[HN Gopher] Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm
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Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm
Author : danso
Score : 531 points
Date : 2021-10-29 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.com)
| danso wrote:
| FWIW, this is the university's press release, titled "Absolutely
| stunning", about the dorm:
| https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Oh, it's stunning alright.
| macinjosh wrote:
| I mean, they aren't wrong. It's just not stunning in the way
| they perhaps meant it to be.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Putting aside any specific complaint, it's crazy to me that an
| amateur architect designed this building and donated with the
| stipulation that the blueprints can't be altered. That has to be
| peak Dunning-Kruger
| noyeastguy wrote:
| Munger obviously cares for young people and education if you read
| or listen to him. I feel like the people complaining about
| economical living conditions are going to turn around and propose
| erasing college debt, without ever addressing the cause. This is
| one way to make college more affordable and allow students a
| better chance of meeting people.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| By that logic, we should all be living in prison cells.
| proteal wrote:
| I think I understand where they're coming from by designing such
| a large, on-campus dorm. There's limited space at UCSB to
| physically house kids nearby. If you look at the map, there's
| only one walkable community to UCSB and that consists of rented
| single family homes (2,000 sqft shacks) that you cram 20-30
| students in. I would argue that living in the dystopian mega dorm
| might make more sense for lots of students who want to be on
| campus but can't afford nearby rentals. However, after living in
| a windowless apartment during lockdown, I would strongly suggest
| they revise their proposal. The toll on mental health that no
| natural light takes is an insidious threat and should be avoided.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| iv is not many single family homes. it's most duplexes. there's
| some larger buildings in the back. it's a highly dense party
| town. it scares parents and donors. ucsb has one of the lowest
| rates of greek life attendees in the entire uc system. why?
| because maybe you need to pay to join a frat if you want to
| party elsewhere. at ucsb you will have more than enough parties
| to attend even if you never set foot in a greek house
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Why does UCSB admit so many students it obviously can't
| support? That seems to be a big issue. I saw it happen when I
| was at Purdue too. They started putting bunkbeds in the
| _public_ dorm lobby because they couldn't support all the
| students they admitted. Its ridiculous that universities are
| doing this to their students.
| leafmeal wrote:
| I think part of it could be the 9% guarantee[1] which
| mandates that the top 9% of California high school students
| be offered a place at at least one UC.
|
| [1]: https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-
| requi...
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| If that was the problem then the UCs could just cut down
| their international student admissions to compensate. No,
| the problem is that the UC system as an organization is
| fundamentally broken, corrupt to the bone, and has all but
| lost sight of their intended purpose of creating and
| proliferating knowledge.
| leafmeal wrote:
| This is a strong claim, without any evidence to back it
| up. There _may_ be some truth here, but against most
| metrics, UCs are among the top research institutions in
| the world with amazing contributions to science,
| medicine, etc. etc.
|
| Could you explain where you're coming from?
| pas wrote:
| I don't get why don't they simply build higher, so more people
| can get them windowz.
| satya71 wrote:
| And we are subsidizing this hubris project with a massive tax
| break for Charles Munger.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| The smells. The noise. The single shower.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| Hijacking the thread a bit, but I'm not sure people understand
| how predatory student housing is in aggregate.
|
| At many colleges you don't even have a choice to live in the
| dorms or not as an undergrad, living on campus for 1-2 years is
| tied to enrollment.
|
| On top of this lots of financing for college housing is wonky,
| because some colleges do not pay property tax. (So you can have
| the college hold the land and some third party company
| finance/build the building students are forced to live in.) This
| is a significant part of ACC's business model.[0] Student loan
| money is used to pay rent on these buildings, so it's indirectly
| funded by taxpayers.
|
| The power colleges have over students lives is concerning
| regardless of if this dorm design is good or bad. If UCSB put in
| one of these requirements students could be forced to take part
| in a social experiment designed by a billionaire. UCSB, or
| another campus w/ a Munger dorm, doesn't have this requirement
| today but could have it tomorrow.
|
| 0: https://www.americancampus.com/
| boredguy8 wrote:
| That's a big fast 'citation needed' for the initial claim.
|
| I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it's wholly false,
| at least at the myriad of colleges I've worked with, and
| generally true in urban settings [0]. Housing is often a loss
| for the university (hence the explosion of PPP to try and
| recoup those losses). Instead, especially at places like UCSB,
| it's landlords in the area that are a large financial burden
| for students. At my last university, rental occupancy within a
| 5 mile radius was at 98%, which exerts a huge upwards pressure
| on rent. Students were BEGGING for more housing, because campus
| housing was on-par or lower than the area, and comes with many
| other benefits related to travel and campus resources.
| Furthermore, college housing often provides a 9 or 10 month
| lease option, which can save a lot of money over an annual
| lease.
|
| Additionally, there is regular evidence [1][2] that living on
| campus helps with retention rates, which is critical to
| avoiding the 'spending money, never getting the credential'
| problem plaguing higher ed. In this light, even if campus
| housing were somewhat more expensive, the benefit in completion
| could easily outweigh those costs.
|
| Munger looks terrible, but there's a HIGH demand and LOW supply
| for housing at UCSB, and at urban colleges in general. It's not
| a cash cow for many, if any, campuses. Certainly not public
| ones.
|
| 0: "'When you look at the metros that have exceptionally high
| cost of living expenses like New York, Boston and San
| Francisco, there has been research done that those areas can be
| significantly cheaper for a student to live on campus,' says
| Amy Glynn, vice president of financial aid and community
| initiatives at CampusLogic, a firm that advises higher
| education institutions."
|
| https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
|
| 1:
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236730093_The_Causa...
|
| 2: https://www.ucf.edu/news/students-living-on-campus-
| experienc...
| gwright wrote:
| > building students are forced to live in.
|
| This is a a bit overwrought. Students are voluntarily applying
| and accepting an offer to attend. They aren't being "forced" to
| do anything.
|
| It may be that many people think this is a bad deal
| (financially, socially, etc) but it is a deal that is entered
| into voluntarily.
| some_random wrote:
| It's hard to go to a university these days and not feel like
| you're getting scammed every single step of the way.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If UCSB put in one of these requirements students could be
| forced to take part in a social experiment
|
| Well nobody needs to go to UCSB. The US is fortunate that it's
| got such a huge and massively diverse range of options for
| university.
|
| I guess if the results are bad they'll suffer for recruitment
| and the problem will hopefully correct itself.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The grad programs at UCSB are not to be sneezed at.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I'd sneeze at them if they tried to make me live in a
| window-less room.
| slownews45 wrote:
| To be crystal clear, at least in California on-campus housing
| is generally where students want to live.
|
| With berkeley on campus housing can rely on FA awards, much
| more flexible in terms of reasons to cancel (ie, you withdraw
| from school), big issue with group leases off campus when one
| person flakes.
|
| What's interesting is that there is a view that we can't try
| out things like this in the US. There are so many critics, and
| so few doers.
|
| Be worth seeing what students think of the housing. I realize
| that may not align with some of the NIMBYs and critics, but
| ultimately they should have voice as stakeholders.
|
| And why not try something out?
|
| For those not familiar, there is a big shortage of on campus
| housing, many schools are waiving requirements to live on
| campus in year 1
| bsanr2 wrote:
| >The dormitory's nine identical residential floors would be
| organized into eight "houses" with eight "suites" (shown here)
| with eight bedrooms.
|
| Sounds unironically like something Scientology-adjacent.
| [deleted]
| pxc wrote:
| If this thing gets built and then abandoned, it has the potential
| to be the most haunted building on Earth
| csours wrote:
| OT, but don't you miss the Action Architect movies like Towering
| Inferno and Death Wish.
| black_13 wrote:
| Corona corners
| zucker42 wrote:
| One piece of context that people might not realize: the student
| housing stock around UCSB is extremely limited. I've heard
| stories about students living in Ventura (40 minutes away by
| car), some students (who presumably are guaranteed housing) have
| been placed in hotels[1], and students living out of cars[2]. So
| this may be the reason that administrators feel pressured to
| accept this building.
|
| Still taking $200 million dollars from an eccentric billionaire
| to build his ideal building is a bit of a strange decision to me.
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/pfvasz/hous...
|
| [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/p91gjl/how_...
| foolfoolz wrote:
| the ventura example seems extremely unlikely to be 100% supply
| or cost related. housing is limited but there's cheaper places
| than ventura that are much closer
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I lived both in my car and in Carpinteria when I was a grad
| student there, so I'm 1.5 for 3 on your list and I wouldn't
| touch this place. What happened to the San Clemente apartments
| on El Camino?
| dqpb wrote:
| Munger Hall, more like Munger Hell!
|
| I feel claustrophobic even if I'm in windowed room where the
| windows don't open.
|
| You basically have to cross your fingers and pray that the HVAC
| system is superb and will remain superb indefinitely and without
| fail.
|
| Oh well, I guess this is fitting on many levels - it's a
| reflection of the psychological boxes universities shove their
| students into, it's an extension of how California promises
| utopia and then delivers dystopia, and it's an example of the
| weakened minds and resolve of Santa Barbarans.
| some_random wrote:
| Watching old people solve the "problem" of young people not
| socializing enough by turning their living quarters into a prison
| is exactly the sort of thing I've come to expect.
| adenozine wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.hfs.uw.edu/HFSExtranet/media/Floor-
| Plans/McMahon... (PDF)
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I agree. With the exception of not having a window. This
| setup looks better in every way than all of the dorms at the
| college I went to.
|
| 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/...
| jefftk wrote:
| 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)
| structural wrote:
| 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.
| gbronner wrote:
| 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.
| Bradlinc wrote:
| I agree. Had I been given the choice of no windows or no
| roommates, I would choose no roommates.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Your point is good, but the profane is inappropriate.
| throwawayninja wrote:
| 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.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Perhaps profane words are appropriate and suited to naming a
| profane architectural concept.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| No it's not.
| thehappypm wrote:
| This dorm gives everyone their own private room, far more
| privacy than the forced doubles and triples many (most) college
| have today.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > 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.
| awillen wrote:
| "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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Could be acceptable for few years if rent was extremely cheap.
| There is lot to trade if living like this would cost less than a
| hundred a month.
| ctdonath wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| Is your mortgage in Santa Barbara?
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| 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?
| HPsquared wrote:
| To quote Zoolander: "What is this, a school for ants?!"
| rglullis wrote:
| Have I misread it, or is TFA claiming that this building is going
| to cost _1.5 Billion Dollars_ to house 4500 students? Over
| $300,000 for each "nice looking" prison cell ?!
| HPsquared wrote:
| California markup, I guess.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yikes, there's hardly space to keep even a guitar in those tiny
| rooms! Depressing.
|
| Is it common these days that dorm rooms are so small?
| pseudolus wrote:
| How did this pass any sort of litmus test? Putting 4500 stressed
| out kids, for whom many this dorm will represent their first
| extended away from home experience, in small windowless cells?
| Modern building codes were created, in part, precisely to avoid
| this type of design.
| mola wrote:
| It passed the test of "being a billionaire with a vision in the
| US"
| DevKoala wrote:
| You will live in ze pod.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's like getting an inside room on a cruise ship. The difference
| of course is that on a cruise ship you're on vacation and usually
| not in your room except to sleep. But I guess that's what they
| want to college kids to do...
| rg111 wrote:
| I see other concerns being voiced which I agree with, like the
| lack of windows and having only two entrances.
|
| Other than these valid safety concerns, and in an ideal world, I
| find myself in support of the project.
|
| I absolutely abhor sharing a bedroom with total strangers. To me,
| it is totally unacceptable.
|
| I would rather live in a physically constrained space rather than
| share it with a stranger, or even a friend.
|
| But I would like a window that I can open.
|
| And I mentioned ideal world because this should drive down cost
| of college for students.
|
| As they are all stacked up in a smaller place eating up less
| space horizontally, their accommodation cost should be down.
|
| But I don't think that this would realistically happen.
| oefrha wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Huh, just so happens Munger Graduate Residence is one of the
| nicest residences, or maybe _the_ nicest residence at Stanford
| (or at least was when I was there).
| meristem wrote:
| Hm. I'm thinking of it as training for long range spaceflight or
| tight LEO or other type of space station---crowded, microscopic
| personal space, no view or just darkness of space, light
| engineered to support circadian cycles.
|
| Will this be good for students in SB? Based on psychological
| research in last few decades, nope.
| elihu wrote:
| I agree with the architect's criticism and I don't think I'd want
| to live in a room without windows without some compensating
| factor.
