Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 87: UCSB Student Housing Cube

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

CUBE CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBE alfred twu's twitter: https://twitter.com/alfred_twu   Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Okay, we're recording a podcast now. I don't believe you. Yeah, I also don't believe you You know now my windows are strangely arranged. All right, well Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with with slides I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go I am Alice school for Kelly. I'm the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her it is past midnight I got up at five in the morning. I am exhausted Well, if it makes you feel better, okay, Liam my name is Liam Anderson my pronouns are he really does I just took a fatty dump Very nice makes me feel worse again. So you perfectly cancel it out. Thank you. You're welcome. All right guests. Go

I'm Alfred dialing in from California and Any pronouns were free Oh, yeah What are we here to talk about Ross Jesus Christ? We're here. We're here to talk about something I haven't been able to get out of my head for four days now. I've been the queue Housing Cube Live in the pod eat the bug etc. Yes This this is this is a story I think that was too good for any for us to pass up

Just doing a rare timely episode. Yeah, I wouldn't fit in like a news segment. Oh, why aren't you guys doing actual disasters? When are you guys gonna do the And death heavy before you next time all right Well, that's my PN to you as we will do something grizzly in the next Yes, you Honor as a British officer you will get some some dead bodies in the next one minimum one killer death 1000 deaths. Yes And we'll laugh at all of them and they'll all be children. Yeah

Dobley funny because their children It was fucked up to that guy blew up a clown school. Oh boy for kids. Yeah Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna talk about an orphanage collapsing and we're all gonna laugh at the death of dead babies Because I've been seventh grade again Real quick before we get to the goddamn news to the one person who gave us a one-star review on Apple podcast and said her her my pronouns are master and God now You have to check all the social justice warrior boxes. I am Very nice

In rare form baby, let's fucking do this. That hates you back. I don't know that hates you back Well, I think we should start by doing the goddamn news All right, nobody knows what the fuck this is yet to to change hit each other near Salisbury in England Yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, do not leaps. Do not read the leaps log But first of all because it's wrong, right? Like we still basically don't know what happened, but Knowing what happened has been greatly hindered by the fact that several people who are like employed on these rail on these railways Immediately like leaked incident logs and control logs and like photos from the scene to Twitter and to train forums because rail fans are a plague And and so like a lot of information came out that now seems to have been wrong

All we really know is that this one train that the one five eight ran into the back of the one five nine There was like the original theory that lasted for about an hour was that there was some like Debris from the tunnel roof on the track that derailed the first train and that took out the signaling But now it seems that that's not the case after all Thankfully no one died is the thing The driver of the rear most train got pretty badly injured. Let's say like this is not dead Yeah, I'm not a pretty badly injured you run two diesel multiple units into each other in a tunnel, you know, and nothing catches fire That's pretty good. It's about yeah. Yeah

But the interesting feature of this is that British Transport Police and now investigating this alongside the rail accident Investigation board the train cops the train cops specially trained trained detectives and I want nothing more in my life than to be a train detective now I can't wait for you to get cancelled on Twitter again Listen, listen. Oh, I want to I want to be a cop crowd booze But only for train crimes crowd goes fucking nuts. See I have this figured out now You could be a train cop without much objection Yeah, as long as you're not, you know kick it off almost although

Yeah, but like it is Unusual for British Transport Police to investigate things like this and to like announce that they're investigating this so quickly and it does Raise the tantalizing horrifying Of train crimes, we're in the train crimes. Oh, it's train crimes. Oh, yeah, we have ascertained that the train suffered a loss of contact with Oh 100 hours Especially heinous

So yeah, we don't know what happened anyway, we the logs don't read the logs don't don't fucking speculate we haven't been much Oh, yeah, I'm sure you read it. We'll solve this crime Yeah, yeah, my mouse is not behaving. All right. Oh, I thought naughty mouse. So this is this is this is why we're here The cube we must pay homage to the cube We love you the cube We live in the cube it's it's sort of like the the opposite of the whole break up the mass thing that architects like to do This is like me on a cheat day, baby That's true, that's true. It is a it's slightly notched. No, I have to say I

always wondered if they had actually came out was a brutalist or Cyberpunk cube what the reaction would be like Oh Loising on the cube Then it's kind of what it looks like. Yeah, so All right, those of you who are listening just on audio, of course what we're talking about is University of California Santa Barbara's new Megadorm Munger Hall, right? Yes Yes, this name because it actually hungers for your flesh and blood

No name for Charlie Munger, which is an incredible name idiots name Chuck Charlie Munger was like longer Chuck Munger the Chuck Munger The guy who sells you your Chuck? He was Warren Buffett's number two at Berkshire Hathaway. So he's a hedge fund guy And He donated a shit ton of money to UCSB on the condition It's great, right? Like this is a return to form for weird eccentric rich weirdos, right?

It's like you don't see a lot of eccentricity these days and now you have this guy going, okay Yeah, I'll give you some money, but there's a Brewster's million style condition here and The condition is I get to design the dorm and you have to follow the drawings to the fucking letter The inheritance is yours if you just spend one night in my Log to the cube absorb the cube we love you cube didn't do this at another school A real fucking Prolific constructor of cubes

Yeah, so the the main feature of this and we'll look at some floor plans later Is that I have the 4,500 dorm rooms in here? 94 95% of them have no windows good Oh On the side had them. Why does the college resemble the present? Settle down Foucault No, also the other thing about Charlie Munger is that he's 97 years

Half-blind and half-blind. It's run had a point I told that to my dad the other day and I stand by it You know, I always think it's a bit reductive in like discussions about climate and things of that nature to think of it It's like a war against the young like an act of contempt by boomers But in this case You just like yeah, they have a point really But yeah, the idea is that since there's no there's no windows in your tiny dorm room The kids will be more encouraged to go out and collaborate and interact with each other in the common areas

