Is a Massive Dorm Project ‘Inspired and Revolutionary’ or ‘Billionaire Egomania’?

It’s 2 a.m., and a fire has broken out at Munger Hall at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The building’s 4,500 undergraduate residents stream down its 11 stories through more than a dozen fire exits and crowd shoulder-to-shoulder on the building’s small lot, where they’re hemmed in by streets, a police station, and a fire station that’s attempting to maneuver a half-dozen fire trucks and their hoses into position.

Rob Hazard, the fire marshal of Santa Barbara County, described that scenario on Tuesday in a phone call with The Chronicle in which he outlined his misgivings about the proposed 1.68-million-square-foot dormitory. Finding places for evacuated students to go, where they won’t be in the way of public-safety crews, is just one of the challenges posed by the project, which, if built, would be one of the densest residential-housing units on the planet.

The proposed dorm, which the university expects to complete in 2025, is the brainchild of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner and a 97-year-old with unconventional ideas about architecture. Although he has no formal architectural training, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into major building projects on college campuses, with the caveat that he gets to design them. Munger offered the Santa Barbara campus $200 million toward the dorm, whose expected price tag has been widely reported as $1.5 billion.

Dennis J. McFadden, an architect who had consulted with Santa Barbara for 15 years, resigned last month from the university’s Design Review Committee in protest. The plan that he said had been presented to the committee as a done deal was in his mind a “social and psychological experiment” on undergraduates, who could suffer from the lack of sunlight or fresh air. That’s because 94 percent of the single-occupancy bedrooms have no windows.

In an op-ed published on Monday in the Los Angeles Times, McFadden wrote that for students assigned to bedrooms in the center of the building, “the experience would be comparable to living at second base and being forced to walk to the center-field wall to find out if it’s cloudy outside.”

When his resignation letter was leaked on social media and news of the contested project went viral, some described it as an extreme example of caving in to the whims of a rich donor. The problem, they said, has only gotten worse as public investments in higher education have declined.

“Financially strapped public institutions are vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy ‘philanthropists’ who hope to leverage relatively small donations for outsize social experiments,” Dana Buntrock, a professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley who has been compiling information about the contested project, wrote.

Design questions aside, “the mere fact that a donor is able to completely bypass the ordinary process of decision making at a university on a project of this magnitude is to my mind troubling,” Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University, said in an interview. Reich is the author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better.

“It speaks to the coddling of the rich person’s ego that their business success should translate seamlessly to any philanthropic cause or project they pursue,” he said.

Donors who give money for faculty positions aren’t normally allowed to pick who gets hired, Reich said. Colleges should set similar boundaries for donors wanting to dictate the design of buildings they help pay for. Assuming Munger receives a hefty tax break for his donation, Reich tweeted, “we citizens are paying for billionaire egomania and this UCSB dorm in the form of forgone tax revenue.”

A former architecture critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times also weighed in, calling the design a “sick joke” and “a jail masquerading as a dormitory.”

In an interview on Friday with The Chronicle, Munger brushed aside complaints about his design as “malarkey,” described his critics as “absolutely nuts,” and said that a similar project he’d designed for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has been a huge success. This one, he said, will be even better.

“You’re only sleeping in the bedroom,” Munger said. “When you want sunlight, you go out into a room with a real window.”

He said that if the university demanded changes in his design, he’d withdraw his donation.

As criticism of the project has mounted, the university and the architects hired to translate Munger’s ideas into blueprints have scrambled to shift the narrative. Navy F. Banvard, an architect with Van Tilburg, Banvard, and Soderbergh, called Munger “the driving force behind the building design” his firm had submitted to the university. Critics have blasted the use of “virtual windows” that Munger said he’d modeled on the simulated portals in all but a few bedrooms of Disney cruise ships. Sunlight, they argue, is crucial to students’ emotional well-being.

Banvard offered a different take. In an email exchange with The Chronicle, he said Munger wanted to encourage collaboration and social interaction among students and to de-emphasize the use of bedrooms. To do that, Banvard said, Munger made the bedrooms as efficient as possible and the shared spaces rich in amenities. The amenities would include a small market, a fitness center, a gastro pub, music rooms, and a one-acre landscaped rooftop courtyard.