|
| It is interesting, though, from the point of view of exploring
| ways for people to live. One of the main objections to human
| habitation on Mars is that people will have to live in radiation-
| hardened bunkers, probably underground. A lot of people consider
| lack of windows to be an absolute show-stopper. I don't think
| that's the case, but I do think that in order to go without
| windows you at least need to pay a lot of careful attention to
| creating natural light conditions and simulating wide-open
| spaces. Maybe you'd have to have more floor-space per person than
| you would otherwise, and maybe you'd need to have a few very
| large rooms with walls and ceiling painted a flat color that's
| hard to focus directly on and looks like sky.
|
| It doesn't seem like the designer of this dorm is doing much of
| that; it seems more like they're just running the "let's take
| away windows and see what happens" experiment. People are
| adaptable and some of them won't mind, but still I don't think
| it's going to be very successful on average.
| balozi wrote:
| I like the idea of increased density for environmental and
| economic benefits it produces.
|
| But I hate the idea of "social and psychological experimentation"
| by some do-gooder billionaire.
|
| I like the idea of experimenting with uncommon modes of
| provisioning housing resources.
|
| But I hate the idea of skirting a competent review process by
| rubber-stamping a donor's designs.
| throw7 wrote:
| No windows, no natural light... this is hilarious. Why not go the
| whole nine yards and construct one of those capsule hotels like
| in Japan? :D
| p1mrx wrote:
| Our collective obsession over "natural" light is the main driver
| behind things like open-plan offices.
|
| The sun isn't magic; why don't we define natural light by its
| spectrum as a function of time, and then replicate it with LEDs
| and a bit of software? This wouldn't even cost much to run,
| because the demand curve matches the supply curve of solar
| energy.
| keyanp wrote:
| While it appears at first glance to be terrible, it is a tradeoff
| that is possibly worth making.
|
| My first year of undergrad was spent living in a "forced triple"
| (3 people in a dorm room meant for 2). I would have much
| preferred a single room even if it meant no windows. Certainly
| would have led to more productivity and sanity.
| mchusma wrote:
| I love this building concept. Affordable housing is critical, and
| the structure of grouping the rooms together is a great fit for
| the college lifestyle. Having your own room is pretty awesome
| versus bunk beds (my college experience).
|
| There is nothing bad about this that I can see. If you don't want
| to live there, don't do it. But describing this as some kind of
| hellscape is way off the mark.
| advisedwang wrote:
| > If you don't want to live there, don't do it
|
| There are going to be some students with no choice. With 4500
| units there, it's going to be an essential part of UCSB's
| housing.
| yyy888sss wrote:
| For $1.5 Billion, why don't they just build 1000 luxury 5 bedroom
| mansions? If they had the land area, they could even build 5000
| individual detached homes for that budget. They could even
| splurge and give each bedroom a window!
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| That's a great way to think about it! If we're spending $X on
| Y-thing, what other things could we have instead for the same
| $X?
|
| That said, I'm guessing the reason is that there is not enough
| land, close enough to the University, on which the City of
| Santa Barbara will allow them to build.
|
| Also, including the assumed cost of the land, you may not be
| able to build 1000 of them.
|
| Also, also, the university may have authority to build on-
| campus 'dorms' but not 'houses.'
| mikeg8 wrote:
| The do not have anything close to that amount of land area.
| VortexDream wrote:
| $1.5b for an apartment building seems insanely high to me. Is
| that what they usually cost?
| xbar wrote:
| Good to know that I shouldn't recommend UCSB to my daughter.
| dirtyid wrote:
| >Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the
| condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.
|
| Blueprints translate to reality exactly zero times in any large
| scale building projects. Plenty of billionaires richer than
| Munger learned this lesson, including crown/royalty that
| literally rule countries. That said, I am facinated by what
| Munger's house is like if he's this obessed with socially
| engineering others via architecture.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Being in a room with no windows seems like a great way to get
| seasonal affective disorder all year long.
| lnanek2 wrote:
| He seems kind of spoiled to me. My apartment has two windows. The
| one in the bedroom is always closed because my wife works the
| night shift and needs to sleep during the day. The other window
| always has the shades drawn because I'm too lazy to put on
| clothes and don't want to bother my neighbors with kids when I
| get up at 6:30AM each morning and do my VR boxing practice in the
| living room.
|
| Pretty sure plenty of college students would be OK with the false
| window shown in the article for reduced cost. The ones that want
| the outside rooms with windows could pay more. Upgrade the false
| window to a free OLED TV and students would probably pick
| interior over that for the same price. Plenty of office buildings
| have windows that don't open, and college kids with windows that
| do open tend to throw TVs and the like out of them, so I doubt
| exterior rooms with windows would even have openable ones with a
| building that tall.
| [deleted]
| JeremyNT wrote:
| The "windowless dorm rooms" sound terrible at first, but the
| rendering shows what's described as a "false window." Is this a
| problem we can solve with technology?
|
| I'm intrigued by this idea a lot, since I am moving to a house
| with a small finished room in the basement.
|
| Does anybody know the current state of "false window" tech? It
| seems to me you really need several things for a true false
| window: first, a large amount of light production that matches
| the color temperature of a typical outdoor environment at the
| given time of day, and second, something that displays some kind
| of plausible outdoor-seeming scene.
|
| You'd also need physical depth and movement to facilitate
| adjusting the directionality of the light source to replicate the
| changes that occur as the sun traverses the sky.
|
| This sounds really difficult to me - is there an example of a
| device that can pull this off well?
| jtlienwis wrote:
| I haven't trusted Charlie Munger at all since reading a paper he
| wrote about how wonderful an investment in Coca-Cola stock is. He
| told all about their great growth rate, cash flow etc but never
| once mentioned if drinking caffeinated sugar water on a regular
| basis is good for you (its not, its very unhealthy).
| mikeg8 wrote:
| He was giving investment advise, not nutritional advice. Just
| because you don't agree with the morality does not mean he was
| incorrect or dishonest.
| b20000 wrote:
| The cost of housing needs to be brought down in California via
| regulation. This could be done by no longer permitting
| commissions on the sale of real estate for example and by only
| allowing for a small fixed fee in a transaction, e.g. $500. One
| of the main problems with the rising cost is the realtors who
| constantly jack up the price artifically.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > his could be done by no longer permitting commissions on the
| sale of real estate for example and by only allowing for a
| small fixed fee in a transaction, e.g. $500. One of the main
| problems with the rising cost is the realtors who constantly
| jack up the price artifically.
|
| Nonsense, the sellers' agent does not own the property and the
| buyers agent does not put up the money to purchase it. They are
| facilitating a large transaction of money between two wealthy
| parties. Those two wealthy parties still exist, and still want
| to transact properties, even if you take out the middle man
| that facilitate the transaction.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| one reason the cost of housing it's so high is regulation.
| building a 4 unit apartment will cost you about 400-600k in
| city and permit fees
| theroqwpeo wrote:
| As a previous comment pointed out this isn't the first of the
| Munger residence.
|
| You can read the student reviews here:
| https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
| danso wrote:
| Munger also helped fund (though not design, AFAIK) the Munger
| graduate residences at Stanford (which, AFAIK, weren't hated):
| https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/munger-graduate-resi...
|
| But a key thing at Stanford and UM is that these were _graduate
| residences_ , with 1 to 1 bedroom and bath ratio, and full
| sized bedrooms. Not 8 undergrad pods per bathroom. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020361/absolutely-stunning
|
| https://www.independent.com/2021/07/27/ucsb-offers-new-detai...
| danso wrote:
| as someone pointed out in another thread, and based on this
| other rendering, the bathroom-to-person ratio looks like 2 to
| 8
|
| https://www.independent.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/07/dormi...
| bogomipz wrote:
| For those not familiar with UCSB, it's basically a beach campus.
| The campus itself has two beaches located within. The idea of
| creating windowless dorm rooms in a location blessed with natural
| ventilation is as dystopian as it is absurd. Further Santa
| Barbara being located in Southern California, is quite hot much
| of the year. It's interesting that Charlie Munger is essentially
| designing dorms for "other people's" grandchildren. There is no
| way Munger's grandkids would ever have to live in windowless
| rooms as they would likely be renting houses off campus. NYU in
| NYC has a similar self-made housing problem - how to grow the
| business by growing the number of students year or year in
| perpetuity. And doing so in areas that already have affordable
| housing shortages for their regular full time residents.
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
| Syzygies wrote:
| 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.
| pasabagi wrote:
| > 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.
| kixiQu wrote:
| > just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air
|
| Well....
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-
| curio...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >Outside air is just above 400ppm
|
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| >similar building
|
| 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.
| musingsole wrote:
| 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!
| [deleted]
| loeg wrote:
| 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.
| tov247 wrote:
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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...
|
| There's also the idea of frozen pathogens thawing and
| infecting animals, which has happened recently: https://w
| ww.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.
| musingsole wrote:
| Gamblers fallacy. Not sure what you're contributing
| besides.
| loeg wrote:
| 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.
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.
| musingsole wrote:
| Nah, you're right. Nothing to learn from the events of
| just a few hours ago, so go ahead and board them up. What
| do I care? They're only humans.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't break the site guidelines like this, or like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038609. We're
| trying for something quite different here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nuerow wrote:
| > _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.
| graeme wrote:
| > but with COVID in the rear-view mirror for the
| vaccinated, I'm not sure it's a major concern.
|
| 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://mo
| bile.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/aha
| ndvanish/status/14534083120667...
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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!
| wpietri wrote:
| Wow, some of the quotes here:
|
| "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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| 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.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| Munger is exclusively a graduate student dorm at Michigan,
| so these folks are in a slightly different situation than
| college freshmen.
| shawndrost wrote:
| You're really misrepresenting the information from the link.
| Munger is the top-rated residence in the area.
| https://www.veryapt.com/Apartments-L7646-ann-arbor-
| central-c...
| daun wrote:
| Either several of those positive reviews are fake, or those
| MBA students are functionally illiterate.
| craftinator wrote:
| 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.
| elpatoisthebest wrote:
| 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| That's how you know they are real.
| nuerow wrote:
| > _Munger is the top-rated residence in the area._
|
| Does this mean Munger is great or that every other sizeable
| offering in the area is even worse?
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _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.
| [deleted]
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| "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."
|
| Absolutely amazing
| nottorp wrote:
| So... did this billionaire get rich by selling anti
| depressants?
|
| I'd understand this as his cunning plan to get richer then.
| hangonhn wrote:
| He's the other half of Berkshire Hathaway --- Warren Buffet's
| company.
| ep103 wrote:
| 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?
| nojs wrote:
| > "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"
|
| Could you share the background for this?
| Avocadoe wrote:
| 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."
|
| [1] https://fourpillarfreedom.com/charlie-munger-the-
| first-10000...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is this 100k in 1950 dollars or what?
| lvspiff wrote:
| 1990 was when the quote was made so 100k in 1990 dollars
| - so $200K today
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Squid game look less unrealistic after reading this.
| orbital223 wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| Mungloon Wallet City
| 542458 wrote:
| To be fair, his previous works at UM and Stanford (confusingly,
| both called "Munger Graduate Residence") have generally very
| good reviews.
|
| 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.
| sireat wrote:
| This is almost like a living will version of:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby which at least
| had some crazy/funny provisions.
|
| This Munger monstrosity is positively distopian. What happened
| to Charlie's wisdom?
| lozenge wrote:
| And the university has to stump up the other $1,300 million.
|
| And the investor will probably be dead before anybody can see
| the effect on students.
| patycake wrote:
| >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.
| [deleted]
| javagram wrote:
| 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).
| praptak wrote:
| We really need a way to protect ourselves against what the rich
| are doing to the rest of us.
| tclancy wrote:
| It would require a system other than one designed around how
| the market clears.
| [deleted]
| sourthyme wrote:
| It is scary how far this made it. All because of money, and
| the thought of losing it.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Indeed, those greedy administrators that accepted money
| from Munger should be let go.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Let go? Sued.
| macinjosh wrote:
| 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I blame the administration at least as much as the donor in
| this case.
|
| It's their responsibility to say no, and they failed in that
| job.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| VRay wrote:
| How much funding are we giving our universities, and how
| much is Europe giving them?
|
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| But that would be socialism /s
| ctdonath wrote:
| 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".
| ripe wrote:
| 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.
| dantheman wrote:
| Yep, incompetent bureaucrats instead of raising prices
| for water decided to try and save a buck without
| understanding anything.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| In this case it's simple, just don't take the money.
| JackFr wrote:
| Well, in this case (and frankly many others) simply saying
| "No" would be the best start.
| gbronner wrote:
| 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...
| bob1029 wrote:
| This is really difficult when a large part of the population
| is either apathetic or actively sympathetic to the policies
| of these insane people.
| dantheman wrote:
| Very simple, just turn down his money.
| gaze wrote:
| I think people feel more powerless than apathetic.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| - Your privacy is being invaded. Look at snowden, PRISM,
| facebook!
|
| - Don't have anything to hide.
|
| - At least use Firefox.
|
| - Nah.
