party in the USA (or most other nations) putting forward. I find the standard issue right-wing vision of the future repugnant and the standard issue left-wing vision completely impractical and divorced from reality. (Aspects of it are repugnant too, but much less so than the right.)
What other non-billionaire visions of the future does humanity have? Xi Jinping's smile-or-die panopticon? Putin's theocratic mafia state?
The billionaires are leading humanity by default because they're on balance the only class of people offering practical workable visions of the future that are at least incrementally better than the present.
If he wasn't sucking at the US Government's teat for funding for SpaceX, tax breaks for Tesla, and evading income taxes then I might admire the guy, but as it is, he's the same corporate grifter in a new set of clothes.
There wasn’t the political will in Congress to make SLS a success because it’s not a voting issue for most of their constituents. This is the fate of any ambitious tech development unless that technology can be used to incinerate half of the world in nuclear-fueled hellfire (moon race), spy on the American people without a warrant, kill brown people in the third world, or be give secondhand to the police to fight the war on drugs.
However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.
SpaceX seems to have quite a bit of accountability; I'm a big fan of how Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo projects were run (fixed costs, especially, which is biting Boeing in the ass right now...), and hope NASA uses it as a baseline for future projects.
A successful SLS would have been a failure. It costs far more per launch and is not reusable.
NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.
Even if that is his vision, it won't work. You can't be king of a frontier for very long unless your rule is very competent, minimal, and low-cost. The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Everybody likes to imply that Elon is going to make some sort of shit new society in space. Perhaps they'll get as far as trying, but the odds of it working out are questionable on social grounds alone.
In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.
Elon hasn't talked a lot about the social aspects of a Mars settlement. Maybe he doesn't care and figures that's up to the people who go there and his mission is just to get people there. Maybe he would agree with you and that's the point. Who knows.
I highly doubt he's naive enough to think the social outcome of a Mars settlement would be some standard issue Earthly political outcome or one that would exclusively favor him. If he is that naive he will be disappointed.
What are they doing? Giving money to public educational institutions? The horror! If a donor is as unreasonable as this one seems to be the university should not accept the money. Nothing is being forced on anyone here. Calm down.
The easiest way would be to do it like in most of Europe and fund universities properly with tax money so that they do not need to waste half their professors' time chasing grants and depend on wealthy donors to fund basic operations.
You have a way: freedom. You're free to not associate. You can choose alternatives to UCSB, Apple, Facebook, lousy jobs, high tuition, etc. Sure you won't get the benefits those offer, but nobody is compelling participation. That's why Americans (at least some of them) are so fiercely adamant about their rights, to a degree that puzzles many: the right to choose differently, however foolish it may seem to others, is the right to choose and is the right "to protect ourselves against what the rich are doing to the rest of us".
Sorry, that's like saying that the people of Flint, MI were free to move somewhere else when their water was polluted.[1]
No, the university is responsible for providing safe housing for the students, and if they accepted this lunatic's plan, they would be breaching that trust.
When parents and students look for colleges, they assume a certain level of due diligence has been done for them, and they will be leaving their teenager in a minimally safe environment. You can't let people off the hook because of some right-wing idea of "freedom".
[1] In April 2014, during a budget crisis, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River) to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
They are. The alternative to “move” is toxic water. My area is developing its own problems, so I’m looking to get out. I certainly wouldn’t send my kids to live in an oppressive uberprison dorm.
Do you have any idea how criminally expensive housing is in SB??? This will provide low-cost accommodations nicer than any Ivy league dorm I've ever seen and enable 4500 people/year (or roughly 15% of Goleta CA) to live on campus. Good luck building that much housing off campus with CA Nimbys...
Classic example of somebody becoming rich and thinking that makes them an expert on everything and the most qualified to solve any problem they cast their mind to. See also: just about every other billionaire on the planet.
Warren Buffet himself calls it the "Shoe Button Complex"
Apparently from his youth, his Dad had a friend that ran a shoe button factory and managed to corner the entire market of shoe buttons. Then in his personal life went on to be a know it all about everything else on the planet.
Munger and Buffet both are pretty transparent about being so didactic though. If you don't want the strings attached to the money, say no.
I think this is a general problem that's common among people with specialized expertise. This kind of problem is common among engineers, lawyers, and doctors as well.
1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
Why am I not surprised that Charles "The-most-important-thing-is-getting-your-first-100000-dollars. Work-multiple-jobs-skip-meals-do-what-you-have-to-that's-the-investing-entry-fee-to-wealth" Munger architected a large prison for students?
I was curious about this as well but can't find any concrete sources.
A blog [1] says the argument goes something like this: “The first $100,000 is a b*tch, but you gotta do it [...] I don’t care what you have to do—if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.”
The worst part is: "The entire proposal ... is budgeted somewhere in the range of $1.5 billion.". So the guy is covering only 13% of the cost and gets complete control.
I'm convinced that when you reach a certain level of wealth and the people around you stop saying "no" to you no matter how fucking disastrous your ideas are, your brain just turns into a soft foam
Honestly, it sounds like he just "optimized" the heck out of a residence, and part of the tradeoffs is that on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. His Michigan building houses twice as many students in the same footprint as competing plans, and the competing plans used shared rooms. Admittedly, these aren't really ideal for COVID though.
As an aside, one of his other interesting architectural quirks is that any shared women's bathrooms are generally much larger than the men's, to deal with differences in how they're used.
It varies from place to place but, typically for a room in a single-family home to be considered a bedroom, it needs 2 egress points, the second usually being a window. I imagine similar codes are in place for multi-unit buildings.
This proposed building has 2 entrances for 4000 people. I cannot imagine it will pass fire code, or could effectively be evacuated in an emergency. Astounding that someone thought it was a good idea.
This design isn't even in the same field as American fire codes. I don't know any jurisdiction in the country in which this could get permitted, certainly not California.
The usual expectation is total time for a fire to cause an alarm, all occupants of a building to respond to an alarm, and make their way to a fire rated area, usually a stairwell, is 2.5 minutes.
Fire code exit requirements depend on the construction style, materials, suppression equipment and use.
You can have a bedroom with only one exit (the requirement you reference is for a second exit, not a window) if walls/doors are rated high enough and you have sprinklers.
This building is being built in an area with some of the STRICTEST fire codes in America - just in case folks reading get the wrong idea. In fact, condo skyscrappers are in my view much more risky (the time to exit a 50 foot skyscrapper can be very long).
Compounding this, historic building in CA was sometimes very poor by modern standards (all wood tinder boxes). So this may very well be a major upgrade in safety over existing housing stock.
Building codes, at least in my part of the US, dictate that in order for a room in a home to be a bedroom it must have a window. Public buildings probably have different rules.
This thread is full of people discussing a topic. Your comment here and elsewhere in this thread doesn't add much - "hey anybody with anything critical to say about anything, just don't use it" applies equally to ANY topic, and isn't the great insight you seem to think bears repeating.
[EDIT: sorry, that probably comes across as harsh. My point is that this whole site is for people to discuss things, and your comment(s) seem to advocate that people stop doing exactly that]
We need laws to save people from themselves and from being taken advantage of.
If fire codes were not a thing, developers would build terrible fire traps and people would rent them. There would inevitably be many deaths; this has happened all throughout history prior to modern building codes (and of course still happens today[1]).
The free market is a lie and impossible; you cannot expect the common person to be an expert on everything. We need (and you should want) baseline standards to ensure a reasonable quality of life for our society - think automobile safety standards and building codes.
That seems spectacularly awful--although there's probably been an overall trend in US college dorms (not that I've made a real study of it) towards small single rooms with common areas in general.
The challenge is that as you shrink individual room size, it gets harder to give every room a window. It can be done--though you may have to have smaller windows. And you basically need to have a more linear design or something that otherwise has a lot of outside surface.
You really just need to stick a courtyard in the middle of it, an extremely common design pattern in such buildings, including one SUNY dorm I lived in.
Or on a slightly larger scale, you stick a courtyard in the middle of several buildings, as is the case with most blocks in Barcelona or Berlin.
I don't see anything wrong with small rooms and common areas. It's the no windows and warren-like density of this that is disturbing.
That students expect to live multiple years without any private space at all in the US has always struck me as very odd. I'm very glad I had a small private room (though, as is common in the UK, I only lived my first year in institutional accommodation). If course it had a working, opening window, a large house common room, a basement pool and games room (in terrible condition of course) and lots of open space outside...
Oh I agree with you. I certainly didn't have a roommate in school any longer than I needed to and, yes, I have somewhat mixed feelings about having multi-person rooms as a design goal as opposed to a space tradeoff (which I think it more commonly is.
And certainly no windows is awful. Every now and then I've had a hotel room that wasn't windowless but effectively got no natural light. Not a fan.
At my college, people fought tooth-and-nail to live in this environment rather than continue with double occupancy dorm rooms. At my school, groups of people claimed a suite (with "points" assigned weighted towards older students). So seniors and some juniors had their choice and they 100% (literally all of them) preferred suites to dorms. It was a fun place to hang out during the day and at night, and you actually have a private space to sleep. No listening to your roommate snore or getting sex-iled when their SO comes over.
