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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation design. There are clearly aesthetic complaints many people will have here, but realistically safety shouldn't be a problem. This is simply not a "large" building by skyscraper standards, and those can be built safely.

Honestly... I think this is very much a taste thing. Is it so weird that I don't think this looks so bad at all? Yeah, yeah, no windows. But dense housing means lots of local goodies in the same building. These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall".

I spent a lot of time in college trudging to stuff through the snow (though to be fair not a lot of snow at UCSB). Physical access to amenities means more than I think suburban detached garage owners tend to remember.

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Former firefighter cautions we should be skeptical of the safety of this plan, and your rebuttal is "surely building codes mandate..."? A zero-evidence rebuttal concerning the safety of 4500 students.

I don’t find it unreasonable to assume that the building will comply with government fire safety regulations and that those regulations are at least somewhat adequate.

The regulations may have been written with architectural rules of thumb in mind, as in, "surely no one would..."

Building code isn't really written as rules of thumb but as rules.

You might be surprised. Fire regulations are very much a local issue and there can be a lot of variance (although many local municipalities base their codes on standards put out by bodies like the NFPA, etc.).

There are quite frequently things that one might intuitively expect to be in the regs, that aren't. Requirements for sprinklers, for example. As surprising as it may seem, there are still lots of places where sprinklers are not required in many buildings.

I don't know the situation in Santa Barbara, but I did email their fire department earlier with an inquiry about this topic. Hoping to hear something back.

Fire sprinklers appear to be required. https://www.santabarbaraca.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.as...

I don't find it unreasonable to think that government regulations around fire safety are based on current building trends. Nobody in the US stuffs 4500 people into a single building with almost all of them in the interior of the building. Nobody would voluntarily live that way, even the "projects" were/are more humane.

Just looking at the proposed floorplan, in an emergency it would be a nightmare to get out. 7 kids trying to get out that one door with a giant table in the way while likely panicking? It screams deathtrap.

You know who was violating fire regulations for decades? Nuclear Power plants! You would things that's the one place where safety would be taken seriously, right?

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/601/fire-p...

Nuclear Plants have an adversarial interest in access control though. Sometimes, yes, even fire safety loses out.

If you were an architect who was concerned enough with the design to quit, wouldn't you both know about and publicize potential (or real) safety concerns?

Not having natural light is one of the best way to attack your mental health. This building is just a bad design, and human are not made to live without natural lights.

...and I am working in a warehouse-style building at a Silicon Valley startup. All the windows have been blacked out, to keep the IP safe. It's a little like being inside a Borg Cube.

And just like this building (Munger Hall), your startup is presumably funded by investor money. ;) Correlation!

Build a replica Borg recharging alcove around the coffee machine

They couldn't cover them in something translucent?

I wish architects showed the same level of concern for office workers!

Kidding aside... given the size of the bedrooms, I get the impression that the students aren't meant to spend much time there aside from whatever amount of sleep college students are getting these days. The rest of their time would probably be spent in common areas that actually do have sunlight. Recalling my personal experience in college, where most of my time was already spent in common areas anyways, I don't see the lack of bedroom windows as that huge a problem.

This particular dorm design also seems to allow for more privacy than a traditional dorm does.

> This particular dorm design also seems to allow for more privacy than a traditional dorm does.

Yes, having shared bedrooms was particularly bad for my sleep. Not sure it's a good trade for a window though.

Modern office buildings have flipped the private offices from the perimeter to the core precisely so that the open office has all the windows. You might not have any privacy or quiet but they do design for natural light now.

Basically forcing people to live in common areas is horrible. Many people find public spaces distracting at best and uncomfortable or worse. Thank God I had my dorm room to escape to where my roommate and I only had to ignore each other to get some peace.

I always retreated to the library when I needed peace and quiet. Also, these dorms have a mini common area shared between 8 dorms.

The design looked like rooms inside a pod inside a building. Seems like a fire in front of a single door could in theory kill everyone in the pod based on the image in the article.

Honestly, this looks like a low security prison to me. Small cells and a day room for activities and socializing.

If they lofted the bed, the desk could be moved under the bed. And if they had everyone just wear house uniforms, they could reduce the need for storage space and reduce the size of the rooms by 1/3

"This is an announcement from Genetic Control

It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot

Restriction on humanoid height

I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the

Properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold

It's said now that people will be shorter in height

They can fit twice as many in the same building site

(They say it's alright)"

(From "Get'em off my property", Genesis, Foxtrot, 1972)

> These 4500 kids in their sardine rooms will have multiple food options, probably several gyms, rec rooms, libraries, etc... all "down the hall".

No better way to get kids prepared for what comes ahead in their adulthood, huh?

To be fair, that sounds like any of the cookie cutter "luxury" apartment complexes I see coming up all over the place, right down to the inability to see anything other than your neighbors out the window.

How many "cookie cutter 'luxury' apartment complexes" do you know that house 4500 people? Let's forgo the absolute number, what about the population density?

94% of the residents won't have windows. Can you list any of these apartments that have that characteristic?

"Cookie cutter" apartment complexes are waaaaay nicer than this, including literally about 10X the square footage per inhabitant, and way more windows. Dunno what you're talking about.

Preparing/conditioning today's young adults for the dystopian future, where all our jobs are being done by robots, and the elite class needs to warehouse the rest of us safely away in 2mx2m cells in gigantic concrete honeycomb dormitories, where we're given a TV and one Soma per day.

If anyone is interested, this is basically the first half of the speculative fiction story, "Mana" (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1) which has been posted here on HN a few times.

Yea, it seems every year we are moving closer and closer to some dark mixture of Manna, Fifteen Million Merits [1] and Elysium [2], where regular people no longer serve any purpose, and are simply warehoused somewhere to keep them out of the hair of the few rich elite.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)

I don't see automated everything becoming possible in our lifetimes, instead I see dystopian societal collapse due to climate shifts being much more likely.

You won't have any possessions, and you will like it.

>Surely building codes mandate a comprehensive evacuation design.

Surely building codes should mandate structural flaws and sinking foundations be fixed immediately.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/collapsed-miami-condo-had-...

this only betrays a deep misunderstanding on your part of the challenges in construction and issues with Sub grade stability in coastal zones and how different those things are to having enough fire exits.

Your comment is not making any point but your of lack of understanding.

"deep misunderstanding on your part of the challenge"

A citizen doesn't care about challenges in construction or software or food contamination, it is our professional responsibility not to be negligent in our work.

the standard for negligence for an engineer isnt that "something bad happened", and talking about a building with foundation issues due to unstable local soil is far different than "didn't meet fire code" from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about the issues at hand.

Just an FYI it's unlikely an architect designed those foundations - there were probably engineers who tested the soil and gave its properties to a designing engineer who designed the foundation and both of those things are going to be tempered by what was common engineering practice at the time, and if the unstable soil situation was known about. My understanding is this situation is common in the area due to building practice at the time.

All a layman knows if that he should not die in his sleep because the building caved in, you can't expect a homeowner to debate you on the exact details of structural engineering.

However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.

Of course in every job, there is constant pressure from management to cut corners, junior colleagues or peers that mess up, deadlines to meet. It is very easy to say to avoid inspecting troubled areas, to say 'I've done my job' and avoid headache. Often it is not in anyone's job description to police this. The 'client' is typically none the wiser, and when problems arise 10 years down the line, often they can't be traced to anyone personally. The fact that we've replaced entire careers with gig economy, and people stay in one job less and companies now invest less in training that ever in the past 40 years means that there is even less accountability and more opportunity for mistakes.