|
| Sorry but no, it's definitly apathy.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Elon's vision is being the king of Mars, where the only
| law is his own. I'm not sold.
| api wrote:
| When did he say that?
|
| 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.
| katmannthree wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| You're right, and what if that's the point?
|
| 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.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, compare SpaceX against, say, SLS, and it looks
| like a pretty cost-effective form of government spending.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Really makes you think...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| ep103 wrote:
| There is power... in the union...
| dejawu wrote:
| 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
| time0ut wrote:
| It looks like a prison. Maybe worse. I think prison cells still
| have a small window (at least what I have seen in media).
| Totally crazy.
| altacc wrote:
| 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.
| canaus wrote:
| Wait until you hear about programmers who frequent tech
| forums.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| 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.
| pxc wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't fulminate._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kristjansson wrote:
| Good to have everything under one roof in Santa Barbara, a city
| where you famously can't go outside 9 months of the year
| krembanan wrote:
| Are there no laws against this in the U.S? In Norway there are
| building codes that prohibits bedrooms without a _real_ window.
| macinjosh wrote:
| 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.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Are such laws necessary? if you want to not live there, don't.
| depaya wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
| finnh wrote:
| 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]
| sojournerc wrote:
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 2 entrances != 2 exits.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Multi unit buildings are REGULARLY build with ZERO window
| exits.
|
| 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.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| 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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| 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.
| rvba wrote:
| In the eyes of rightwingers even building code is literal
| communism.
|
| On a side note, I wonder if the billionaire apllies own ideas
| on himself, or is he a "special exception".
| karaterobot wrote:
| I appreciate the architect being willing to resign in protest
| over what he believes is an irresponsible action that will damage
| the students' well-being. We need people willing to put their
| reputation and finances on the line when they think something is
| dangerous.
|
| Personally, I'm not convinced by the argument he's making though.
| I'd like to see some evidence that not having a window in your
| sleeping quarters is psychologically damaging: I suspect it's not
| been uncommon in many places in the world, and throughout
| history.
|
| On the other hand, I'd like to see evidence that Munger's idea,
| that the students will spend less time alone in their rooms and
| more time in a shared environment, will play out. I saw the
| reviews of the existing dormitory he'd built, but I don't
| consider that rigorous.
|
| In general, I'd just like to see evidence once way or the other
| rather than knee-jerk speculation. Maybe I should get out of this
| thread.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > small single rooms with common areas in general
|
| This is fine; the problem with Munger's design is that most of
| them don't have windows.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| mdpye wrote:
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| lqet wrote:
| Compared to this [0] dorm in Skopje, the UCSB project looks like
| a palace.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/gallery/VKnTn
| chasing wrote:
| Alternate plan: Raise taxes on the wealthy. Use that money to
| fund the University of California. Spend money on dorms that
| actually adhere to modern standards and are designed by actual
| experts and innovators in architecture.
|
| Frustrating that universities have to rely on the whims and
| quirks of wealthy individuals like this.
| supperburg wrote:
| This place cost 1.5B. If you want to give everyone more space
| and windows then it's only going to cost more, and that's
| before it's goes over schedule. This is one dorm building for
| one college. If you play it through, which you have never done,
| then you would see that even if we took every penny from the
| rich we wouldn't be able to do what you said. And by the way,
| you are in the top 1% wealth bracket globally, so why don't you
| put your money where your mouth is and empty your bank account
| and send it to a family in Myanmar? Then you will be living the
| redistribution dream you always blather about.
| chasing wrote:
| I am, relatively speaking, wealthy. And, yes, I do think my
| taxes should be higher so other Americans can have access to
| basic resources like food, shelter, healthcare, and
| education. I'm sorry this idea angers you. Nothing else in
| your comment makes enough sense to respond to.
| Vaslo wrote:
| "Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents
| out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could
| interact and collaborate."
|
| Ever wonder why housing in communist countries is dark and small
| but subways are grand and built with marble?
| mikestew wrote:
| I'm absolutely serious when I say that the second illustration of
| the "suites" bares a striking resemblance to the layout of the
| county jail I briefly stayed in in Anderson, Indiana. There a few
| differences I'll note:
|
| 1. The rooms in the jail were larger, but I did have a roommate,
| so I'm not sure which has the larger amount of personal space.
|
| 2. In jail, at least there were windows.
|
| 3. In jail, I only had to share the toilet with one other person.
| The dorm has eight people, and one pooper and shower? I'll take
| jail, thanks.
|
| 4. Jail didn't have a fridge and kitchen sink, however.
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| I think people you're underestimating how poor the conditions
| in most jails are. Maybe at Riker's island you share a toilet
| with less people, but it's dirtier, the healthcare will take 20
| years off your life and there's good chance you'll get murdered
| before you get out.
| rainpain wrote:
| 8 people and one bathroom. WTF! Lotta people gonna be shitting in
| bags
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| My dorm freshman year had the same ratio. Didn't seem to be a
| problem.
| geodel wrote:
| Perhaps there will be super pooper in common areas where 50
| people can take dump at same time.
| tweedledee wrote:
| My primary concern would be the noise. I can deal with small
| rooms, no windows etc. but I assume students crammed that close
| together would be crazy noisy. I have ADHD so I'm much more noise
| sensitive than most, but even for normal people I would expect
| better sleep and study outcomes from a quiet environment.
| [deleted]
| benzible wrote:
| This couldn't make the case for a wealth tax any clearer. Leaving
| the question of which large-scale social projects should be
| undertaken and how they should be carried out up to the whims of
| billionaires clearly ain't it.
| bregma wrote:
| Warehousing is not housing.
| curiousgal wrote:
| [ _Laughs in Paris_ ]
| praptak wrote:
| "Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500
| students with two entrances"
|
| Is it even possible to make it fire code compliant?
| thisisnico wrote:
| This seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
| exhilaration wrote:
| There must be an exception for structures with intentionally
| limited exits, such as prisons and billionaire-designed student
| housing.
| [deleted]
| macinjosh wrote:
| Entrances != Egresses. Do you ever notice those doors that say
| emergency exit only?
| spyspy wrote:
| They clearly forgot to count the windows..
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "Don't worry, there's plenty of fake windows you could use,
| oh wait..."
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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.
| maxcan wrote:
| 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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.
| ryan93 wrote:
| What percentage of fire doors on dorms do you think are
| locked or barricaded. .001%, less?
| ldoughty wrote:
| 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...
| lozenge wrote:
| If a handful of fire exits are blocked during a fire
| every year, aren't there 1,000x more that are blocked
| during no fire?
| mindcrime wrote:
| _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.
| dihydro wrote:
| 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
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think the general concept of the one way exit door is
| rescuable from the mistakes of the Triangle Shirtwaist
| fire.
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Fire?wprov=sfla1
| raldi wrote:
| Yes, because what matters is _exits_ , and I count at least ten
| stairwells on every floor:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > 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 seems unlikely.
| ep103 wrote:
| 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.
| vneur wrote:
| 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....
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| giarc wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| That's basically le Corbusier, if not in the details, then in
| the totalitarian urge to organize people's lives.
| avisser wrote:
| They should make the outside more brutalist to be honest
| about the intentions.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| Every student will have a single when the thing opens, and
| then later they'll put in the bunk beds.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| ansible wrote:
| 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.)
| LegitShady wrote:
| This building does look like a miserable place and that's before
| it gets used - just from renders. It looks like the work of
| someone designing a low security jail who thinks it's art.
|
| Give the cheap furnishings a couple years of abuse from students
| this will be Pruitt igoe or a jail with actual jail blocks but at
| least the idiot who designed it is paying for it himself.
| quercusa wrote:
| The individual rooms look a lot like prison cells.
| mbg721 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| fencepost wrote:
| Sounds like if they choose their materials properly they can
| easily repurpose into a supermax prison....
| pphysch wrote:
| Sad that economical living spaces are considered so radical on
| HN.
|
| I lived in a small dorm with a crappy roommate (actual roommate,
| not flatmate). So I didn't spend any unnecessary time in my room
| outside of sleeping. I hung out at the library, cafeteria, etc
| and went to random talks/activities on campus (there are a lot of
| them on a big campus).
|
| No windows? Sunlight alarms exist. They're great. Modern AC is
| also great.
|
| I would definitely trade the privacy and security of private
| quarters for a tiny window that would probably be facing another
| dorm building.
|
| University campuses are not prisons or suburbs. You can move
| freely and there are fantastic amenities in walking/shuttle
| distance. _Affordably_ living in the thick of it, with private
| quarters, is an incredible luxury for most students.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > No windows? Sunlight alarms exist. They're great. Modern AC
| is also great.
|
| From an economic standpoint, why spend money on an inferior
| substitute when you can get the real thing for free?!
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The real thing isn't free. It costs an externally facing
| wall.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I'm guessing pretty much any new dorm built today will
| have central air in any case.
|
| My initial reaction was pretty negative and not sure how
| I'd feel about the overall size and the lack of windows in
| rooms. On the other hand, in a lot of designs even if you
| have a window it's often facing a wall.
|
| However, I actually favor optimizing for the common space.
| I liked that kind of design. And the rooms being discussed
| here don't seem much if any smaller than the smaller
| singles I remember.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The rooms seem a little bit smaller than usual singles,
| but I'd gladly take the size downgrade if it meant I
| didn't need to share a room with 1-3 other people.
| vladharbuz wrote:
| The point is not that extremely small living spaces, which you
| flatteringly describe as "economical", are intrinsically bad.
| The issue here is the imbalance of power.
|
| I can say with near certainty that very few of the students who
| would be living in this space would opt for such a layout
| (extremely small rooms, no windows). Obviously, the students
| have absolutely no say in the matter, and neither does the
| university staff who is supposed to take care of the students'
| well-being.
|
| Rather, the power dynamic here is completely unilateral. Every
| detail of the space 4500 people will be living in will be
| prescribed and commanded by one guy, based on no other
| credentials than the fact that he's paying for it.
|
| This is the issue: the imbalance of power, and the unilateral
| ability of an investor and "hobby architect" to make
| generations of students live in conditions they would not
| themselves choose. The fact that people on HN seem to be
| against this building only serves as evidence that most people
| would not choose to live in it.
| pphysch wrote:
| What an incredibly dramatic comment. Are you being serious
| right now? HN is not remotely representative of the general
| population, much less undergraduate student population.
|
| And most students aren't going to let their anti-
| authoritarian angst/daddy issues get in the way of an easy
| commute and good night's sleep.
| exabrial wrote:
| Wow that's terrifying.
| dependsontheq wrote:
| Interesting, just to give some perspective from the other side of
| the pond, I think in most EU countries it would be totally
| illegal to build this because you need to have windows.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I had an apartment bedroom without light when I was a student -
| and then are right - you will definitely not want to spend a lot
| of time in there.
|
| But for me the biggest problem was oversleeping since there was
| not light to wake me up! :)
| newbie789 wrote:
| I'm surprised that an 11 story building would be considered in
| that area. There are very, very few tall buildings in Santa
| Barbara.
|
| Then again, "rich old people doing outlandishly ridiculous
| bullshit" is pretty much what that town is all about. (I lived
| there for 20 years)
| trhway wrote:
| Who needs real windows in that ant city if one can have all the
| windows the one may want in the metaverse. The building is
| designed for maximum security, a Hogwarts North Korean style. In
| our future ant civilization the punishment will be not the
| physical isolation, it will be taking your Oculus away and
| disconnecting from the metaverse.
| mindcrime wrote:
| From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say this:
|
| A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two entrances?
| There's a word for that: deathtrap.
|
| Building this is setting UCSB up to be the site of the next
| Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], Station Nightclub fire[2],
| or Hamlet Chicken Processing Plant fire[3].
|
| At a first glance, based only on the information provided in the
| article, I'd say that there is basically NOTHING good about this
| idea. But I'll allow that there are other details that could
| change the dynamic. Still, the weight of history suggests the
| importance of taking a somewhat skeptical position towards any
| measure of hand-waving when it comes to fire safety. At the
| moment, color me skeptical.
|
| Edit: Let me add this... the linked article doesn't go into any
| real details about the fire safety aspects of this, so there's a
| lot of info we don't have without digging into other sources. One
| of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler system. IF
| local building codes require sprinklers in dormitories and this
| building is properly sprinklered, that would assuage some of my
| concerns, as a working sprinkler system is basically the single
| most important thing you can have to save lives in the event of a
| fire.[4]
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire
|
| [3]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_chicken_processing_plan...
|
| [4]: https://nfsa.org/2020/12/15/sprinkler-saves-proof-that-
| fire-...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A lot of charming naivete here along the lines of "surely the
| city has fire regulations, and surely the building will be
| reviewed for those!"
|
| You forget the power of money. I live near the Apple Spaceship,
| where they have the city of Cupertino completely cowed and
| afraid to even ask a question about their stupid plans. An
| entire useful east-west artery (Pruneridge) was permanently
| taken out of service for that.
|
| It's so cute when you assume that Santa Barbara is going to say
| No to this.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > From my point-of-view as a former firefighter, I would say
| this:
|
| > A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two
| entrances?
|
| I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you'd know
| that exits (for regular use and, even more so, _emergency
| exits_ ) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset
| of) entrances.
|
| The plans for the building [0] show 10 escape stairs with
| dedicated exits (including the four which also have doors onto
| the two main entrance lobbies for regular use) and dozens of
| additional first-floor exit doors.
|
| > One of those details would be the presence of a sprinkler
| system. IF local building codes require sprinklers in
| dormitories
|
| _State_ building codes in California have for new construction
| for more than 30 years (heck, California has, for a decade,
| required them for new single family homes, too.)
|
| If the resigning architect could have plausibly raised the
| argument "this building will either get everyone killed in a
| fire or never be allowed by the fire marshal to be occupied
| because it flagrantly breaks the most basic fire code
| requirements", they probably would have led with that rather
| than fuzzy social and psychological concerns.
|
| [0]
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gb5DVYUPyNj2JYla5B_dL4-Ke-j...
| motioncuty wrote:
| I would say that, as someone holding a B.S. in Fire
| Protection Engineering, I am extremely uncomfortable with no
| windows in a bedroom.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I'm curious - reading this makes me depressed at how stupid
| HN and reactionary HN seems to have become.
|
| Do people not realize that in California we build
| residential buildings that are MANY MANY stories tall.
|
| The LACK of operable windows in a bedroom is generally a
| REQUIREMENT on a skyscraper / residential condo tower for
| safety reasons. They worry about kids falling out etc.
|
| The safety plans involve other measures - including much
| better building codes around fire control (ie, sprinklers).
| Fire hardened emergency exists (ie, these students may be
| moving out of historic all wood tinderboxes if my old CA
| school is any indication).