You know, yeah, big big cubular version of those coffee shops that are like no Wi-Fi talk to each other Leave me alone. Why do I have to I don't like why why stop fucking like What what if you lived in that coffee shop? The guy who runs it is 97 years old and half-blind apparently and half-blind It's like my dad fucking designed this dude and there's no windows. I love my dad, but I would not trust him to design a building So I thought I thought we're gonna we're gonna talk a lot about the building later but I thought maybe we'd look at some of the maybe some of the the philosophical underpinnings

Someone who'd try and design something like this. We're gonna holistically interrogate this building. Yes In order to understand Mungahore, you have to understand the society that produced it So open your your copies of capitol to page one. Yes. Well, I think a good place To start is asking what is light and air and why is it good to have in a building? Why didn't you get this diagram of me? So No, I'm just I'm not gonna feel that you're not gonna fill that air. Okay. No. No Well, that is air air is not necessary on a podcast that's usually bad

Oh Yeah, windows they were invented windows good, you know Windows windows they're like Hole and in your wool, but all in a wall where the light comes in you can look out of it And sometimes people look in your window, but that's weird. Don't do that Yeah And and things like air can come in and out of windows. Yes Hmm

You obtain some kind of like vitamin D from your windows probably unless you live in Scotland Which I do and then you don't oh And I know genuinely I got a mass text from my GP going Like hey by the way, you don't get enough vitamin D from sunlight in winter in Scotland To be healthy you need to take vitamin supplements because there is not enough sunlight for you amazing amazing That's usually not an issue here in California. Oh Yeah, but you live on gods at your sketch, so

So so yeah a light and air is like important to have in buildings have been lots of attempts at like Trying to sort of skirt around that fact, right? You know starting as far back as like New York City tenements, right? I don't want to be cask of a month. Yeah, dude I read that story and I didn't like what happens That's the other that's the other It's the other way to interpret what the cube dorm is Hmm, we'll just wall the students up in there. Yeah We make them fight whoever whoever wins and lives gets free one year one year tuition

This is this is not the bank of mom and dad mm-hmm I love I love a tenement Glasgow has a lot of these two and you can tell a tenement conversion because they used to be like You know one room is a one unit, right? Like it sleeps a family or two, right? And and they've had to like You know divide those up into apartments and so what they've done is they've just sort of chopped off a bit of the hallway too and the consequence of this is that you end up with a really like a corridor shaped bathroom and it's the most fucked thing in the world like It's a really long thin bathroom. I don't like that How does that even work? Where do you poop?

If you want to poop you have to walk all the way like squeeze past the bathtub or the shower or whatever and then get into the Like at the end of the room there Wow So like some of the earliest New York City tenements right there basically rectangles, right? So what you're seeing in a picture here is actually That's later version copy old law tenement so before that there were no laws and There are no windows on it inside No laws no rules and cat paradise

Yes, I've met a real egg cap of the wild at my last job and she was Fascinating man. It was horrible. I was like You should be in a museum So anyway, the old law tenements they came out out because remember this is back before Indoor plumbing really was a thing before air conditioning with a bag and so They're lost that every room must have a window and Of course, they still wanted to build the largest building possible and so all the windows on the side face into these little courtyards as you see here and

A bunch of them together they look like a bunch of dumbbells and so they're sometimes called the dumbbell apartment And this this this little courtyard here because I know European buildings have these two and they call it like a course of light Which I find delightful This shit does not work at all. It just immediately turns into like a event right a couple of decades later New York banned this type of building and Now the past what's called a new law and a new law and amidst arm But you shape building that looks more like a regular apartment building. So you have That are actually 20 or 30 feet apart

Yeah, you have to have a window that looks out onto something instead of like a big sort of De facto chimney full of rotten garbage. I'm out in a garbage. The garbage is up to the second floor One of the reasons that this Dumbbell tenement was a failure was because people would throw trash into the courtyard because New York. It's convenient. Yeah They still don't have garbage cans, which is kind of amazing. This is true So greatest city in the world Well, we've improved a lot of mats, baby on trying to get light and air into buildings since then, right?

Right. Yeah, this fucks. I like that. It's actually pretty good. Yeah, so what you're looking at here is one of the most common floor plans in Hong Kong public housing called the new Harmony type one and This is your standard modern design philosophy that came out of the second half of the 20th century It's all about light and air that you've got these tall buildings space them apart from each other Everybody has fresh air and has windows and all the rooms And especially if you've ever Had Asian cooking, you'll know why you need ventilation for rooms like the kitchen. Oh, yeah, get all the grease out of your building But for a long time, this was the direction that

architecture is headed in taller buildings more light or air great views Oh Yeah, though you can live in the cube The problem with this is it's socialism because all of these buildings look alike and that means that it's socialism and socialism Is when you live in a big building that looks like other buildings. Yeah, that looks like that Maybe the outside is like in a pastel color. That's socialism. Yes There's just a big mural of Stalin here for some reason All right, it's been a meanwhile here we are in 21st century, California and

we've got great weather here great views and We're back to building tenement style buildings with little tiny courtyards Of course, yes, good idea every one of these buildings you see here was built in the last five to ten years. Oh, wow Like at least at least they're more earthquake safe than building a giant tower, right? Right. No Okay These are all these are all like, you know, these are your standard like small double-loaded corridor building That means you only get windows on one side of your apartment. Oh

May not have windows Apartments on the side you're facing in the three-foot courtyard Hmm Now not full of trash, but still right but in fact these buildings today actually cover more of a lot in the New York apartments of the 19th century Progress we've gone backwards How do we get there well typically when you look at a building There's this thing called floor area ratio, which is

