10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit
https://www.djreprints.com.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102

A HED

Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side

Gig: Designing College Dorms
The 95-year-old billionaire has many unusual ideas about architecture, and schools have to listen
when he funds new buildings

By Nicole Friedman and Jason Zweig

May 2, 2019 10 25 am ET

LOS ANGELES— Charlie Munger’s signature phrase is “I have nothing to add.” Ask him about
architecture, however, and he will talk your ear off.

Mr. Munger—investing legend, vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Warren Buffett’s
longtime business partner—has channeled that passion into the hundreds of millions of dollars
he’s donated toward buildings at major universities and other institutions in recent years. The
offers come with a caveat: Schools that want his money have to accept his ideas about building
design, too.

Some of the 95-year-old billionaire’s ideas sound eccentric. Removable walls? Windowless
bedrooms? Modeling dormitories after cruise ships? Mr. Munger calls conventional
architecture “massively stupid.”

“Architects don’t love me,” he says. “Either I change architects, or he does it my way.”

Mr. Munger discussed his love of architecture, among many other subjects, with two Wall
Street Journal reporters last week in his elegant one-story home in the Hancock Park area of
Los Angeles. He designed the house himself, in 1959.

Mr. Munger held forth for nearly six hours—a contrast to his notoriously laconic style when he
and Mr. Buffett answer questions at Berkshire’s annual meeting, which will be held this
weekend in Omaha, Neb.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 1/6
10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

The conversation began in his

study, where bookshelves line
the walls. Binders of Value Line
stock reports are vastly
outnumbered by volumes by and
about the likes of Mark Twain,
Samuel Johnson and Benjamin
Franklin, Mr. Munger’s hero,
whom he admires for his
curiosity, ingenuity and wit.

How often has Mr. Munger read

books on architecture? “Never,”
he says.

That hasn’t stopped him from

spending up to several hours a
day working on architectural
drawings. Neither has being
blind in one eye for roughly four
decades and having failing vision
in the other. Current and former
school officials recall him
frequently sending them hand-
drawn designs and calling with
new ideas.

“He doesn’t want to do it if he

Bright people ‘do many dumb things,’ says Mr. Munger, pictured at his Los Angeles home. PHOTO: MICHAEL LEWIS FOR THE
WALL STREET JOURNAL

doesn’t understand it,” says Mr. Buffett, who has been Mr. Munger’s business partner for more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 2/6
10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

than 50 years. Of his partner’s passion for design, Mr. Buffett says, “It’s hilarious to me, because
I can’t tell you what the color of the carpet is in my bedroom.”

In the dining room, looking onto a garden, Mr. Munger speaks almost nonstop over a dinner of
Wagyu steak with rice and asparagus, lemon cake and assorted chocolates from See’s Candies, a
company Berkshire owns. Mr. Munger stands and walks with difficulty, but as soon as he is
seated he talks in long, elaborate sentences. He doesn’t stop talking until a few minutes before
midnight.

When Mr. Munger designs buildings, he dislikes curves, wasted space, shared bedrooms and
bad acoustics. He likes using precast concrete and putting hallways and staircases on the
outside of buildings.

His approach to architecture echoes his roughly six-decade-long career as an investor: He

revels in his ornery defiance of conventional wisdom.

“You can’t solve your problem, if you want correct thinking, by just hiring bright people,” he
says, “because they do many dumb things.”

Although Mr. Munger never

formally studied architecture, he
has experience developing real
estate in Southern California. He
built a community of luxury
beachfront properties called Sea
Meadow in Montecito, Calif., in
the 1980s and ’90s, which his
friends call Mungerville.

He says he wants to use

architecture at schools to coax
students into common spaces
where they can mingle and
Mr. Munger studies a college campus plan. PHOTO: PETER KAUFMAN
collaborate: “The students will
educate themselves and one
another much better if we do the housing right.”

An early plan for a graduate dormitory at the University of Michigan—built with a $110 million
donation from Mr. Munger in 2013 that also funded fellowships—had space for about 300
students. Mr. Munger’s final design fits more than 600. Most of the bedrooms lack windows.