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _The LACK of operable windows in a bedroom is generally
| a REQUIREMENT on a skyscraper / residential condo tower
| for safety reasons. They worry about kids falling out
| etc._
|
| Can you explain more on this point? Because tall
| buildings not having windows that open because children
| might fall out of them sounds completely ridiculous to
| me. Some of the Soviet commie blocks were 16 storeys tall
| and obviously the windows can be opened.
|
| What are the other reasons why this restriction would be
| in place? I'm genuinely curious.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Sure.
|
| One issue is that for tall buildings a fair bit of
| thought goes into things like aerodynamics of overall
| building, ventilation / HVAC control, and internal
| pressures.
|
| A tall building has an issue with its core / utilities
| usually, the taller the go generally the worse the ratio
| of non-livable space to livable. So things that mess with
| for example HVAC efficiency may be seen as a negative.
|
| If everyone opens a window on one side of a building,
| over building surface areas and wind speeds at heights,
| you can get pretty crazy pressure issues. You can also
| get aero issues. You an also run into HVAC issues (ie,
| volume of air from 3 open large windows on the 40th floor
| may overwhelm HVAC system capacity).
|
| Let me ask you, you are building a skyscraper to rent.
|
| If you allow folks to open their windows and the wind
| blows something out that kills someone on the street -
| who will be sued? If someone drops something out (trying
| to put a plant in window or stick a telescope out) and
| kills someone - who pays. If someone falls out that
| window, who will be sued (see a cruise line that had a
| stupid idiot hold a kid through the window and drop
| them).
|
| Other issues are around maintenance and weather proofing
| etc etc. Again, environment at height can often be harsh,
| and now you may have to have someone on side of building
| to replace a window or related mechanisms. Easy in a
| house at ground level, a pain at height.
|
| BTW - I like windows that open and would NOT live in a
| tall res condo. My key point was that all the folks
| talking about how window exists are required - it's so
| weird seeing people speak with such certainty on
| something so easily disprovable.
|
| I think up to 30 floors or so and older places it was
| common for windows to open (they were also built
| differently, more open space / daylighting / shallower
| footprints (ie, H shape buildings vs full block
| buildings).
| mindcrime wrote:
| _I would think that, you being a former firefighter, you'd
| know that exits (for regular use and, even more so, emergency
| exits) are not the same thing as (are generally a superset
| of) entrances._
|
| Yes, I've already addressed that point multiple times in this
| discussion. Emergency exits are _a_ factor, but not a be-all
| / end-all.
|
| _State building codes in California have for new
| construction for more than 30 years (heck, California has,
| for a decade, required them for new single family homes,
| too.)_
|
| Thanks for sharing. I'm not a California resident, so I'm
| less familiar with the particulars of their regulations out
| there.
| op00to wrote:
| Where are you? In the northeast, sprinklers have been
| required in institutional buildings for as long as
| California.
| mindcrime wrote:
| North Carolina for me.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| Interestingly, NC's requirement for student housing is
| actually done internally by the UNC System rather than by
| any code authority. The last unsprinklered dorms at UNC
| were torn down a few years ago.
|
| As far as I know, building codes do require sprinklers in
| new residences just judging based on the 2010s era
| complexes around campus. I had assumed this was standard
| everywhere now, but maybe not. The place I live in now is
| from the 60s iirc and so of course does not have any.
| Interestingly, the entire buildings fire panel and smoke
| heads seem to have been retrofitted rather recently, but
| the old continuous bells are still in use with no
| strobes. Surprisingly, many residents do not seem to
| understand the significance of not having sprinkler
| protection and do not evacuate with any urgency, if at
| all.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Interestingly, NC 's requirement for student housing is
| actually done internally by the UNC System rather than by
| any code authority. The last unsprinklered dorms at UNC
| were torn down a few years ago._
|
| Interestingly enough, I believe at least some of that was
| in direct response to the UNC Phi Gamma Delta fire back
| in 1996.
|
| https://www.wunc.org/news/2021-05-12/unc-chapel-hill-phi-
| gam...
|
| _and do not evacuate with any urgency, if at all._
|
| Yeah, there's an unfortunate "thing" about automatic fire
| alarms - the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Many automatic
| alarms go off a LOT and more often than not the reason is
| either a straight up fault in the system, or at best, a
| "real, but non fire" reason like smoke from cooking. I
| listen in on Chapel Hill FD dispatch a lot and I can tell
| you, CHFD goes to the various dorms around campus all the
| freaking time for alarm activations, and rarely is the
| cause any kind of actual active fire. So people get
| conditioned to treat those alarms as "nothing-burger".
| It's unfortunate.
| op00to wrote:
| Dang! Thanks for widening my horizons!
| jsight wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea that there were still states that
| wouldn't require them.
| mindcrime wrote:
| There's a lot of nuance to that, because "requirements"
| vary based on building type and other details. And TBH,
| I'm not 100% up on the latest details even here in NC, as
| I've been away from the fire service for some time now.
|
| What I can say with some confidence is that sprinklers
| are widely required in commercial buildings, and I think
| it's safe to say that's fairly widespread across the US.
| But even there, I wouldn't say the requirement is totally
| ubiquitous.
|
| Getting into residential structures is where it gets
| murkier. For single family homes, I think something like
| 46 states don't require sprinklers for new construction.
| For multi-family, and things like dorms, I'm less clear
| on the details of what is / isn't required around various
| parts of the country.
| jsight wrote:
| Oh, I was meaning for multi-family dwellings. I haven't
| seen them in single family homes either, though it is
| interesting that requirements are starting to increase
| there too.
|
| TBH, I just wish there were stricter rules for smoke
| detectors and equipment in garages. I feel like this is a
| big gap with the current rules, at least in my state.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For single family homes, I think something like 46
| states don't require sprinklers for new construction.
|
| Also, just to add on here, a number of states have
| adopted statewide rules _prohibiting_ local codes from
| requiring sprinklers for new single-family homes.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I think probably you shouldn't be talking down to the
| firefighter about fire safety this way
|
| Most of what you said was already addressed
| LegitShady wrote:
| The architect didn't resign over fire safety. The fire
| safety discussion isn't really relevant. There are a lot of
| sprinkled buildings with rooms without direct exits or
| Windows. Most office building and many dorms etc even.
|
| That's not a statement of support for the building just
| that it isn't why this architect found issue.
| mindcrime wrote:
| It's all good. Just because I have experience as a
| firefighter and have some domain knowledge that the average
| joe lacks, doesn't mean I'm always right. And my comments
| above were based on, as I've said, limited knowledge as
| there are a lot of areas that TFA doesn't touch on.
|
| I think this is a good discussion though, as maybe it
| exposes some members of the public-at-large to some
| thoughts on fire-safety that they haven't considered deeply
| before. If so, that's a win in my book.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| What makes a firefighter an expert on building egress
| requirements? The building must meet NFPA code (or
| whichever fire code the AHJ has selected) or it can't be
| built, period. Whoever their insurance company is will not
| insure the building if it doesn't meet life safety
| requirements.
|
| Dismissing someone who isn't a fire code expert who is
| making claims about fire safety is just fine to me.
|
| If we were discussing how to safely fight fires, then by
| all means defer to the firefighter.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _The building must meet NFPA code or it can't be built,
| period._
|
| To be pedantic, that _may_ be the case for this specific
| building, as CA may be a state that simply adopted the
| relevant NFPA model code wholesale and with no changes;
| but it 's not a true statement in the most general sense,
| as not all localities adopt the various NFPA codes
| verbatim (or at all).
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You're correct, I edited my post to reflect that right as
| you posted. Thanks for posting the clarification.
| giarc wrote:
| As point out elsewhere, 2 entrances doesn't mean 2 egress
| points. There are likely lots of one way doors out of the
| building.
| raldi wrote:
| I count ten emergency stairwells on every floor:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
| MR4D wrote:
| That's 450 people per stairwell. Assuming 20 people per
| floor, it would be packed with lines extending out into the
| floors.
| badwolf wrote:
| Is this really any different than any highrise, that
| nobody seems to have this very pressing concern over?
| raldi wrote:
| I don't think either of us is qualified to express fire-
| safety-analysis statements with absolute certainty, but I
| would think the prior likelihood would be very small that
| plans would be drawn up with glaring fire-code
| violations, or that fire code would be written to allow
| the possibility for dangerous queueing hazards.
| mindcrime wrote:
| History suggests that the primary ingress/egress points are
| the only ones worth considering. Emergency doors have a
| nagging tendency to be obstructed, hidden, barricaded or even
| flat-out locked even when they're not allowed to be. And
| that's assuming people will know where they are. When they're
| half-drunk, half-stoned, half-asleep, and wandering around in
| a smoke filled corridor at 2:00 am.
| capableweb wrote:
| Indeed. From the linked articles above:
|
| > Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked
| - a common practice at the time to prevent workers from
| taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft - many of
| the workers could not escape from the burning building and
| jumped from the high windows.
|
| > Various historians have also ascribed the exit doors
| being locked to management's wanting to keep out union
| organizers due to management's anti-union bias. The foreman
| who held the stairway door key had already escaped by
| another route.
|
| > Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became
| unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded
| onto the single exterior fire escape - which city officials
| had allowed Asch to erect instead of the required third
| staircase
|
| > The toxic smoke, heat, and the resulting human rush
| toward the main exit killed 100; 230 were injured and
| another 132 escaped uninjured.
|
| > By this time, the nightclub's fire alarm had activated,
| and although there were four possible exits, most people
| headed for the front door through which they had entered.
| The ensuing crowd crush in the narrow hallway leading to
| that exit quickly blocked the exit completely and resulted
| in numerous deaths and injuries among the patrons and
| staff.
|
| > Twenty-five workers were killed and 55 injured in the
| fire, trapped behind locked fire doors.
|
| > The majority of those who escaped unharmed were workers
| in the front of the building who left through the unlocked
| main entrance,
|
| It seems clear that two entrances/exists are not enough,
| even if there is numerous of extra emergency exists. People
| will, in panic, return to the point they came from, even if
| emergency exists are highlighted.
| jefftk wrote:
| "Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were
| locked - a common practice at the time..."
|
| Your quote is from a fire in _1911_. This is no longer at
| all common practice, and would get the university in
| serious trouble during regular inspections.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, the quotes are all from the linked articles, one of
| the event happened in 1911. It's not unheard of that
| schools also disconnect fire alarms and block fire
| escapes because students "abuse" those from time to time.
|
| So yeah, maybe one of the quotes is less strong, but the
| sentiment still stands, that fire exists are not a
| replacement for main exists, as people tend to go back to
| where they came from, instead of seeking new exists.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Most US downtown skyscrapers generally have the one main
| entrance and then a fair amount of secondary stairwell
| exits as well. Some of those are even residential
| buildings.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Indeed. The "devil is in the details" though. You can
| "get away with", for example, fewer entrances/exits if
| you compensate by requiring fire proof construction,
| sprinklers & standpipes, fire rated interior partition
| doors, etc.
