Architecture
The Amateur Architect
Munger had no formal training in architecture, but he designed buildings anyway — dormitories, mostly — and made following his blueprints a condition of his gifts. It produced some admired work and one of the strangest fights in American campus design.
Late in life, architecture became Munger’s great avocation. He sketched floor plans, argued with professionals, and gave away tens of millions of dollars on the explicit condition that his designs be built as he drew them. His governing idea was social: pack student bedrooms in tightly, even windowlessly, to push young people out of their rooms and into shared common space, where — he believed — the real education happens. The idea was sincere. It was also, in its most ambitious form, the subject of a public revolt.
Michigan: the first windowless rooms
Munger’s $110 million gift to the University of Michigan funded a graduate residence — the largest single gift in the university’s history at the time, with $10 million of it set aside for fellowships. To force students into communal life, many of the bedrooms in its clustered units had no windows. Munger later judged the omission a mistake. Not adding artificial windows there, he said, “was a mistake on my part.”
Munger Hall: the revolt
The Michigan idea returned, vastly enlarged, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2021 Munger proposed a single eleven-story megadormitory — roughly 1.68 million square feet, housing up to 4,500 students — in which about 94% of the bedrooms would have no windows at all. Students would live in small single rooms grouped into eight-bed “houses,” with artificial windows meant to mimic daylight. Munger said the inspiration was the cabins of cruise ships, where windows are scarce and nobody minds because the public spaces are inviting. He would fund it with a gift of about $200 million, on the condition that it be built to his design.
The professionals balked. Dennis McFadden, an architect who had served on the campus design-review committee for years, resigned in protest in a letter dated October 25, 2021, calling the project unsupportable “as an architect, a parent, and a human being.” The critic Paul Goldberger was harsher still, describing it as “a grotesque, sick joke — a jail masquerading as a dormitory.” The story went national, and the design did not survive the scrutiny. The project was abandoned in 2023.
Stanford: with windows
Not every Munger building was a battlefield. His Stanford graduate residence — funded by a 2004 gift of 500 Berkshire A shares, worth roughly $43.5 million — was built with windows, housing about 600 graduate students. The windowless concept came later; here, the rooms looked out on the world.
Harvard-Westlake
At the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, where he was a longtime trustee, Munger helped fund a science center that opened in 1995, along with a library designed with movable walls. The work was less contentious and longer-lived than the dormitories that made headlines.