Cases of unpredictable 'something bad happened' are extremely rare. Soviet government was warned that reactors used in Chernobyl were dangerous, Tepco was warned that sea wall protecting Fukushima was inadequate, Robert Lund warned that Nasa should not launch Space Shuttle Challenger, residents of Grenfell Tower warned about fire safety before they burned alive, same goes goes for Bhopal disaster, subprime loans and 2008, 737 Max and every other major event. It is also extremely rare that the consequences of these decision ever catch up with the top brass. Hence we have culture of negligence.

> All a layman knows if that he should not die in his sleep because the building caved in, you can't expect a homeowner to debate you on the exact details of structural engineering.

If said homeowner is trying to 'score points' by pointing out things they don't themselves understand, then they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.

>However I can comment on the culture of negligence - and I think it's getting worse.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

>If said homeowner is trying to 'score points' by pointing out things they don't themselves understand, then they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.

The hell kind of attitude is this? Someone goes through the effort of doing research to wrap their head around something with which many people don't even bother to acknowledge, and challenge you with a question that you as the professional are reasonably expected to be able to answer, and that's your response?

I hope you never work with me. We would not get along at all.

It's clear the donor purposefully designed the rooms to be unpleasant to get people up into common rooms. It's just... weird. It doesn't matter if it looks good or bad but uncomfortable design like this is bizarrely aggressive to students, who are already living away from home and at-risk for depression and suicide.

Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.

As you note, students are at-risk for depression and suicide in today's existing student living quarters.

We don't know whether or not a community focused living design would help or hurt in this regard.

The covid/contagion question is interesting, because we DO know that designing for contagion safety is seemly inherently at odds with designing for social/emotional safety.

I think there's no clearly superior solution here, which tells me that building both types of systems would at least help further our understanding of the issues.

> Not to mention that housing like this makes breeding grounds for the flu and other contagious illnesses. It's poorly timed given we're still battling Covid-19 worldwide.

Designing 100 year buildings around our current hysterical reaction to covid is just silly. Covid is over, time to move on.

History will harshly judge our reaction to covid and we will hopefully never repeat this awful public health policy again. The idea that we should be designing building with covid in mind is just a symptom of how much parts of society has lost the plot.

"Covid is over" is inaccurate and is at best very US/EU-centric.

There is a reason though that I specifically called out all contagious illnesses. I can tell you that I got colds and the flu much more often in college than I do even in an open office. What's more, is students don't get sick days or time to catch up after an illness except in the most serious cases. I don't think it's illogical to think students (and their parents) don't want a dorm hotbed for contagions.

False dilemma. They could make the first floor have food courts and gyms, while having windows or simply not having a 97 year old billionaire donor dictate taste with zero input just because money.

You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs exist, or are adequate.

> just because money

Money is really important, probably the single most important constraint for state universities.

yes, I understand the perverse incentives that led to greenlighting this. its also not an excuse. they should reject the $200 million donation and hope Munger sends another with no restrictions. that's where we are at.

Maybe build the $200M dorm instead of the $2B dorm?

His money represents less than 10% of the final cost of the dorm, while retaining 100% of the design rights.

Something's happening here that's more than just the money.

No, it's just the money. It's just the perverse disconnect between the wealthy, and those just trying to get by.

It's Mr. Burns hanging a "you're here forever" sign, or Kanye West ranting about his napkin design for the iPlane in the Oval Office while dropping a few "motherfucker"s.

> You are assuming a lot about whether the safety designs exist, or are adequate.

Uh, yes. Because there are laws governing how we can construct buildings in a safe way, and on the whole (c.f. the number of deaths in building fires over time) they work well. So I trust them.

As far as the putative logic flaw, I don't see it. Everything is a tradeoff, even "because money". Saving money on the dorm means lower tuition, more scholarships, more facilities elsewhere, maybe a few new endowed professorships, etc...

You're assuming those laws are adequate. I wrote that the first time. It's a bad idea, you trust them just because the catastrophes haven't happened. For the next few weeks in your day to day, look at how many emergency exits are disarmed or blocked or locked, look at how many other inspectable things just aren't inspected, like when the last elevator inspection occurred on the ones you use.

