21
votes
Architect resigns in protest over UCSB mega-dorm
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- Authors
- Tyler Hayden, Indy Staff, Jerry Roberts, Nick Welsh, Jun Starkey, George Yatchisin
- Published
- Oct 28 2021
- Word count
- 815 words
Good on the architect for refusing to go along with this. The fact that the university board seem so willing to overlook the well-being of students in exchange for $$$ is pretty gross.
I think the kicker for me is that the $200 million still requires another $1.3 billion in funding from the university to actually complete the project (and that's if it doesn't go over budget). They are letting him have complete control for providing 15% of the total budget. WTF
I am a UC alumni and it's really disappointing to see the direction high level, unaffiliated executive hires have been taking the entire system. It feels like they are intentionally trying to turn every UC and every UC student into a very convenient, cookie-cutter output. Each UC has its own flavor, priorities, and culture. UC Santa Barbara has a really vibrant social scene and is the last university I can think of to need prison level methods to drive student engagement. Anyone who has been to Isla Vista can speak to that. This feels more like an attempt to squash student life than it is to catalyze it.
As a former Gaucho, I can vouch for this. UCSB and SBCC students that live in Isla Vista already have social engagement built into their housing because nearly every one of them has to share a bedroom with at least one other person! All for the low low price of 800-1200 bucks a month, I might add. They desperately need more housing near campus, and 4,500 individual rooms sounds amazing, but come on, people need windows. Young adults in their late teens/early 20s already have a hard time navigating that time of their lives, and for many people that age, it is the first time that they will experience depression or some other form of mental illness. I can't imagine going through the tough times I had at 19-20 in a windowless room with 8 other kids just outside my door.
All that said, I'm sure a bunch of students would sign up for it in a heartbeat since it means they can sleep in privacy. By the time my senior year rolled around, I was so sick of sharing a room that I rented a 10'-10' studio apartment (featuring a fridge, oven, sink, bathroom, and closet) that was in the back of a double-wide trailer located about 4 miles from campus...for 800 fucking dollars. My one window was about 2.5 feet from a brick wall, so I never got any direct sunlight or breeze, but I still felt great about my choices. That should give you an idea of what the housing market in IV is like and that was almost 10 years ago.
Hold up, two-person dormitory rooms are 800-1200 USD/month?! That's cheap?
Most of what I know about this is pre-covid hearsay, but UCSB has extreme housing problems. It's a large university, in two relatively small beachfront towns (not actually close to Santa Barbara). The towns are very anti-development, and anti-density, opposing building any new housing, especially for students, and mostly have single-family detached houses (and not very many of them). Thus, there simply is not nearly enough housing. But at least Isla Vista seems to have few regulations on living conditions in those houses, so many landlords take single-family houses and rent them in absurd ways: I was once shown a combined listing for two adjacent houses, which were both clearly built as not-particularly-large single family homes, listed at around 20,000 USD/month, with explanations and diagrams of how at least 20 students could be fit into them. I have heard that Covid has made students and others more reluctant to accept these conditions, which has made the problem even worse, to the point of students ending up in hotels, and in one case, a lecturer telling me one of their students had become homeless because, when they moved to UCSB, they found that the place they had rented wasn't actually available, and there was simply no other place to rent.
I got the sense that the towns involved have no incentive to address the problem, because the non-university residents of the towns don't want it to be addressed, seeing the university as damaging what would otherwise be a rather quiet and rural/agricultural area, and largely having political and cultural differences with the student body and a hostility toward academia in general. I assume they hope that making living conditions as miserable as possible will push people away from the university and make it shrink; they really seem to want the university to go away entirely. Meanwhile, students are largely not involved in local politics, and so the pro-housing side is not heard or cared about; to the extent that they become politically involved, they usually blame the problems on the university, or focus wildly idealistic and infeasible ideas at higher levels of government that have no chance of working, rather than considering the impact the towns and lack of buildings has. Graduate students and even faculty have problems as well, unless they can get the limited university-owned housing (they have housing for both), because no one is going to pay as much for a single-family house as a large bunch of students crammed into it.
