UCSB is UC Santa Barbara. The billionaire is Charles Munger - Warren Buffett's closest partner and his right-hand man.

Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm - The Santa Barbara Independent

The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.

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A consulting architect on UCSB's Design Review Committee has quit his post in protest over the university's proposed Munger Hall project, calling the massive, mostly-windowless dormitory plan "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being."

In his October 25 resignation letter to UCSB Campus Architect Julie Hendricks, Dennis McFadden ― a well-respected Southern California architect with 15 years on the committee ― goes scorched earth on the radical new building concept, which calls for an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.

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McFadden draws striking comparisons between Munger Hall and other large structures to illustrate its colossal footprint. Currently, he said, the largest single dormitory in the world is Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, which houses 4,000 students and is composed of multiple wings wrapped around numerous courtyards with over 25 entrances.

"Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances," McFadden said, and would qualify as the eighth densest neighborhood on the planet, falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It would be able to house Princeton University's entire undergraduate population, or all five Claremont Colleges. "The project is essentially the student life portion of a mid-sized university campus in a box," he said.

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Charlie Munger

Charles Thomas Munger (born January 1, 1924) is an American billionaire investor, businessman, former real estate attorney, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; Buffett has described Munger as his closest partner and right-hand man.

The fucker really hates windows. Emphasis mine.

Architectural efforts

Munger is an amateur architect. He has donated to universities on the precondition that the universities follow his architectural blueprints exactly.

On April 18, 2013, the University of Michigan announced the single largest gift in its history: a $110 million gift from Munger to fund a new "state of the art" residence designed to foster a community of scholars, where graduate students from multiple disciplines can live and exchange ideas. The gift includes $10 million for graduate student fellowships. Munger designed the residence, which houses 600 single bedrooms, most of which are designed to be windowless.

The Munger Graduate Residence, funded and designed by Munger himself, opened in late 2009 and now houses 600 law and graduate students. The Munger family gave a major gift to Stanford's Green Library to fund the restoration of the Bing Wing as well as the construction of a rotunda on the library's second floor, and endowed the Munger Chair in Nancy and Charles Munger Professorship of Business at Stanford Law School.

Munger has been a trustee of the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles for more than 40 years, and previously served as chair of the board of trustees. His five sons and stepsons as well as at least one grandson graduated from the prep school. In 2009, Munger donated eight shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock, worth nearly $800,000, to Harvard-Westlake. In 2006, Munger donated 100 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock, then valued at $9.2 million, to the school toward a building campaign at Harvard-Westlake's middle school campus. The Mungers had previously made a gift to build the $13 million Munger Science Center at the high school campus, a two-story classroom and laboratory building which opened in 1995 and has been described as "a science teacher's dream". The design of the Science Center was substantially influenced by Munger.

In October 2014, Munger announced that he would donate $65 million to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is the largest gift in the history of the school. The donation went towards the construction of a residence building designed by Munger for visitors of the Kavli Institute in an effort to bring together physicists to exchange ideas as Munger stated,"to talk to one another, create new stuff, cross-fertilize ideas".

In March 2016, Munger announced a further $200 million gift to UC Santa Barbara, conditioned on the university’s commitment to spend it on an undergraduate dormitory of Munger’s own unconventional design, featuring windowless bedrooms, tripling the record gift he gave for the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. In October, 2021, Munger's insistence that the university follow his design compelled professional architect, Dennis McFadden, who had served the university for two decades, to resign from the university's Design Review Committee. McFadden stated that the windowless, 1.68-million-square-foot dormitory would be “'unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being.... An ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light, air, and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants.... The Munger Hall design ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn’t matter.... [T]he building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves."