Interesting collision of the idea with the covid era. During an outbreak you’d want students to have a private airspace to go to and the possibility of ventilation.
Update: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews!
But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate.
"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
>Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal
This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
> This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air.
Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag.
Looks like that's actually been accounted for directly:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
Reading the comments feels like everyone went to college in bizarro world. The dorms I lived in always had shared bedrooms. In one 4 people across two bunk beds. Having a room to call my own in a dorm would have been an extraordinary improvement. Wouldn't have cared in the slightest bit about a window.
What I can't get from this article is price. When I was student, reason why students shared those rooms with bunk beds was mainly because that was the thing they(or rather their parents) could afford and renting proper flat was out of their capabilities.
Nowadays, in the city I live in 20min distance from university my rent for flat might be cheaper than what students are paying for their dorm room(with windows).
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Isla Vista is the closest community to UCSB, and the students get packed into the private housing there as well (monthly cost of renting a house is about $1200 per bedroom, and you often have to sign a lease for 12 months even if you'll only be there for 9).
Nobody said anything about not wanting windows. It's the choice between a window and sharing a single room with 4 people. No window is the easy choice.
For you, perhaps. And maybe I would have said the same thing in college, when I paid approximately zero attention to my health. But I learned in the years since that light levels make a huge difference. A room like that could easily have pushed me into severe "seasonal" depression.
Exactly. These days, I know that the pain of 3 obnoxious "same-room" roommates may still be worth the price vs sunlight, which will dramatically affect my overall mood. I can easily complain about the roommates, but the light will have a greater real effect on my mood.
I wouldn't say the housing market in Ann Arbor has a fair bit of choice. The vast majority of undergrads live in frat style 7+ bedroom houses. There really aren't a huge number of 1 or even 2 bedroom apartments available, and what does exist is either incredibly run down or 2k+ a month in a high rise building that grad students can't afford.
North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
It's super frustrating when people take a phrase, change its meaning by removing it from context, and then nitpick it.
That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
Is your claim based on the assumption that it has to be within walking distance of campus? It's been awhile since I lived in the area, but I never had issues finding a reasonable student apartment if you were willing to bus/bike/commute in
I've met several MBA's, and they are more 'partially literate' in that they can write huge quantities of stuff, but each paragraph has nothing to do with the last paragraph.
Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
The most highly educated person in my extended family has the worst spelling and grammar of anyone I've ever seen. Getting a hand written note from them is always a guessing game.
God, this annoys the crap out of me. People say I write novels in my emails, so I tried breaking things up once for an MBA. It resulted in a dozen or so emails that when concatenated would equal the "novel" they'd have originally complained about.
Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
My goal wasn't to represent the link. People can click on the link, and the person I replied to already said it had great reviews. My goal was to pull out quotes I thought interesting.
They claim to address health effects of light with dynamic "virtual windows." I agree it would be useful to study how well this works. If nothing else, it would inform how we design long haul spacecraft eventually...
“All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
There were cholera epidemics in the 19th century, until we realized we shouldn't drink contaminated water. In cities such as London, this required major infrastructure investments.
We're just realizing we shouldn't breathe contaminated air, and we're just realizing that we need to make infrastructure investments.
CO2 is a good proxy for infectious disease transmission risk. We breathe out CO2 as we spread pathogens. Outside air is just above 400ppm (higher with auto exhaust) and architects aimed for 600ppm before the pandemic. As one approaches CO2 levels closer to outside air, infectious disease transmission plummets.
To balance ventilation with energy costs (and avoid accelerating global warming) one needs heat exchangers that can't easily be retrofitted into an existing building. Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
In my experience sitting on building committees, architects are better at original visuals than original engineering. When a Spanish village restores ancient stone huts for tourists, they run DC wiring for LED lights. When I ask if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb, architects just stare back at me, deer in the headlights. So I'm not hopeful that a radical reworking of our infrastructure will originate with architects.