The dorm I lived in undergraduate had a suite system and it would be my preference though not all rooms were singles (and they generally had usable windows).
The dorm was recently renovated. Curious what they did to the interior design.
A lot of deadly fires happen at night when people are in bed sleeping. And most of the "bedrooms" in this building would not have windows, per the article.
an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
"Ah", but you might say, "just use someone else's window!"
To which I say "bullshit." If it's 3:00 in the morning, and you have a bunch of sleepy, probably hung-over (or still buzzing) college kids, and a building full of smoke and superheated toxic gases, the odds that these kids will successfully locate and utilize another window strike me as so low as to not even be worth considering. Drunk college kids don't do well with dormitory fires, or at least that's what a lot of historical evidence suggests.
Which history shows us tend to be locked or barricaded when they're not supposed to be, or obstructed in some other way, or otherwise unavailable.
Sure, there are other egresses available in principle. Hell, you can sledge-hammer your way through a wall in a pinch. But in any practical sense? Having two primary ingress/egress points is a horrible idea.
You know that the world has progressed since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, right?
I know that its hard to to believe that there has been progress in the last 100 years, as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc.
You know that the world has progressed since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, right?
Of course I do, duh. The question is "how much has it progressed?" Note that the Hamlet fire I mention was in 1991, and the Station Nightclub fire was in 2003, so it's not like Triangle Shirtwaist is the most recent example of a mass fire tragedy. And there are other examples, those three just happened to be "top of mind" for me.
as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc
Sure, but most of those things are orthogonal to fire safety.
I can't recall the last time I saw a fire exit blocked... Feels like one of those things people keep repeating because of a handful of newsworthy events a year...
Feels like one of those things people keep repeating because of a handful of newsworthy events a year...
People keep talking about that handful of newsworthy events because we don't want there to be more of them. Or at least we want them to become less frequent, and less deadly when they do occur.
Go to your nearest grocery, hardware, or department store, head to the back on the day that a truck comes, and look around.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it exists. You fell into the argument from ignorance fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
My office building is inspected a couple times a year. They flip out if you get anywhere near blocking the operation of an interior fire door (like auto closing metal doors), much less egress doors. Hell, until recently they wouldn't even let us have fans because of the possibility it could impact the design of the air handling for the building effectively removing smoke.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century
Yes, we have to some degree. That doesn't mean we should be complacent now.
And major fires that kill lots of people because bad decisions were made are not a phenomenon that stopped happening after Triangle Shirtwaist. Things got better, but we still have room to continue to improve.
I remember sitting in my dorm room in FT (at UCSB) and watching the Tea Fire flames jump closer and closer. Fire is a huge threat in the area, even that close to the coast. This seems like insanity.
> an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
> Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate.
That would be in accordance with much the rest of UCSB's architectural motif. Something of a Mission-Brutalist aesthetic: oppressive concrete blocks topped with Spanish tile.
Yeah this doesn't work. The Marines stuffed me into a very small barracks room and gave me a room mate. It doesn't make you leave any more often, it just makes you fight.
But in this case, every student will have a single, on a campus where the lack of singles is one of the biggest student complaints. Especially loathed are triples, which would be eliminated campus-wide once this building opens.
Spot on. The barracks this happened in was built in 1945, and was single Marine occupancy. Now up to three Marines share the same room, depending on rank.
I lived in a rather small double occupancy dorm room for a couple years of my college career.
It was common to leave your door open if you wanted to socialize, but then close it if you needed some quiet to study.
And there are all types. Some really do need the quiet to concentrate. Some apparently like having others around while studying, like the folk who were in the 24-hour study lounge of the main library at midnight.
The accommodations should cater to all kinds who have different needs.
I do wonder if the tiny bedrooms will have sufficient sound insulation, in the walls, ceilings and floors, and especially the doors. And I wonder if the AC will be sufficient, individually controllable, and always working so that it is feasible to shut yourself up in your room to study.
And also... sometimes you just get tired of your roommates. All it takes is one guy to chews his food loudly to mess things up for everyone else. (No, that didn't happen to me, but my freshman year roommate regularly stunk up the place with weed. Or incense to cover up the weed. Which didn't fool anyone.)
I lived in a building like this at Cornell University. The building was a converted mental health asylum prior to its purchase. Tiny rooms, with tiny slit windows, common areas, and doors that automatically swung shut in every room.
Every year, students did their best not to get stuck living in that building. The only ones who considered it voluntarily were the engineering students (due to proximity to the eng campus). The "bolstered" social communal area did not make up for the additional anxiety and mental pressure of the jail-cell like rooms, and the feeling of isolation and no-escape that the layout fostered. The only thing it did do, was make a notable increase in the school suicide rate.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Cascadilla Hall, but this seems like a lot of exaggeration. For others who want to see what these dorms look like, you can see images of the Cascadilla rooms alongside more modern campus dorms like Mews on this page: https://conferenceservices.cornell.edu/planning/accommodatio....
Mews looks pretty unfortunate, yes. It's bad when the realtor taking a picture from the extreme corner of the room to make the room look big style photos still make a room look like a prison cell.
Why not provide adequate living facilities and those that want to venture out and socialize will, and those that want to hang out in their room will do so. Seems odd to try and force them out of their room.
When your primary design priorities are housing a lot of people you don't care about and preventing suicides, you tend to get to the same final product.
No windows? No natural light whatsoever? That's gotta have a serious negative impact on the mental health (and possibly sleep patterns?) of the students.
Not to mention that in case of a fire, all the people rushing to the two exits will get into a stampede, and those who remain in their rooms will suffocate, with no windows to open for fresh air or to be rescued from?
This is the most dystopian thing I've heard of in a while.
NYC has a law that for a room to be legally called a bedroom, it must have a window that's not on a lot line. I can't believe California doesn't have a law like that.
The NYC law doesn’t actually accomplish much though. The last time I lived in NYC, probably 4 years ago, I was in a $3k/month studio and my legally mandated window faced into the interior well of the building, maybe 50x50’ wide and probably 40 stories deep. No plants, only the palest hint of sunlight.
That's a pretty common building code across the US for typical residential units. Hotels and the like get around it by offering multiple avenues of escape in the event of an emergency.
I once got a deal on a 1600sqft apartment in a Maryland row home. It was listed as a 1-bed, even though it had 2 more rooms that were as big as the bedroom, but couldn't legally be called bedrooms because no windows. I believe the codes required you couldn't have more people living there than could live in 1 bedroom.
There are tons of windows and natural light in the common areas; the design is meant to encourage congregation there. The bedrooms are just for sleeping, dressing, and sex.
i don't like to sleep in a room without windows. i like to see the night sky or signs of life outside my room, and most importantly i hate waking up in the dark. i would switch universities or sue if forced to accept a windowless room.
Do you understand how how housing selection works ?
There is zero requirement to live in their housing. So what the hell are you going to sue them over?
There is a shortage of on-campus housing - do you understand that? That is what this project is trying to solve for in part.
If you live off campus - go for it! In fact, even if you WANT to live on campus you'll have to enter a lottery after year 1, they only usually can prioritize first year students. So trust me, if you don't like this housing, no one is going to make you pay for it, and they'll be happy to have you out.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends. And as someone who didn't get a single until senior year, being able to get it on without having folks walking through or in room will be seen as a MAJOR positive by students.
i would sue them if i was forced. if there is a choice, i'll of course take that instead.
but i am expecting that noone should want to live in a room without windows, so some people are going to get the short straw.
of course i may be wrong and there are enough students who actually don't care, or even prefer it over the alternatives.
however i fear that most of those are not aware of the downsides of a windowless room.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends.
that is not the point.
i like working with others too.
but waking up in complete darkness every day is not healthy.
even if most students won't be harmed by it, some will.
sure, i understand the tradeoff you are making. and i expect many will if that's the only way to get some privacy. that is understandable.
but as a parent i would be worried sick if my kids would make that choice.
there is no reason a building has to be designed that way. it should be entirely possible to give everyone a small room with a window. how much personal space do you need to sleep? 4m² should be enough.
Even in the US having living quarters with no windows must be illegal. It’s dumb enough that people are allowed to work in offices with no windows, but this has to be illegal.
Yes, many buildings are shaped in interesting ways to allow it as well. For example, this building could have an interior courtyard and then have windows facing both out and facing in. Or even a few courtyards.
True. But there are exceptions, including the presence of fire suppression which this building will most definitely have. And dormitories fall under different codes than residential building codes which is where the egress window rule comes from.
You’d have seven roommates and would also have no window. Looking at the layout, it’s like sharing a tiny apartment with 7 other people. This is the worst part, if you have one disruptive person out of eight, they are going to make everyone else miserable. Hard to get sleep, hard to study.
The dorm I was in undergrad had a suite type of arrangement. (Though the rooms were not all singles and they mostly had usable windows.) IMO, it's preferable to the long corridor with rooms coming off of it.
The lack of windows seems not great and perhaps the massiveness as well. But the basic idea of groups of rooms sharing a common area is fine by itself.
