Does Money Trump Ethics in Architecture?

 

Not too long ago, I was talking with an alumnus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who mentioned plans for a strange new dorm on campus.  When I was attending Caltech in the 1970s, I had the privilege of visiting UCSB, and it has classic California vistas:  beautiful beaches, palm trees, hills in the distance.  You'd think that any dormitory there would take advantage of the view and at least allocate one window per dorm room. 

 

Well, Charlie Munger doesn't think so.  Mr. Munger, an investing associate of Warren Buffett, is a billionaire who has donated $200 million to UCSB to build a new dormitory for 4500 students, which would make it one of the largest campus dormitories in the U. S.  But he is saying that the dorm has to be built to his specifications, which are eccentric, to say the least.

 

For one thing, most of the rooms where people actually live will not have any windows.  Mr. Munger says they can have TV screens like staterooms in Disney cruises have—a kind of artificial view that can show anyplace in the world, presumably.  The building will have windows, but they open into common areas, not individual dorm rooms.  And so far, the plan is for the building to have only two entrances. 

 

Architect Dennis McFadden has served on UCSB's building design review committee for about fifteen years.  But he resigned when the university overruled his opposition and accepted Munger's plans.  In his letter of resignation, he said that “[t]he 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."  That about covers the field.

 

I'm assuming that the university has not yet run the plans by the Santa Barbara building-code enforcement authorities.   When they do, I think the fire marshal will have a few things to say about plans for 4500 students to exit in a few minutes through only two doors.  Maybe Mr. Munger won't mind the university hanging fire escape stairs on the exterior, like you used to see in old noir movies of nighttime chase scenes in Manhattan.  But that's an issue for another day.

 

The more fundamental question here is, how loudly does money talk when it comes to building a fairly permanent thing like a dorm that promises to create problems?  If we judge by UCSB's actions so far, you'd have to say it talks pretty loud. 

 

It's one thing if an eccentric millionaire leaves her dog a $12 million trust fund, as the late Leona Helmsley did for her Maltese, appropriately named Trouble.  But buildings in general, and dormitories in particular, affect the lives of thousands of people over their useful lifetime. And while I doubt that anyone staying in Munger Hall will actually die from it (unless they really do build it with only two exits and there's a fire), they may not grow weepy at their thirtieth class reunion remembering how wonderful it was to wake up every morning to a TV screen instead of an ocean view.

 

In The Aesthetics of Architecture, the late philosopher Roger Scruton tackles the old saw de gustibus non est disputandum (Latin for "in matters of taste, there can be no disputes.")  He disputes learnedly through some three hundred pages that just as there are right and wrong ways to behave in society and to execute works of fine art, there are right and wrong ways to design buildings—not simply from a safety point of view (which goes without saying) but from an aesthetic point of view as well. 

 

If UCSB builds Munger's dorm exactly the way he wants it built, it won't fall down.  And with appropriate fire codes observed, it won't be dangerous to live in.  But judging from the exterior artist's renderings posted online, the building can't avoid looking like what it is:  a big box to house as many students as possible in as small a volume as possible. 

 

We have something similar on my campus at Texas State University.  Called Tower Hall, it is a monolithic oblong block dotted with tiny four-foot-square windows, and from the outside (I've never been inside, although my nephew survived a semester in it) looks like a nice, well-designed prison.  I'm not sure what combination of poor judgment, penny-pinching, and administrative absence of mind led to the construction of Tower Hall, but fortunately the mistake has never been repeated, and since the advent of our current President Trauth twenty years ago, she has imposed a pleasing Romanesque style on any building built during her watch. 

 

Engineers, and possibly even some architects, spend little time or effort to consider the long-term effect of the appearance and aesthetics of their works on the spirits of those who use them.  Americans are not accustomed to think in terms of decades, and perhaps the enticing bait of a $200 million donation beguiled the UCSB authorities to throw good judgment to the winds and agree to Mr. Munger's plans for a building that will ultimately cost more than five times that amount.  Such issues have imponderable effects that may not seem important, but accumulate over time. 

 

If we're looking for bad examples, I will hold up for inspection the school I served for seventeen years:  the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  While it is a highly regarded research institution that would be better known if it were not in the shadows of Harvard and MIT, the Amherst campus is a collection of nearly every major architectural style used for public buildings in the U. S. from 1880 to 2020, from a faux-Gothic chapel to a 1960s-bunker-style administration building to a 26-story library that is wildly out of place in a small New England town.  It shows what happens when every administration wants to make its presence known by doing something different than the last one did with whatever money comes to hand.  Although there were other factors involved, I blame the architecture of that campus for at least some of the most depressing days I have ever experienced in my life.

 

I recommend that the building planners at UCSB take an extended field trip—in February, let's say—to UMass Amherst to see what happens when other considerations prevail over aesthetic ones in architecture.  If that doesn't change their minds, nothing will.