To make matters worse, even for graduate students and faculty that are better able to commute, the towns, and Santa Barbara itself, have limited transportation, largely just one highway and one rail line (with extremely infrequent and unreliable trains) going along a single route, which somewhat frequently becomes impassable because of fires, mudslides, or other problems, making commuting from outside very difficult. Pre-covid, I had heard of people sleeping in their offices in order to be able to teach, or cancelling several classes, because their only viable commute home was cut off.
The same sort of dynamic plays out at UC Davis as well, with the university overwhelming the town in population and doing wild things to the local housing market. They're a little bit further ahead in building more housing, though, I think in large part due to Davis being an agricultural university and thus both holding more land itself and having large tracts of flat farmland around it for construction.
Oh, buddy. I'm guessing that you, or perhaps some other lurker reading this isn't intimately familiar with the absolute shit show that life at UC [fill in the blank] or any other halfway decent American university is. Like the other commenter said, most of the housing in Isla Vista is made up of single-family homes and small apartment buildings. Most students pay somewhere between 700 and 1200 USD/month to share a room with someone. Here is a look at IV craigslist for rooms/shared. As you can see, shared rooms are going for about $900/month. I'm not sure what the prices are like in the dorms, but I would imagine they're similar.
IV is unique with its housing structure, but I imagine those prices are in the same ballpark that students at UCLA, UCSD, UC Berkeley, or UCSF deal with. Hell, even the stoners up at UC Santa Cruz are probably getting close to those figures. So to answer your question...yes? I mean, if someone can find a space in IV that houses two people for a total price of 1200 USD/month? Yeah, that's cheap.
I guess now is a good time to bring up the fact that tuition prices at UCSB for California residents is around 5k/quarter. So your average full-time UCSB student living in IV is paying around 25k/year for tuition + a shared room in a beat-to-shit house or apartment. IIRC, summer session is a little bit cheaper, so if you stay the whole year you're probably looking at an even 30k. That's before you factor in things like food, books, phone, travel expenditures, and of course, the alcohol and marijuana that gets you through your existence. After all, UCSB stands for "U Can Study Buzzed."
Now, this next little rant is based on my own experience from 10 years ago, but I think it helps paint a clearer picture of how fucked everything is. When I was at UCSB, the only financial aid I was able to get were a pair of federal loans - something in the neighborhood of 5k/year subsidized and 5k/year unsubsidized. That's because my father made around 100k/year at his job in Los Angeles. Since 100k is enough for someone in LA to afford a decent one-bedroom apartment and a midsized sedan, grants were off the table. As for loans, I guess anything beyond 5k from the government would be excessive? I mean, those Tomahawks don't come cheap. It didn't matter if I had siblings that were in college, or if my dad had existing debt and literally no money in assets. If I wanted to borrow any more money, it would have to come from a private source with less friendly interest rates. Thankfully, I am incredibly privileged. My dad covered tuition, I did my first two years of school at a community college, I took a year off to live at home so I could work and save money, and then I worked between 25-30 hours/week after my savings ran dry. If I didn't have one or more of those things, I easily could have racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Instead, I was able to sneak out with 20k for two years. Why would anyone want to change this system? It's perfect.
This just sounds like a billionaire wanting to toy with people and have a little fun through subtle psychological torture. I can't believe anyone wants this to get built.
And the fun part is
So he's only putting up 13% of the cost but gets all the control over the stupid design.
And on top of that, it's going to be called Munger Hall. No wonder billionaires get their names put on anything. If this is what it costs to get universities to agree to your horrible ill-thought plans, the actual name must cost peanuts.
I simply can't imagine what kind of person decides to have strong, idiosyncratic opinions about the architecture of a dorm and choosing to impose something that looks like a McArthyist caricature of a Soviet dystopia. Like. . . why? You could have done anything! You could have made them all live in building that looks like a giant blender! Why this?