Having your own "pod" (within a shared common suite) may be preferable than the standard situation of sharing a standard-size bedroom with a stranger. One bit of context is that UCSB has had a profound housing shortage (since at least 2010), and students have had to triple up in rooms: https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-detai...
Huh, here in Sweden you can't include rooms without windows as living area. If this building was sold in Sweden, it would be listed as a pretty tiny house with huge storage/accessory areas.
To a university, undergraduate students are kind of accessories, so it fits. The real money is in research grants and maybe athletics (although nobody seems to agree whether they cost more than they bring in).
Much of the US has similar requirements, that any bedroom has 2 egress points. One of those points is usually a window, the other the door to the rest of the building.
Idk how real estate works for large-scale dorm-blocks, but in my town, this would have to be listed as effectively a building full of storage closets.
as someone who attended ucsb and has also spent a week in a bedroom without a window I really hope this doesn't happen.
it'll really mess the kids up. I felt awful waking up in that room. not having any natural light to cue you in to what time it is forces you to turn on the light to wake up. waking up to artificial light is an absolute miserable experience and if I had to do it for a year I would leave... of course all of these kids would have already signed a lease for the year and can't just afford to call that money a loss and live somewhere else.
Not that there aren’t other issues here, but there are imitation windows (portholes?) that would provide that light cue in the morning. It wouldn’t be a totally windowless cell.
100% agree. Living conditions are already brutal at UCSB. This will just force students to live like prisoners. I can't think of anything more shitty to do to a student. Weird way to be a donor...
Not really - looking through the reviews, it's cheap and newly furnished, but almost everyone is concerned about the windows (even those who say they personally don't mind it seem to be well enough aware that it's a problem).
I don't think anybody is saying that the lack of windows is itself a good thing, even the "forced socializing" line of reasoning clearly uses the lack of windows as a stick to get people out of their rooms. It's just an acceptable tradeoff for a sizable subset of students.
A lot of the reviews amount to "well at least it's cheap" which is not really a ringing endorsement. When you build living spaces that are terrible to live in, they become inexpensive relative to the horror that is the current rental market.
But that seems like a bad solution to rent inflation.
Well, if they are better considering the cost, then they are better considering the cost...
Maybe someone else can design a building that has similarly good/better reviews and gives students windows. But to just assume that there are unproven better cost/benefit options at the needed scale... Well, does not seem justifiable either
Note that many of the positive reviews are from pre-covid times and the two that coincide with the pandemic note how ill suited it is to such conditions.
Well….designing a building to be good for pandemics also means making it be good for respiratory viruses in general.
You do, in fact, want to have 100 year water systems that would work in a cholera epidemic. Designing buildings for good airflow will probably not go out of style either.
The reason old NYC buildings have radiators that are so hot, you need to open a window to let in the winter air, is because they were purposely designed that way. Because of the 1918 flu pandemic.[0]
Also, there are a bunch of things that we consider
normal that were born of crisis: [1]
It can help against radiation sickness (with thick enough walls providing shielding) or possibly agains drowning or vacuum exposure (if sufficiently pressure tight). ;-)
I view it as exactly the other way around: if you're building barracks in any normal year, sure, don't care about pandemics.
But for any long-lived building, thinking how it will work in various disaster scenarios is crucial, as your design will affect the life or death of thousands living there, even if it's "just" for one-two years. And given everything we know about the recurrence of pandemics, it's virtually certain that at least another one will come around within 100 years.
This is a graduate residence hall and graduate students tend to be a much higher mix of foreign students — looking at the reviews, many are praising that it’s pre-furnished and they didn’t need to do a whole lot to get set up. It’s also been my experience that foreign students (particularly from Asia) are just used to cramped, windowless accommodations like this for student housing so it’s not as dystopian-feeling to them.
Residents seem to like it overall but reading though them, most qualify them as "great except the rooms don't have windows".
It feels mean, for lack of a better word. Maybe particularly in Santa Barbara with its beautiful sunny days. There's something dystopian about putting young students in windowless rooms and figuring "they'll get used to it". Next step is to save money by getting rid of windows in apartments, office buildings, etc. and everyone will spend their day under artificial lighting. There will be social clubs for people who want to see the outside world once a week.
It's probably better in SB than just about anywhere else, since you can quite literally always just go outside. I think that's almost part of the "point" here. To try to demotivate students from sitting in their rooms. I don't like that approach at all, but I actually don't think windowless bedrooms are the worst thing in the world.
I had a windowless dorm room for a year in a very cold northeastern city where I couldn't realistically spend time outside for most of the year. It was attached to a windowed suite common room and I liked my roommates, so it was no big deal. I think I would have suffered a lot had I been a real social recluse, though.
Trying to demotivate students from sitting in their dorms by making it a sad cramped place doesn't seem to gel well with the modern idea of psychological safety helping people get more done and take more risks.
Its a stick instead of a carrot in your most personal place, your home.
Not sure what the point was of you bringing this up.
Are you saying that you liked only having 2 toilets and 1 shower per 16 people? Are you saying that since your experience was that, others should have similar?
Just trying to understand the purpose of you bringing up your anecdotal experience.
edit: Also looking at the link it looks like two students get 1 private room with a window, and some even get balconies. There's outside courtyards as well. Not sure how this is similar to the design mentioned.
It houses 96 suites, 6—7 bedrooms each. Each bedroom is 16x9 with their own private bathroom. In one of the blueprints in the UCSB article, there appears to be 1 bathroom per 8 suites [1].
To be fair, graduate housing is supposed to be a bit better than undergrad dorms — especially in regards to not having to share a bedroom with a total stranger. And maybe the UCSB's tiny single room design (windowless or not) will be a good tradeoff for not having to have a roommate as an undergrad.
That looks like two bathrooms per 1 suite, or 1 bathroom per 4 rooms. I never shared a bathroom with less than 3 other people in my four years at college, so that doesn't seem particularly out of the ordinary for an undergraduate dorm.
The difference in size of rooms seems significant, though.
Looks like it's might be 2 bathrooms based on this tiny floorplan image [0], I thought from the isometric image it was 1.5 (2 toilets, 1 shower). And it looks like there's maybe 2 common area toilets. The ratio seems fine in theory...I think my undergrad dorm floor had 2 communal bathrooms with 8 toilet stalls and 8 showers for 30-35 residents. I'm assuming intersuite sharing would become normal.
The podsize also isn't that bad in theory — they aren't much smaller than I remember the single rooms in my dorm being. The big difference is that the single rooms had windows, but also allowed for lofted beds — e.g. you would put your desk under the bed, and there'd be enough room to have a small couch where the desk would normally be. The UCSB pod furniture appears to be fixed (but again, it's just an architect drawing)
I had a friend living at Munger at Umich and visited a few times.
The vibe of the building is similar to an hotel. As you enter, there is a foyer with elevators. The upstairs floors have windowless corridors where you enter the suites.
Each suite has a long corridor with doors to the rooms (4 on each side, if I remember correctly). Each room is on the "inside" of the building, so they don't have windows, but they have private bathrooms.
The living quarters have a shared double kitchen (two fridges, two cooking ranges, etc) and a double living room (two couches and two tvs). This room also has a wall of windows so there is plenty of sunlight there.
The suite I visited was coed and had graduate students from different schools living together. It was definitely an interesting vibe.
As any dorm, there are other amenities that are shared with everyone like a patio on the roof, a gym, rec room, and study spaces. Also, all the rooms are furnished, so it might be a good set up for someone that doesn't have furniture or doesn't want to worry about it.
When compared to other grad student housing options (Northwood 1-3 for single students or a shared room in Northwood 4-5), Munger is definitely an improvement (mostly it's location and the fact that is a new construction, to be honest) but it is a little bit more expensive than NW offerings.
Hm interesting, except hotels are very dense and I’ve never been in a hotel room without a window. I believe it’s illegal. If it weren’t, then the market would show that people want windows.
Not illegal everywhere, and not uncommon, either. I was a little late booking a trip to Stockholm the other day, and of the few remaining quality hotels, most rooms were sadly listed as "No windows".
> I’ve never been in a hotel room without a window
You might not be able to extrapolate your own experience over all hotels, there are countless of hotels without windows, and it's surely not illegal everywhere.
Glad he had the balls to step down and call them out. The other committee members and people in charge of the project should be embarrassed as they failed to represent the best needs of the university and its students.
Windowless dorms, crazy 97 year old billionaire amateur architect and a bunch of corrupt university staff and committee members who would do anything to save a few bucks. What could go wrong? Humanity at its finest.
100%. Sure, the billionaire is probably an asshole, but he’s also 97 and not an architect. The real problem here is the leadership at the university deciding to move forward with this monstrosity just to get a big donation.
You do not need to be an architect to see that living in windowless boxes (not rooms) will damage young adults psychologically. Just put yourself into this room and try to study for 6 hours a day. It looks worse than a prison cell.
This old fart probably has his own ideas about how poor students need to work and live in order to "earn" an education. Not to mention anything regarding virus spreading...
