Scaleless, Overblown, Inhumane Prison
This letter is my protest against the student dorm “Munger Hall” proposed for the UCSB campus.
This building is a horror. This building violates all norms of humane architecture that have been firmly established over the past century. It is the work of an uneducated (in architecture) rank amateur with zero consideration for the lives of its future inhabitants. it looks like a bad dream of Hitler’s favorite architect Albert Speer.
This scaleless, overblown, inhumane prison does not belong anywhere on Earth let alone on a campus of the UC system. This proposal would be vigorously shot down at any architecture student review at any school of architecture in the Western World (or the entire planet). This brutal, dopey pile is the product of a dark mind, and if one explores the companies that made Mr. Munger obscenely wealthy, one sees a hit parade of the cannibal capitalist corporations currently destroying our planet’s ecosystems and destroying the health of the people around the world. This vast and amateurish pile smacks of the dark, oppressiveness from which it was born.
Please do not allow this project to go forward as proposed. To allow Charlie Munger to design a building (other than his own home) is like allowing a car mechanic to perform brain surgery. Architects spend seven and a half years in college for a reason.
Jim Blake is an alum of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author of Distill the Zeit.