“He’s interested in the nuts and bolts. He’s not as interested in aesthetic design,” says Mary Sue
Coleman, former president of the university and current president of the Association of
American Universities. “He likes to solve puzzles.”

Mr. Munger also likes anticipating how a building could be used differently in decades to come.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 3/6
10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

“He can see into the future,” says Jim De Matté, chief of campus operations and construction at
Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, where Mr. Munger has designed several buildings. “I
don’t know how he does it.”

Mr. Munger wanted external hallways and staircases for the high-school science building at Harvard-Westlake School in Los
Angeles. PHOTO: HARVARD WESTLAKE SCHOOL

Mr. Munger designed Harvard-Westlake’s middle-school library, which opened in 2008, with
several computer rooms, but insisted on making the walls removable. When students later
switched en masse to laptops, the computer rooms were easily converted for other uses.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How many conditions are too many for a multimillion-dollar donation? Join the conversation
below.

In most cases, Mr. Munger chooses schools that he or his family members attended. (He studied
mathematics at Michigan and meteorology at the California Institute of Technology, and earned
a law degree from Harvard.)

When Mr. Munger imposes his design vision, even bathrooms don’t escape his attention.

“Any time you go to a football game or a function there’s a huge line outside the women’s
bathroom. Who doesn’t know that they pee in a different way than the men?” Mr. Munger says.
“What kind of idiot would make the men’s bathroom and the women’s bathroom the same size?
The answer is, a normal architect!”

At Harvard-Westlake in the 1990s, a preliminary design for the high-school science center he
was funding called for the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms to be the same size. He turned to the
architect and said, “We’re teaching biology in this same building?”

The plans promptly changed, and the girls’ bathrooms were built larger than the boys’.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 4/6
10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

Mr. Munger's University of Michigan design included seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom suites with large common spaces.
PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Mr. Munger’s demands and attention to detail don’t always go over well. “Not every
representative of a nonprofit is expert in dealing with the eccentricities of Charlie, who’s so
deeply involved in every step of the process and often late into the process,” says his friend
Peter Kaufman, chief executive of Glenair Inc., an aerospace-parts manufacturer in Glendale,
Calif.

After committing an initial $200 million to improving undergraduate housing at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, Mr. Munger has spent much of the past few years designing a
dorm for the school.

Mr. Munger’s proposal includes suites of eight single bedrooms alongside large common
spaces. Most bedrooms would have artificial windows patterned after the portholes on Disney
cruise ships, with customized lighting to mimic daylight.

The building still has to pass

various approvals. Mr. Munger
is confident that students would
rather have single rooms than
bedroom windows.

“The minute I saw that, I

realized that was the correct
solution. And everything I
thought before is massively
Warren Bu ett and Mr. Munger in 2003. PHOTO: ERIC FRANCIS GETTY IMAGES stupid,” he says.

He predicts that when this dorm and his future housing projects at UC Santa Barbara are
completed, “it will be widely regarded as the best in the world.” He invokes Moses leading the
Israelites out of Egypt: “It isn’t that the Jews didn’t get to the Promised Land, it’s just that
Moses didn’t get to… That’s OK. This will all come to fruition after I’m dead.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 5/6
10/11/2019 Buffett Partner Charlie Munger Has a Side Gig: Designing College Dorms - WSJ

He lets out a dry laugh: “Now, I’m not going to try to die early just so that’ll happen, but I’m OK
with it if it does.”

Write to Nicole Friedman at nicole.friedman@wsj.com and Jason Zweig at

intelligentinvestor@wsj.com

RELATED READING

•Warren Buffett’s Empire, in 194,300 Square Feet (May 2, 2019)

•When Charlie Munger Calls, Listen and Learn (Jan. 25, 2019)

•What You Should—and Shouldn’t—Learn from Warren Buffett (May 1, 2015)

•The Secrets of Berkshire’s Success: An Interview with Charlie Munger (Sept. 14, 2014)

•Lesson From Buffett: Doubt Yourself (May 5, 2013)

Copyright © 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit
https://www.djreprints.com.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-partner-charlie-munger-has-a-side-gig-designing-college-dorms-11556807102 6/6