Charlie Munger, the funder and designer of a planned future residential building at the University of California Santa Barbara that has come to be known by the nickname “Dormzilla”, has an opinion about why his design attracted so much vocal criticism. The people who are against the design take that view because “they think some goddamn Republican billionaire is telling the university what to do.”
Munger is right. That’s why many of us object.
Yes, I think the design sounds terrible in the way that I think extreme architectural designs typically sound terrible. I think architecture and infrastructure built to prove an individual architect’s or developers peculiar theories about what people need and want, that is designed to produce particular behaviors or social practices, has turned out to be a bad idea over and over again, whether it’s Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright or Robert Moses or anyone else. Including Charlie Munger.
I understand that any building has some precepts about usage and needs baked into its design. We have a new building for some of our science departments whose design was heavily influenced by a recent belief that making labs and working spaces visible from outside creates a lot of positive synergies and possibilities for collaboration. Some ideas about the interaction between design, usage and the psychological functioning of building users are pretty durable and fairly well-justified by a big body of empirical research also—high ceilings aren’t just an aesthetic fad.
When many of us react to “some goddamn Republican billionaire” we are first and foremost reacting to what we know about the history of how bad design and power have been entangled, about what happens when any goddamn master planner with some fixed ideas gets to have his way because he controls the purse strings or the government or both and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks.
And inside academia, we’re also reacting to that beyond the domain of architecture alone. There’s a long list of disastrous programs, initiatives, centers and policies that some goddamn billionaire pushed a university to adopt or build that were not subject to any sort of oversight or debate. We don’t object out of some stubbornly parochial vision about shared governance. It’s not a prim commitment to procedure for procedure’s sake. There’s nothing hypothetical here. It’s great for people to donate to a college or university that they love or admire, and even to discuss ideas about matching their donation to an idea, initiative or need. That’s a far cry from what Munger and people like him do, which is to insist out of vanity that a huge institution and a big community have to do exactly what they want in order to get that support. That’s not philanthropy, it’s power. That’s not expecting gratitude, it’s ordering servitude. Which, unfortunately, some campus leaders are all too willing to provide.
So yes, Charlie Munger understands. He knows exactly why he’s involved and what he wants out of it. What irritates him is that not everyone immediately bent the knee, that’s all.
Image credit: "Berkshire Hathaway 2009 Munger quote" by TEDizen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.