We're trying to save people that trust the system too much. Let me know if you know any people like that.

> You're assuming those laws are adequate.

This is getting toward conspiracy theory territory. It's... a building code. Yes. Yes, I tend to trust building codes that have been keeping all of us safe in our homes and offices for the better part of a century. If building codes don't work, then where are the disasters in all the other buildings? You're saying that every other building in the USA in the 20th century "just happened" to be built safely, despite a thousand year history of terrible urban fires, and that regulation had nothing to do with it?

Nothing conspirational about it. In the follow up to the Grenfell fire[1], my development was reviewed and the cladding in use on several buildings was found… less than ideal. The homeowner’s association is currently drafting a plan to have it replaced.

This isn’t some theoretical, conspiracy-laden issue. It’s an actual problem.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

> In the follow up to the Grenfell fire[1], my development was reviewed and the cladding in use on several buildings was found… less than ideal.

Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are "government regulators", and "they made sure it was fixed". And now it's being fixed.

You're literally citing the fact that safety regulation worked correctly as evidence... that it doesn't? Without the regulators you'd still be living in a deathtrap!

Which means one should not trust that new and existing buildings are safe because of the mere existence of code or that there are competent people that exist to review and report.

The safety regulation did not work because of the 71 people that died in Grenfell. What would you say if you lived there yourself "ah thats just bad luck for me"? what would you say if you lived there yourself and were one of the people that was reporting to the regulators about the problems in advance "I trust this system, I'm glad this system is based purely on trust, trust works so well, all should trust building codes because they are CODES, I like codes, they are infallible, its so cool that people exist to review the codes as well. This happens so rare due to the codes and not from simply being an uncommon occurrence that challenges building standard."

I don't really understand what your perspective here is to be honest. Not being wrong?

"Yes! And by whom was it reviewed? And what happened when they reviewed it? I'm guessing the answers are "government regulators"

I think you misunderstood the poster - 100 people burned alive because the regulators were asleep at the wheel. That tragic disaster is the only reason his building was checked for adequacy, and it failed, along with thousands of others.

Right now there are thousands of buildings which were built and sold in breach of fire regulation, and the apartment owners are being saddled with 100% of the bill even when they own 25% of the apartment. In some cases the cost of repair exceeds the value of the property.

My point is that regulation is necessary, but not sufficient. Saying "It complies with regulation" isn't enough to deflect criticism — compliant buildings can still have serious safety issues.

I don't see any conspiracy. I think it's obvious that the situation vis-à-vis fire safety has improved, and improved tremendously over the past 100 or so years. But I also think it would be a mistake to think that the answer to the question "are we there yet" is "yes". That is to say, don't assume we've reached some final, end-goal state where safety regulations are ideal.

Large, multi-fatality fires are less common now, but they do still occur. I'd argue that we can always aspire to get better with regards to fire safety.

That's correct. I don't appreciate your willingness to invalidate what I and others are pointing out to you.

Building codes are state and municipal level laws. There is no harmonization. There are varying degrees of compliance based on competency, actual corruption conspiracies, and budget all of which changes decade over decade, building by building.

Many other regulations and individual behaviors have helped keep people safe. The way electronics work, the way people are educated, the public service announcements, the response times, and sometimes the building materials. Some things have actually become more flammable over the years.

Regarding building codes, 98 people just died in a literal building collapse in the Miami area. Your standard, if I understand correctly, is "that was just 1, where are the city wide Chicago fires", when the counterpoint is that this collapse prompted reviews of many properties and many more structural issues have been found in just that one municipality that threaten hundreds and thousands of people.

You shouldn't trust this process. You should root for the process to work decently since the probability of a disaster is low - this is the only area we agree! the incidents aren't happening! - but you should know that this is all luck. Continual luck in a system that barely works.

Laws work together with norms.

The norms of architecture that mandate e.g. windows for living spaces are here being violated so extremely someone's stepping down over it. This is therefore not an average project.