|
| We don't know yet how many (if any) of those things will
| apply to Munger Hall. I have reached out to SBFire to ask
| some of these questions, and hope to hear back from them.
| giarc wrote:
| I'm sure all egress doors would have crash bars. Think of
| any tall building, they typically only have one or two
| major entrances but then many one way egress doors. This
| building wouldn't be any different.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Dormitories typically have a _terrible_ problem with their
| one-way doors getting mysteriously blocked. In my college
| dorm, they were chained shut. This was to prevent people from
| opening up an egress door from the inside and getting alcohol
| from the people on the outside. Also the hatch on the top of
| the elevators was nailed shut.
| k8si wrote:
| Oh that sounds so great. I walk out the door to class,
| realize I forgot a pen, then get to take a 15 minute walk all
| the around the building just to get back up to my room.
| Wonderful
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| A fringe benefit of the design is that it applies
| behavioural and evolutionary pressure against forgetfulness
| and other cognitive flaws.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Evolutionary pressure, what? This isn't a situation where
| people who just happen to forget a pen one day deserve to
| not breed.
| queuebert wrote:
| Such as free will.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're
| aware of.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In emergencies, people tend to head to the exits they're
| aware of.
|
| Signage, lighting, and periodic drill requirements exist
| (among other reasons) so that people will be aware of
| emergency exits.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You didn't contradict a single thing I said.
|
| Drill requirements in particular are utter jokes. Nobody
| pays any attention to them.
| maxcan wrote:
| Its exceedingly likely that that number does not include fire
| escapes and emergency exits.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Maybe so. This article elides a lot of details... in fact,
| they don't touch on fire safety aspects at all as far as I
| can tell. So maybe there are sufficient accommodations made
| in terms of fire safety. It's hard to say.
|
| But... if the design really was done by an amateur architect
| who probably has little or no background specifically related
| to fire/life safety issues vis-a-vis building design, and it
| truly hasn't been modified from his design... I don't know.
| I'll just say "color me skeptical" for now.
|
| If I'm ultimately proven wrong, then I would actually be very
| happy. I'd much rather suffer the indignity of having to
| admit I was wrong about something on HN, than watch a news
| report detailing hundreds of student deaths on campus.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that approves
| permits without checking if they're valid for the local
| fire code? That just doesn't pass the smell test.
|
| My alma mater had to go back and redo a building based on
| fire marshal concerns.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Is there a local jurisdiction in this country that
| approves permits without checking if they're valid for
| the local fire code? That just doesn't pass the smell
| test._
|
| I would hope not. The article describes this as a
| "proposal" and I'm not sure how far along they are with
| it. Maybe they haven't even gotten as far as submitting a
| design for fire safety inspection yet. Or maybe they
| have, got feedback, and made adjustments in response, and
| the article above glossed over that. It's hard to say
| based only on what we know from TFA at the moment.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Would it even pass fire regs? Surely that makes it a non-
| starter?
| mindcrime wrote:
| It's hard to imagine how it would, but fire regulations vary
| dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The article
| doesn't go into whether or not there has been any review of
| the plans from that perspective, so it's hard to say.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-2000-mar-26-re-12733...
|
| That's by way of a reddit post about the dorm that I stumbled
| across trying to find the answer to whether there were fire
| code concerns with the project.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It will have sprinklers that's the code now.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Those are factories, so it's a bit different, but I agree with
| you. In my state every room in a home that could be used as a
| bedroom or for regular occupancy (ie not a closet) has to have
| a window large enough to get a person out. For damn good
| reason.
|
| How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire code?
|
| I don't even understand how this was seriously considered in
| the first place. Apparently the project has a $1.5B pricetag
| and this old coot is tossing in a seventh of that? WTF.
| wpietri wrote:
| > How the fuck was this project compliant with local fire
| code?
|
| UCSB employs 10k people in a town of 90k. This is a $1.5
| billion project that the University is desperate to have. It
| seems totally plausible to me that they could find a
| compliant inspector and/or get a variance for the building.
|
| Whether or not it's actually safe, you can bet that the
| companies making millions off this will have a plausible
| _story_ about safety. With lots of documents and
| presentations and software models. What 's a small-town fire
| safety inspector got to put against that?
| queuebert wrote:
| I was unable to get home owner's insurance for my home until
| I removed the existing burglar bars on the windows.
| raldi wrote:
| In addition to the two entrances, there are ten emergency exit
| stairwells on every floor:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
| paganel wrote:
| This Munger guy shouldn't design buildings, he should have
| sticked with making money out of bull-riding the stock-
| market.
| ajross wrote:
| Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation
| design. There are clearly aesthetic complaints many people will
| have here, but realistically safety shouldn't be a problem.
| This is simply not a "large" building by skyscraper standards,
| and those can be built safely.
|
| Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so
| weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah,
| no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in
| the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will
| have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms,
| libraries, etc... all "down the hall".
|
| I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the
| snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical
| access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached
| garage owners tend to remember.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation
| design.
|
| Surely building codes should mandate structural flaws and
| sinking foundations be fixed immediately.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/collapsed-miami-condo-
| had-...
| LegitShady wrote:
| this only betrays a deep misunderstanding on your part of
| the challenges in construction and issues with Sub grade
| stability in coastal zones and how different those things
| are to having enough fire exits.
|
| Your comment is not making any point but your of lack of
| understanding.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "deep misunderstanding on your part of the challenge"
|
| A citizen doesn't care about challenges in construction
| or software or food contamination, it is our professional
| responsibility not to be negligent in our work.
| LegitShady wrote:
| the standard for negligence for an engineer isnt that
| "something bad happened", and talking about a building
| with foundation issues due to unstable local soil is far
| different than "didn't meet fire code" from the
| perspective of anyone who knows anything about the issues
| at hand.
|
| Just an FYI it's unlikely an architect designed those
| foundations - there were probably engineers who tested
| the soil and gave its properties to a designing engineer
| who designed the foundation and both of those things are
| going to be tempered by what was common engineering
| practice at the time, and if the unstable soil situation
| was known about. My understanding is this situation is
| common in the area due to building practice at the time.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| All a layman knows if that he should not die in his sleep
| because the building caved in, you can't expect a
| homeowner to debate you on the exact details of
| structural engineering.
|
| However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and
| I think it's getting worse.
|
| Of course in every job, there is constant pressure from
| management to cut corners, junior colleagues or peers
| that mess up, deadlines to meet. It is very easy to say
| to avoid inspecting troubled areas, to say 'I've done my
| job' and avoid headache. Often it is not in anyone's job
| description to police this. The 'client' is typically
| none the wiser, and when problems arise 10 years down the
| line, often they can't be traced to anyone personally.
| The fact that we've replaced entire careers with gig
| economy, and people stay in one job less and companies
| now invest less in training that ever in the past 40
| years means that there is even less accountability and
| more opportunity for mistakes.
|
| Cases of unpredictable 'something bad happened' are
| extremely rare. Soviet government was warned that
| reactors used in Chernobyl were dangerous, Tepco was
| warned that sea wall protecting Fukushima was inadequate,
| Robert Lund warned that Nasa should not launch Space
| Shuttle Challenger, residents of Grenfell Tower warned
| about fire safety before they burned alive, same goes
| goes for Bhopal disaster, subprime loans and 2008, 737
| Max and every other major event. It is also extremely
| rare that the consequences of these decision ever catch
| up with the top brass. Hence we have culture of
| negligence.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, but there is nothing guaranteeing that the common area
| amenities (rec room, multiple food options, libraries, etc.)
| won't be reallocated to additional dorm rooms or storage.
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| It's clear the donor purposefully designed the rooms to be
| unpleasant to get people up into common rooms. It's just...
| weird. It doesn't matter if it looks good or bad but
| uncomfortable design like this is bizarrely aggressive to
| students, who are already living away from home and at-risk
| for depression and suicide.
|
| Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds
| for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed
| given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| As you note, students are at-risk for depression and
| suicide in today's existing student living quarters.
|
| We don't know whether or not a community focused living
| design would help or hurt in this regard.
|
| The covid/contagion question is interesting, because we DO
| know that designing for contagion safety is seemly
| inherently at odds with designing for social/emotional
| safety.
|
| I think there's no clearly superior solution here, which
| tells me that building both types of systems would at least
| help further our understanding of the issues.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding
| grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's
| poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.
|
| Designing 100 year buildings around our current hysterical
| reaction to covid is just silly. Covid is over, time to
| move on.
|
| History will harshly judge our reaction to covid and we
| will hopefully never repeat this awful public health policy
| again. The idea that we should be designing building with
| covid in mind is just a symptom of how much parts of
| society has lost the plot.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Former firefighter cautions we should be skeptical of the
| safety of this plan, and your rebuttal is "surely building
| codes mandate..."? A zero-evidence rebuttal concerning the
| safety of 4500 students.
| jl6 wrote:
| I don't find it unreasonable to assume that the building
| will comply with government fire safety regulations and
| that those regulations are at least somewhat adequate.
| mindcrime wrote:
| You might be surprised. Fire regulations are very much a
| local issue and there can be a lot of variance (although
| many local municipalities base their codes on standards
| put out by bodies like the NFPA, etc.).
|
| There are quite frequently things that one might
| intuitively expect to be in the regs, that aren't.
| Requirements for sprinklers, for example. As surprising
| as it may seem, there are still lots of places where
| sprinklers are not required in many buildings.
|
| I don't know the situation in Santa Barbara, but I did
| email their fire department earlier with an inquiry about
| this topic. Hoping to hear something back.
| docfort wrote:
| Fire sprinklers appear to be required. https://www.santab
| arbaraca.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.as...
| tw04 wrote:
| I don't find it unreasonable to think that government
| regulations around fire safety are based on current
| building trends. Nobody in the US stuffs 4500 people into
| a single building with almost all of them in the interior
| of the building. Nobody would voluntarily live that way,
| even the "projects" were/are more humane.
|
| Just looking at the proposed floorplan, in an emergency
| it would be a nightmare to get out. 7 kids trying to get
| out that one door with a giant table in the way while
| likely panicking? It screams deathtrap.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You know who was violating fire regulations for decades?
| Nuclear Power plants! You would things that's the one
| place where safety would be taken seriously, right?
|
| https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-
| monitor/601/fire-p...
| salawat wrote:
| Nuclear Plants have an adversarial interest in access
| control though. Sometimes, yes, even fire safety loses
| out.
| fdr wrote:
| The regulations may have been written with architectural
| rules of thumb in mind, as in, "surely no one would..."
| LegitShady wrote:
| Building code isn't really written as rules of thumb but
| as rules.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| If you were an architect who was concerned enough with the
| design to quit, wouldn't you both know about and publicize
| potential (or real) safety concerns?
| [deleted]
| joachim4 wrote:
| Not having natural light is one of the best way to attack
| your mental health. This building is just a bad design, and
| human are not made to live without natural lights.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I wish architects showed the same level of concern for
| office workers!
|
| Kidding aside... given the size of the bedrooms, I get the
| impression that the students aren't meant to spend much
| time there aside from whatever amount of sleep college
| students are getting these days. The rest of their time
| would probably be spent in common areas that actually do
| have sunlight. Recalling my personal experience in college,
| where most of my time was already spent in common areas
| anyways, I don't see the lack of bedroom windows as that
| huge a problem.
|
| This particular dorm design also seems to allow for more
| privacy than a traditional dorm does.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| > This particular dorm design also seems to allow for
| more privacy than a traditional dorm does.
|
| Yes, having shared bedrooms was particularly bad for my
| sleep. Not sure it's a good trade for a window though.
| Grakel wrote:
| Basically forcing people to live in common areas is
| horrible. Many people find public spaces distracting at
| best and uncomfortable or worse. Thank God I had my dorm
| room to escape to where my roommate and I only had to
| ignore each other to get some peace.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I always retreated to the library when I needed peace and
| quiet. Also, these dorms have a mini common area shared
| between 8 dorms.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Modern office buildings have flipped the private offices
| from the perimeter to the core precisely so that the open
| office has all the windows. You might not have any
| privacy or quiet but they do design for natural light
| now.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| ...and I am working in a warehouse-style building at a
| Silicon Valley startup. All the windows have been blacked
| out, to keep the IP safe. It's a little like being inside a
| Borg Cube.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Build a replica Borg recharging alcove around the coffee
| machine
| BoorishBears wrote:
| They couldn't cover them in something translucent?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| And just like this building ( _Munger_ Hall), your
| startup is presumably funded by investor money. ;)
| Correlation!
