I didn’t know it until I read this that in August - UC Santa Barbara rejected his $200 million “gift” to create his idiotic windowless skinner building. It’s covered in the last few paragraphs.

Charlie Munger

Architectural efforts

Though Munger had no formal architectural training, he contributed heavily to numerous building designs, including dormitories at Stanford University and the University of Michigan, as well as his current home. He has donated to universities on the precondition that the universities follow his architectural blueprints exactly. In each case, Munger promoted key architectural concepts of his own liking, and ceded professional architectural responsibility to a licensed architect of record, e.g., Hartman-Cox Architects in the case of the dormitory at UMichigan, and the firm of VTBS for the U.C. Santa Barbara residence hall.

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 was 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 toward 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 preferences, notably windowless bedrooms and common areas, while 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.”

In August 2023, after widespread backlash to what critics called the “windowless dorm,” UC Santa Barbara abandoned the project and began to solicit alternative housing proposals. Munger also withdrew his pledge of support.