There's also an incentive for them to make buildings as large and as expensive as possible as they it affects their income. Certainly I'd argue self interestedly that all living quarters should be as large and extravagant as possible as I'd like to live in a large extravagant place. But, millions (billions?) of people are doing just fine in much smaller places than these self interested architects are suggesting.
That's not really how architecture works. There is a client supplied budget and site that multiple architecture firms submit proposals for. Suggesting a needlessly large and expensive building will do nothing but leave you without any work.
The goal is to get the students out of their bedrooms. There's plenty of common space, and lots of really nice places to go study and socialize out of your bedroom. This is intended to promote real-life socialization, which is the only real reason to go to in-person college these days.
Plus, everyone gets a single!
My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
The goal is to get the students out of their bedrooms. There's plenty of common space, and lots of really nice places to go study and socialize out of your bedroom. This is intended to promote real-life socialization, which is the only real reason to go to in-person college these days.
But there's zero evidence this building will actually accomplish this. And, according to the architect who resigned, plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Achievement: kids lying on their beds doomscrolling because the common space in the room is dominated by a massive table with exactly enough room for everybody to bump elbows.
Sure, but the school can't justify spending triple per student than standard dorms cost. Even with the gift, the school needs to be financially responsible, and making a huge leap in quality of life would seem financially irresponsible when thousands of other colleges squeeze kids into forced doubles and triples. This is a step towards giving students both privacy and spaces to socialize, with some drawbacks that are a consequence of not having infinite funding.
Perhaps Seasonal Affective Disorder is something we should consider when designing livable, humane spaces instead of relying on an artificial substitute. Happy, healthy students are more likely to socialize — ruthlessly value engineering their private living quarters as a way of forcing socialization is the opposite approach we should be taking.
Sure, we get the goal. It could even be an interesting experiment. Maybe some people would like it. Maybe lots of people. Or maybe it causes lasting psychological harm. But this is going to get built and used for decades regardless of the results of the experiment.
> My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
You and your college roommates had a choice. Did everybody in your dorm do that?
If you want to talk about "choice", this is not the hill that matters. So many colleges force their students to live on campus, and then squeeze them into forced doubles or even triples in conditions far worse than what's being built here.
I could assume that they would have those amenities also, but we have no way of knowing, and isn't that a concern in and of itself?
In the article linked below, the artist renderings look more like an open concept market place like a mall or Boston Public Market. Fine spaces to eat, shop, and socialize, but not so good for study.
https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning
Which is great except 50% of people are introverts and need space to recharge. How many people live like this in real life? That speaks to the choice of hanging out followed by "leave me alone".
It sounds like an experiment but it could probably have been done slightly further "away from home" if it was about collaboration. Just have places to encourage people to hang out if they want to and not if they don't. Forcing them just feels like mental breakdown waiting-to-happen.
Or, you force socialization on a population that's increasingly turning inward, to the detriment of society in general.
It's hubris that on one hand HN can bitch about how egomaniacal companies like Facebook and Google are, and yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
Where do we think those social-deaf, micro-optimizing engineers come from?
Among other things, architectural design makes decisions about how space is allocated and how it will probably be used. Of course, architects get things wrong. The dorm I lived in undergraduate did a fair bit well--and also had some common space that was sort of out of the way and was hardly ever used.
But one way or another, an architect is going to design things in a way that (they think) optimizes for certain behaviors and use whether that's socializing/collaborating or the maximum privacy/anonymity.
> Or, you force socialization on a population that's increasingly turning inward, to the detriment of society in general.
College kids living in dorms are turning inward? Do you have proof of that or that is just a hunch?
> ... yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
The goal of making architecture promote socialisation is great. The complaint is not about the aim. The complaint is about how it is achieved.
Bedrooms with no natural light or natural air circulation suck. We don't build houses like this because it is not a good idea. Saying that your aim was to promote socialisation doesn't change that.
I detest architectural coercion. Who is this old rich fuck to force "socialization" (a dystopian word if there ever was one)? That's my business. Buildings and urban environments should be built to allow various degrees of social interaction based on one's own personal needs and determinations as you see fit, not some megalomaniacal lunatic's tyrannical and dehumanizing designs. This is the tyrannical streak running through modernist architecture. For some reason, some people with money see everyone else as rats or cattle that they can heard around as they please, for their "own good".
In an environment that respects human persons and their individuality as well as their social nature, the environment is structured according to subsidiarian principles. The town square is where anyone can socialize with anyone in town. Next the building courtyard is where anyone in the building can socialize with anyone else in the building. Next, the living room or common area of an apartment is where anyone can socialize with anyone in the apartment (analogously for single family homes). Individual bedrooms are for total privacy. I don't need to be coerced out of my bedroom if that's where I need to be because some crazy billionaire high on his own flatulence says so.
Be very wary of so-called "philanthropists". They are in love with their power to control and coerce, not the actual good.
To quote C. S. Lewis:
"My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
Living like this is actually pretty common both at universities and as a young adult. You have private space, a shared kitchen/dining room, and the building has lounges and other public amenities.
Your room is for sleep, and possibly study, though there are other places on campus with fewer distractions. You can choose to eat and work together in groups in your dining room. You socialize away from your suite so you don't annoy your roommates.
The dorms that I used had all sorts of unpleasant features:
-- giant shared bathrooms had gang showers, or required you go go down 2 flights of stairs and along a hallway for 100 yards
-- shared larger rooms with multiple beds and desks, creating issues around differing schedules
-- no kitchens or cooking facilities
-- no food storage facilities, creating unsanitary conditions
etc.
As an example, a fairly common layout that I've seen is a 3-room quad -- two very small rooms with two bunk beds, two dressers and maybe a close adjoining a not particularly large 'common' room with 4 desks, perhaps a mini-fridge, and a beat-up couch.
>Which is great except 50% of people are introverts and need space to recharge. How many people live like this in real life?
The vast majority of students? I don't think I knew a single person who lived without roommates when I was a university student. Freshman year nearly everybody shared a room with 1-2 other people, this new dorm would provide far more privacy than that.
Your college roommates had the option to black out their windows. People in this dorm won't have the option to open the curtains. That's the difference.
I worked in this office where there were windows, but I was really far away from any of the light they emitted. I'd get these pounding headaches every day until I moved to a different floor where I was closer to the window. It was a miserable place to work.
I actually lived in a room remarkably similar to this one year in college. It was marginally bigger than what is pictured, but the space was used far less efficiently (lots of annoying free-standing furniture) so functionally it was probably smaller. Aside from the lack of a window making it awfully hard to wake up in the morning, it was no big deal. It was actually my favorite dorm room I had in college. The single-room-in-a-suite model is amazing.
The big thing was that I had a common room shared with my suite-mates which was large-ish, comfortable, and naturally lit. I spent my time at home there, but it's college so I spent most of my time out of the dorm anyway.
My big concern with this UCSB dorm would be for students who are significantly asocial. For the many who crave an isolated personal space, it could be majorly depressing. I get the idea that the entire goal of the design is to try to get people to not behave that way, but I doubt that will work.
I'd guess this dorm would be a great experience for a very significant majority of students, but basically a torture chamber for an unfortunate minority. Ergo it's probably an extremely bad idea.
Yeah, I feel like most folks here are wildly out of touch with what it's like to be a college student, including the architect. I, and just about everyone else from my college, would trade just about every creature comfort for a private room to sleep. In fact my college had suites like these and they were fought over tooth-and-nail in the room draw process.
I think one of the most bizarre things we accept in life is college kids being forced into doubles and triples. College "kids" are adults, not little kids in camp.
Plus, even with my window in my single suite room, my sleep cycle was so messed up half the time due to the occasional all-nighter that having no window might have actually been easier for me to deal with.
> I think one of the most bizarre things we accept in life is college kids being forced into doubles and triples.
I went to uni. in the 70s in the UK. I never had to share. A few students at the same uni. did but it was almost always possible to move to a single room later in the year.
Do so many US students really have to share rooms, and if so why?
Yes, it's extremely common to share, especially in the first couple years. Many many colleges require students to live on campus freshman year and the provided housing is forced doubles (or even triples) and sometimes even temporary housing. As for why -- it's cheaper to stuff 2 or 3 students into 1 dorm room, obviously.
You do realize that like, 10% of the student population at UCSB is offically homeless right? Right now they sleep on friends couches, in their cars, or in transient weekly rental situations
Millions of people ( billions?) live in windowless boxes (not rooms) and there is no evidence they're damaged psychologically. I'm not saying I don't prefer windows but this kind of statement strikes me as privileged bubble thinking.
Using your wealth to forcefully prop up your fledgling(?) career seems like an asshole move. Donating funds with some strings (e.g., put your name on the building/school)? Fine. Donating and forcing your amateur designs be used? Asshole move. At that point you're not really trying to benefit anyone but yourself.
What I don't understand is how this shithole costs so much? 1.5 billion for 4,500 residents comes out to 333,333 per resident. It feels like they could probably build normal dorms for that price.
This looks so insane to me, I wonder how much building a normal apartment would cost in that area. I'm building a 7000sqft high-standard house in South America for around 200K USD.