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The design looked like rooms inside a pod inside a building.
| Seems like a fire in front of a single door could in theory
| kill everyone in the pod based on the image in the article.
|
| Honestly, this looks like a low security prison to me. Small
| cells and a day room for activities and socializing.
| wombatpm wrote:
| If they lofted the bed, the desk could be moved under the
| bed. And if they had everyone just wear house uniforms,
| they could reduce the need for storage space and reduce the
| size of the rooms by 1/3
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "This is an announcement from Genetic Control
|
| It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot
|
| Restriction on humanoid height
|
| I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying
| all the
|
| Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh
| so bold
|
| It's said now that people will be shorter in height
|
| They can fit twice as many in the same building site
|
| (They say it's alright)"
|
| (From "Get'em off my property", Genesis, Foxtrot, 1972)
| rglullis wrote:
| > These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple
| food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries,
| etc... all "down the hall".
|
| No better way to get kids prepared for what comes ahead in
| their adulthood, huh?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| To be fair, that sounds like any of the cookie cutter
| "luxury" apartment complexes I see coming up all over the
| place, right down to the inability to see anything other
| than your neighbors out the window.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| "Cookie cutter" apartment complexes are waaaaay nicer
| than this, including literally about 10X the square
| footage per inhabitant, and way more windows. Dunno what
| you're talking about.
| [deleted]
| canaus wrote:
| How many "cookie cutter 'luxury' apartment complexes" do
| you know that house 4500 people? Let's forgo the absolute
| number, what about the population density?
|
| 94% of the residents won't have windows. Can you list any
| of these apartments that have that characteristic?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Preparing/conditioning today's young adults for the
| dystopian future, where all our jobs are being done by
| robots, and the elite class needs to warehouse the rest of
| us safely away in 2mx2m cells in gigantic concrete
| honeycomb dormitories, where we're given a TV and one Soma
| per day.
| rglullis wrote:
| _You won 't have any possessions, and you will like it._
| superkuh wrote:
| If anyone is interested, this is basically the first half
| of the speculative fiction story, "Mana"
| (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) which has been posted
| here on HN a few times.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, it seems every year we are moving closer and closer
| to some dark mixture of Manna, Fifteen Million Merits [1]
| and Elysium [2], where regular people no longer serve any
| purpose, and are simply warehoused somewhere to keep them
| out of the hair of the few rich elite.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
| r00fus wrote:
| I don't see automated everything becoming possible in our
| lifetimes, instead I see dystopian societal collapse due
| to climate shifts being much more likely.
| vmception wrote:
| False dilemma. They could make the first floor have food
| courts and gyms, while having windows or simply not having a
| 97 year old billionaire donor dictate taste with zero input
| just because money.
|
| You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs
| exist, _or are adequate_.
| yaacov wrote:
| > just because money
|
| Money is really important, probably the single most
| important constraint for state universities.
| vmception wrote:
| yes, I understand the perverse incentives that led to
| greenlighting this. its also not an excuse. they should
| reject the _$200 million_ donation and hope Munger sends
| another with no restrictions. that 's where we are at.
| indymike wrote:
| Maybe build the $200M dorm instead of the $2B dorm?
| falcolas wrote:
| His money represents less than 10% of the final cost of
| the dorm, while retaining 100% of the design rights.
|
| Something's happening here that's more than just the
| money.
| throwaway75787 wrote:
| No, it's just the money. It's just the perverse
| disconnect between the wealthy, and those just trying to
| get by.
|
| It's Mr. Burns hanging a "you're here forever" sign, or
| Kanye West ranting about his napkin design for the iPlane
| in the Oval Office while dropping a few "motherfucker"s.
| ajross wrote:
| > You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs
| exist, or are adequate.
|
| Uh, yes. Because there are _laws_ governing how we can
| construct buildings in a safe way, and on the whole (c.f.
| the number of deaths in building fires over time) they work
| well. So I trust them.
|
| As far as the putative logic flaw, I don't see it.
| Everything is a tradeoff, even "because money". Saving
| money on the dorm means lower tuition, more scholarships,
| more facilities elsewhere, maybe a few new endowed
| professorships, etc...
| randcraw wrote:
| This design came from an amateur architect, someone who
| has never designed ANY building before and is surely
| clueless about safety laws and even basic physical
| structural limits. To imagine the design has seen
| anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what
| they're doing is assuming a lot.
|
| All this just to save $200/1500 (13%)? You can get a
| better discount than that at any retailer.
| nescioquid wrote:
| While the story was about the architect's resignation,
| there's got to be a story here. Why would the school
| spend a billion dollars and tie its hands like this
| (circumventing its own review process and providing input
| for needed changes) to get a 200 million "gift"?
|
| Did the university believe it couldn't otherwise house
| 4500 students for a billion dollars? Were there
| considerations involved other than student housing?
| mattmcknight wrote:
| > This design came from an amateur architect, someone who
| has never designed ANY building before and is surely
| clueless about safety laws and even basic physical
| structural limits. To imagine the design has seen
| anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what
| they're doing is assuming a lot.
|
| This is false statement. The architectural design was
| provided by Van Tilburg, Banvard, & Soderberg, AIA.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I think you're overreading the amateur architect angle.
|
| Presumably, they didn't say "Hi, Charlie Munger, please
| draw up a building for us on a napkin."
|
| It's in fact a barb that Munger is a non-practicing
| architect, and apparently ruffled feathers with the
| professional architect on the committee.
|
| Which, from working with some prima donna architects, I
| am both unsurprised and unsympathetic about.
|
| Building engineers ensure everything is to code.
| Architects fret about whether it looks and feels right.
|
| Some architects are good at making livable spaces, but an
| architecture degree doesn't guarantee that, and a lack of
| one doesn't preclude it.
| jkaptur wrote:
| > Building engineers ensure everything is to code.
| Architects fret about whether it looks and feels right.
|
| The idea that architects don't worry about building code
| is absolutely incorrect on a project of any scale.
|
| Prima donna "starchitects" worry less, but that's because
| they've hired other architects to handle it.
| ajross wrote:
| So which one was the guy who quit?
| kixiQu wrote:
| Laws work together with norms.
|
| The norms of architecture that mandate e.g. windows for
| living spaces are here being violated so extremely
| someone's stepping down over it. This is therefore not an
| average project.
|
| Concern seems reasonable.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The concern is especially strong here because of the
| nature of the building.
|
| In an ordinary apartment building, if you build it
| stupid, people won't want to live there. Then the
| landlord won't want to build it that way to begin with
| and if some fool does it anyway there will be a profit
| incentive to knock down the building and do it again.
|
| This is a dorm. At at state school. The normal market
| forces aren't there. The landlord isn't going to be
| motivated by losing money. The tenants aren't in an
| ordinary market because dorms are often subsidized or
| have unique zoning that allows for lower cost than is
| legally permissible in other available housing and are
| likely to be closer to the school than other available
| housing. So you have to exceed a higher threshold of
| terrible before people will abandon them.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's strange that this _isn't_ a law. Everywhere where
| I've lived in the US, windows are required in a room with
| a bed.
|
| I can't imagine it wouldn't be very pleasant, as an
| example, someone smoking weed inside a dorm next to me
| without a way to vent it out.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Afaik, most windows in newer, high-density commercial
| buildings are non-functional.
|
| It's difficult to design a large window, that will also
| open, that also insulates sufficiently to hit modern
| energy efficiency certifications.
| hackersword wrote:
| In the event of a fire, "opening" the window is not
| necessarily a function of if the window is MEANT to be
| opened ... but CAN it be opened. Eg: throwing a chair
| through it, or firefighters breaking window from outside,
| etc.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Residential is different, due to generally higher
| ventilation requirements (e.g. bathroom & kitchen).
|
| YMMV, but I live in Seattle, where there has been a
| residential boom with plenty of towers, and I have never
| seen a residential apartment with non-functional windows.
| Every room will have at least one that can open (though
| for efficiency reasons they're usually casement windows,
| which are annoying in their own right)
| cpwright wrote:
| Zoning and building codes set forth by a municipality do
| not necessarily have to be followed by the state
| government (presuming the UC system counts as part of the
| state government).
| lazide wrote:
| Lol - I have yet to see any cost savings passed through
| as lower tuition. More budget for sports, more
| administrator salaries, MAYBE an endowment but let's not
| get too ahead of ourselves.
|
| This is just squeezing the undergrads to feed the rest of
| the machine more efficiently.
| vmception wrote:
| You're assuming those _laws_ are adequate. I wrote that
| the first time. It 's a bad idea, you trust them just
| because the catastrophes haven't happened. For the next
| few weeks in your day to day, look at how many emergency
| exits are disarmed or blocked or locked, look at how many
| other inspectable things just aren't inspected, like when
| the last elevator inspection occurred on the ones you
| use.
|
| We're trying to save people that trust the system too
| much. Let me know if you know any people like that.
| ajross wrote:
| > You're assuming those laws are adequate.
|
| This is getting toward conspiracy theory territory.
| It's... a building code. Yes. Yes, I tend to trust
| building codes that have been keeping all of us safe in
| our homes and offices for the better part of a century.
| If building codes don't work, then where are the
| disasters in all the other buildings? You're saying that
| every other building in the USA in the 20th century "just
| happened" to be built safely, despite a thousand year
| history of terrible urban fires, and that regulation had
| nothing to do with it?
| mindcrime wrote:
| I don't see any conspiracy. I think it's obvious that the
| situation vis-a-vis fire safety _has_ improved, and
| improved tremendously over the past 100 or so years. But
| I also think it would be a mistake to think that the
| answer to the question "are we there yet" is "yes". That
| is to say, don't assume we've reached some final, end-
| goal state where safety regulations are ideal.
|
| Large, multi-fatality fires are less common now, but they
| do still occur. I'd argue that we can always aspire to
| get better with regards to fire safety.
| pdpi wrote:
| Nothing conspirational about it. In the follow up to the
| Grenfell fire[1], my development was reviewed and the
| cladding in use on several buildings was found... less
| than ideal. The homeowner's association is currently
| drafting a plan to have it replaced.
|
| This isn't some theoretical, conspiracy-laden issue. It's
| an actual problem.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
| ajross wrote:
| > In the follow up to the Grenfell fire[1], my
| development was reviewed and the cladding in use on
| several buildings was found... less than ideal.
|
| Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when
| they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are
| "government regulators", and "they made sure it was
| fixed". And now it's being fixed.
|
| You're literally citing the fact that safety regulation
| worked correctly as evidence... that it _doesn 't_?
| Without the regulators you'd still be living in a
| deathtrap!
| vmception wrote:
| Which means one should not trust that new and existing
| buildings are safe because of the mere existence of code
| or that there are competent people that exist to review
| and report.
|
| The safety regulation did not work because of the 71
| people that died in Grenfell. What would you say if you
| lived there yourself "ah thats just bad luck for me"?
| what would you say if you lived there yourself and were
| one of the people that was reporting to the regulators
| about the problems in advance "I trust this system, I'm
| glad this system is based purely on trust, trust works so
| well, all should trust building codes because they are
| CODES, I like codes, they are infallible, its so cool
| that people exist to review the codes as well. This
| happens so rare due to the codes and not from simply
| being an uncommon occurrence that challenges building
| standard."
|
| I don't really understand what your perspective here is
| to be honest. Not being wrong?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when
| they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are
| "government regulators"
|
| I think you misunderstood the poster - 100 people burned
| alive because the regulators were asleep at the wheel.
| That tragic disaster is the only reason his building was
| checked for adequacy, and it failed, along with thousands
| of others.
|
| Right now there are thousands of buildings which were
| built and sold in breach of fire regulation, and the
| apartment owners are being saddled with 100% of the bill
| even when they own 25% of the apartment. In some cases
| the cost of repair exceeds the value of the property.
| pdpi wrote:
| My point is that regulation is necessary, but not
| sufficient. Saying "It complies with regulation" isn't
| enough to deflect criticism -- compliant buildings can
| still have serious safety issues.
| vmception wrote:
| That's correct. I don't appreciate your willingness to
| invalidate what I and others are pointing out to you.
|
| Building codes are state and municipal level laws. There
| is no harmonization. There are varying degrees of
| compliance based on competency, actual corruption
| conspiracies, and budget all of which changes decade over
| decade, building by building.
|
| Many other regulations and individual behaviors have
| helped keep people safe. The way electronics work, the
| way people are educated, the public service
| announcements, the response times, and sometimes the
| building materials. Some things have actually become more
| flammable over the years.
|
| Regarding building codes, 98 people just died in a
| literal building collapse in the Miami area. Your
| standard, if I understand correctly, is "that was just 1,
| where are the city wide Chicago fires", when the
| counterpoint is that this collapse prompted reviews of
| many properties and many more structural issues have been
| found in just that one municipality that threaten
| hundreds and thousands of people.
|
| You shouldn't trust this process. You should root for the
| process to work decently since the probability of a
| disaster is low - this is the only area we agree! the
| incidents aren't happening! - but you should know that
| this is all luck. Continual luck in a system that barely
| works.