The weird thing is that he most likely will not see any result of this little experiment. Even if they start building now, the thing will take years to complete and then you'd have to have people live in it for at least a semester before you could start gathering early data. So we're talking in like maybe 5 years? Dude would be a 102 at that point.
Just stumbled across this bit:
Just 2 entrances for 4500 students. Sounds like an extreme fire hazard.
I'm assuming that there would have to be many additional fire exits to comply with building code. It sounds like he was just pointing out a possible congestion issue?
The density is crazy though. With a density like that and only a cube's surface area to put windows, it sounds like most rooms and common areas would be completely devoid of natural light.
I was going to say that whole windowless tiny room thing sounds like prison, but then I remembered that even every prison cell has to have windows.
This sounds comically horrific and I'm split between hoping it doesn't get built, and sheer curiosity of how bad the experiences and stories coming out of it will be if it gets built and people actually have to live there.
My college was known to have a dorm on campus that broke fire code in a million ways. The biggest being that the rooms were deemed too small for multiple people to live in safely. The school still put two people in each room and just paid all of the violations each year. With the exception of the rooms that were underground, even the rooms in that building all had windows.
Many people will have an opinion on this based on no data, but seems like gathering evidence would be a better idea. Whatever opinion you have on first impression is probably uninformative. I can think of interesting questions though.
If the idea is that students don’t stay in their rooms much, where are they supposed to hang out? Will there be enough space to spread out comfortably? How about in bad weather?
How good is ventilation?
What about fire safety?
Are there similar buildings? What did students think of them?
These aren’t answered by the article.
I don't think we have no data. This is a senior architect with a bunch of experience resigning and feeling compelled to go to the media over this. I Google'ed him and I can't find any instances of him doing this previously so I think taking him at his word is not unreasonable.
The actual letter is here which elaborates a bit more on the snippets in the news articles: https://imgur.com/a/frdrEIl#mT568MB
That's an expert opinion, not data. It does refer, vaguely, to data:
But there are no footnotes. If there's ample evidence that he's familiar with, couldn't he have referred to at least one study that's pretty good, as an example? This is basically just saying "trust me, it's bad."
There aren't footnotes because this is a resignation letter, not an academic paper. A simple search for "interior environments with access to natural light, air, and views to nature improve both the physical and mental well-being of occupants" brings up a number of studies and other sources that corroborate the thought. It's not some niche, experimental new idea that's only breaking ground now, this is a simple well-established concept in this field and beyond.
This also isn't some bozo off Twitter with one of the almost-freely handed out blue checkmarks saying "trust me, it's bad". This is a professional and qualified architect resigning over legitimate architectural concerns based on information and concepts that are pretty commonly known and accepted. You don't need to be an architect to understand why sunless, windowless places are depressing, just like you don't need to be a baker to know that a cake made with salt instead of sugar is going to be a bad cake.
Have you read those studies? Are they any good? That's still just handwaving in the general direction of "studies exist." It's not enough to do a search, they need to be evaluated, and neither of us did that.
Then after vaguely referencing the studies, you say we can answer this via common sense. (But then why the studies?) This is the same thing the bluechecks do on Twitter. Maybe we shouldn't assume we know all about a design we haven't studied.
I don't think common sense can answer this definitively. Certainly I'd prefer a bedroom with windows. But on the other hand, if it's for sleeping only, we close the blinds anyway. Some people even need blackout curtains. If that's all you do, maybe dark is good? I think it becomes critical to have other quiet places to hang out, though.
I'd also be concerned about ventilation. But perhaps it's provided in a different way? Closed windows don't provide any airflow.
Another reason to have a window is for evacuation in an emergency, which is why there are specific codes for egress windows. But maybe they covered that a different way?
Common sense gives us some obvious questions to ask, but it doesn't answer them.
Stop just asking questions. What's the point of this?
