It’s stoveless because of the dangers of fire and smoke. There’s probably no way to put exhaust ductwork in that building.
Remember, students don’t need luxuries like air and cooked food.
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“Everybody loves it, they fight to get in.”
This is a verifiable statement although it sounds like it comes straight out of Trump’s playbook and I’ll bet it has the same basis in reality.
And his second one that no one other than the one architect who quit is questioning the glory of this design (even though it is obvious from the interview a lot of people question it).
I’ll bet neither statement can wihstand even minimal fact checking.
The entire building sounds like an energy pig since it is 100% dependent on power to operate safely since deep interior rooms without ventilation could become dangerous.
This smacks of something that will be torn down within years or very expensively modified once he is dead enough not to file lawsuits.
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Many years back, I spent my freshman year in a pie-slice room in the Litchfield towers at the University of Pittsburgh. My dorm room had two windows that could pivot open but were locked shut (until everybody passed around a copy of the key).
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Not in the renders for the 8 person “bedroom clusters”…
Even if they are allowed microwaves, not sure what the point of a large kitchen with a large dining table is if people are just going to be microwaving cups of Ramen. :-/
The “houses” of 8 8 person bedroom clusters have full kitchens with actual stoves. Again, not sure what the point of these are. Do they really expect the 64 person “houses” of 8 8 person bedroom cluster band together to form large scale communal cooking 3 times a day, along with clean up? Because I really don’t see that happening, even if this building tries to force by not having the professionally run commissaries needed for the percentage of the 4,500 students who elect not to try communal cooking.
Has Munger met college students? Poll them and ask whether they want giant dining tables in their “bedroom clusters”, or something more loungy where they could hang out together without all having to sit in dining chairs at a giant communal table.
Source, PDF of slides for “Scoping Hearing on Munger Hall”:
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This quote caught my eye because it’s just what Le Corbusier said when he proposed his “radiant city” designs back in the early 1920s. In his huge residential towers personal space would be reduced to the bare minimum, like a ship’s stateroom. It was designed for sleeping and limited sitting. Every other aspect of life was lived outside, including, in his vision, dining and recreation. He was the granddaddy of the notion of fitting humans to a building rather than fitting a building to humans. Anyone interested in the subject must read architect Peter Blake’s 1974 book (something of a rant). Form Follows Fiasco, which dissects modern architecture’s obsession with “immensely rational machines,” big, beautiful buildings designed to fit theories of what people should want without considering what people really want–and need.
Munger is the right age to have grown up inside this delusion. His statements are all variations on, “I don’t need to ask people what they need. I know what people need. It is this, this, and this. I will build the building accordingly and they will like it.”
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Much worse than any prison, even a panopticon.
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All these grandiose plans are probably designed by extroverts, who think of introversion as something to be cured by forced architecture.
Granted a high density dorm is probably the no win situation for an introvert, no matter who kludges it.
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“You will eat together, and like it!” :-/
All the oversized kitchen/dinging areas and total lack of communal lounge area in the “bedroom clusters” really, really seems like massively pushy and misplaced social engineering scheme by Mr. “I’m gonna make everyone else pay 1.3 billion dollars for this and name it after myself”
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Yep. He’s got that dangerous stubborn ignorance that seems to be lauded in parts of the States. “Y’all and your education! Shuddap! I know what I know, and I know two plus two is seven!”
(I’m not entirely sure it’s Dunning-Kruger effect, and even if it is, I’m leery of applying that label since it’s so overused)
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Technically, I don’t think it is. Dunning-Krueger is where people who know a bit about a subject don’t know how much they don’t know, so they feel like they’re accomplished because they know so much (certainly more than they used to), as opposed to those who know a lot, and thus know how little they knew whey they felt like they knew everything and how much there is they don’t understand, and tend to underestimate their own skill.
That’s an entirely different thing from the people who go in knowing nothing and assume they may as well already be experts because “how hard could it be?”. (See also: emeritus professors of physics and geology with Opinions about Climate Change.)
They aren’t mis-estimating their position on the skill curve: they’re not on the skill curve at all, just saying “Hey, hold my beer, I got this!”.
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Fucking hell, I’d have to walk over to the fridge, round the giant table, all the way down to wash the veg, up a bit to prep them, then all the way round the giant table to cook them.
Did he try talking to, like an architect? Cos they would have nipped that stupid kitchen design in the bud.
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You’d also have to find a way to do inventory control. Just who do they think is going to stock this kitchen shared by 64 people? And how do they think the food is not going to be stolen? I’m just not getting what they think is supposed to happen in these kitchens. These aren’t fire houses. I really doubt 64 strangers are going to band together in all of the 8 “houses” per floor and cook for one another at scale.
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Given that that at least one architect who tried to work with him quit because his professional ethics wouldn’t allow him to have anything to do with the project, that doesn’t say a lot for architects who will work with him.
Once the thing is built, I’m sure he doesn’t care what they do. If it ends up being Lord of the Flies, it’s all the fault of the students, given that the perfection of his design is, a priori, genius and perfect.
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The kitchens remind me of another classic modernist folly, the kitchens of Pruitt-Igoe. One of the features of that development was undersized in unit kitchens with a communal kitchen available. It wasn’t popular.
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That’s called the Clarkson Effect.
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Oh but he has a highly skilled team of people who do everything while he just drunkenly lurches on to set to deliver the he to camera.
@moortaktheundea I have been meaning to watch the Pruitt Igoe effect for ages. Have you seen it and do you recommend?
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Depends on your goals. If you want a passable engaging doc that will give you a decent overview, yeah go for it. If you want the nuance and understanding of the successes and failures of it and similar structures, not on its own. It was good enough to be included as homework in my grad classes and to leave everyone eager for discussion. It also needed enough context, correction, and clarification to eat up an hour of class time. It has the usual documentary shortcomings, it misses context and the sirector’s views shape the product a lot.
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Skip so. Decent read on it?
ETA
Two hours of film length reading. Film can be so s l o w…
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