Goodbye Dormzilla, Hello Student Housing

The colossal, proposed boondoggle of UC Santa Barbara’s Munger Hall student housing project, memorably nicknamed “Dormzilla,” has finally been laid to rest.

On October 25, 2023, UCSB Vice Chancellor Garry MacPherson circulated an official memo to campus staff, students, and faculty announcing two architecture firms chosen to design campus housing for 3,500 students in accordance with UCSB’s 2010 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) targets. The message, unwritten but obvious by omission, was that the new architects were retained to design an alternative to Munger Hall, whose demise had been rumored for months.

In today’s world of unsettling disruption, it is rare when a bad idea championed by an unfettered billionaire like Charlie Munger comes to a decisive end, thanks to genuine grassroots opposition. It is worth marking the moment, as a reminder that people can make a difference when they organize and thoughtfully make their views and voices heard.

On October 24, 2021, Munger Hall’s first public opponent grabbed national and international attention. Dennis McFadden, a consulting architect to UCSB for 15 years, wrote a scathing letter resigning from UCSB’s Design Review Committee stating he was “disturbed” by the Munger Hall plan and the lack of transparency in the project’s design and approval process. His fury at Munger Hall’s plan — for 4,500 students to be housed in a behemoth 1.7 million square foot building, where 94 percent of the tiny 7-by-8 foot bedrooms were windowless — was summed up in his letter stating that Munger Hall was “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”

McFadden’s letter found its way to widespread media outlets and online forums. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes ran a segment describing Munger Hall’s “Dorms that look like holding cells on a Moon colony.” An L.A. Times headline declared: “How jailhouse design is more progressive than UC Santa Barbara’s ‘dormzilla’.”

Students, faculty, alumni, community leaders, professional architects, engineers, and planners jumped into the anti-Munger Hall fray. An organization called CHAMP! (Campus Housing Alternatives for Munger Hall, Please!) and allies organized a public forum featuring a student-designed alternative housing plan, and a presentation by the UCSB administration. The students’ plan was presciently based on the original principles for new student housing mandated in the 2010 Long Range Development Plan, which will also guide the new, post-Munger Hall design. An alumnus vowed to remove UCSB from his will if the mega-dorm was built.

Munger Hall’s public arc of outrage took almost exactly two years, from the McFadden letter to the administration’s announcement of new architects.

Two days following the announcement of the student housing plan reboot, an ironic epitaph to the Munger Hall saga premiered on Amazon Prime Video. The series Upload depicts the crossroads of utopia and dystopia, where people’s consciousness is uploaded to cyberspace when they die. As in real life, the quality of their virtual world in the afterlife depends on their ability to pay. In Upload’s Season 3’s third episode, the main character can’t afford luxury cyber-accommodations and lands in a massive windowless structure named the “Charlie Munger Reduced Circumstance Housing.” The building’s living quarters are a sitcom version of the real Munger Hall layout — crowded and claustrophobic.

Like the best comedians, the timing was spot on — just when Charlie Munger and the UCSB administration lost an earthly home for Munger Hall, it magically reappeared as a punchline in a series about a comedic virtual afterworld. One can only hope the building’s fictional residents won’t be disturbed by Munger Housing’s inhumane design. I’m rooting for the showrunners to script protests against the sitcom version of Dormzilla, because even avatars deserve a window on their world.

Deb Callahan is a UCSB alumna, Environmental Studies major, Class of 1981. She is the chair of CHAMP! and president of North Star Strategy.