| bhickey wrote:
| The problem with the Station wasn't the lack of egress, it was
| the lack of identified egress, a choke point at the main
| entrance which triggered a crowd collapse, pyrotecnics and
| combustible foam.
| aaron695 wrote:
| $200 million+ and no one raised fire safety because they hadn't
| read Wikipedia?
|
| The are far more that 'two entrances' on the plans. What are
| you talking about? What plans are you analysing? I count 12 not
| including things like the laundry and lobby exits, which are
| also inter-linked.
|
| What's wrong with HN. This is a really interesting project.
| Tech is getting very cool for dense living. And we know dense
| communities increases innovation and is the most environmental
| thing you can do.
|
| Anyone who's dealt with architects know they are the absolute
| worst. It's all about looks not usability. The widows is
| controversial, but that's the point. A system that works
| without windows changes the game. And university students are
| not old HN people who want to live their entire day in a room.
| nradov wrote:
| Yes the local building code has required sprinklers for some
| years now.
| [deleted]
| mindcrime wrote:
| FWIW, I am intrigued enough by this that I decided to reach out
| to SBFD and inquire as to their position (if any) on this
| proposal. I just sent the following email to several of their
| fire prevention / inspections / public info people. If/when I
| hear back, I'll update you all. Or heck, maybe one of them will
| sign up for an HN account and post something. That would be
| interesting.
|
| ----
|
| > SBFire:
|
| > Hi, I have a question I hope you can help me with. I
|
| > stumbled across an article about the proposed UCSB "Munger
|
| > Hall" on an Internet forum that I frequent.
|
| > https://www.independent.com/2021/10/28/architect-resigns-
| in-...
|
| > As a former firefighter myself, I got some serious bad
|
| > vibes from the way this building was described. I made a
|
| > comment about my concerns which sparked (no pun intended)
|
| > a lot of discussion about fire safety, building codes,
|
| > etc.
|
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356
|
| > As it happens, the original article was somewhat light on
|
| > details about the fire safety aspects of the building. So
|
| > I wanted to reach out to you and simply ask "From an SB
|
| > Fire perspective, has this building design been reviewed,
|
| > and - if so - are there any outstanding concerns from a
|
| > fire/life safety viewpoint?"
|
| > I'm particularly interested in knowing if there are any
|
| > concerns around the number of entrances / egress points,
|
| > the proposal for interior bedrooms with no windows, and
|
| > whether or not this structure would be sprinklered.
|
| > Thank you kindly!
| coding123 wrote:
| I'm not the guy you contacted, but I've had my head down in
| Title 24 crap for months, but here's the egress requirements
| in CA:
|
| https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CFC2019P4/chapter-10-means.
| ..
|
| Read the section on "[BE] 1004.2Cumulative occupant loads."
| bagels wrote:
| My first reaction was the terrible danger this design presents
| as well. Doesn't code require each room to have two means of
| egress? Usually the second one is a window.
| mcint wrote:
| Many if not all UC campuses need only respect _state_
| regulations. City and County building codes need not apply, and
| fire codes, hopefully would, but University administrators have
| room to push that.
|
| Land grant universities!
| CameronNemo wrote:
| _A building meant to house 4500 students, with only two
| entrances? There 's a word for that: deathtrap._
|
| For more than just reasons if fire in my opinion. I'm surprised
| nobody has said the word gun yet. Are they going to be scanning
| people and checking their backpacks art he door? That sure
| would make it feel more like a prison.
| slownews45 wrote:
| You are not a student at this school.
|
| Where I went to school we got lots of strong opinions from
| outsiders. But some of the "worst" dorms were the most
| popular for reasons that are not always obvious to outsiders.
|
| And yes, some students like to live close to others. UCSB may
| be doing double and triple bunking in rooms (my school did 4
| to a room for a while, when the "crappy" new space opened it
| was first choice in the housing lottery).
|
| Folks talking about sharing a bathroom meaning that people
| will be pooping out of windows are idiots who either went to
| some elite school where you are waited on by butlers. It
| would not be uncommon for a hall with 15 rooms to have two
| bathrooms.
|
| Other things that offended folks that students gave no craps
| about. We had some coed bathrooms, was never an issue. I'm
| sure now they are called gender neutral.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with gun safety?
| slownews45 wrote:
| What does a building with 10 emergency exists, lots of
| individually lockable suites and rooms have to do with
| guns?
|
| Santa Barbara has strict anti-gun laws already. CA has a
| lot of anti-gun laws already. The UCSB system has anti
| gun laws already.
|
| Santa Barbara issues something like 50 permits a DECADE
| for concealed carry. It's a "may" issue jurisdiction, and
| they don't issue.
|
| And if metal detectors are implemented, I'm not sure
| students will care. They already exist for large sporting
| events and other areas of concern, so if there was a
| concern you'd want fewer main entrances so you could
| staff them.
|
| Bigger issue is normally non-students in student housing,
| so security can be good in terms of setup. This means the
| newer buildings often do things like keycard access to
| suites only for suite holders, and some even do keycards
| for your room separate from suite, again, all logged and
| tracked. I visited a friend at a school where I had to
| sign in my car with a guard, had to be escorted to their
| room by a front desk staffer etc. That's extreme - no way
| UC is going that (this was a small elite place).
|
| The major student issues in terms of safety are stranger
| access to dorms / bathrooms at night, theft issues (bikes
| / bags etc), and nuisance issues (noise, weed smoke,
| parties etc).
| notRobot wrote:
| 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.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| black6 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawa21782 wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| For students who prioritize windows in the room where
| they're almost never awake, they have every other dorm on
| campus to select from.
| Gare wrote:
| I count 64 bedrooms per "house". That's a lot of people for a
| single common area that doesn't seem that big.
| raldi wrote:
| There's a small common area for every eight bedrooms, and
| larger ones shared between groups.
| Gare wrote:
| Yes, but the small area is also windowless.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| But it is not. Not all rooms can be places along the exterior
| walls of the building.
| em-bee wrote:
| in many places in the world houses are designed to allow
| windows in every room. it's not that hard.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| Most code requirements in the US require a bedroom to have
| an egress window.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| There are ten emergency stairwells on every floor:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm going to depart from the norm here... And announce I'd
| actually _like_ to live in that building.
|
| I really value communal shared space, and very few types of
| housing provide it - usually dedicating 90%+ of space to
| individuals to live a gloomy existence mostly alone requiring
| Netflix for company.
|
| Shared space should be 'tiered' - Ie. Personal space, space
| shared with near neighbors, space shared with a wider
| neighborhood, and everyone's space. And that's exactly what this
| development provides.
|
| If I were the university running this place, I would make 'room
| swaps' super easy to enable people to move near their friends and
| to allow communities of like-minded people to form.
| hnxs wrote:
| The toilet:person ratio is 1:4
|
| It's like sharing a bathroom with 4 people, but worse
|
| no thanks
| londons_explore wrote:
| You know most offices have a much worse ratio...?
| Gare wrote:
| Most people don't live in an office, only spend there 8-ish
| hours per day.
| hnxs wrote:
| do you live in an office?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Are you considering the scale of the building and the lack of
| access to outside? Imagine, the pod next to your's, deep in the
| interior of the building with only two entrances/exits,
| accidentally starts a fire. Or houses a crazy person who keeps
| defecating in their waste-bin. Just imagine the CO2 levels and
| lack of oxygen, even without the other environmental issues!
|
| I, too, value communal shared spaces. A giant block with no
| natural light or fresh air, for $300k per tiny unit, is not the
| way to do it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| As a new building I assume it will have proper air supplies
| to each room...
|
| And lighting can totally be artificial _if_ it is
| sufficiently bright to be akin to sunlight. If I can 't get
| sunburn off it, it isn't a suitable sun-substitute.
|
| These people will still have access to the outside, where
| there will hopefully be a large park all around.
| raldi wrote:
| There are ten emergency stairwells on every floor:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FC1jlGjVEAIvAG8?format=jpg
| jmpman wrote:
| I'm with you, but I'd go one step further. I'd like this setup
| for a work environment. Small, individual offices with doors,
| connected to a shared team room with a dedicated conference
| table. With such a setup, you can opt to isolate for some
| distraction free work, or socialize, working together around
| the shared conference table.
|
| If I were UCSB, I'd build a scale dorm with the layout -
| (32-150) rooms, with real windows (that could be painted over
| initially to mirror the planned false window). Surely Munger's
| donation doesn't require the full size building to be completed
| in X years. Take his money, build the test - validate that it
| causes no psychological harm, calm the critics, and then build
| the full sized one.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| There's a podcast I love -- the Magnus Archives. Highly
| recommended. Spoilers for that, but ...
|
| A character aligned with an entity that feeds off loneliness at
| one point describes a failed attempt to architect an apartment
| complex, designed to maximize loneliness and associated despair
| (prior to a sacrifice of the residents). Life imitating art, I
| guess.
| xputer wrote:
| It always strikes me as odd that many houses and apartment
| buildings in the US west coast will have entire walls with zero
| or nearly zero windows in them. Apartments and houses here are so
| much darker than in Europe.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I'd rather have no roommate than a window.
| aristophenes wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| No, actual _room_ mates. Not flat mates. Like sharing a bed
| room or bunk bed with a stranger, hostel style. That 's what
| this is competing with.
| docmars wrote:
| Not sure if dorm or... prison.
|
| Wtf UCSB, really?
| Ajay-p wrote:
| I do not have a problem with 4,500 students in a dormitory, it
| reminds me of a large resort hotel, but each room must have a
| window. Not just for sanity but safety.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| ucsb has a small housing problem and a bigger party image
| problem. there's great dorms, probably some of the best in the
| country. not because they are nice, they are old and small, but
| they are close to the ocean. you can hear the waves crash from
| your room in most dorms
|
| there's only space for freshmen and some upperclassmen. the upper
| class dorms are reserved for honors or scholarships. everyone
| else moves out to isla vista (iv) after freshman year. iv is
| adjacent to ucsb
|
| iv is a fucking amazing place. high density shitty housing that
| costs insane amounts. home to good parties. iv is so famous for
| partying it has lots of students for santa barbara city college
| too even though that's a 20 min drive away. and people come from
| all over the country for this community college just to party
|
| ucsb wants to shake its party image. halloween is so nuts in iv
| they do id checks just to enter, have mounted police, close down
| roads, etc. so getting more student housing away from iv will let
| them say we have options for students who don't want to party.
|
| but holy shit that dorm complex looks horrible to live in
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Kudos to this architect for standing up to this, but my question
| is, why does standing up to completely obvious monstrosities like
| this take any courage at all?
|
| Perhaps this is nothing new and just exactly what "The Emperor's
| New Clothes" is all about. That is, any non-affiliated person
| could easily say "You want to house 4,500 students in a
| windowless prison because some billionaire gave you about 14% of
| the financing?" but somehow the administrators in charge of this
| are pushing, pushing, pushing.
|
| I think I'm just a little depressed thinking of all the recent
| cases that seem to me like they should be easy, clear cut moral
| questions where assumably smart, good people throw out their
| morals in a heartbeat because $.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Looking at this design, I feel like Munger should team up with
| Zuckerberg. You could probably fit 45,000 students in this if,
| instead of tiny windowless rooms, you just dipped all the
| students in a nice nutrient electrolyte broth and hooked their
| heads up to the metaverse. Think of all the collaboration that
| would happen!!
| MR4D wrote:
| I would like to ask Charlie Munger 1 question:
|
| "How do you expect students to live in this place during another
| Covid-like lockdown?"
|
| Yeah, this is insane.
| amarant wrote:
| 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.
| musingsole wrote:
| 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.
|
| Starting to smell misinfo on this...
| mbg721 wrote:
| 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).
| wirthjason wrote:
| This story brings back memories of my college days studying
| philosophy and reading about Jeremy Bentham'a Panopticon.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
|
| Philosophy classes should have a field day with Munger's design
| and these kinds of social experiments.
| dsauerbrun wrote:
| 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.
| rfw300 wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| i'd sue to try to get that money back. but i'd also expect to
| know before signing that i'd get such a room.
|
| but i would not stay. my mental health is not worth it.
| flerovium wrote:
| I believe the word is "neo-penal" University architecture:
| https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=999
| Gravityloss wrote:
| In comparison, this is some cool student housing:
| https://copenhagenarchitecture.dk/tietgen-student-housing/
|
| It's a ring. The personal rooms have views to the outside, and
| the communal spaces open to the inside.
| abledon wrote:
| wow, thats beautiful. Just copy paste that ffs
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Can't wait for this to be featured on "eyesore of the month"[1].
|
| [1] https://kunstler.com/featured-eyesore-of-the-month/
| xg15 wrote:
| The reasoning for this architecture is supposedly to encourage
| socializing, but my suspicion is it will actually do the
| opposite.