It doesn't matter if I read them or not because I am not the one questioning a professional, certified, trained, career architect's knowledge of architecture. I am not the one demanding studies. And I am not the one now asking how good those studies are. I have told you where the studies are and how to find them because I know there are many out there, and the information has been championed by trained professionals in multiple fields from psychology to medicine to architecture. Why, and how, have you moved to "Yes, but how good are those studies?" Go read them and find out for yourself if you're actually intellectually curious.
Your response begs the question: what if his resignation did have citations? Would you have skipped straight from "Why should we take his word for it, he didn't cite any sources" to "Why should we trust his sources at all?" Where would the goalposts move to next before you acknowledge that maybe a professional, certified, trained, career architect may be qualified to speak about their field without multiple levels of proof for every issue they raise?
For that matter, what are your qualifications to even bring up these concerns as if this architect is misled or misguided in their thoughts but you have some smoking gun of a concern that they must have not thought about? How are your concerns viable to raise without citation, but his are not? It's wild to me that you said that nobody can speak definitively on this design, including the architect who was hired to build (and then resigned over) it, without any citations and that we're all basically acting like Twitter users, but you've got a number of concerns and questions that could blow the whole thing wide open.
And all this because you find it hard to believe that living in what basically amounts to a prison isn't commonly accepted as a good thing without scientific citations.
It's bewildering you went from this to later say "I don't think common sense can answer this definitively." Why does common sense have to when you now know there are studies, enough that you asked for a review of them? I notice you pivoted everything away from the studies you can find and to suggest this is from the altar of common sense—common acceptance is not common sense. It's only commonly accepted because there are decades of studies and documentation out there.
My point is that as outsiders who didn't study the issue, we don't really know if this is design is as bad as it sounds. (It does sound bad, but that's a first impression.) And even if we studied it a little more, maybe we still wouldn't be sure. And that's okay! You seem upset by this, but you don't need to be. Nothing is at stake, for us. It's just a random story someone shared.
Taking sides and arguing about it becomes "instant expert syndrome" and I try to caution against it, but I seem to be misunderstood. Is there some way that I can caution people about jumping to conclusions that won't get people angry about it?
I think the problem you hit in this specific instance is that there are more or less two binary sides on this, as it's been presented in the article, and one of the sides is roughly "don't jump to conclusions here." So even though you're coming from a place of good faith intellectual curiosity and trying to be neutral, in this specific instance that ends up effectively joining the argument and defending one of the specific sides in the disagreement. If one party is claiming that another party is taking a negative action, and the other party is denying it, asking people to doubt the accusation is siding with a specific party rather than being completely neutral.
It seems like the two sides described in the article are “this building is a good idea, let’s build it” and “this building is a bad idea, it must be stopped. (Or changed a lot.)” Munger and the board seem to be on one side and the architect is on the other.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not” seems like it should be default for outsiders on basically any story that you never heard of before? You can say that even without reading the article. Or after reading it you could say “huh, that’s weird.”
But since nobody here is saying that they like the building, there would be no conflict here if I didn’t say anything. (I could have skipped it, and then there would have been some posts showing contempt for the project and nothing else.)
I think it would be good to get to “That sounds really weird. Why would someone want to build that?” Maybe that’s what I should have said to start with.
I think the pro-building claim is weaker than claiming that the plan is strictly good. Their claim is that the building plan isn't known to be harmful enough to necessitate changing. I think that position is aligned with "I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not" because "I don't know" means that the building can proceed as planned. You would need to be actively convinced that it was a bad plan to divert it. This would be different if the board was openly committed to only building beneficial plans, and wouldn't proceed unless the plan was validated to be good along several metrics. In that scenario a position of pure doubt really would be neutral. But it doesn't look like that's the case, so that's why I'm saying that it's taking their side. If the goodness of the plan is in question, the board is going to support building it because it's not proven to be harmful. Assuming I understand the situation correctly.