A new small apartment in San Francisco cannot be built for less than $800k these days, so coming in a $333k per resident is not too surprising to me in a similar high-cost city with a building with a ton of amenities.
An apartment for $800K is understandable. A small bedroom @ $333K is not.
If they already own the building, it is only construction costs whereas buying an apartment is possibly extortionate land or property prices from the current owner, which is purely demand-driven.
Looking at the blueprint, it seems like 7 of the 9 floors will be solely suites. I assume one floor will be dining hall which I wouldn't count as an amenity, which means only 1 of the 9 floors actually has amenities beside the small common space each suite has.
It does sound like a lot of money but that is also a huge dorm. I couldn't find numbers on a more recent dorm project but MIT's Simmons Hall was completed in 2002. (Which also has sort of a weird window thing going on.) It "only" cost $78 million--so presumably something in excess of $100 million today. But that's for a dorm only housing 350 or so students vs. 4500. But, still you're looking at about 2x the cost per student housed.
But the thing is Simmons Hall is practically a work of art. If you asked students if they wanted to live there or in this place pretty sure every single one would say Simmons.
Like Stata, it's grown on me a bit looking from the outside. It's certainly not boring. Never been inside though so no idea how well it works as a dorm.
In addition to the window thing, the sheer scale of 4,500 students gives me pause. It's something like 10x the number of students of any dorm I've ever experienced.
Not to dispute any of your arguments, I'm really surprised at your referring to the consideration of whether to accept a gift of $200M as "save a few bucks".
I completely missed that in my first pass. This crazy donor negotiated absolutely authority over the design by covering less than 20% of the cost. That's both impressive and alarming.
If someone is donating 15% of project costs but with strings attached that make the project more than 15% worse (which arguably might be the case here), then that's not a good deal and should be rejected.
Ya I've been thinking about this too, that personal shame needs to play a bigger role today.
For example, if I designed a cell phone that wasn't waterproof, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an engineer.
If I took a campaign contribution and voted against the people I my district, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an elected official.
And so on and so forth. This lack of transparency, accountability, critical thinking, personal responsibility, professionalism, etc has given us this bizarro world 21st century reality where one rich guy can soil the lives of countless others in a seemingly impeccable way. To name one undesired outcome of this local optimum in the multiverse of possible realities..
Edit: $200 million is nothing to sneeze at, so nothing against Charlie Munger for that. I do wish though that philanthropists would donate without strings attached, or else it ends up being an extension of their egos.
Would you please follow the site guidelines, including these ones?
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Eschew flamebait."
Comments that consist only of denunciatory rhetoric and add no information are the opposite of what we're hoping for here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
Just in case anyone is worried, I have no opinion about the building or any of the people involved. Moderation like this is purely concerned with comment quality on HN.
Jesus FUCK that's a horrible idea. My neighbor is a maintenance guy for a sober living complex and he has talked to me about maintaining these kinds of high density environments, and this seems like a nightmare scenario just waiting to happen.
Also, just emotionally, this can't possibly work. There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy.
This reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where they ride the exercise bikes and earn credits and watch advertisements 24/7.
I find the profanity nicely limited and appropriate; if the comment had gone on to curse institutions in general / not share a constructive anecdote that's where I'd call it inappropriate.
There's no rule against profanity on HN. It's maybe loosely correlated with breaking the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - for example the one asking people not to fulminate), but obviously not always. We're not Bowdlers here.
"There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy."
I lived in Stanford for four of its most overcrowded years... as a junior I lived in an tiny two bedroom apartment that had three people in it, because the university needed to get extra people in and didn't have the space.
Obviously a ton of things wrong with this building, but the idea that this will cause people to have "so little space and so little privacy" ignores the fact that UCSB is in a tremendous housing crunch right now. Adding more housing isn't going to suddenly create a space with little space and privacy... that's the current state of affairs, and more housing will alleviate it. You have to examine this in the context of the university, not in a vacuum.
So little privacy? The first three of my four years in college I had shared rooms; only had a single my senior year. I think that's reasonably common? This is much more privacy than that.
(Lack of windows is much more of an issue from my perspective)
As long as the ventilation is good, I don't care about the windows -- the idea is that you should use your bedroom for sleeping at night, and go socialize and learn about things elsewhere.
I suspect that a lot of night-owl students will actually appreciate the lack of windows and roommates -- they'll sleep better.
I lived in a four-bedroom apartment with individual bedrooms (and three common rooms) my first two years and a rented house with a couple of housemates my last two. From the rendering shown, these kids will have less space by something like a factor of ten. The amount of living space per student proposed here is by no means common and really does look like a prison block.
My college dorm room (150 sq ft[1]) wasn't much bigger than these rooms, and I had a roommate. Privacy isn't something dorms have had in a long time, and a tiny solo sleeping room actually affords more privacy, I think? My roommate often stayed up late at night playing videogames with voice chat, which sucked in a double. Also a (tiny) single room gives you more privacy for sex, which is another important part of college.
I don't love this building, but I don't think (1) privacy is an actual problem with it, or (2) that the concerns of a sober living facility are necessarily the same as a college dormitory.
In one of my years at a top 5 rated undergrad university I was in a ~100 sq. ft. windowless room as part of a 6 person suite with a decently large common room. That was a slightly unusual situation at my school (the windowless part, I mean), but remarkably like what is being proposed here. The overall building was quite a bit smaller and most of the rooms had windows and all that, but it really was almost the same from my perspective.
It was absolutely fantastic. I had a private space to sleep in and retreat to when necessary (a single is a major luxury for most undergrads!). I had a semi-private space shared with my suite-mates for work, socialization, etc. There were larger common spaces I could utilize around campus. It was my favorite housing situation I had while at school.
I could see it being a major problem for those who are highly socially reclusive, though.
> There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy
I feel like you haven't been in a college dorm in at least the last decade. These look far better than most dorms I know of.
I'd much prefer this setup than the dorms I had to be in freshman year. Small rooms fitting 2, 3, even 4 people in one bedroom is crazy. At least I'd actually have a room to myself. They call the living quarters small, but they look roughly the same size as what I had if you subtracted my roommate's space out of the room.
Thank god I got an off-campus house with friends years 2-5.
Problem is: those "cells" cost ~$300,000 each. Assuming a break-even at 10 years, that's $2,500/month - more than my mortgage for a 2400 sq ft home on .75 acres with a small forest. At $100/mo, would take 250 years to pay off.
Many seem to not understand that real estate is not unlimited-supply like most manufactured goods. Just because you want a particular home doesn’t mean expect it will go for MSRP like common retail goods. You’re bidding on a strictly limited supply, vs others willing to bid more. At some point reconsider what you’re actually trying to get, and that better is far more affordable elsewhere.
Your datapoint was only interesting if it was comparable to building housing in UCSB. Since you don't live in Santa Barbara, I don't know why you brought it up.
Your choices are completely irrelevant here. UCSB students have already determined that what is best for them is not what you describe as "better." Your mortgage rate in some cheaper locale is totally irrelevant to the cost of building a dwelling in Santa Barbara.
Reminds me of the below the waterline cabins that cruise ship staff share. Has anyone looked into the mental health of people already living in similar conditions?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadUpdate: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews!
But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate.
https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
How can they miss the problem when the worst case scenario for some idiotic design like this happened last year!
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
Further reading: https://www.govtech.com/em/emergency-blogs/disaster-zone/cov...
Your info needs updating. The vaccines wane, and breakthroughs aren’t harmless.
Swedish study found efficacy decline basically to nothing at 7 months and severe disease efficacy did too: https://mobile.twitter.com/x2IndSpeculator/status/1454126453...
Separate study found no reduction in risk of long covid in the event of a breakthrough: https://mobile.twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/14534083120667...
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
What theory is this? I've heard of globalization and rapid transportation speeding up pandemics, but never climate change.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
There's also the idea of frozen pathogens thawing and infecting animals, which has happened recently: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/4884009...
In general it's not that climate change makes pandemics worse, but it makes the chance of a new disease infecting a human more likely.
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
Does this mean Munger is great or that every other sizeable offering in the area is even worse?
Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Of course you're entitled to your preferences, but we can safely say that the vast majority want windows in their living space.
“All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
We're just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air, and we're just realizing that we need to make infrastructure investments.
CO2 is a good proxy for infectious disease transmission risk. We breathe out CO2 as we spread pathogens. Outside air is just above 400ppm (higher with auto exhaust) and architects aimed for 600ppm before the pandemic. As one approaches CO2 levels closer to outside air, infectious disease transmission plummets.
To balance ventilation with energy costs (and avoid accelerating global warming) one needs heat exchangers that can't easily be retrofitted into an existing building. Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
In my experience sitting on building committees, architects are better at original visuals than original engineering. When a Spanish village restores ancient stone huts for tourists, they run DC wiring for LED lights. When I ask if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb, architects just stare back at me, deer in the headlights. So I'm not hopeful that a radical reworking of our infrastructure will originate with architects.