How big the building is relative to the piece of land. Yeah, the building's body mass index before building The board the building still stood on the we fit a little too long tail We've all been there So if you have a certain amount of building you're trying to sit on a lot you can either throw up the whole lot with a low building or You can go taller and leave hard to a lot open unless you're in California where we love our height limits and so oh my density

The four people are ruining my somehow one point nine million dollar condo What is the fools down in an earthquake good? I hope some people are traumatized when they see buildings. Yes You're you're you're erasing the trauma of someone who had to look at a building once So this this picture shows what a 4.0 floor area ratio So you can see how so you're allowed to build the same amount of your four times the amount of square footage of the lot, right? Right, that's pretty common in a lot of downtown areas in the u.s. today But we're seeing more of the We're seeing more of a low squished in buildings partly because of the

our country's obsession with height limits, but also because we built a lot of buildings out of wood which Has limits to how tall you can get right. I don't think it does give me the 50-story To make it happen What's New York then since then so New York has actually continued with trying to give even more light and air and They're high density district. They allow these taller buildings So you've got a hallway. You've got apartments on each side and you got windows And everybody's rooms now imagine if you cut that building into four pieces and you put them side by side next to each other That's how you get the key. Oh

God oh No, let's just have to like look through the window that like goes through four other people's apartments Hey, Johnson. Oh, hey, Steven. You're not here in a hall of mirrors You're in the palace of Versailles terminating vista using you can have it out of your apartment Well, I mean sometimes you're lucky to have a window in your apartment at all even in like you should be grateful Mmm. Also, look at the fucking footprint of the cube. It's monstrous. Yeah, you can build something Way less. I don't know horrifying for the same for the same like

Yeah That would be socialism that would be socialist hours in the park isn't so you see those red cars that is not socialism Mm-hmm. There's been some like a temp set like building, you know, sort of a window less window light buildings, right? The NSA uses them Yeah, the What's it? I remember there was something in Washington DC a while back where they're trying to get a variance so they could build a building full of you know, micro unit apartments And they would have an SA. Yeah, and they would have skylights instead of you know, no normal windows

So it's literally What if you're not on the top floor? That's how adx super milled is super max is built right? So you don't know where you are in the building, right? I'm not mistaken in saying that that's literally how super max was built No, that's definitely that that's that's like a thing that like you see the gods up on a gantry above you. Definitely. Yeah But there have been there have also been some I think some weird attempts at building completely windowless buildings Um for people to work in Right. Well, yeah, I'm gonna again ask the question. Why? Well, I guess because because oral roberts. That's why oh, yeah, all right

That's my question. You don't get paid to look out of a window And the 60 foot jesus the 60 foot jesus make it madio or 500 to 600 foot jesus So this was uh, this was the abundant life building Which is the headquarters for the oral roberts ministry Uh, it was built 1958 pineapple. Oh, yeah, it does look like brutalist pineapple Dude was a real fucking weirdo. Oh, that guy was a weirdo. Yeah, but um, but The idea was they were gonna save money on heating and cooling By having no windows in the building

All right, this is an office building underneath the skin there. Didn't you say abundant blessings or something? Is the abundant life that doesn't that doesn't feel like abundant life I know i'm not christian or whatever, but I got to tell you I do not feel abundantly alive I'll shoot into the pharaoh's tomb And then like you're like, what do you what do you call this? Oh, it's the abundant life pyramid. This is where you live now You will serve oral roberts in the sea of reeds. Yeah, I remember calling these types of buildings vertical basements I like that

Yeah, is your basement any or an ousy? I don't like that. I don't like that question Alice you want to hear something gross? Yes, your belly button is just your old mouth That's true So this this was one of the the first attempts at building a completely windowless building um, at least one of the first modern attempts, um, you know Where where there was like a conscious part of the design and uh, yeah workers hated it No one liked to go in there. It's been abandoned since 1980. They can't find a

tenant for it, right? Even though it's mostly a good building Um, spooky abandoned concrete tomb fantastic. I can't believe they can't find a buyer Incredible, um, I think we can conclude from that though that light and air is good in a building Yeah, well the thing is right like we never actually talked about what makes light and air good Which is that they make people less sad. Yes Like people for some reason our little monkey brains get sad when we don't have uh natural light and uh

Some kind of ventilation. Yes It looks like a significantly dumber if we don't get a good ventilation because uh in buildings with very few windows And they were certainly the times where I was the most unhappy Ross you're when I worked in king of prussia and I was the most miserable son of a bitch alive. All right. Yeah And then there was um, uh trexel university has all those underground classrooms. Those are unpleasant Those all those are awful. Oh, I've I've been in some underground classrooms on my day too. And yeah, no the You really do feel like you're being entombed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah Especially at Drexel because the buildings are all old and creaky and hideous

Oh, I was thinking the worst one the basement has multiple levels like you're in a sub basement. Yeah, that shit's worse Yeah, Drexel's uh, they call it the garden level classrooms, right? Yes, they did And it was on it was on the fourth sub basement of the old print shop of um The evening and sunday bulletin building Um, right. So you were you you were four stories down in a building which even above ground was windowless Yeah, um, if if anyone is ever curious beyond the uh, we want you to do material analysis of the conditions that cause these disasters

It's don't fucking go to trexel university. Yes At berkeley, they built one of those types of buildings recently also where It's four stories above ground and about five below ground And the reason was they wanted then about nine stories of stuff That they had a five-story height limit. So That's so stupid Oh, no, my views of the homeless people they're being interfered with

Go golden bears So I thought another fun thing to sort of discuss is this idea that we're going to use architecture to get people to collaborate, right? Or to like um, sort of alter their behavior You know, and and this is this is something a lot of universities. I think have really tried to put into action Um, oh for sure. They're like collaborative living spaces Do you remember the fizzbees at trexel? Uh, I don't know what those were the like if you shared a major You could live in like cs housing. Oh, I don't like that

