Munger Hall, the most hated building in the world that provides screens instead of windows

• Branded houses The house that is manufactured

Munger Hall, the world's most hated architecture project of Fall 2021, is so far-fetched it's fascinating. What is Munger Hall? A college projected in Santa Bárbara, California, that will occupy 156,000 square meters built (to have a scale: the largest El Corte Inglés building in Spain occupies 55,000 square meters) on 11 floors,

. The interesting thing is that these inhabitants will occupy rooms of 6.4 square meters and that, in 94% of the cases, they will not have natural light or ventilation.

Munger Hall does not have patios or a façade that makes room for compliments or any type of porosity

that allows its interior to be aired. Munger Hall is a monolith, approximately 120 meters on each side. Their rooms will be individual (in the United States, the colleges usually offer double rooms), they will be grouped in apartments with eight cells (with two bathrooms and a kitchen to prepare breakfast) and will have, instead of windows, plasma screens that will follow the Cardiac rhtyms. That is: they

and then at night they will turn very dark blue. The building will also have a generous parking lot for surfboards, seating areas on its perimeter and in the attic (these do, with windows facing the street), laundry rooms and common kitchens in the basement (those who have calculated the spaces consider that they are very insufficient ) and a 97-year-old millionaire benefactor whose interest in leaving such

is a mystery.

Some context: the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB), the university that will receive 200 million dollars from Munger to build the residence hall, has been living for years in a serious real estate crisis since it has calculated that it

.

The appreciation of housing in the city is driving students away from UCSB.

That context explains, at least in part, the search for radical solutions like Munger Hall.

A detail of the room floors of Munger Hall.

On the right the cells.

Charlie Munger is the fictional character in this story. Lawyer, card player, investor, owner of

... In recent years he has already financed non-refundable construction of colleges for Stanford and Michigan universities and other projects in various educational centers of the southern California. The 200 million that he will give to Santa Barbara will not cover all the planned investment (estimated at 1,500 million dollars) but they are enough for Munger to have imposed his project and his architect, Navy F Banvard, of the VTBS studio ...

... who is actually

Banvard has stated in

magazine

that the residence design "emanates from Mr. Munger's research and his continued work on transforming the student residence concept." Your client's relationship with architecture is contradictory. On some occasion he has ironically referred to the profession of architect and on some other occasion he has played the designer of other student residences and of his family home. His references are atypical: Munger, for example, has said that

and has recalled that, in them,

, which represents an obvious improvement on the natural model.

Banvard, for his part, acknowledges that the Santa Barbara approach is a "social experiment."

The common areas of Munger Hall.

The project is already underway despite the fact that it has provoked ridicule, resignations, criticism and rejection campaigns. The most obvious has to do with the conditions of habitability and environmental sustainability. How much does it cost and what energy expenditure does it require to aerate and illuminate a windowless building? And that, in California, with a very friendly climate. Then there are the complaints that have to do with the common good and urbanism: the façade of Munger Hall has a slight air of historical architecture, but it makes no effort to contribute something to the public space, to the street. And, finally, come the political ones:

Deciding how people who aren't even your customers should live?

But, in its own way, Munger Hall is also modern. Their way of life will be dense, as dense as that of the most saturated neighborhoods of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, according to their critics. It is a living machine pushed to the limit in a country tormented by urban sprawl. In addition, its plan leads the flow of residents to the living / study areas of the perimeter of the building

. And that is a very current idea. Munger Hall, in the background, reproduces the half-work, half-leisure, half-work spaces of the headquarters of technology companies: those images of

style sofas

and

Is there anything in the history of architecture that has resembled Munger Hall?

Could the blocks of flats seen in

look like this if someone had projected them?

You can, but

.

Wasn't there a digital window in some

?

Also in the USSR, in the 1920s, at a time of great migrations from the countryside to the city and a housing crisis, there were experiments in collective housing that in common areas reproduced bits of wild nature indoors.

A little Disney, a little Facebook, a little USSR, that's also Munger Hall.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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