Our building wasn't going to have windows that opened, till I suggested the building would be usable parts of the year even if the central air failed. I was assured it would never fail. The central air in the previous building failed the next week; I was never implicated. Then our administration overruled the architects and put in office windows. People teased me that I cost us a "this building pees spring water" green certification. Then the pandemic, and I was a hero.
In 2015 it was, sure. We'll probably hit a seasonal peak of 420ppm next year. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
RCP8.5 has us at 1000ppm by the end of the century. By then outside air ventilation will mostly be needed to keep people in meeting rooms from putting themselves into a coma.
Well....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...
This is exactly the type of information that gets lost between generations that makes past decisions make sense. It's why I ferverently collect older academic/engineering literature. Not necessarily for the equations, but for some of the context around the problems and challenges of the time we no longer think about because they are "already solved".
Everyone moans about radiators once you start sealing up windows to be more green. Surprise! They were designed with the inefficiency of having an open window in mind for health and ventilation purposes since the turn of the century! Of course you end up with problems when you violate a functional invariant!
This blows my mind too. I expect it's coming, though: the cables would be cheaper, and if there's one driver of change in construction, it's cost.
Another question is, would it be a straight improvement? I think transformers are typically very efficient, and I could imagine the losses from running a lower voltage through a long line might be greater.
You could make it to ~30ft on existing wiring as long as you kept draw under 5A. That’s ~60W and enough to power all of 5 pretty anemic 12V bulbs.
If you actually need something like a 60ft run from your transformer and 15A to play with, you’re going to be looking more towards something like 6AWG. If you want to keep under 3% voltage drop you’d be looking towards 2AWG.
14AWG 2-wire is something like $0.35/ft. 6AWG 2-wire is like $0.75/ft. 2AWG 2-wire is coming up on $3/ft.
There’s a reason we use AC for power distribution rather than DC.
You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
If you wanted to run 1800W DC as we run current power (14/2, hundred foot+ runs, etc) you'd be looking at something like 720VDC at a couple amps.
There's three main things I see as limitations to really pushing DC up to those levels:
1. Safety, plain and simple. 2. Switching. You generally require larger contacts and bigger gaps to switch DC because you don't get the benefit of it crossing over a 0 point several times a second. This gets worse the higher the voltage goes. This requires much more involved switching equipment. E.g., it's common to see a relay rated for switching 120VAC/30VDC. 3. Economies of scale. This one isn't some law of physics, but most current equipment you can find is 12/24/48VDC outside of very expensive industrial stuff. Also you're gonna need some pretty big transformers to step this stuff back down to usable voltages since everything we need it for is generally running at single-digit voltages. (Efficient, but just another big thing on the BOM for every single device.)
That said, I'm just a hobbyist so I may be missing something fundamental here.
15A at 120VDC wouldn't require massive wires. I'm not sure why you think it's drastically different from 120VAC for wire sizing. If dropping 10% of the AC voltage is OK, dropping 10% of DC is presumably OK, too, and either is I * R. About 96 meters to drop 12V, or 48 meters out and back.
It's not a good idea for plenty of other reasons, but...
1. Safety is relative. 10-20mA is enough to kill a person. In AC voltage we measure it as root mean square, the actual peak to peak voltage is greater than Double that.
2. There are such things as solid state switching. Solid state relays and field effect transistors come to mind. This is also how we down convert DC power to lower voltages, very fast switching giving an average voltage that is the target (see buck converters).
3. DC power is everywhere and it is easy to do DC to DC conversion. Single chip solutions exist. Hell your car is entirely 12V (if ice powered, EV's are a different matter)
Hope that helps :)
I
While I think 12V would be too low, I think there's also a happier medium than 120/220V. Something like 50V is nice because you're very unlikely to get an electric shock, while taking advantage of the fact the average LED current draw is like 1 fifth of an incandescent.
Apparently it will:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
The Michigan building has separate, private baths. Looking at the UCSB rendering, single toilet, single shower for eight.
The plan view OTOH, shows two baths.
One or the other is wrong.
edit: apparently it isn't about hundreds of students sharing one room.
Absolutely amazing
And the investor will probably be dead before anybody can see the effect on students.
How is this even allowed from an engineering perspective? Unless his design and blueprints are perfect, which I highly doubt, it’s insane that no changes could be made. Is this common practice in architecture? I’ve never seen anything like it.
- Don't have anything to hide.
- At least use Firefox.
- Nah.
Sorry but no, it's definitly apathy.
Take Elon Musk for example. His vision of the future is more compelling than anything I hear any politician of any political party in the USA (or most other nations) putting forward. I find the standard issue right-wing vision of the future repugnant and the standard issue left-wing vision completely impractical and divorced from reality. (Aspects of it are repugnant too, but much less so than the right.)
What other non-billionaire visions of the future does humanity have? Xi Jinping's smile-or-die panopticon? Putin's theocratic mafia state?
The billionaires are leading humanity by default because they're on balance the only class of people offering practical workable visions of the future that are at least incrementally better than the present.
However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.
Really makes you think…
NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.
Even if that is his vision, it won't work. You can't be king of a frontier for very long unless your rule is very competent, minimal, and low-cost. The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.
Elon hasn't talked a lot about the social aspects of a Mars settlement. Maybe he doesn't care and figures that's up to the people who go there and his mission is just to get people there. Maybe he would agree with you and that's the point. Who knows.
I highly doubt he's naive enough to think the social outcome of a Mars settlement would be some standard issue Earthly political outcome or one that would exclusively favor him. If he is that naive he will be disappointed.
It's their responsibility to say no, and they failed in that job.
I ask because in-state tuition in California and Washington is so high that you could afford a full time PhD student tutor with it.
No, the university is responsible for providing safe housing for the students, and if they accepted this lunatic's plan, they would be breaching that trust.
When parents and students look for colleges, they assume a certain level of due diligence has been done for them, and they will be leaving their teenager in a minimally safe environment. You can't let people off the hook because of some right-wing idea of "freedom".
[1] In April 2014, during a budget crisis, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River) to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
Apparently from his youth, his Dad had a friend that ran a shoe button factory and managed to corner the entire market of shoe buttons. Then in his personal life went on to be a know it all about everything else on the planet.
Munger and Buffet both are pretty transparent about being so didactic though. If you don't want the strings attached to the money, say no.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd understand this as his cunning plan to get richer then.
Why am I not surprised that Charles "The-most-important-thing-is-getting-your-first-100000-dollars. Work-multiple-jobs-skip-meals-do-what-you-have-to-that's-the-investing-entry-fee-to-wealth" Munger architected a large prison for students?
Could you share the background for this?
A blog [1] says the argument goes something like this: “The first $100,000 is a b*tch, but you gotta do it [...] I don’t care what you have to do—if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.”
[1] https://fourpillarfreedom.com/charlie-munger-the-first-10000...
This Munger monstrosity is positively distopian. What happened to Charlie's wisdom?
Michigan: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
Stanford: https://g.co/kgs/TbYAFH
Honestly, it sounds like he just "optimized" the heck out of a residence, and part of the tradeoffs is that on average people would rather have a small private room with a fake window and lower rent and than a shared room with a real window and higher rent. His Michigan building houses twice as many students in the same footprint as competing plans, and the competing plans used shared rooms. Admittedly, these aren't really ideal for COVID though.
As an aside, one of his other interesting architectural quirks is that any shared women's bathrooms are generally much larger than the men's, to deal with differences in how they're used.
This proposed building has 2 entrances for 4000 people. I cannot imagine it will pass fire code, or could effectively be evacuated in an emergency. Astounding that someone thought it was a good idea.
This idea that a 60 floor skyscraper is going to do opening window "exits" over 300 foot drops is insanity and disgusting.
Please look up condominium skyscrapers before talking about window exists being required from a housing code standpoint.
The usual expectation is total time for a fire to cause an alarm, all occupants of a building to respond to an alarm, and make their way to a fire rated area, usually a stairwell, is 2.5 minutes.
You can have a bedroom with only one exit (the requirement you reference is for a second exit, not a window) if walls/doors are rated high enough and you have sprinklers.
Compounding this, historic building in CA was sometimes very poor by modern standards (all wood tinder boxes). So this may very well be a major upgrade in safety over existing housing stock.
On a side note, I wonder if the billionaire apllies own ideas on himself, or is he a "special exception".
[EDIT: sorry, that probably comes across as harsh. My point is that this whole site is for people to discuss things, and your comment(s) seem to advocate that people stop doing exactly that]
If fire codes were not a thing, developers would build terrible fire traps and people would rent them. There would inevitably be many deaths; this has happened all throughout history prior to modern building codes (and of course still happens today[1]).
The free market is a lie and impossible; you cannot expect the common person to be an expert on everything. We need (and you should want) baseline standards to ensure a reasonable quality of life for our society - think automobile safety standards and building codes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
Not with that attitude.
This is fine; the problem with Munger's design is that most of them don't have windows.
Or on a slightly larger scale, you stick a courtyard in the middle of several buildings, as is the case with most blocks in Barcelona or Berlin.