No, but like that's sort of what I like you can do it that way or you can do it whatever the hell way this is I guess Well, the fuck is that? So, you know, there's this idea you you try and um, build a building that fosters collaboration. This was sort of um, I think Uh, based on something called building 20 at mit right Building 20 was notorious because it was it was basically where they shoved everyone was working on something weird into this one temporary building Uh built during world war two, right? Um, you know, and and everyone was everyone in this building because Uh, they had so much freedom to work. They could just do whatever the hell I wanted

You know, the whole field of linguistics was developed in here Noam Chomsky just sort of came up with it while he was put in an office Put away from everyone else like yeah, yeah, understanding each other is bring back the tower of babbles But it was like, you know, this was this was a piece of shit building, right? Um all made of wood and asbestos And they just put a bunch of mit kids in there and you know, they came up with all kinds of stuff, right? And Universities have tried to replicate that success um

And not done a great job at it, right? Hmm So it's the people not the building is it's yeah, right, but it's also they try and um a lot of times they try to sort of facilitate this by um Removing privacy, right? Right Yeah, so Good example. This is the richards medical research labs at university of pennsylvania Uh luke kahn designed this one

uh And um, one of the things he wound up doing was uh, you know, try to make all the lab spaces Sort of open single units, you know, everyone would be doing their research Together, I guess right? And the researchers all hated it and put partitions in immediately nice That's awesome reminds me how in the town I grew up in one of the elementary schools was built in the 70s when open-plan schools

were the hot fad It was a disaster as you can imagine. I remember hearing about how they finally put in walls and it was the biggest thing in town Yeah, having worked and uh gone well Yeah, how do we go to school and in an open plan and having worked in several I can tell you Just the the whole big brother is watching you. It's not super good for morale shockingly enough Yeah, and open open plan offices are I think getting popular or they have been popular because they're cheaper to build

Well, it's the same thing with restaurants man every fucking restaurant you go to now You can't fucking hear yourself think you cannot have a conversation in them. Yeah, listen. It's no it's not being distracted It's collaboration Unless unless listen unless it's one of those weird erotic sushi bars Where I eat the sushi off the naked person. I know man. I'm good Yeah, that's why I'm not crazy. You're crazy. That's why I listen you're all collaborating on eating this barbecue shrimp Yeah, and so that's why was these open offices now you've seen The phone booth somehow make a reappearance inside office building. Oh, yeah

And the weird nap pods. Yeah, because people crave the tiniest bit of privacy, but like How that works Uh-huh, uh-huh, but we can't give you an office So what we can do is you can you can book a 10 minute slot in the cube which is soundproof So you can say the word in that I have a larger. I have a smaller cube inside the cube I live in Lotus cube Which actually That's where we go from here is we look at the cube properly see how these ideas have been applied in the torture

teenagers Set out our table stakes here of air and lights and various of cubes. Yes So, uh, who wants to see the floor plan? Me, I guess here we go That's a good idea of how big this floor plan is it's about 400 feet long and over 300 wide So it's about the size of maybe two blocks prison architect Well, usually when you build a prison you need to provide windows in the cells

Shit, that's literally true. It's a bit worse than prison. Yeah, I would say it's more like, uh, what do you call it? animal feedlot Concentrated education operation Yeah, I'm a basary engineering student All right, so you got you know, you got a you got a main corridor your main double-loaded corridor It's got two banks of elevators here in the middle um And then off of it's divided into eight houses per floor

Right. Yeah, that's those are like these That's a whole house right there And that's further subdivided into eight sort of pods If the houses why can't they be separate buildings? That would make too much sense And then and then each of those eight

pods units whatever you call it is subdivided into Eight single occupancy rooms around a central corridor with a bathroom Wait, so you don't even have a roommate You're just going insane climbing the walls in your windowless solitary dorm. Yes. We already have a word for this supermax No supermax gives you a window This was a skylight, but yes Point stands I think yes

And the whole building has two regular exits. I assume it has more emergency exits at these exterior stout stairwells Yeah, it's got looks like 10 emergency exits So we're always good on that Right. Yeah, assuming assuming you assuming the power hasn't gone out in the building and you can make it out of your you know windowless tiny room down your windowless tiny corridor to the Windowless tiny stair. You're fine genuinely if you if you wanted this experience, but with more fucking

Human contact you could join the navy like this is This is an aircraft carrier is what this is. At least you get to see harriers and shit Yeah, you're like navigating by bulkheads. It's insane So at the end of each house, right? There's the common area, right? Right and it has A kitchen it has some tables. It has I think a ping pong table I think that's nice. Yes, and that's where you go if you want to not go crazy From isolation and instead go crazy by forced socialization. Oh, it's even worse. Yeah How many games of ping pong do you think you could play before you went insane?

63 of your best friends that you never met less than 10. I How are you supposed to like oh man, you can't have any meaningful? I guess no, that's I don't even know just very angry What if what if what if you what if you are like in up in house two here? And your friends are in like house seven. How the fuck do you work that you have to like commute over there? Yeah, I mean they probably have to give you like a little golf cart to go from one end of the building to the other And nearly riding those electric scooters But if you've not mentioned that why don't we skip up to the roof of this building?