To be clear I'm not trying to tell you that you shouldn't have posted either. It's just that you seemed genuinely confused as to why other posters took your comment as an argument and engaged with it that way and asked why, and I have a possible explanation.
I think that's true assuming no data, but we do have a couple data points already:
So my practice would be to bias slightly towards "windows are helpful for humans" because I have data pointing in that direction, and no data pointing against it. It is still possible that windows are constructed out of habit and not a net benefit for humans, but it seems unlikely given what I already know. I would be interested on studies but don't think I'd need one at this point to move past the neutral position. I don't think studies should be required for taking weakly held positions on every single internet article, though maybe it would be better if we decided to take the time and back up all our positions that way.
With most stories shared here, we aren’t going to do anything about it. We’re just talking on the Internet about stuff other people are doing. So it seems like nonintervention should be the default assumption?
I would like to promote that. Pretending that we’re going to intervene in every conflict we read about so we need to take sides adds a lot of unnecessary heat, raising the conversational stakes in a way that’s mostly fake. Discussing each news story as if we were going to intervene seems exhausting.
I’d rather be thinking about it as “what can we learn from this?” It seems healthier?
I agree that having windows on bedrooms seems more likely to be a good idea for a lot of reasons. I hadn’t really considered not doing that. On the other hand, noticing someone doing weird stuff and asking why seems like a better way to learn something interesting, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief for a bit. What was Munger thinking and why couldn’t anyone talk him out of it? How did he promote this plan? He’s putting serious money behind it and the school’s leadership is putting even more money. There’s some possibility that they’re just mistaken (it wouldn’t be the first time someone built a bad building) but maybe not?
Though, admittedly, I haven’t been curious enough to investigate.
I think your viewpoint is healthy if nobody here is an expert on this and we don't have the cues of other experts as a place to start from. Leading with curiosity rather than judgment will likely lead to better learning.
I think some of the reason you're getting pushback though is that people take the framework you're promoting (honestly and in good faith, I believe) and use it very frequently elsewhere online as a way of frustrating and wasting the time of people who do have expertise on things or are comfortable yielding to experts because the information in focus is largely accepted science. Neutrality is valuable, but feigning neutrality is a way a bad faith actor can frame everyone else as being biased -- it cues the community to doubt those with corresponding “non-neutral” stances.
Furthermore, asking questions as a rhetorical strategy -- rather than from a place of genuine curiosity -- is a timeworn way that bad faith actors erode conversations on controversial topics. Implicit within those questions is a shift of the burden of proof, where the person asking the questions is essentially requiring others to do their homework for them. It's a trap, because if people refuse to do that, they look impolite, dismissive, or hostile, which furthers the idea embedded in the "neutrality" that those individuals are coming to the table with bias. If people do engage the questions, however, they don't achieve anything because the person was never interested in intellectually exploring the topic in the first place, which is why so often answers to questions aren't followed with "oh wow, thank you!" or "interesting, I didn't see it that way before" but simply a treadmill of more questions. Force your opponent to score a goal against a skilled defense, and then, right as the ball is on track, move the goalpost and set up an entirely different defense. Force them to try to score again. It’s easy to carry out, but exhausting for interlocutors. The bad faith actor usually “wins” by attrition.
Because the bad faith actor wastes the genuine time and effort of others, it makes those same individuals less likely to respond in good faith the next time they see similar behavior, which further feeds the idea that they’re biased and shouldn’t be trusted. This is part of the reason why so many topics can't even get off the ground anymore. The assumption of bad faith is all but baked into certain topics at this point -- potentially even the majority of online discourse whenever there are conflicting viewpoints.
I don't believe you were acting in bad faith at all, but I think it might be valuable for you to see that your comments here follow a contour that many people have had bad experiences with online. The types of questions you've posed here are similar to the types of stances that people will use when attempting to deny COVID or vaccine efficacy, for example. A "neutral" position on COVID is to accept that it exists because of the prevailing and undeniable evidence we have on it. However, people who want to deny it will create a false neutrality by positioning "COVID is real" versus "COVID isn't real" and occupying the space in between them, which makes the "COVID isn't real" position (as far as you can get from the truth and as biased as one can possibly be on the topic) look like it's simply equidistant away from neutral to "COVID is real".
