A Billionaire Donor Designed a Mega-Dorm. An Architect Called It a Psychological Experiment.

A consulting architect at the University of California at Santa Barbara has resigned in protest of plans for a massive dorm of mostly windowless bedrooms conceived and financed by a 97-year-old billionaire.

The architect, Dennis J. McFadden, described the project’s design as “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being.” The 11-story building is based on a design created by Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of Warren Buffett and a vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway. Munger donated $200 million toward the project on the condition that it be built according to his plans. He has no formal training as an architect, but has donated hundreds of millions of dollars, with the same caveat, for buildings at major universities and other institutions, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Contacted on Friday, Munger said it was the first he’d heard of the architect’s objection. Any big project invites controversy, he said, but he has no intention of tweaking his design to satisfy critics. “There isn’t the slightest chance I’m going to change,” he said.

If the university were to require any changes, “They’re not going to have my donation,” Munger said. “Why would I let one crazy man change the design?”

The planned dorm, which was presented to the campus’s Design Review Committee as 100-percent complete, would house about 4,500 students in single rooms, 94 percent of which would lack windows, according to McFadden, a highly-respected Southern California architect. Munger’s idea was that small, windowless bedrooms would encourage students to come out and congregate in common spaces.

“In the nearly 15 years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational, and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall,” McFadden wrote in his October 24 resignation letter to Julie Hendricks, UCSB’s campus architect.

In an email to The Chronicle on Friday , a campus spokeswoman, Andrea Estrada, said the university was grateful for McFadden’s contributions and insights while serving as an advisory consultant and that it recognized the value of considering multiple design perspectives. However, she added, the university is “delighted to be moving forward with this transformational project.”

She said the plan was a collaboration among the university, Munger, and Navy Banvard, whom she described as a distinguished architect with Van Tilburg, Banvard, and Soderbergh. McFadden said his understanding was that the plan was based entirely on input from Munger, who, in his conversation with The Chronicle, also took credit for the design. McFadden declined further comment, saying he hadn’t planned to go public with his objections, but that he was glad the controversy was being aired after his resignation letter was shared on the social-media site Reddit.

Estrada said all housing projects are guided by a campus plan that seeks to provide affordable, energy-efficient housing that reduces the number of students living in a neighboring community that also suffers from housing shortages. The Santa Barbara campus is under intense pressure to build thousands more dorm rooms to accommodate its growing student body.

Munger defended his plans in his conversation with The Chronicle. “The whole idea is to get people closer together so they educate each other. There will be 4,500 students in one building, and almost everything they need will be there,” he said.

The UCSB project, Munger said, is a modified version of a graduate–housing project he designed at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The Munger Graduate Residence, which opened in 2015 and also saw pushback to the design, “is a raging hit there,” he said. “You never saw such a happy group of students. It’s working like gangbusters.”

Officials at the University of Michigan did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

Among the advantages, Munger said, are single rooms for all students. If they want sunlight and views of the surroundings, they can go into a common room, the way passengers on Disney cruise ships leave their rooms to step out into common areas with windows. The individual dorm rooms, he said, will have “a better version” of the artificial windows on Disney cruise ships, which he said are a hit with passengers.

In a July news release, the university described the massive project, which the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper dubbed “Dormzilla,” as “absolutely stunning.”

“Munger Hall — a joint venture between the university and philanthropist Charles Munger — will fulfill the university’s commitment to provide not only more student housing, but housing that is both better and more affordable for students,” the release said. “It will do so with flourish and elegance.”

The university’s chancellor, Henry T. Yang, praised Munger’s “inspired and revolutionary design.” It will include study areas, meeting rooms, lecture halls, and “a wealth of social spaces that bring students together in community with one another,” he said.

McFadden sees otherwise. One of his primary objections is the lack of windows in most bedrooms, as well as the fact that it does nothing to take advantage of the campus’s stunning setting overlooking the Pacific Ocean. “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 well-being of occupants,” his resignation letter states. “The Munger Hall design ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn’t matter.”

The building’s eight-person living units are “sealed environments with no exterior windows in the shared space or in 94 percent of the bedrooms,” McFadden wrote.

“The design team offered no research or data to justify the radical departure from student-housing standards, historical trends, evidence-based design principles, and basic sustainability principles. Rather, as the ‘vision’ of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.”

Among those who objected to the project was Marc Vukcevich, a former member of the design-review committee who graduated from UCSB in June.

“My freshman-year roommate committed suicide, and the idea that students could self-isolate in a windowless room alarms me,” he said in an interview.

The university’s Graduate Student Association said, in an email to the university, that by going ahead with the dorm, the university is ignoring the input of students, faculty members, and the consultant hired to review the project. “There is mounting evidence that Munger Hall, as currently designed, will have a detrimental impact on students’ mental health and bodily safety,” it says.

McFadden also found the sheer size of the project troubling. Munger Hall would have just two entrances and “would qualify as the eighth-densest neighborhood on the planet,” he wrote. “It would be able to house Princeton University’s entire undergraduate population,” he added. “The project is essentially the student-life portion of a mid-sized university campus in a box.”