After a billionaire designed a windowless dorm at UCSB, an architect resigned in protest

“Absolutely stunning” is how the University of California, Santa Barbara, described plans for Munger Hall, a towering residence hall for more than 4,500 students that was designed by Charlie Munger, a billionaire and an executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

But Dennis McFadden, an architect who served as a consultant on the university’s design review committee, did not agree. On Oct. 24, in a scathing letter to the committee chairs, he announced that he was resigning over the university’s decision to approve a design he likened to “a social and psychological experiment.”

He said he was “disturbed” by a design that would cram the students into a 1.7-million-square-foot, 11-story building and make the vast majority of them live in small rooms without windows, “wholly dependent on artificial light and mechanical ventilation.”

“In the nearly 15 years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall,” he wrote in the letter. “The basic concept of Munger Hall as a place for students to live is unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”

McFadden’s resignation followed an Oct. 5 meeting of the committee over the design, which the university has embraced as it contends with a housing shortage so severe that students have had to be placed in hotels. On its website, the university said that Munger Hall would create “better and more affordable” housing “with flourish and elegance.”

Munger, 97, shrugged off the criticism and said he saw it as nothing more than typical carping by architects.

“I’m not a bit surprised that someone looked at it and said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” he said Friday. “What’s going on here is that it’s going to work better than any other practical alternative.”

Munger, who is not a licensed architect, said he worked with licensed architects for the project.

McFadden “may not have been consulted, but many other people were,” Munger said. “This is not something that’s done by a nut case in a room by himself.”