From what I see in responses to you, Munger has designed other well-received dorms in the past so that gives him credibility on this topic. It doesn't mean he's right but it's a good chance his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it - especially coupled with the current article that describes how he thinks.
This is total conjecture but I can imagine him doing something like this: Question: how do you make students the most miserable? Answer: create a dorm that discourages social interaction, and is far from classes and amenities.
Starting from that, you do the opposite: create a large, centrally located dorm where the design discourages sitting in your room and encourages use of shared spaces while benefiting from greater density and central location.
If the question is "are windowless rooms good?" the answer is "no." If the question is "are we willing to sacrifice bedroom windows so that we have grater communal life and better walkability" the answer is probably "yes, possibly."
Logically it's the same argument for why some people prefer to live in small city apartments when they could live in a much larger home elsewhere for the same price. The very nature of city real estate is tied to the nature of city life (both as a cause as an affect) and it's simply a tradeoff. Asked on its own "do you want a cramped apartment" the answer is always "no" yet people often opt for it in context.
> his thinking is more nuanced than those shitting on it
To be fair, an architect with 15 years on the UCSB Review Committee resigned over this... so it's not just outsiders and the media who are bagging on the design.
Munger Hall at Stanford is actually pretty nice - I was stunned by how nice the apartments were actually. However if I remember correctly they are totally opposite in concept to the UCSB proposed dorm - Stanford ones have two rooms to an apartment, a decent living area between the two rooms, not much of a big building common area, and definitely windows in each apartment.
So yes, I agree that the UCSB dorm design sounds terrible in comparison.
My comment was responding to a call for authority. I’m not using their position for anything more than to say that they’re informed.
> When I don't sleep, I'm not in my bed or my bedroom.
I’m similar now but I was in my room a lot when I was in uni. There were also plenty of kids on my hall who were in their rooms at basically all times, leaving only for class and food.
> There were also plenty of kids on my hall who were in their rooms at basically all times, leaving only for class and food.
If I may venture a guess, it may have been caused by the lack of better alternatives.
Reducing the sleeping room to its core feature (sleeping!) may give more space to build rooms for other important features, while disincentivizing staying in one room at basically all times (which I see as generally a bad idea)
Architects for his other buildings didn't resign though. Why do you trust this one specifically over the other ones who followed through creating the buildings?
His other buildings weren't so wildly divergent from the consensus about good building design either. The closest seems to be his University of Michigan graduate housing. In the building he does have windowless dorm rooms (often complained about) but there's only 7 of them off a shared kitchen and living room space instead of 70+. He took the design of Munger Hall and scaled it up almost directly with some rearranging and scaling, each room on the somewhat successful [0] UM Munger Dorm becomes a new pod of smaller rooms.
The designs are so different the relative success of the UM dorm shouldn't transfer much credibility to the design of the UCSB dorm. Going from sharing a lit common space with 7 people to 70 people is a massive change in the dynamics of those spaces. At a very basic level the UM space is owned and controlled by few enough people you can call it semi-private. At the UCSB level it's just a full public space which is a different dynamic.
[0] I say somewhat because people hate the windowless individual rooms it has enough amenities that they still rate it highly. He's fully banking on the fake windows making the new smaller rooms palatable. While massively increasing the number of people you have to share your nearest source of natural light with. edit: even that conclusion isn't universal some people had a pretty bad time living in those dorms https://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/qkmp5h/i_wa...
But everyone is complaining about windowless dorms, not too great a distance from sunlight. I don't know if his design is great, but HN is just filled with 98% middlebrow dismissal on the topic.
The two things are related. If my bedroom is windowless but I can easily spend semi-private time in a naturally lit area the problem with the bedroom is diminished, the Michigan dorms have that feature, each 'pod' has a lit space shared by a small number of people. In the UCSB design you have to move to a decidedly public space shared by many people. That transition has a lot of problems, it's no longer 'your' space as you have no control over it and can't meaningfully modify or control it.
By whom? A suspicious site with terrible English and reviews like “you’ll get used to it” and “grat (sic) room”. If Amazon can’t keep scammy reviews away, how is some site like “veryapt” supposed to do so? It seems there is plenty of criticism of the Michigan project (even from residents)[1], but it also differs in a key point, in that all the rooms are suites, whereas the proposed project is even denser, with 8 bedrooms sharing 2 bathrooms a piece.
This design reminds me in some ways of the disastrous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis. It's demolition in the 1970's was prominently featured in the film "Koyaanisqatsi"
"Apartments clustered around small, two-family landings with tenants working to maintain and clear their common areas were often relatively successful. When corridors were shared by 20 families and staircases by hundreds, public spaces immediately fell into disrepair.[20] When the number of residents per public space rose above a certain level, none would identify with these "no man's land[s]"
One would expect that a major University building would not suffer from disrepair but the psychological effect of "disowning" the common areas might remain.
The apartments in Pruitt-Igoe were also deliberately small.
How far? I spent a semester at Rutgers and many students need to take busses many miles to get to class. It feels like like a campus community than just about any other school I’ve been on as a result.
Oh, I didn't imagine it could be that far. I meant more than a quarter mile = very far. I meant like being 200m from the dining hall vs 3 football fields from the dining hall -- you end up socializing more with people in your dorm if you're slightly isolated.
This is total conjecture but I can imagine him doing something like this: Question: how do you make students the most miserable? Answer: create a dorm that discourages social interaction, and is far from classes and amenities.
Starting from that, you do the opposite: create a large, centrally located dorm where the design discourages sitting in your room and encourages use of shared spaces while benefiting from greater density and central location.
If the question is "are windowless rooms good?" the answer is "no." If the question is "are we willing to sacrifice bedroom windows so that we have grater communal life and better walkability" the answer is probably "yes, possibly."
Logically it's the same argument for why some people prefer to live in small city apartments when they could live in a much larger home elsewhere for the same price. The very nature of city real estate is tied to the nature of city life (both as a cause as an affect) and it's simply a tradeoff. Asked on its own "do you want a cramped apartment" the answer is always "no" yet people often opt for it in context.