Billionaire donor behind Cal's windowless mega dorm doesn't care about critics: 'There will be more like it'

Critics have called it dormzilla, a nightmare vision of the future. 

But Charlie Munger, the billionaire donor behind a controversial dorm slated to be an 11-story, 1.68 million square foot building with few windows of natural light and only two entrances planned at the University of California Santa Barbara, thinks that he’s helped design the revolutionary dorm of the future that will alleviate problems with student housing and make for a better college experience. 

 And he pushes back on the idea that he is unqualified to plan a dorm despite no formal training and explains why he would spend his billions – and his time – on the way a dorm is built at a university.

“I have spent years on this project working with very good architects and also with campus planners and chancellors and everybody else,” he said of UCSB's $1.5 billion project, which he has pledged $200 million toward. "Years and years of thought employing a very good architect and with the other people including the campus people involved have gone into this design. Years.

"It’s not some crazy idea of a donor. This has been worked out with the university.”

Munger, 97, a vice president at Berkshire-Hathaway, and the dorm’s plan became top stories in the news when Los Angeles architect Dennis McFadden, a longtime consultant to the university resigned last month over the project, calling the building "destructive" and "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.” 

The $1.5 billion project "is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of" students, McFadden said in the letter.

Parents and students have also expressed concern about the building and it has sparked editorials in the Los Angeles Times and a stream of amateur criticism across the internet in recent days. 

Describing the planned building as a "deathtrap," news site Gizmodo imagined students living "like rats. It’s unclear how accessible any emergency exits are or how robust the ventilation system is."

Munger: 'Mega dorms' are the future of university housing

When asked about the backlash to the plans, Munger said he didn’t think it was much of one.

“You have one architect who never looked at the model reaching conclusions on his own,” he said. “It’s normal for every architect in the world to think he can design a building better than all the other architects.”

And his hope is that he will prove critics wrong and it will be the future of university housing. In a press release about the project earlier this year, the university promised it would provide housing to 5,000 students and help deliver on a 2010 plan to increase enrollment.

“I anticipate there will be four more dorms like this at UCSB eventually and I think there will be a great many more at other campuses in the UC system because I think everyone is going to see how much better this works than it was traditionally done,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing it, I can do a lot of good because people are going to copy it.” 

Munger has been described by Forbes as Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett’s “right-hand man” and according to the magazine also is the chairman of newspaper publisher Daily Journal Corp. and sits on the board of retailer Costco. His net worth is estimated to be at $2.2 billion and his previous donations include $110 million to Michigan for another large dorm he helped design.

So why give away money into architecture projects? 

“I feel compelled to make charitable gifts by the fact that I had some financial success and that’s what I think I’m honorably bound to do,” he said. “And once I’m making charitable gifts, I’d rather give them to buildings because I consider buildings and architecture - I look at it as architecture is the queen of the arts and buildings as just terribly important to mankind.

“If you do them right the buildings help you for 100 years ahead. They go up in value instead of down. They’re amazing things what buildings will do for the world. Particularly buildings that are used in schools. I think I can do more good per-dollar giving away buildings than anything else.”

Architecture: 'The queen of the arts'

His love of architecture, he said, started with an uncle who was an architect. 

“But I think mostly it was just logic. If you take the net human satisfaction in your own life from pleasant buildings, pleasant restaurants, pleasant dining space, pleasant auditorium space and you compare that to that to the net pleasure you had in your life from sculpture or paintings, this is no comparison. Buildings can do way more good. It’s the queen of the arts,” he said. 

Munger has no formal training in architecture but pushed back on the idea it was just a hobby. He said he made his first million dollars on an apartment building and has built houses for his family.

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"I’ve been building houses for myself and my family for a long time and I’m almost 98 years old and I’m interested in it," he said. "I built three houses by myself so I’ve been quite interested in intelligent architecture planning all of my life. It can’t be called a hobby when I made my first million on it."

The UCSB dorm, he promised, would include artificial light that was better than natural-light windows in some respect, giving students privacy when sleeping and offering proximity to everything they need in campus life. 

He also pointed to what he said was the success of the dorm he helped design at the University of Michigan (though one student complained in a story on CNN today that the building’s lack of natural light had been ‘a low point’ of her experience during a Covid-19 scare.)

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“It’s going to work,” he said. “It’s a carbon copy but much improved of the building at Michigan and the Michigan building is mobbed. Everybody loves it. So how can you fail when you make an improved version?”