Oh, I actually got the first floor first it looks like first floor So one of the rooms that actually gets windows is the surfboard storage room This is true. Like why they are building this this completely windowless building right next to the beach Dude I just I love how much how it just says just 570 surfboards. Yes That's like that's like one of those in rem lawsuits where it's like united states versus, you know a Plymouth or whatever like United states versus

570 surfboards partially waxed So you got an entry hall Right, and this is the same corridors before you can see there's interior multi-purpose study rooms So you're not you're not going to see anything while you're studying that would distract you Right. Yeah, I think I'd probably lose my man. I would not have survived in the storm I'll tell you that right now There there's a big male room has windows the main room does have windows The like food prep area has windows

Uh, the fire water tank and fire pump room has windows the pets have a window Two giant mechanical rooms have windows, but the study rooms don't have a window. That's genius What I think is interesting is they have some apartments on the exterior I guess those are for the staff because I guess they realized they couldn't find anybody who would be willing to work there I thought it might be for like disabled students or something now. Fuck them too Yeah It's 88 compliant in that it encourages all students to commit suicide by the end of the second semester Well, the fun one is it also has a roof deck

Let's see that roof. Yes Oh so So you you see they have like, um They have a multi-purpose classroom up there. This is like spilt like a town square sort of situation Like an outdoor mall. You got a gastropub. You got your uh, you got your counseling and psychotherapy, which you you will be using Oh, yeah, you sure. Well all seven of the spots available for them I'm I'm curious about what recreation is, uh

More ping pong tables that looks like the only thing in there probably And a funny thing, of course, is that this is um, you know, this this is an inward facing courtyard on the roof So no, you're not getting any of those beautiful views out there Of course, I think it's got a glass ceiling as well. Oh my god Hmm Beautiful I love to go to the gastropub which will presumably serve me various of bugs Yeah, it's about to say yeah, well, you're gonna be there quite a bit because you're gonna be uh Drinking to forget that you live demonstration kitchen suck my nuts

Did they just what are they demonstrating? I don't know the most efficient way to slit your own wrists Yeah, we're really heavy on the self harm judge. I'm remembering my time in college and there was some self harm So we could stick a trigger warning on here at some point. So this was this was uh, charles bungers Uh, uh, artistically conceived perfect plan. No, or a student torture chamber. Okay. There you go Well, listen, listen, okay. He may be a 97 year old weirdo who like devised a way to torture students But like at least he's giving them the money to do it, right? Like Uh, uh a little bit of it. Yeah

Uh Yeah, you know, this is the real punchline of this whole project is I genuinely never knew this for all the silliness and all the absurdities of this design It doesn't even save money Even if you take out the cost that's covered by the donation. It still costs more per bed than a standard dorm that

The university of california system has been building dozens of in the last few years But he's he's not even gonna pay for like even a plurality of it. No, it's third 13% of the funding That's ridiculous. That's so fucked. What why did they agree to this? I The university of california system has A colossal set of endowments. Like they don't actually really need his money, but like also He's not giving them that much. What?

Why take it? Oh, uh, because they want to you know, they need to um, they need to assert their dominance over local building code red I don't know. One rumor I've heard is that they're hoping to get more money out of them in the future But even still we're talking about a public cost of around $300,000 per student Just incredible boy, we have not have we gotten to the we haven't gotten to the artificial windows bit No

Just what kind of I just want to happen in the building code that have allowed this thing to even get built in the first place I don't want to do spoilers, but I want to read a direct quote from him About artificial windows that rely on led lights If you want a romantic and dim you can make it romantic and dim What in your life have you been able to change the sun in this storm? You can it's a pretty cheerful place these little bedrooms The idea for the virtual windows was inspired by the artificial windows and the cabins on disney cruise ships. Mr. Munger said except mine are better 97 year old man loses the thread a bit

Had a point Yeah, so anyway one of the first Comments that popped up everywhere when the cube was first the cube made around some of the tweets Was that oh, this building's a huge fire hazard. How are people gonna get out normally? think about how You know if you look at new york buildings have firing states outside the windows and so on and You probably have heard of building codes that require bedrooms to have windows and that used to be true, but

The recent trend in fire protection has been around sprinklers And to really encourage people to use sprinklers The code has been written to allow all sorts of exceptions if you provide sprinklers And one of those exceptions is having windows in a bedroom Oh my god, that rules. Wow So so when the fire starts The sprinkler immediately floods my room and I drowned on the eighth floor

Once again, like your greatest hazard is drowning. This is an aircraft carrier again Like go join the fucking navy if you want to live in this Yeah, so you can kind of see the history of fire protection philosophy At first after you have these big fires that burned down entire cities It was all about how do we keep the fire from spreading so you saw a switch from wood buildings brick buildings And then of course that didn't really solve all the problems. There are still people dying in huge numbers in hotel fires and

Things because even though the building didn't burn down People couldn't get out of it in time and so the second wave of fire protection philosophy was making sure that there enclosed exits That's where you get the rule that buildings have to have two stairs and also where bedrooms had to have windows because that was

your second exit out of your bedroom because most bedrooms only have one door And more recently though because Stuff inside buildings has gotten more flammable the design philosophy has changed again to Putting out the fire before it becomes dangerous and that's where the sprinklers come Hmm, but you kind of need like all of these things working at once, right? It's definitely a belt and suspenders approach where if one doesn't work at least you got the other to fall back on

So that seems a little antithetical to uh, yeah, you don't need a window in this bedroom if you have a sprinkler Do you follow me that's like nothing one of the like sort of legs out from under this chair. It's like like Yeah, so one way to think about it today is you've got a few primary approaches to fire protection you prevent the fire from happening in the first place by One thing we do now is that you have to have more electrical outlets on the walls every so many feet or so so that

We aren't daisy chaining power cords And then there are fireproof walls between apartments You have smoke alarms everywhere You got sprinkler system You got doors or windows to get outside And then you've got fire department comes the fire And so the idea is that you know, even if one of these components isn't working Perfectly at least one of the other ones will kick in and hopefully keep the fire