Our building wasn't going to have windows that opened, till I suggested the building would be usable parts of the year even if the central air failed. I was assured it would never fail. The central air in the previous building failed the next week; I was never implicated. Then our administration overruled the architects and put in office windows. People teased me that I cost us a "this building pees spring water" green certification. Then the pandemic, and I was a hero.
RCP8.5 has us at 1000ppm by the end of the century. By then outside air ventilation will mostly be needed to keep people in meeting rooms from putting themselves into a coma.
This is exactly the type of information that gets lost between generations that makes past decisions make sense. It's why I ferverently collect older academic/engineering literature. Not necessarily for the equations, but for some of the context around the problems and challenges of the time we no longer think about because they are "already solved".
Everyone moans about radiators once you start sealing up windows to be more green. Surprise! They were designed with the inefficiency of having an open window in mind for health and ventilation purposes since the turn of the century! Of course you end up with problems when you violate a functional invariant!
> Munger Hall could dodge all the bad publicity about fake windows if it sports a "next pandemic ready" ventilation system out of the blocks.
Apparently it will:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
> if our new building will have DC wiring for LED lights, rather than a cheap, inefficient transformer in every bulb,
This blows my mind too. I expect it's coming, though: the cables would be cheaper, and if there's one driver of change in construction, it's cost.
Another question is, would it be a straight improvement? I think transformers are typically very efficient, and I could imagine the losses from running a lower voltage through a long line might be greater.
Running DC typically requires much higher gauge wire. To keep under a 10% voltage drop (which is a _lot_), our current 15A branch circuits on 14g wire would be limited to about 10ft away from the transformer.
You could make it to ~30ft on existing wiring as long as you kept draw under 5A. That’s ~60W and enough to power all of 5 pretty anemic 12V bulbs.
If you actually need something like a 60ft run from your transformer and 15A to play with, you’re going to be looking more towards something like 6AWG. If you want to keep under 3% voltage drop you’d be looking towards 2AWG.
14AWG 2-wire is something like $0.35/ft. 6AWG 2-wire is like $0.75/ft. 2AWG 2-wire is coming up on $3/ft.
There’s a reason we use AC for power distribution rather than DC.
Does AC differ significantly to DC when it comes to wire gauge? If so, why? I thought wire heating was simply a function of amps?
While I think 12V would be too low, I think there's also a happier medium than 120/220V. Something like 50V is nice because you're very unlikely to get an electric shock, while taking advantage of the fact the average LED current draw is like 1 fifth of an incandescent.
Is this assuming that you keep the voltage low? Say at 12V? Wouldn't we push the voltage to maximise the power pushed and minimise the resistive losses?
The comment about powering a few anemic lightbulbs on 60W was assuming 12V, but otherwise it's all pretty independent of voltage.
You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
If you wanted to run 1800W DC as we run current power (14/2, hundred foot+ runs, etc) you'd be looking at something like 720VDC at a couple amps.
There's three main things I see as limitations to really pushing DC up to those levels:
1. Safety, plain and simple.
2. Switching. You generally require larger contacts and bigger gaps to switch DC because you don't get the benefit of it crossing over a 0 point several times a second. This gets worse the higher the voltage goes. This requires much more involved switching equipment. E.g., it's common to see a relay rated for switching 120VAC/30VDC.
3. Economies of scale. This one isn't some law of physics, but most current equipment you can find is 12/24/48VDC outside of very expensive industrial stuff. Also you're gonna need some pretty big transformers to step this stuff back down to usable voltages since everything we need it for is generally running at single-digit voltages. (Efficient, but just another big thing on the BOM for every single device.)
That said, I'm just a hobbyist so I may be missing something fundamental here.
Ohms law plays a big part in all this. Resistive losses are governed by the square of current multiplied by the resistance of the wire. As such running higher voltages minimises these losses. We use this all the time with our power transmission lines which generally run at 500kV AC if I recall correctly.
1. Safety is relative. 10-20mA is enough to kill a person. In AC voltage we measure it as root mean square, the actual peak to peak voltage is greater than Double that.