 

Sources:  The website ArchDaily carried Kaley Overstreet's article "Health, Safety, and Welfar:  What Happens when Design Trumps Ethics?" on Nov. 14 at https://www.archdaily.com/971880/health-safety-and-welfare-what-happens-when-design-trumps-ethics.  I also referred to an NBC news article at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/uc-santa-barbara-mega-dorm-munger-hall-rcna4401, and Wikipedia articles on Charlie Munger and Leona Helmsley.  Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture was published in 1979 by Princeton University Press.  I thank Michael Cook of Mercatornet.com for drawing my attention to the ArchDaily article.

 

The Medium Makes the Message: Music and Technology

A few years ago, my wife tried to start a home-based graphics and communications freelance consulting business by teaming with another woman I'll call M.  M. was of Japanese origin and had trained for some years as a classical pianist, although at the time she was earning money as a Japanese-English translator.  When my wife set up shop with her graphics software, she turned on a radio to a classical music station, and M. objected.  When my wife asked why, M. said that she was compelled to pay full attention to any music she could hear, and to have any music playing at all while she worked was an intolerable distraction.  The partnership soon dissolved for reasons unrelated to the background-music issue.  But I recall the different ways M. and my wife reacted to music as paradigms of two approaches to music that the future may judge our era by.

Engineering has made possible the incredibly widespread propagation of recorded music to all corners of the earth.  Until the invention of the phonograph in 1877, music disappeared as soon as it was made, and except for minor technologies like music boxes and barrel organs, the only way to hear music was to make it yourself, or to be near somebody who was making it.  Either way, music was integrated into life in an intimate, personal way, because either you or someone in your vicinity was personally engaged in musical performance any time music was heard.  It was under these conditions that ancient Greek philosophers developed their first aesthetic judgments, which were about music.  And under these same conditions, classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms produced those monuments of tonality which are standards by which all other Western music is judged. 

At least, that is what philosopher Roger Scruton says about the matter in his book The Aesthetics of Music.  In a music-appreciation class in college, I first became aware of the fact that classical music has intricate structures and complexity fully comparable to other cultural achievements in art and technology.  In his book, Scruton spends 500 pages showing just how complex music is, and what makes great music great.  I suspect he is the same kind of person as my wife's friend M.:  to him music demands attention, and can be analyzed and judged in detail.  I base this conclusion on the fact that at one point he refers to classical music as "the music which asks to be heard, but never overheard."  M. was hearing the classical-music station my wife tuned in to, but my wife was just overhearing it.

Toward the end of his book, Scruton spends a few pages discussing popular music, and how the only measure of quality that anyone tries to apply to it is that of popularity:  what's in the top 40, for example.  It is engineering and technology which has made possible the worldwide dominance of the "democratic culture of America" in music.  He uses the word "democratic" not in its political sense, but in the sense of "the common people," so the music of a democratic culture is the music most people listen to.  And that is not classical music by any means.

Scruton acknowledges a connection that relates music, culture, and religion, and many of the most transcendently beautiful musical compositions were created for religious services.  By contrast, most events called "concerts" today that involve popular music can be viewed as orgies of idol worship.  As Scruton puts it, "It is not a metaphor to describe Kurt Cobain as an idol; on the contrary, he is simply one among many recent manifestations of the Golden Calf . . . . If the music sounds ugly, this is of no significance:  it is not there to be listened to, but to take revenge on the world."  In other words, most popular music is itself instrumental, not in the sense of not having words, but in the sense of being used for some other purpose:  to break up silence, to relax the listener, or to enrage, excite, or stupify.  By contrast, classical music of the type that Scruton spends most of his book on is an end in itself:  it is played because it is not work, but play.  And the point of play is to play, not to achieve some other purpose by means of playing.

Modern engineering and technology does not encourage long-term thinking.  As I get older, I am increasingly impressed by the brevity of product lifespans and the transitory nature of engineering firms and even entire technologies.  Engineers are not used to thinking about how their work may affect future generations, not only materially, but intellectually and even aesthetically.  For good or ill, the democratic-culture type of music is the overwhelmingly vast majority of all music made and heard in the world today.  The conditions under which the great classical composers lived are gone forever.  Will anyone, now or in the future, ever equal or surpass the achievements of the great composers of tonal Western music?  Or will their compositions stand like the Egyptian pyramids, isolated monuments to a way of life and a set of priorities that are completely foreign to our present and future experience?

These are questions neither Scruton nor I can answer.  But by flooding the world with the kinds of music it wants, engineers have forever changed the course of musical history.  With all of the more urgent issues that engineering can address these days—energy scarcity, sanitation, and so on—worrying about what engineering has done to music may seem pointless or trivial.  But the next time you hear music, remember that what you hear is as much a product of the means of hearing it as it is of the musicians who wrote it and played it.  And remember that there are a few people left who can still appreciate, understand, and judge music by standards that most of us know little or nothing about.

Sources:  Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press.