So long as you don't like uh remove them in favor of the one that failed right But so far the the track record has been pretty good the amount of People who die in buildings that have sprinklers is only a fraction Relative to those. Oh, yeah, sprinkles rule. Yeah, it seems like you know, most most fires these days are in like single family houses Not in like apartment buildings. Right. I don't have any statistics to back that up, but It's true. Yeah They're designed to contain the fire to the room that they started in and for the most part they do that

Yeah, unless you you know, uh had flammable cladding on the outside of the building or something Right. Yes, uh, who would do that? Uh Yeah, so for those of you who May not know how a sprinkler works. It's pretty simple. There's uh, yes sprinkles their pipes with water and there's this little Thing inside that melts or breaks when the temperature gets too high and that lets the water out which hits this Metal thing at the top and sprinkles it out to cover the whole space And I think you might actually be looking at an aircraft carrier or other ship on their picture on the right

It's some guy some guy wearing matrix sunglasses and an orange job I mean honestly drip like yeah Yeah, and how did sprinklers come about they've been invented for a while But they really only got big after the 1980s when there was a big hotel fire in vegas in a building that was only partially sprinkler and Most of the people who died were in the parts that didn't have sprinklers And so afterwards the code was changed to really encourage sprinklers everywhere

Hmm Like uh one meridian plaza and philly also had that issue. Yeah, they thought the thing was gonna fall over to without Yeah, we did talk about that And Jesus I thought that modern ship was less flammable. No Everyone goes to like here and buys uh sawdust and glue Um, is it because we stopped putting asbestos and everything? Yes

I think it's that in the glass. Yes and the podcast right now. Yeah asbestos guys best us Yeah, but what happened was they found that in the past they might take 10 15 minutes before The room fire got out of control now it gets out of control in about three minutes Which means next we make everything out of oil, right? There's not enough time for the fire department to get there And so you got to have something to put out a fire on its own and

That's why sprinklers Well, I mean that's that's good to know that when I'm trapped in my tiny uh, tiny tiny Cube room that's on fire. I won't be have to um, I won't have to deal with living for much longer Don't worry a couple of deep breaths Is it protects everybody else in the building because if you're in that room and you don't get out You're still screwed, but the idea is the fire is not going to spread to the next room and so Yeah, you can see here where with modern buildings they get out of control really fast. And so sprinklers are designed to go off within a minute or two

The fire is starting This definitely uh, this definitely kind of reminds me of one of those military slides. I gotta say. Oh, yeah This is some power point Yeah All right, now we know about fire Yeah, so now you know how they're able to get away with not having windows in a bedroom from fire code And so this monger guy, he's built a couple other dorms as before in the

One in michigan You've got the same eight person pod With a hallway pods Yeah common space That has the windows But at santa barba to take it to the next level where Your pod doesn't have its own windows, but then you got eight pods That are combined into a mega pod or I guess they call it a house

Trying to make it sound a little friendlier And only when you go down this 100 foot long hallway to the Big room at the end you have windows Great they got like they got everything there. They got a communal kitchen, you know So it's also stinky all the time And you have to look at other people's steering wheel. Nice hamster wheel for you. Oh, that's fun. We're in awesome stress I mean it's a little friendly because you're helping to power it

If you live in like one of the one of the buildings further down the corridor You can get some good cardio and just going to breakfast at least it's a good point Yeah, you're you have your own tomato kitchen in each pod And then there's a big kitchen And uh, okay So no matter what someone's gonna throw your cast iron pan in the dishwasher once or twice a month You're just chasing it around the various dishwashers, you know, I want a bigger issue. So this type of layout is Who cleans this place? Oh my god

Who's responsibility is it? The student the most annoyed person there This is an endurance test. Yeah, I don't see a sango janitor closet in this entire house That's a good point. There were some there were some on the first floor. We looked at them there. There is Uh, there's a there's a couple there's a couple of custodial rooms in there There's like no privacy in this at all like you're maybe you're trying to Soak in some sunlight through your meager window and then people just walk in and out can't do anything You know, it's really funny. What the footprint the footprint of the custodial rooms about the same as the 570 surfboards

Priorities no warped a class war baby Are the surfboards provided or is it just like you could store 570 surfboards here if they brought 570 surfboards, you know, I don't think they went into that detail But it does bring the question of if the first 570 people bring surfboards. What do the other 3,900 people do? You have to like you have to like hot desk your surfboards. Yeah Yeah, you have to you're gonna have to uh, you're gonna have to shove it in your pod with you. You'll have to sleep on it Yeah, but yeah, where did this whole idea came from as you mentioned before it came from cruise ships Yeah, I love marine architecture

It's it's great and it definitely doesn't make me incredibly depressed Well, I gotta I gotta say having been on on a cruise ferry with an interior cabin For one night, it's fine. Yeah And it started to get it started to get to both of us After a while and we weren't in the room all that long And I remember both of us being like man, I wish we had a fucking window. Yeah to look at the black lifeless sea Munger just going like okay. Now. How can we introduce pitch and roll? To the point, yeah

No, that's too unpredictable. You need like a constant roll Put the whole building on hydraulics it put it in a wave tank Really lends a whole new meaning to a floating foundation Ha Thank you for that Justin. And so as this munger guys go to a couple other buildings They've been around long enough to have some reviews like this one It was great up up until the covid started Staying in an apartment with no windows and no access to other facilities within the building isn't worth it

