Does Charlie Munger’s Death Finally Put an End to Dormzilla?

For months, critics of a proposal for a massive, mostly windowless dormitory at the University of California at Santa Barbara have insisted the plan is dead, citing the university’s announcement that it had hired two architecture firms to design alternatives.

On Monday, with word that the building’s designer, the 99-year-old billionaire Charlie Munger, had died, it would seem that the structure critics had dubbed “Dormzilla” would also be abandoned. Munger’s death was announced by Berkshire Hathaway, where he was a vice chairman who helped Warren Buffett expand the business into an investment powerhouse.

In October the university’s vice chancellor for administrative services, Garry MacPherson, said in an internal memo to the campus that the firms the university had selected would be designing housing for 3,500 students to help meet long-range plans. The university has faced legal challenges from neighboring communities because of its alleged failure to build enough housing for its growing enrollment.

Munger had promised to provide at least $200 million toward construction of the dorm, which was expected to cost nearly $1.5 billion to build.

Earlier this month, when asked to confirm reports that Munger Hall was no longer on the table, a campus spokeswoman hedged. “The campus is moving forward with a separate student-housing project to meet our LRDP (long-range development plan) targets of 3,500 additional beds,” Kiki Reyes wrote. “We anticipate that this project will be funded with traditional debt financing. Mr. Munger has been a long-term supporter of our campus, and we have ongoing conversations with him.”

It’s not clear what those conversations might have involved, but Munger is someone the university clearly had an interest in keeping happy. He was one of the Santa Barbara campus’s most generous donors and had given hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges, including the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School.

On Wednesday, Reyes reiterated the university’s plans to proceed with the “separate housing project” for 3,500 students, but she declined to confirm reports that the Munger Hall project had been scrapped altogether. A campus-building committee is guiding the architects’ work, Reyes said, and after the planning and design phase, the university will seek permission from the UC system’s Board of Regents to expedite construction.

Munger’s donations often came with strings attached. The pledge to Santa Barbara was no exception; he insisted the massive dorm complex incorporate his designs, despite his lack of formal training as an architect.

In conversations with The Chronicle and other news outlets, Munger defended the controversial plan, which was scaled down from 4,500 to 3,500 beds, as one that would encourage students to come out of their bedrooms and interact with one another in the building’s large common areas and extensive amenities. Students would live in single rooms, about 94 percent of which would have virtual windows.

Munger told The Chronicle that, for most students, the opportunity to have private bedrooms would more than make up for the lack of natural daylight. His proposed windows would feature a “circadian-rhythm control system” that changes lighting levels and colors to imitate natural daylight.

His description to the university’s regents, when pitching the project in 2016, was more colorful: The bedrooms, he said, would have artificial portholes instead of windows — the kind one finds on Disney cruise ships, where a “starfish comes by and winks at your kid.”

As criticism of the project piled on from students, faculty members, and architects, Munger refused to budge, calling his critics “absolutely nuts” and saying he had no intention of changing his design.

“Modern life,” he told The Chronicle, “is full of people clamoring about things they know nothing about. This [Munger Hall] makes nothing but sense.”

The university’s chancellor, Henry T. Yang, who had been one of Munger Hall’s most ardent supporters, issued a statement on Wednesday calling Munger “a creative thinker and a generous supporter of universities, including our UC Santa Barbara campus.” He said that Munger’s contributions, which include the Munger Physics Residence, would “have an enduring impact on our campus.”