|
| The tiny rooms are perfectly compatible with the "antisocial
| 4channer" lifestyle. Internet addicts will probably be thankful
| because there is less space they have to keep clean.
|
| What it seriously discourages is inviting someone into your room,
| doing sports, caring for plants or pets or inviting your own
| group of friends for a boardgame night.
|
| It also takes away any agency over when or with whom you want to
| socialize by forcing you through the common area when you want to
| eat or just have to use the bathroom.
|
| I've been in a dorm with single-occupancy rooms but shared
| kitchens. I can say it can get extremely awkward if some other
| group is having a party and you just want to cook something for
| dinner. And that design had an ordinary shared kitchen, separate
| from the floor. I can only imagine how awkward it gets if the
| only way to your room is through the common area.
|
| The forced socializing (but only with your housemates) reminds me
| of something out of The Crimson Rivers. If that billionaire guy
| demanded exclusive authority over room assignments next, I
| wouldn't be completely surprised.
| thehappypm wrote:
| So what type of dorm encourages any of those activities? A
| shared double or triple, like what most students deal with?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The part I don't get is that the total project will cost over 1.5
| billion USD and Charlie Munger, the value investor, will get his
| building and name on it for only 200 million. The art of the deal
| for him for sure. But the school is screwing themselves and the
| students for such a measly donation in terms of the totality of
| the deal.
| bell-cot wrote:
| With the reputation & nicknames the place may soon have with
| students - "Mungertraz", "Gulag Munger", "Black Hole of Chuck
| Munger", "Bergen-Munger", etc. - the naming rights aspect may
| at least be a "better" deal for the University.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Let's just call it Suicide Hall from the start, because that's
| going to be its name in the future.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| OK hold up, density _is_ good. Let 's not do some laundered CA-
| loves-housing-crunch here.
|
| But yes, the thing needs more entrances, windows, and _also_ the
| floorspace needs vastly more street interaction.
|
| There is this sick thing where if you compare old and new
| buildings, and the streetscape is vastly less compact than it
| used to be. My favorite comparison is in Long Island City:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7487041,-73.937889,3a,75y,20...
|
| and
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@40.742877,-73.9540354,3a,75y,76...
|
| Now, sure maybe schools aught not to have commerical tennants for
| some reason (though frankly I think that's kinda romantic/naive)
| but the density of ammenities should be no less. There should be
| cafeterias, corner stores, etc., all spilling out onto the
| street.
|
| It's not a fortress or mall.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Strongly agree. I feel very lucky, personally, for the dorms I
| had in university that were basically on city streets
| intermingled with private homes, businesses, and so on. After
| growing up an incredibly cloistered childhood in an inescapable
| car suburb, living in walkable (while suburban) Pittsburgh was
| incredible by comparison and really let me grow into a
| functional adult if I'm being honest.
| alabamamike wrote:
| IDK, maybe letting your Gganbu design the mega dorm is a bad
| idea?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Reminds me those cage houses in Hong Kong or iso-cubes in the
| Judge Dredd universe.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Munger also did the same thing for the University of Michigan's
| graduate residence building^; 95% of the rooms have no windows.
|
| ^ https://housing.umich.edu/residence-hall/munger/
| testplzignore wrote:
| That building holds 630 residents. The proposed building holds
| 7x more.
| theroqwpeo wrote:
| Reviews of this residence:
| https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...
| raldi wrote:
| Students seem to love it. It's a shame that this sole piece
| of actual data is buried so far down underneath piles of
| speculative naysaying.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Seems like they love it for the location, convenience and
| price. Not for the lack of windows. Granted, no windows are
| cheaper but still...
| celtain wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Are the ratings reliable?
|
| 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+.
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| Surprisingly positive reviews.
| nisegami wrote:
| A lot of those reviews seem to be posted in late November
| 2019. Seems suspicious to me. Granted, I'd probably be fine
| living there.
| kpmcc wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree, but I'd also challenge that we shouldn't be
| designing our permanent, 100+ year structures around
| pandemics.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-
| curio...
|
| [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/war-famine-
| pestilence...
| yardie wrote:
| I'll wait for the medical profession to tell me the cure
| for a major ailment is a windowless, tightly enclosed
| space with limited circulation.
| celtain wrote:
| Has the medical profession told you that your current
| housing situation cures a major ailment?
| phatboyslim wrote:
| I had the same initial reaction as most here when reading the
| article. This data has caused me to think more critically
| about the concept, thank you.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| 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
| wayoutthere wrote:
| 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.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Hard to believe that they didn't use this in their
| advertising copy
|
| "Feels less dystopian than what you're used to"
| nineplay wrote:
| 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.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| 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.
| pa7ch wrote:
| 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.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Yeah strongly agree there.
| zz865 wrote:
| Interesting, most reviews are fine with it.
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| Thanks, it seems very well liked.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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).
| awillen wrote:
| Wow, did not expect those to come in at an 8.8.
| wongarsu wrote:
| At least there everyone seems to get their own bathroom. The
| UCSB version seems to have one bathroom and one shower for
| every suite of 8
| loeg wrote:
| We had 2 toilets and 1 shower (in a single shared bathroom)
| per suite of _16_ students at UW in McMahon:
| https://hfs.uw.edu/Live/Undergraduate-Housing-Rates-and-
| Info...
| canaus wrote:
| 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.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's not uncommon, is the point.
| pacbard wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| Worth noting that the UM building is a significantly different
| scope and scape:
|
| 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...
| raldi wrote:
| I see two back-to-back bathrooms per eight bedrooms.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| > there appears to be 1 bathroom per 8 suites
|
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| 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)
|
| [0] https://www.independent.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/07/dormi...
| paganel wrote:
| > 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small,
| single-occupancy bedrooms.
|
| I've lived until relatively recently (~5 years) in a communist-
| built, collective-housing unit which had hundreds of studios, if
| not more (I was unit number 700-something), and even there an
| access to windows (for the actual room and for the kitchen) plus
| a small balcony were taken as a given, any other option would
| have looked like prison.
|
| Also, I'm pretty sure the studio-apartment potentially not having
| an window would have broken even the communist-era building
| regulations, how does the building from the article pass those
| regulation, are they really that lax when it comes to access to
| windows?
| chubot wrote:
| Wow this is an idea by Warren Buffett's business partner? I
| thought he was widely respected but this indeed seems like a
| monstrosity.
|
| 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.
| starlust2 wrote:
| His money has made him an "expert" in all things.
| jefftk wrote:
| Lots of uninformed reactions hiding the important stuff in this
| thread:
|
| * Munger did something similar at the University of Michigan,
| which residents review positively:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038730
|
| * The building plans include sprinklers and have multiple escape
| stairs their own exits:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039893
|
| * There are lots of windows and natural light in the per-suite
| common areas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038874
| elihu wrote:
| The per-suite common areas don't have windows. It looks like
| there's a large-ish common area with windows per "house" shared
| by 64 people.
| alabamamike wrote:
| IDK, maybe letting your Gganbu design the mega-dorm wasn't the
| best idea?!?
| g051051 wrote:
| I love parts of it (the small single occupancy rooms), but I'd
| hate having those common areas right outside every door
| (especially that TV), one bathroom for 8 people, etc. The odds of
| at least one inconsiderate jerk (not cleaning, stealing food,
| being loud, etc.) in every "pod" is probably close to 100%.
| ghaff wrote:
| The dorm I lived in undergrad had a variant of that common area
| arrangement--though rooms had windows and they weren't all
| singles. I definitely preferred it to the anonymous corridor
| approach. Not to defend this particular design for a number of
| reasons, but having a variety of rooms clustered around shared
| spaces is pretty common:
| https://capitalprojects.mit.edu/projects/new-residence-hall
| vincnetas wrote:
| Regarding windowless rooms, this could be helping a bit :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw
|
| Artificial skylight
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're joking, right?
|
| I stayed in a hotel room in Hong Kong with no windows. It
| sucked, but being a tourist I was never in there. It's
| different for a student dorm.
|
| There's a lot of blather about "human rights" but I think
| "access to the outdoors and natural light" might well BE a
| human right.
| gt565k wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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".
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| tclancy wrote:
| It's $200 million in your pocket at a cost of $1.3 billion
| out.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| Sadly, that's not over the top when it comes to institutional
| building. Particularly in Californian costs.
| fasteddie wrote:
| 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.
| lbriner wrote:
| 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.
| baud147258 wrote:
| well, it's not just a small bedroom @ 333k, it's the
| small bedroom plus all the shared spaces.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| lvass wrote:
| 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.
| mapmap wrote:
| $29 per sq ft is amazing! Have you documented your project?
| Interested to learn more.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| yashap wrote:
| 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.
| indodima wrote:
| 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...
| tomtheelder wrote:
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > 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?
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| 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
| themitigating wrote:
| But you do need to prove that statement because you are
| implying it's obvious
| comrh wrote:
| There's a huge amount of research done by actual
| architects on what makes a building "healthy" for human
| occupation. https://www.wellcertified.com/
| asiachick wrote:
| 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.
| gbronner wrote:
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Your roommates chose to have blackout curtains. And they
| could choose to open them.
| adolph wrote:
| A student in a windowless room could choose to have a SAD
| lamp.
|
| https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-sad-lamps.html
|
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/light-
| therapy/ab...
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Apropos name.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Ah yes, let's make the students paying out the butt pay
| for an expensive lamp in a room that barely fits in said
| room.
| dymax78 wrote:
| > My college roommates had blackout curtains on the small
| windows in our rooms. Not sure how this is different.
|
| I'm extremely confused. Were your blackout curtains made
| of sheet metal and welded to the walls?
| wpietri wrote:
| 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?
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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.
| dihydro wrote:
| 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
| lbriner wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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."
| thehappypm wrote:
| Sir, this is a Wendy's
| gbronner wrote:
| 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.
|
| Munger's vision is a palace compared to this.
| dave5104 wrote:
| > The dorms that I used had all sorts of unpleasant
| features
|
| Just because you had a poor dorm experience doesn't mean
| a brand new dorm built in 2021 needs to replicate that
| experience.
| celtain wrote:
| >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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _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.
| k8si wrote:
| Introvert's nightmare. Also, who can study in a common
| area with all the noise?
| klyrs wrote:
| Goal: socialization.
|
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I would imagine an introvert would do far worse in a
| shared triple room with no common areas at all, in this
| dorm, they have a private room.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Why is the alternative automatically a triple room with
| no common area, and not simply a single room with at
| least a window (plus a common area)?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Because that's what this proposal is replacing.
| dEnigma wrote:
| But the real alternative is another (better) proposal,
| not keeping things as they are.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| This is why the library exists.
| asiachick wrote:
| 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.
| swalsh wrote:
| 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.
| Belphemur wrote:
| Maybe they're betting on the donor dying before having to
| start the project, and hope to keep the money ?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| If the donor is attaching terms to the donation then I'd
| expect there will be some sort of contract in place to
| ensure his terms are met.
| kylecordes wrote:
| His heirs might be much more reasonable about
| renegotiating it.
| exhilaration wrote:
| But money! I agree that this is a pretty crazy project, but
| that's a lot of money to turn down for a public university.
| xenophonf wrote:
| The bequest isn't anywhere even close to covering the
| entire cost of the building, which is what blows my mind.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I am pretty sure Charlie Munger is far from being an asshole.
| He is also pretty far from being an architect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Architectural_e.
| ..
| clintonb wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
| aurizon wrote:
| I see a lot of criticisms by people with a long history of wood
| buildings(which burns), painted(which burns), wooden furniture
| with foam(which burns). Is this building made totally out of non
| combustable components which will not create toxic fumes if
| intentionally doused with gasoline. This means all furniture,
| floor covers, lights etc simply will not burn. Then they have
| sprinklers as well. Windows, Bill Gates has some rooms with no
| windows at all, but they do have huge screens on which lessons,
| movies, travelogs, and even the view from any place on the
| property at any time of day or date. How would you like to have a
| screen of a warm sunny day in June to look at on a dreary January
| day?
|
| We have seen the result of aged construction codes unable to
| adapt to this modern age. This dorm looks to have been well
| thought out as an experimental future habitat, with fire safety
| and access thought out, exits, air exchange, heat exchange all
| dealt with adequately
| devwastaken wrote:
| If it has a kitchen with actual cooking, this is exactly how
| dorms should be designed. I don't care about having a window if
| there's ventilation. I care about _affording it_ and not having
| another dumb kid to share that space with.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 8 people, 2 cans, and a kitchen sink. Guess what happens next!
|
| Answer: you pee out the window (because someone is already using
| the sink)
| quercusa wrote:
| Sorry, no windows!
| gorgoiler wrote:
| There's one at either end of the canteen/open plan toilet.
| [deleted]
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