Again, and most importantly, I don't think you were trying to do this in the slightest. We've been on Tildes long enough together that I know how important questions are to you, and I know that your posts here are coming from a genuine place. Your questions often prompt me to think about topics in valuable ways, and I'm often grateful for you bringing them to the table. I just think that, in this particular instance, there is a lot of overlap between the questions you're asking and the types of questions bad faith actors would ask, and I think that's why you got some pushback in this thread.
I'd like to preface this by saying that this is my personal impression of this chain of comments and I am not trying to put words in your mouth or attempt to analyze your intent.
They way you approached this topic in general is fine, you want to know more, the problem is that you repeatedly asked questions while yours were getting answered. Like @kfwyre said, it's a treadmill that all too often is used maliciously on the internet. I'm not involved in this discussion, but I personally was annoyed reading those comments, because to me they came across as demanding of proof that, at any point mind you, you could've gone and researched yourself. You want academic citations from the people you talk to while at the same time providing none yourself.
The good faith which this argument comes from, i.e. the desire for more knowledge, is lost between those words.
Some of my questions were at least partially answered and I should have acknowledged that better.
I think part of the issue is that I've been using questions as a way to get across my sense that some stories are incomplete. I don't really expect people to either do research or guess at the answers, unless they want to. We could do a lot of research and it might still be inconclusive. I'm pro-curiosity in principle without actually being all that curious, because, well, it never ends, and to me this is just another story on the Internet.
If a story is incomplete because we haven't heard from both sides, answering other questions would still leave this lingering sense of incompleteness. (Or it might be incomplete in other ways.)
I think I was clumsy about using questions to get at this. Maybe the Socratic method is overrated.
Yeah, getting emotionally invested in every internet article is a waste of energy, it's better to read to learn. Like I mentioned already though, I think in practice your comments were arguing in favor of a specific party from the article, and that's where the disagreement came from. I do also think it's interesting that the plan has no windows and that was a fixed requirement to the point of the architect resigning. If I had to guess I'd say that wanting a very high density building is the most likely reason, but it would be interesting to know more. I know nothing about this and haven't investigated either.
It's not just bedrooms but common areas as well.
I think, as lay people, it's perfectly valid to rely on expert opinion that's backed up by research or experience. Certainly it's your prerogative to go dig those up and cross-examine them if you wish -- but I don't think chiming in with a "+1" when an expert says "trust me it's bad" is necessarily a bad thing, especially within the context of a resignation letter.
I don't think it's a badly-written resignation letter. However, for our purposes as outsiders who are interested in learning things about architecture, it's less than ideal.
There is a similar problem with other people's +1's. Yes, windows are popular, but this is just feeding our own opinions back to us. It isn't learning either.
Well yes, sorry about that. A conversation about this article went rather badly on Hacker News (though there were some good points) and I was trying to head it off here. But that was clumsy and shouldn’t make assumptions.
Apparently there's another dorm for University of Michigan sharing a similar design. I don't know how much Munger had a say in its design, but it's literally called Munger Graduate Residences, so I assume he was involved in some capacity.
It's the highest rated dorm in its area.
The size and amount of natural light in common spaces does not seem comparable, though I haven't seen a floorplan. It is also for Graduate students.
For those opening the link, you can just answer ‘skip’ to all of the survey prompts to get to the reviews of the dorms
Maybe I’m just not looking at the photos of this or the similar Michigan dorm enough, but it seems like all the rooms have a window?
The note for the photo of the bedrooms says "A typical bedroom with a false window. | Credit: Courtesy."
It looks like there's panel that approximates the light from a window, which is one of those things that's in just about every dystopian future movie ever.