Well, hopefully you won't live through a pandemic in munger. So this may not apply to you But the pandemic's still going and we'll still be going by the time they have to build this thing. Oh, yeah And oh god, imagine being fucking locked down in this that is solitary confinement Like you are just in jail at that point I can't even go to the demonstration kitchen. I know right You got demonstrate in front of the demonstration kitchen. Let me in Oh Yeah, and so about a hundred years ago, there was another big pandemic and one of the

architecture of design ideas that came out of it was That people should be able to open their windows to get fresh air, especially in the winter months. That's why get rid of the miasma Yes, that's why you saw these old buildings that had radiators Located right under the window and the idea is that even though it's Below zero outside you leave your window open the radiator is cranked up and running

and brings in fresh air heats it up and Keeps you warm Scottish people still do this and it makes me feel insane every time it's you know Minus five outside and they have the windows open I have to leave my windows open when the radiator is going in my apartment. It gets too hot otherwise That's how they're designed their size To be used with the window But obviously here you can't do this because no windows. Yes, and so this is actually the history one of the

interesting histories of mechanical ventilation is They found that people would often leave the windows closed in their bathrooms in the winter Even though that was the only source of Fresh air in the bathroom. And so you get all the mold and other gross stuff And so the building code was changed to require Mechanical ventilation bathrooms, even if they did have a window. And so at that point people started asking the question. Well, it's We've got fresh air coming to this bathroom through a fan. Why do we need windows in the bathroom then?

And you can start to see where that starts to go Yeah, well, why don't we need windows anywhere? Why can't we just make it all ducts? So the way the building code worked in the us was up until the 90s there were three building codes That were used in the three different parts of the country. There's the uniform building code That was written in california There was the national building code that was used in the northeast and midwest

And then there was the standard building code That was used in the south God, it's like boxing promotion. That's what I was about to say. Yeah And heavyweight champion of the world world heavyweight champion Right, and of course when you're running Walter Wynn isn't here for some reason Wait when you've got manufacturers and architects and developers and landlords operating buildings across the whole country Over a while they realized, you know, we should probably

standardize this stuff and so in the 90s after a long process that spanned a couple decades they finally merged it together into what they called the international building code Which is mostly used in the countries of the united states and the united states It's the world series of building codes. Yes However, uh, one way they made a compromise was everybody was that

If you were able to build something using any of the three codes before You will now be able to build it anywhere in the country And There are some grumbling of course, for example the windowless rooms originated from the midwest and the east but it wasn't until Maybe 10 years ago that california finally of my outfits

But it's okay though because you can have fake windows Fake windows upset me so bad. Let me tell That's just pure fucking evil man. It's just it's just a big led screen. Right? Yeah, it's it's just a big screen that doesn't have as many cable connectors Well, I think the ones they're installing in the uh in the pods are actually just um You know sort of a soft white light. They're not like they don't have like a fake window seen on them Oh, you can't even change the fucking like fake view. No

what No, that's decadence So you just have you have a solitary cell with a mood lighting thing in it. Yes That's one of the issues is because these fake windows They're actually kind of okay if all you're going towards a fake view But it don't produce anywhere near the amount of light as a real vitamin d presumably God that sucks. Oh, yeah

Yeah, and to give you an idea of just how far apart from the real deal we're talking Your standard light bulb over here Puts out about 100 lux of light. That's your standard indoor light and Overcast day is 10 times that so even if the sun's not out even if it's cloudy or if there's wildfire smoke Which is about a quarter of a year over here in california You still got about 10 times as much light as you would from your standard indoor light bulb We we fucked up and we accidentally gave students year-round seasonal effective

Right and as you can see here, they do make special lamps That are super right for people who have seasonal effective disorder but even those are only a fraction of the actual sun And they don't make you a shitload of them together. Yeah And that's how you get daisy chain tower strips

Oh, I wonder how many outlets are in each one of the cubicles My feeling is that if they don't do the code minimum because the balloons are tiny they're only be two of them That's what I was thinking too The thing about students is they don't have a lot of like Electrical devices Mostly mostly like to write by like candlelight with a quill Oh, that'd be a bad idea in a in a tiny room though tiny interior room You'll you'll trigger the sprinklers and I'll um

Yeah, that's the other issue back when I lived in a dorm with about 60 people in it the fire alarm would go off a couple times every semester from somebody Smoking in their room or somebody bumped into the smoke alarm and then we ought to add back here at the building That's who is 60 people If you've got 4500 people in the building, you're gonna be doing that twice a week

That's about to say I wonder if they can like only have the smoke alarm in one section of the building Who is that what one section is going to be covered? That's fine Those kids burned they burned man. We already got some of their tuition. You wind up with a You wind up with like a crushing uh stampede Uh twice a month really thin out the student population. Yeah You've heard of weeding classes now get ready for weeding dorms Oh Yeah, so the University of California system

Has about 10 different campuses And all of them have a student housing crisis and so they're all building lots of dorms, but Everybody else has decided that Windows are nice to have And these these have all like come out cheaper per student, right? Yeah with like more space My god Yeah, because one of the things is that these are very standard types of buildings He showed a contractor list and he said, oh, yeah, I built five of these before I know what to do

I know how to schedule it You show them the plans for the cube and the guys try to figure how I get to get enough cement mixers Mobilize to do that foundation poor and all kinds of problems come up with something that's far larger than Any building and probably 100 feet 100 miles of Santa Barbara Yeah Well, I'm sure I'm sure um charlie munson Munger whatever his face is don't soil josh. Don't soil josh is good name. Yeah, that's a good point

It will he will soon have his cubes everywhere. We will all live in the cube and be happy. That's fine. The bugs the bugs. Yeah He the bugs living bug living The funny thing is that the one school where Their mascot is an anteater Their dorms have plenty of windows You see her by Well, what did we learn? Well, yeah, let there be light unless you go to ucsb Yeah, nice. Well, my real thing is what do you think is going to happen to the cube?