“This is Mr. Munger’s approach to substantively improve the mental and emotional health of the students, and it has been a key guiding principle throughout the design process,” Banvard wrote. He conceded that the use of virtual windows was “unique and a bit unorthodox,” but he said that people who had visited a full-size mockup of the house and bedroom Munger created to test his theories had found that the virtual windows “very much replicate natural daylight.”

Banvard said he also wanted to clear up misconceptions about the building, including the idea that it would have only two entrances and would therefore be a firetrap. Although there are two main entrances for the 4,500 occupants, the building would also have 14 fire exits and would fully comply with fire and other building codes, Banvard said.

Hazard, the Santa Barbara fire marshal, said that while the exits seemed “robust,” he worried about where the thousands of students would go when they evacuated since the massive building would take up nearly the entire lot.

Normally, students would be able to move onto a parking lot or field, but the proposed site is hemmed in by streets, a police station, and a fire station, he said. “When we’re looking at 4,500 students exiting the building at 2 a.m. and six or eight fire trucks are pulling up, we’ll be trying to navigate through a sea of people standing around taking cellphone videos,” Hazard said. His department would respond to fires, but the campus’s own fire department is responsible for making sure the building meets safety codes.

Asked about that concern, Banvard said the project was undergoing modeling to verify the ability of residents to safely and quickly evacuate the building.

‘It’s Weird, Honestly’

The Munger Graduate Residences at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor offers a look at a much smaller version of a similar dorm. It has single-occupancy bedroom suites, each with windowless bedrooms and a kitchen, a dining room, and community space that do have windows.

The Michigan dorm received mixed reviews on ratings websites, with many students welcoming the extensive amenities, including a rooftop track, game rooms, private rooms, and kitchens, but others complaining about the lack of windows. “Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic,” a Michigan medical student wrote in January on veryapt.com.

Last year Hassan Kobeissi, then a graduate student at Michigan, posted a YouTube video tour of his bedroom in which he notes the sparse furnishings, his hamper, shelves, deodorant, and, matter-of-factly, the absence of natural sunlight.

“If you look around, there’s no windows in this room,” Kobeissi says. “That’s something I had to get used to when I moved in here. I’m honestly still not used to it at all. It’s weird, honestly …" He then points out an alarm clock on his bedside table, which he got for $30 on Amazon. It has a light feature that simulates sunrise. Without it, he wouldn’t know when to get up.

“There’ll be times when I wake up, and whether it’s 5 a.m. or 5 p.m., or 1 p.m. or 1 a.m., there’s no way for me to know what time it is in here since there’s no window,” he says. “Honestly if you spend all day in here, you have no idea what time it is.”

Another video shows the common areas of the suite he shared with six other students. Again, he mentions that the shortage of windows — there are six along one wall of the suite — is his biggest complaint.

Who Calls the Shots?

In his resignation letter, McFadden said the building design “was described as 100% complete, approval was not requested, no vote was taken, and no further submittals are intended or required.”

Banvard said that the design was “an ongoing and iterative process” and that some elements were still being developed. Asked whether the Design Review Committee would get a crack at further changes, a campus spokeswoman did not respond. But in an email last week, she indicated that plans for the dorm were moving ahead, despite McFadden’s objections.

In July the chancellor, Henry T. Yang, praised Munger for the dorm’s “inspired and revolutionary design concept.”

The dorm’s modular residential units will be prefabricated offsite, then installed at a pace of about 25 pods per week, cutting down on the cost and construction time, the university said.

Every room, with or without operable windows, would be provided with a continuous supply of fresh air at about twice the rate required by building and mechanical codes, Banvard wrote. “One could argue that this may be an improvement in air quality, as it does not require a student to open the window for fresh air.” The virtual windows in most of the bedrooms would have “circadian-rhythm control systems” that would mimic the level and warmth of daylight. All of the common areas, he wrote, would have access to direct natural light.

Geovany Lucero, a fifth-year senior who serves as student advocate general for the student government, plans to survey the entire student body this week, and feels students have largely been left out of the decision-making process.

“When an architect who has served the university for 15 years resigns in protest and the university announces it’s excited about moving ahead with the project anyway, it makes me feel that students’ needs and lives are not at the center of its priorities,” Lucero said on Tuesday. “It’s dangerous how powerful and wealthy people can make decisions like this for the university.”