“An ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light, air, and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants,” he wrote.ĭescribing the process of designing the UCSB building, he said, “We took the penthouse space, which everybody wants, which is twice as valuable as ordinary space, and gave it to the students.
While forceful, it stuck to mild, academic language. McFadden told Record that the letter was meant to remain private. In his most recent letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the company he runs with Warren Buffet, Munger wrote that “the worst attributes of bureaucracy should much more often be treated like the cancers they so much resemble.” In other words, my way or the highway.īut when Dennis McFadden, a veteran southern California architect, resigned last week from a design review committee at UCSB, after Munger’s building was presented as a fait accompli, his letter made news around the world. I’ve fixed that,” he said, “We took Corbusier’s errors and the errors in university housing and eliminated them one by one.” So the whole thing didn’t work worth shit. But, Munger said, that building “was too narrow to make the spaces interesting. Speaking from his home in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park, which he designed himself and which he said has “lots of windows,” Munger said he based the dorm’s design on the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille by Le Corbusier. Rendering of typical house plan at Munger Hall, UCSB. And only about 6 percent of the rooms - the end rooms in each row of 32 - have windows. Rows and rows of identical 10 foot by 7 foot bedrooms give the building, in plan, about as much variety as a sheet of graph paper.
So Munger’s plan for an 11-story, 1.68 million square foot housing block was greeted with open arms by the university’s chancellor, Henry Yang, who called it “inspired and revolutionary.” The building will have nine identical residential floors, each divided into eight “houses,” with each house further divided into eight eight-person suites. UCSB is experiencing a severe housing shortage and is being pressured by area residents to build new dormitories. Munger said he hadn’t decided how much of the building’s $1.2 billion cost he will cover, but he said that it will be the biggest gift he has ever made. “Every other college will be jealous,” he asserted. In a wide-ranging conversation with Record, he called his opponents - including a respected architect who resigned from an advisory committee last week - “idiots” and said he expects the 4,500-room building to be copied all over the country. Charlie Munger, the 97-year-old billionaire who has been ridiculed for wanting to build a dormitory with thousands of windowless bedrooms at the University of California, Santa Barbara, came out swinging on Monday morning.
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