2. There are such things as solid state switching. Solid state relays and field effect transistors come to mind. This is also how we down convert DC power to lower voltages, very fast switching giving an average voltage that is the target (see buck converters).
3. DC power is everywhere and it is easy to do DC to DC conversion. Single chip solutions exist. Hell your car is entirely 12V (if ice powered, EV's are a different matter)
> You could get the current 1800W of energy out of a branch circuit with 15A at 120VDC and all the limitations/massive wires I described.
15A at 120VDC wouldn't require massive wires. I'm not sure why you think it's drastically different from 120VAC for wire sizing. If dropping 10% of the AC voltage is OK, dropping 10% of DC is presumably OK, too, and either is I * R. About 96 meters to drop 12V, or 48 meters out and back.
It's not a good idea for plenty of other reasons, but...
No kidding! We just went through 2 years where this building would've been the absolute worst to grapple with. Imagine those 4,500 being told to sit out the pandemic in their rooms.
How can they miss the problem when the worst case scenario for some idiotic design like this happened last year!
Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent? I mean I agree it would be a miserable place to shelter-in-place for COVID, but with COVID in the rear-view mirror for the vaccinated, I'm not sure it's a major concern.
I think fire safety, lack of entrances, lack of windows and fresh air are bigger concerns.
There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.
With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.
It's easy to find better explanations with a quick search, but the general idea is that as habitats change, animals will move toward the poles and come into contact with other species that they historically haven't, creating lots of new opportunities for diseases to jump between species and mutate and do all the things they love to do.
There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...
Please elaborate on how that's responsive to my comment. Again, not really sure a possible 2 year pandemic is especially significant in the 50 year design life of a building. Even if it sits empty for 4% of its life with 100% probability (generous), you still get 96% (48 years) of use out of it.
First, you take an arbitrary probability number that depends on man-made models that are likely much more wrong than right. We've had a lot of hundred- or thousand-year events in the last two decades.
The models depend on predicting an uncertain future, and for this kind of stuff using past data has little meaning. It's not lottery numbers where probability really gives you some hard insights. We also have a lot more people, climate change and with it likely more movement from affected areas and a lot of other stuff going on that makes it hard to use data older than this century to gain insights into what will be.
Next, you interpret said probability as nicely equally distributed over time. I don't know what to say to such an interpretation.
Also, a pandemic is a kind of event that even if it indeed only appears rarely (which we hope but don't know) each time has a huge impact.
You can’t just apply extreme value theory to spectacular events because it supports your argument. Yes, there was a hundred years between the 1918 influenza outbreak and Covid. No, that doesn’t mean you can say that pandemics probabilistically occur once in a hundred years. The world is changing at an extraordinary pace, populations are exploding, humans and animals interact more than ever, and international travel is trivial.
Covid is not going away. Get your vaccine and move on with your life. In another year nobody will even remember the damn thing (at least for most places… some don’t seem to want to let this go).
Designing buildings around 1.5 years of isolation because of covid is silly. We will never react to a future pandemic this way again. History will consider this whole mess as one of the most disastrous public health policies ever created and people trying it again will be laughed out of the room.
That being said… designing rooms with no windows is just awful. Bathrooms and stuff, sure. But primary living spaces like bedrooms or living rooms? That is a ticket for depression!
> Design life for buildings is under 50 years and 100-year pandemics are somewhat less frequent?
Mankind has been designing and living in buildings for far longer than 50 years. Supposedly the US has a lot of experience designing and building prisons, which have far more stringent requirements than university dorms, and clearly these lessons have been learned long ago.
But just not by Munger, who apparently is militantly against any feedback from any architect.
We can't feign ignorance. Bad design is bad design.
Update: from another comment, Munger designed a similar building in Michigan. It has great reviews!
But, one of the top ones was “great until pandemic”. Adding this to clarify that, contra other comments, I don’t necessarily think Munger was mistaken. But events have made the idea unfortunate.
https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat...