Design flaw
Add billions and egomania and what do you get? Egomaniacal billionaire paying part of the cost for a student dormitory in which most of the rooms have no windows.
The 11-story, 159-foot-tall Munger Hall dormitory was designed by 97-year-old billionaire Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the approximately $1.4 billion project under the condition that his designs would be followed exactly.
He’s not an architect. He’s not a designer.
Cramming thousands of students into a residence hall where only 6% of the rooms have windows to some seems like a social experiment, but a similar concept has been executed at the University of Michigan with the Munger Graduate Residences.
Munger Graduate Residences opened in 2015 at the University of Michigan, housing up to 630 graduate students in an eight-story 380,000-square-foot building. Munger, a Berkshire Hathaway vice chair who donated $110 million towards the $155 million project, wanted to bring a “transdisciplinary” living experience to graduate students.
A transdisciplinary windowless experience.
What’s the point?
And I thought building codes required bedrooms to have windows.
I have spent the majority of my working life in windowless offices; the building I have taught in for the past 16 years has few windows, and they are all in a different part of the building. I rarely know what the weather is, what the sky looks like, or what time of day in terms of sunlight. I am convinced it does very little to help my depression, and almost certainly exacerbates it. This dorm is an exercise in cruelty, just as is the building where I spend so many of my waking hours.
He might be an egomaniacal billionaire, but he just might also be a crypto-revolutionary. This building would appear to be the sort of nightmare design that will bring the students inside it out into the streets in a manner to make Paris 1968 look like a Sunday school picnic.
So generous of him to hand them a $1.2 billion dollar obligation. If he wants it built exactly to his design, he should have paid for quite a bit more than one seventh of it.
A “transdisciplinary living experience” sounds like it might translate as “time you spoiled brats got toughened up and learned life isn’t gonna be a goddam bed of roses.”
Oh, the halcyon days of graduate school. I remember my office: it was in the 2nd basement. Not even just the basement: the next one down. Next to the steam tunnels that came from the power station and fed steam to the radiators in the ancient dormitories. It got so depressing down in that dungeon that my lab-mates and I would go upstairs to the coffee cart just to stand there and get some sunlight from the entryway windows, even filtered as it was through the gray winter clouds.
Happy to see that graduate students are still being treated like so many cattle. (NOT)
James,
My first office as a PhD student was in the other direction. It was one of a line of offices built in wood on top of another building, as an afterthought. The view was nice and I got to see plenty of sunshine (too much, there were no blinds and they wouldn’t let me install any) but it was genuinely terrifying when it was windy. I’m not convinced the offices were nailed down properly. And they were freezing all year round.
I couldn’t complain too much, though, because due to an administrative oversight, they’d given me an office to myself and I didn’t want anyone to notice. I’m not sharing my blackboard* with anyone
The offices were still there when I went back to work at that university years later and were still there last time I was past, getting on for thirty years after I first used one. I’ll stop before I start reminiscing about the various computers I had to use.
I read about the building in the OP a couple of months ago. I think the ‘idea’ is to make the individual bedrooms so unpleasant to be in that the students will have no choice but to mingle in the communal areas. This is very reminiscent of certain schools of architectural thought in the UK. That is, architecture for poor people, of course. Poor people benefit from that sort of thing. Rich people, mysteriously, seem to benefit from having pleasant private spaces. Funny, that.
* blackboards, in those days, seems hard to believe, now.
My lab as a DPhil student was nothing special, but as a post-doc it was another matter — on the 6th (and highest) floor of a newish building, with a fine view of the Golden Gate (and a less fine view of the Acheson Physicians Building, a real eyesore (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sharonhahndarlin/6912418170)).
I guess I feel pretty privileged with my graduate student office. It was small, lacked windows, and had a vortex caused by the HVAC, but it was inside, on the second floor of a new building with lots of easy access to the bathroom, and it was heated and air conditioned.
Graduate student computers? Don’t get me started on those! Awful.