I actually agreed with his reasoning on this and don't think it was motivated by greed at all.
Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.
You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.
Speaking as a person with an architecture degree, it is, in my opinion, plainly a completely stupid idea. I cannot imagine one person I have ever met with similar professional training who would consider it anything other than completely stupid.
As a person who hasn’t paid any attention to his corner of the finance sector, this horrible dorm was my introduction to the man. My immediate conclusion was that he rose to the level of his incompetence. I may yet read his speech on decisionmaking biases, but it will be with a degree of skepticism about whether it is cooked in its own juices.
Natural light, fresh air, second means of egress, bla bla.
The egregious thing is it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. It’s like if you wanted to make a safer car by building it out of 500mm thick concrete. Oh, it’d be safe alright, but slow, wallowy, dangerous for others, poor gas mileage. Fast downhill, I guess. Wouldn’t be any better as an EV. It might be good for a few people, apparently.
Others might disagree, but I still don't think you've provided a good explanation for why you believe it's "plainly a completely stupid idea".
Your argument is:
> it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect.
But it does solve the problem? And unlike your concrete car example, the only downside here is that students won't have natural light in their dorms, which as many people in this thread have suggested probably isn't as big of a problem as having to share a room for many (perhaps most) students.
I think it's fine to say you don't like it and perhaps in most cases are better trade-offs that could be made, but it seems to me that for some people who just want to use their dorm for sleeping this trade-off does work. Would you not recognise this?
Sure, I recognize "some" people may be OK with no windows. How many is that? Lacking empirical data at hand, let's just look around. How many windowless bedrooms have you seen? I don't think I'm extrapolating from too few data points when I suggest the answer is, statistically, zero.
It's not just a couple of rooms, it's thousands (iirc).
The overweighting is out of all proportion and doesn't reflect common experience. Further, students tend to lack money and choices. Here is a choice between bad or worse. Even I would choose a windowless cell over sleeping rough. I would choose to eat bugs over starving. Must it come to this on a university campus?
I was just on a campus this past weekend and half the windows were blacked out by the residents themselves. Natural light shining into where you sleep is overrated.
I really dislike the "Light On Two Sides Of Every Room" pattern of Christopher Alexander, which is ideally accomplished with two externally facing windows on different walls. Windows compromise how I would like to layout the room's interior to my own preferences. I don't care what an architect envisioned for a generic human habitability, I want a space to feel habitable to me. Most of the time that means eliminating natural light.
That is, of course, your completely legitimate individual choice. If there’s a window, you can block it. If, on the other hand, there is no window and you want one, this is more difficult to resolve.
Alexander and his team absolutely expected people to adapt the patterns to individual preferences, and so stated right up front. As a matter of general preferences, “light on two sides” was found through diligent research to be a “deep and inescapable property of a well-formed environment”. So if you’re designing a habitation for thousands of people, maybe lean heavily that way.
Of course, and there's a lot to like about Alexander's approach. Though while designers may lean heavily one way at first, maybe they could also sample the perspective of the actual thousands of people who will occupy the space before construction starts? Priors are just that: priors. They are meant to be updated to posteriors, whether by an individual, or whether by thousands of people. Sometimes the update will be minimal no matter what sub-population you sample, which is a good sign something is actually deep and inescapable, but sometimes it will be rather large because even thousands of people can share a few specific characteristics not so prevalent in a random general population sample where the prior came from and which absolutely affect what feels habitable to them.
e.g. Active college students, so also mostly young, mostly unmarried, freshly liberated from the parental household.. And of course the main activities of the building and its rooms, like sleep vs work, should be considered more strongly before applying a general pattern. I don't mean to assert that form should always follow function, though, or that architects don't already consider inescapable tradeoffs, which by their nature some people won't like the decisions because they would have traded differently all else equal.
On a tangent, I was reminded of a funny architecture crime. CS students at MIT got a wacky Gehry building (the Stata Center) while the architects have and keep a very normal and tasteful building (the Rogers Building). Gehry was even sued at some point because the building had functional issues. That goes back to the point about windows: frequently it's actually not enough to just block a window. They change the environment more than just letting in light or not, they affect things like temperature (sometimes for the better! Ability to open one for a breeze or window AC is a blessing in many rooms), humidity, structural soundness, and ease of mold growth. When you have a window or two in the bedroom that you block out, it still affects where you can place things because of those other concerns.
> If, on the other hand, there is no window and you want one
You rent a different apartment. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept with regard to his building and the need for some people to call it a hellscape. He's trying to offer a less expensive place for people to live for a couple years while they go to school.
A dorm room is not a habitat. It is just one room that someone will occupy for part of their day, mostly while asleep. He hasn't blocked out the sun.
Get off your high horse. You don’t know what everybody wants. To choose between having a dorm mate or having no windows I would absolutely pick no windows.
It’s not a high horse, it’s an educated horse. If you want to live in a box, go for it. Students, especially poor ones, don’t always have a meaningful choice in the matter.
Why not make the coffin-rooms half height too? People sleep lying down, right? All that wasted space.
But it's not so much a "story" considering the reasoning is still motivated by cost savings. I don't really care to condemn "greed", to be honest. I'm mostly baffled by how terrible those rich people are at spending money.
Why doesn't a billionaire like Charlie Munger want to be remembered for building the most lavish building with the most incredible experience ever on the campus, instead of the one that optimizes for a problem with constraints that are mostly made up ("it might cost too much money for Charlie Munger")? It's just straight up dumb.
That's probably the whole point - they "just sleep" in their small single occupancy rooms and do most of their socializing in attractive common areas.
If you're wondering how the kids are going to hook up - well, window or not, single-occupancy beats the hell out of literal room-mates, which was my dorm experience. And we sure as hell found a way.
If you ask students whether they'd rather have a windowless private room or a shared room with a window, what do you think the breakdown will be?
According to Munger that was, indeed, the whole point. His dorm design focused on making the common areas nice places where people would enjoy spending time, while optimizing the dorm rooms for bed-related activities. It seems like a reasonable strategy.
Two years and two roommates, they literally only spent their time in our shared room when they went to bed. 95% of waking hours, they were in communal area or classes. Myself, on the other hand, I liked my window and full room for half the price. Although we really need to figure out the communal area for society, because bars, parks, and cafes in the US are not even close to cutting it for how communal people are in college.
Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.
You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.