Is ‘dormzilla’ the solution to California’s housing crisis?

“What does it take

“What does it take to make architecture go viral?” The answer,
said Carolina A. Miranda in the Los Angeles
Times^[1], is a blueprint for a
vast, 11-storey student dormitory in which almost all the 4,500
residents sleep in windowless cells.

That’s what the University of
California^[2], Santa Barbara, is about
to build to help solve its student housing shortage. It’s the
brainchild of Charles Munger, a 97-year-old billionaire with no
architectural training, who is donating $200m to the university on
the condition that it uses his design. Rooms will have LED screens
to mimic sunlight – an idea inspired by the virtual portholes on
Disney cruise ships – and air piped in.

Critics point out that natural light and fresh air are so
psychologically vital that they’re even staples of basic jail
design. Their objections have been ignored by university leaders
and by Munger, who told an interviewer: “I expect these buildings
to sprout up all over America.”

Munger Hall – dubbed “Dormzilla” by critics – will look and feel
like “a self-storage warehouse”, said Henry Grabar on Slate^[3] (New York), but UC Santa
Barbara will take it because it’s in “desperate, desperate need of
new housing”.

In idyllic Santa Barbara, as in much of California, property is
incredibly expensive, with average house prices exceeding $1m.
Local zoning laws ban or severely restrict new apartment
construction. As a result, students have been bunking in hotels and
even sleeping in their cars. It might be better for students to
have no windows than to spend nights at the Marriott or on the back
seat of a Hyundai.

For student housing, “Dormzilla is fine”, said M. Nolan Gray on
Bloomberg^[4] (New York). The spartan
single rooms are designed only for sleeping, and Munger’s design
provides ample, airy communal spaces for study, dining and
recreation, “to coax students out of their rooms and into the
community”.

“Perhaps it’s utopian of me,” said Aaron Gordon on Vice^[5] (New York), but I think
we can solve housing shortages without stuffing students into
windowless cells. Architects and engineers are armed with a mass of
research that suggests Munger’s design is “both unhealthy and
unsafe”. Imagine a fire or a blackout in a darkened building with
4,500 students trying to flee through two main exits. Once again,
we’re seeing proof that “in order to solve one crisis, we are often
all too willing to create others”