Concern seems reasonable.

It‘s strange that this isn‘t a law. Everywhere where I‘ve lived in the US, windows are required in a room with a bed.

I can‘t imagine it wouldn‘t be very pleasant, as an example, someone smoking weed inside a dorm next to me without a way to vent it out.

Afaik, most windows in newer, high-density commercial buildings are non-functional.

It's difficult to design a large window, that will also open, that also insulates sufficiently to hit modern energy efficiency certifications.

In the event of a fire, "opening" the window is not necessarily a function of if the window is MEANT to be opened ... but CAN it be opened. Eg: throwing a chair through it, or firefighters breaking window from outside, etc.

Residential is different, due to generally higher ventilation requirements (e.g. bathroom & kitchen).

YMMV, but I live in Seattle, where there has been a residential boom with plenty of towers, and I have never seen a residential apartment with non-functional windows. Every room will have at least one that can open (though for efficiency reasons they're usually casement windows, which are annoying in their own right)

I'm in a Seattle tower and the extent to which our windows open is a joke. You can't actually get any ventilation from a 16 inch wide window allowed to open up to twelve degrees. I like the idea of being environmentally friendly but we definitely lost the plot where airflow is concerned.

The concern is especially strong here because of the nature of the building.

In an ordinary apartment building, if you build it stupid, people won't want to live there. Then the landlord won't want to build it that way to begin with and if some fool does it anyway there will be a profit incentive to knock down the building and do it again.

This is a dorm. At at state school. The normal market forces aren't there. The landlord isn't going to be motivated by losing money. The tenants aren't in an ordinary market because dorms are often subsidized or have unique zoning that allows for lower cost than is legally permissible in other available housing and are likely to be closer to the school than other available housing. So you have to exceed a higher threshold of terrible before people will abandon them.

This design came from an amateur architect, someone who has never designed ANY building before and is surely clueless about safety laws and even basic physical structural limits. To imagine the design has seen anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what they're doing is assuming a lot.

All this just to save $200/1500 (13%)? You can get a better discount than that at any retailer.

> This design came from an amateur architect, someone who has never designed ANY building before and is surely clueless about safety laws and even basic physical structural limits. To imagine the design has seen anywhere sufficient review by others who DO know what they're doing is assuming a lot.

This is false statement. The architectural design was provided by Van Tilburg, Banvard, & Soderberg, AIA.

I think you're overreading the amateur architect angle.

Presumably, they didn't say "Hi, Charlie Munger, please draw up a building for us on a napkin."

It's in fact a barb that Munger is a non-practicing architect, and apparently ruffled feathers with the professional architect on the committee.

Which, from working with some prima donna architects, I am both unsurprised and unsympathetic about.

Building engineers ensure everything is to code. Architects fret about whether it looks and feels right.

Some architects are good at making livable spaces, but an architecture degree doesn't guarantee that, and a lack of one doesn't preclude it.

> Building engineers ensure everything is to code. Architects fret about whether it looks and feels right.

The idea that architects don't worry about building code is absolutely incorrect on a project of any scale.

Prima donna "starchitects" worry less, but that's because they've hired other architects to handle it.

So which one was the guy who quit?

While the story was about the architect's resignation, there's got to be a story here. Why would the school spend a billion dollars and tie its hands like this (circumventing its own review process and providing input for needed changes) to get a 200 million "gift"?

Did the university believe it couldn't otherwise house 4500 students for a billion dollars? Were there considerations involved other than student housing?

Lol - I have yet to see any cost savings passed through as lower tuition. More budget for sports, more administrator salaries, MAYBE an endowment but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

This is just squeezing the undergrads to feed the rest of the machine more efficiently.

Zoning and building codes set forth by a municipality do not necessarily have to be followed by the state government (presuming the UC system counts as part of the state government).

Yeah, but there is nothing guaranteeing that the common area amenities (rec room, multiple food options, libraries, etc.) won't be reallocated to additional dorm rooms or storage.

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