Are they actually going to build it? Do you think they'll build it? We'll see them ahead with it. Yeah Jesus, I think they're gonna build it. I mean the architect resigned over it or an architect Not as so who was on the committee to approve this thing Or at least uh solicit feedback gave us they all apparently hated it and the school said fuck you. We're doing it anyway I love academia. You know, my guess is it'll end up like that office cube that we saw earlier Eventually nobody wants to use it Yeah, no, well, this is what I think is going to happen. This is my official prediction They're going to build it. They're going to use it for like five years

And everyone's going to hate it and this would be a massive disaster and they're going to mothball the building and then They're going to leave it mothballed for two years and then a housing crisis Really again, it's ugly head again, and then they'll reopen it and then to be fair They do have a housing crisis, but this is not the way you solve it and after reopening it They will then give every student in their legionnaires disease. Oh, yeah Justin I shouldn't have let you borrow this lathe I guess I I guess I trust you. I've just laid

4500 cases of legionnaires This podcast brought to you by legionella That's legionella ask your doctor if it's right for you With love from philly Yeah All right. Well Um, praise me to the cube Praise me to the cube

Living a pod I don't believe in one cube Living the pod eat the bugs give up your car Well, the other one 170 surfboards to work. Yeah, I'd rather just live in the gti, man Those seats go down far far enough. I could manage it. I think your car is bigger than the cube room Has more windows More horsepower. Yeah

The cube can't move at all except in an earthquake. I could move all the time needs a sprinkler system though I have one I'm excited. It's just a bug. It's just a jar of dip spit. I keep it in the back For situations just like that dude. He had to work Oh Well, well that was a podcast we have a on this podcast. We have a segment we like to call Safety third there's safety third Oh, well

I'm tired. I have to poop again. So let's wrap this up. All right I'm so fucking tired, dude. Hi. Well, there's your problem crew and I used to work in construction The company I worked for was building an eco-friendly house with sips Structural insulated panels. I love sips. They're so fucking quick to throw up Well, we're gonna hear about them. Yeah If you're unfamiliar with sips Imagine a big ice cream sandwich made of two layers of osb

Oriented strand board right and sandwiching a layer of cyrofoam They supposedly have a fire retardant in them, but who boy That's a good ass side, baby There's a reason I thought of the story while listening to your episode on the station nightclub fire They're super high efficiency. How long ago did they send this in? Thank you for digging through the archives. Yeah, they're super high efficiency So they're used in green building But if you want to cut a new window or door opening or make a wire chase

You have to use a hot knife that makes a ton of nasty black smoke and releases all the burned styrene into the atmosphere Hooray for green building. So what do you do if you don't have a window to let that burn styrene into the atmosphere? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it Just have the student cutting themselves a window I'm breaking out of here, man I don't remember what it was like on the outside Digging through the floor with a spoon You order sips from a factory who makes them to spec

They arrive at your build site in stacks on a flat bed We had a bobcat with forks to offload them Allegedly someone at the factory told their foreman that they usually move them around the lot at the factory Without securing them to the forks They just have the lowest paid employee ride on top and hold the stack down by body weight What could go wrong? shake hands With danger. Let's shake at all your limbs with danger

Shake leg with danger Good boy, good boy Shake and shake At my build site, I was the lowest paid employee. So guess what? The foreman told me to climb up on on top of the stack of s i of sips While he picked them up with the forklift bobcat because he loved to drive the bobcat Who doesn't whom someone else? Oh, that's wholesome. Yeah I remember thinking it seemed like a bad idea as he jostled me in the stack of sips off the truck

You can see here's the bobcat Here he is sitting on the sips I am I gotta say a bobcat does not have the smoothest motions of any kind of machine out there From the ground to the flatbed is about four feet plus the stack of sips was probably seven feet plus some extra for clearance So i'm pretty sure I was about 12 feet off the ground

I think uh, it not not to be reductive here, but I think if you are going by osha rules Not only should you not be doing this, but if you are doing this you should be wearing full You actually need full protection for this one. Yeah You probably already know that bobcats are skid steer Meaning that they do zero degree turns Meaning that they pivot on a point somewhere near the center of the wheelbase So this means that the load on the forks is way the fuck out in front of the pivot point giving it a pretty high moment of inertia Meaning that when my boss whipped the bobcat around 180 degrees the stack of sips was flung off the forks

With me along with it The concrete driveway wasn't yet poured so it was still number one and number two crushed stone That you know the big two to three inch shit that's like trying to walk on a pile of baseballs under normal circumstances I was falling from 12 feet. So I instantly rolled my ankle painfully and landed on hands and knees But of course there was also an entire stack of sips that were falling on almost the exact same spot. Oh, no I barely managed to frog jump out of the way on my bad ankle in the split second of time before the sip could misery me Quick time event After the foreman ascertained that the sips weren't too badly damaged

He told me not to go to the er and instead like every good middle school pe teacher told me to walk it off I did go I did go to the clinic after work though got an x-ray and luckily it was only badly sprained And we secured the rest of the loads stacks of sips to the forks The most dangerous ice cream sandwich. Yes Keep up the good work Good work. Yeah, that's us doing a good work. Thank you In no way structural materials can kill you

All right, all right, you convinced me the next episode's on the boston molasses disaster. That's right Boston molasses flood. Oh, uh, tell them where to send in a safety third It's a good point because we haven't been making that clear if you want to send in a safety third It is Wtyp pod at gmail.com. Stop fucking DMing me them. That's At gmail.com Yeah, you can buy a shirt from us too at a solidarity superstore Yes, Marshall's Marshall time

Time to do commercials kill james bond 10 000 losses franklin, uh trash future Uh, guest, uh, where can they find you? Oh, uh, you can find me on twitter at alfred underscore to twu Do you have any shows podcasts or anything that would interest the people alfred high speed rail maps? Yeah All right, well, I think that was an episode then Ray was an episode about a cube