That students expect to live multiple years without any private space at all in the US has always struck me as very odd. I'm very glad I had a small private room (though, as is common in the UK, I only lived my first year in institutional accommodation). If course it had a working, opening window, a large house common room, a basement pool and games room (in terrible condition of course) and lots of open space outside...
And certainly no windows is awful. Every now and then I've had a hotel room that wasn't windowless but effectively got no natural light. Not a fan.
The dorm was recently renovated. Curious what they did to the interior design.
Is it even possible to make it fire code compliant?
an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
"Ah", but you might say, "just use someone else's window!"
To which I say "bullshit." If it's 3:00 in the morning, and you have a bunch of sleepy, probably hung-over (or still buzzing) college kids, and a building full of smoke and superheated toxic gases, the odds that these kids will successfully locate and utilize another window strike me as so low as to not even be worth considering. Drunk college kids don't do well with dormitory fires, or at least that's what a lot of historical evidence suggests.
Sure, there are other egresses available in principle. Hell, you can sledge-hammer your way through a wall in a pinch. But in any practical sense? Having two primary ingress/egress points is a horrible idea.
I know that its hard to to believe that there has been progress in the last 100 years, as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc.
Of course I do, duh. The question is "how much has it progressed?" Note that the Hamlet fire I mention was in 1991, and the Station Nightclub fire was in 2003, so it's not like Triangle Shirtwaist is the most recent example of a mass fire tragedy. And there are other examples, those three just happened to be "top of mind" for me.
as we sit here communicating effortlessly across the globe, protected from huge numbers of diseases that ravaged humankind, enjoying workplace fatality rates decreased by multiple orders of magnitude, enjoying universal suffrage, etc etc
Sure, but most of those things are orthogonal to fire safety.
People keep talking about that handful of newsworthy events because we don't want there to be more of them. Or at least we want them to become less frequent, and less deadly when they do occur.
So I think maybe we've progressed beyond the bad old days of the early 20th century.
Yes, we have to some degree. That doesn't mean we should be complacent now.
And major fires that kill lots of people because bad decisions were made are not a phenomenon that stopped happening after Triangle Shirtwaist. Things got better, but we still have room to continue to improve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Fire?wprov=sfla1
> Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate.
That seems unlikely.
It was common to leave your door open if you wanted to socialize, but then close it if you needed some quiet to study.
And there are all types. Some really do need the quiet to concentrate. Some apparently like having others around while studying, like the folk who were in the 24-hour study lounge of the main library at midnight.
The accommodations should cater to all kinds who have different needs.
I do wonder if the tiny bedrooms will have sufficient sound insulation, in the walls, ceilings and floors, and especially the doors. And I wonder if the AC will be sufficient, individually controllable, and always working so that it is feasible to shut yourself up in your room to study.
And also... sometimes you just get tired of your roommates. All it takes is one guy to chews his food loudly to mess things up for everyone else. (No, that didn't happen to me, but my freshman year roommate regularly stunk up the place with weed. Or incense to cover up the weed. Which didn't fool anyone.)
Every year, students did their best not to get stuck living in that building. The only ones who considered it voluntarily were the engineering students (due to proximity to the eng campus). The "bolstered" social communal area did not make up for the additional anxiety and mental pressure of the jail-cell like rooms, and the feeling of isolation and no-escape that the layout fostered. The only thing it did do, was make a notable increase in the school suicide rate.
But for me the biggest problem was oversleeping since there was not light to wake me up! :)
Not to mention that in case of a fire, all the people rushing to the two exits will get into a stampede, and those who remain in their rooms will suffocate, with no windows to open for fresh air or to be rescued from?
This is the most dystopian thing I've heard of in a while.
There is zero requirement to live in their housing. So what the hell are you going to sue them over?
There is a shortage of on-campus housing - do you understand that? That is what this project is trying to solve for in part.
If you live off campus - go for it! In fact, even if you WANT to live on campus you'll have to enter a lottery after year 1, they only usually can prioritize first year students. So trust me, if you don't like this housing, no one is going to make you pay for it, and they'll be happy to have you out.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends. And as someone who didn't get a single until senior year, being able to get it on without having folks walking through or in room will be seen as a MAJOR positive by students.
but i am expecting that noone should want to live in a room without windows, so some people are going to get the short straw.
of course i may be wrong and there are enough students who actually don't care, or even prefer it over the alternatives. however i fear that most of those are not aware of the downsides of a windowless room.
This type of housing really works for folks who like working with others, getting along with others, making friends.
that is not the point. i like working with others too. but waking up in complete darkness every day is not healthy. even if most students won't be harmed by it, some will.
sure, i understand the tradeoff you are making. and i expect many will if that's the only way to get some privacy. that is understandable.
but as a parent i would be worried sick if my kids would make that choice.
there is no reason a building has to be designed that way. it should be entirely possible to give everyone a small room with a window. how much personal space do you need to sleep? 4m² should be enough.
The lack of windows seems not great and perhaps the massiveness as well. But the basic idea of groups of rooms sharing a common area is fine by itself.
Idk how real estate works for large-scale dorm-blocks, but in my town, this would have to be listed as effectively a building full of storage closets.
Starting to smell misinfo on this...
it'll really mess the kids up. I felt awful waking up in that room. not having any natural light to cue you in to what time it is forces you to turn on the light to wake up. waking up to artificial light is an absolute miserable experience and if I had to do it for a year I would leave... of course all of these kids would have already signed a lease for the year and can't just afford to call that money a loss and live somewhere else.
but i would not stay. my mental health is not worth it.
It's a ring. The personal rooms have views to the outside, and the communal spaces open to the inside.
^ https://housing.umich.edu/residence-hall/munger/
But that seems like a bad solution to rent inflation.
Maybe someone else can design a building that has similarly good/better reviews and gives students windows. But to just assume that there are unproven better cost/benefit options at the needed scale... Well, does not seem justifiable either
Most of the 9 or 10 star reviews say the lack of windows is a problem, yet still give 9 or 10.
There are very few low ratings. A 1, a 5, a 6, the rest 7+.
You do, in fact, want to have 100 year water systems that would work in a cholera epidemic. Designing buildings for good airflow will probably not go out of style either.
Also, there are a bunch of things that we consider normal that were born of crisis: [1]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/war-famine-pestilence...
But for any long-lived building, thinking how it will work in various disaster scenarios is crucial, as your design will affect the life or death of thousands living there, even if it's "just" for one-two years. And given everything we know about the recurrence of pandemics, it's virtually certain that at least another one will come around within 100 years.
"Feels less dystopian than what you're used to"
It feels mean, for lack of a better word. Maybe particularly in Santa Barbara with its beautiful sunny days. There's something dystopian about putting young students in windowless rooms and figuring "they'll get used to it". Next step is to save money by getting rid of windows in apartments, office buildings, etc. and everyone will spend their day under artificial lighting. There will be social clubs for people who want to see the outside world once a week.
I had a windowless dorm room for a year in a very cold northeastern city where I couldn't realistically spend time outside for most of the year. It was attached to a windowed suite common room and I liked my roommates, so it was no big deal. I think I would have suffered a lot had I been a real social recluse, though.
Its a stick instead of a carrot in your most personal place, your home.
Are you saying that you liked only having 2 toilets and 1 shower per 16 people? Are you saying that since your experience was that, others should have similar?
Just trying to understand the purpose of you bringing up your anecdotal experience.
edit: Also looking at the link it looks like two students get 1 private room with a window, and some even get balconies. There's outside courtyards as well. Not sure how this is similar to the design mentioned.
https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2015/07/heres_your_firs...
It houses 96 suites, 6—7 bedrooms each. Each bedroom is 16x9 with their own private bathroom. In one of the blueprints in the UCSB article, there appears to be 1 bathroom per 8 suites [1].
To be fair, graduate housing is supposed to be a bit better than undergrad dorms — especially in regards to not having to share a bedroom with a total stranger. And maybe the UCSB's tiny single room design (windowless or not) will be a good tradeoff for not having to have a roommate as an undergrad.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_WUixhkwu4&t=32s
[1] https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/munge...
That looks like two bathrooms per 1 suite, or 1 bathroom per 4 rooms. I never shared a bathroom with less than 3 other people in my four years at college, so that doesn't seem particularly out of the ordinary for an undergraduate dorm.
The difference in size of rooms seems significant, though.
The podsize also isn't that bad in theory — they aren't much smaller than I remember the single rooms in my dorm being. The big difference is that the single rooms had windows, but also allowed for lofted beds — e.g. you would put your desk under the bed, and there'd be enough room to have a small couch where the desk would normally be. The UCSB pod furniture appears to be fixed (but again, it's just an architect drawing)
[0] https://www.independent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dormi...
The vibe of the building is similar to an hotel. As you enter, there is a foyer with elevators. The upstairs floors have windowless corridors where you enter the suites.
Each suite has a long corridor with doors to the rooms (4 on each side, if I remember correctly). Each room is on the "inside" of the building, so they don't have windows, but they have private bathrooms.
The living quarters have a shared double kitchen (two fridges, two cooking ranges, etc) and a double living room (two couches and two tvs). This room also has a wall of windows so there is plenty of sunlight there.
