The controversial Munger Hall at University of California Santa Barbara represents the university's capitulation to "the whims of old white men" and will lead to another Greta Thunberg moment, argues UCLA architecture professor and City Lab director Dana Cuff.

Architecture has the capacity to coalesce historical eras by reflecting society at a key moment in time, telling us the story of our shared existence. In 1981, an uproar sprang from the winning competition entry for the Vietnam War Memorial by Maya Lin, a young Asian woman still a graduate student.
In the early 1970s, the demolition of nearly 3,000 units of public housing at Pruitt-Igoe designed by Minoru Yamasaki symbolized the end of modernist utopian aspirations, and with them, the idea of warehousing poor families of color. One step further back, when public housing programs were advanced by the federal government in the 1930s and '40s, public debate raged. In each of these moments, social and political conditions reached a flashpoint that was clarified by architecture. A building or monument mirrors back to architects and the general public an intelligible translation of swirling complexities otherwise hard to grasp. When that happens, the debate around the architecture is a debate about our shared existence. Alas, the Charlie Munger windowless dorm at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is attracting so much attention because it is the building of our moment.
What was confusing or invis...