The suite I visited was coed and had graduate students from different schools living together. It was definitely an interesting vibe.
As any dorm, there are other amenities that are shared with everyone like a patio on the roof, a gym, rec room, and study spaces. Also, all the rooms are furnished, so it might be a good set up for someone that doesn't have furniture or doesn't want to worry about it.
When compared to other grad student housing options (Northwood 1-3 for single students or a shared room in Northwood 4-5), Munger is definitely an improvement (mostly it's location and the fact that is a new construction, to be honest) but it is a little bit more expensive than NW offerings.
You might not be able to extrapolate your own experience over all hotels, there are countless of hotels without windows, and it's surely not illegal everywhere.
Why would he put his name and legacy on it? There must be another side to the story, though it’s hard to imagine what.
Wikipedia mentions that he has done this at University of Michigan too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_w...
https://observer.com/2019/05/warren-buffett-vp-charlie-munge...
It's hard to imagine what "windowless" has to do with encouraging new ideas. It feels more like a cost-cutting measure.
Windowless dorms, crazy 97 year old billionaire amateur architect and a bunch of corrupt university staff and committee members who would do anything to save a few bucks. What could go wrong? Humanity at its finest.
Plus, everyone gets a single!
My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
But there's zero evidence this building will actually accomplish this. And, according to the architect who resigned, plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Achievement: kids lying on their beds doomscrolling because the common space in the room is dominated by a massive table with exactly enough room for everybody to bump elbows.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-sad-lamps.html
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/light-therapy/ab...
> My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
You and your college roommates had a choice. Did everybody in your dorm do that?
It sounds like an experiment but it could probably have been done slightly further "away from home" if it was about collaboration. Just have places to encourage people to hang out if they want to and not if they don't. Forcing them just feels like mental breakdown waiting-to-happen.
It's hubris that on one hand HN can bitch about how egomaniacal companies like Facebook and Google are, and yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
Where do we think those social-deaf, micro-optimizing engineers come from?
But one way or another, an architect is going to design things in a way that (they think) optimizes for certain behaviors and use whether that's socializing/collaborating or the maximum privacy/anonymity.
College kids living in dorms are turning inward? Do you have proof of that or that is just a hunch?
> ... yet on the other complain about how architecture designed to promote socialization is unfair.
The goal of making architecture promote socialisation is great. The complaint is not about the aim. The complaint is about how it is achieved.
Bedrooms with no natural light or natural air circulation suck. We don't build houses like this because it is not a good idea. Saying that your aim was to promote socialisation doesn't change that.
In an environment that respects human persons and their individuality as well as their social nature, the environment is structured according to subsidiarian principles. The town square is where anyone can socialize with anyone in town. Next the building courtyard is where anyone in the building can socialize with anyone else in the building. Next, the living room or common area of an apartment is where anyone can socialize with anyone in the apartment (analogously for single family homes). Individual bedrooms are for total privacy. I don't need to be coerced out of my bedroom if that's where I need to be because some crazy billionaire high on his own flatulence says so.
Be very wary of so-called "philanthropists". They are in love with their power to control and coerce, not the actual good.
To quote C. S. Lewis:
"My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
Your room is for sleep, and possibly study, though there are other places on campus with fewer distractions. You can choose to eat and work together in groups in your dining room. You socialize away from your suite so you don't annoy your roommates.
The dorms that I used had all sorts of unpleasant features:
-- giant shared bathrooms had gang showers, or required you go go down 2 flights of stairs and along a hallway for 100 yards -- shared larger rooms with multiple beds and desks, creating issues around differing schedules -- no kitchens or cooking facilities -- no food storage facilities, creating unsanitary conditions
etc.
As an example, a fairly common layout that I've seen is a 3-room quad -- two very small rooms with two bunk beds, two dressers and maybe a close adjoining a not particularly large 'common' room with 4 desks, perhaps a mini-fridge, and a beat-up couch.
Munger's vision is a palace compared to this.
Just because you had a poor dorm experience doesn't mean a brand new dorm built in 2021 needs to replicate that experience.
The vast majority of students? I don't think I knew a single person who lived without roommates when I was a university student. Freshman year nearly everybody shared a room with 1-2 other people, this new dorm would provide far more privacy than that.
I'm extremely confused. Were your blackout curtains made of sheet metal and welded to the walls?
The big thing was that I had a common room shared with my suite-mates which was large-ish, comfortable, and naturally lit. I spent my time at home there, but it's college so I spent most of my time out of the dorm anyway.
My big concern with this UCSB dorm would be for students who are significantly asocial. For the many who crave an isolated personal space, it could be majorly depressing. I get the idea that the entire goal of the design is to try to get people to not behave that way, but I doubt that will work.
I'd guess this dorm would be a great experience for a very significant majority of students, but basically a torture chamber for an unfortunate minority. Ergo it's probably an extremely bad idea.
I think one of the most bizarre things we accept in life is college kids being forced into doubles and triples. College "kids" are adults, not little kids in camp.
Plus, even with my window in my single suite room, my sleep cycle was so messed up half the time due to the occasional all-nighter that having no window might have actually been easier for me to deal with.
I went to uni. in the 70s in the UK. I never had to share. A few students at the same uni. did but it was almost always possible to move to a single room later in the year.
Do so many US students really have to share rooms, and if so why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_e...
If they already own the building, it is only construction costs whereas buying an apartment is possibly extortionate land or property prices from the current owner, which is purely demand-driven.
In addition to the window thing, the sheer scale of 4,500 students gives me pause. It's something like 10x the number of students of any dorm I've ever experienced.
For example, if I designed a cell phone that wasn't waterproof, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an engineer.
If I took a campaign contribution and voted against the people I my district, I would feel a tremendous sense of personal shame as an elected official.
And so on and so forth. This lack of transparency, accountability, critical thinking, personal responsibility, professionalism, etc has given us this bizarro world 21st century reality where one rich guy can soil the lives of countless others in a seemingly impeccable way. To name one undesired outcome of this local optimum in the multiverse of possible realities..
Edit: $200 million is nothing to sneeze at, so nothing against Charlie Munger for that. I do wish though that philanthropists would donate without strings attached, or else it ends up being an extension of their egos.
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Eschew flamebait."
Comments that consist only of denunciatory rhetoric and add no information are the opposite of what we're hoping for here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
Just in case anyone is worried, I have no opinion about the building or any of the people involved. Moderation like this is purely concerned with comment quality on HN.
Answer: you pee out the window (because someone is already using the sink)
Also, just emotionally, this can't possibly work. There's no way to succeed in such a high pressure environment like those college years with so little space and so little privacy.
This reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where they ride the exercise bikes and earn credits and watch advertisements 24/7.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I lived in Stanford for four of its most overcrowded years... as a junior I lived in an tiny two bedroom apartment that had three people in it, because the university needed to get extra people in and didn't have the space.
Obviously a ton of things wrong with this building, but the idea that this will cause people to have "so little space and so little privacy" ignores the fact that UCSB is in a tremendous housing crunch right now. Adding more housing isn't going to suddenly create a space with little space and privacy... that's the current state of affairs, and more housing will alleviate it. You have to examine this in the context of the university, not in a vacuum.
(Lack of windows is much more of an issue from my perspective)
I suspect that a lot of night-owl students will actually appreciate the lack of windows and roommates -- they'll sleep better.
I don't love this building, but I don't think (1) privacy is an actual problem with it, or (2) that the concerns of a sober living facility are necessarily the same as a college dormitory.
[1]: https://www.hfs.uw.edu/HFSExtranet/media/Floor-Plans/McMahon... (PDF)
Somehow, UCSB considers having 3 people[1] in a room about 2.5x the size as as "having privacy".
[1] https://www.housing.ucsb.edu/housing-options/options-filter/...
It was absolutely fantastic. I had a private space to sleep in and retreat to when necessary (a single is a major luxury for most undergrads!). I had a semi-private space shared with my suite-mates for work, socialization, etc. There were larger common spaces I could utilize around campus. It was my favorite housing situation I had while at school.
I could see it being a major problem for those who are highly socially reclusive, though.
I feel like you haven't been in a college dorm in at least the last decade. These look far better than most dorms I know of.
I'd much prefer this setup than the dorms I had to be in freshman year. Small rooms fitting 2, 3, even 4 people in one bedroom is crazy. At least I'd actually have a room to myself. They call the living quarters small, but they look roughly the same size as what I had if you subtracted my roommate's space out of the room.
Thank god I got an off-campus house with friends years 2-5.
Many seem to not understand that real estate is not unlimited-supply like most manufactured goods. Just because you want a particular home doesn’t mean expect it will go for MSRP like common retail goods. You’re bidding on a strictly limited supply, vs others willing to bid more. At some point reconsider what you’re actually trying to get, and that better is far more affordable elsewhere.
Your choices are completely irrelevant here. UCSB students have already determined that what is best for them is not what you describe as "better." Your mortgage rate in some cheaper locale is totally irrelevant to the cost of building a dwelling in Santa Barbara.