In 1965, the Yale architecture magazine Perspecta commissioned Charles Moore, a young architect who had taught at the University of California, Berkeley for the previous six years, to write about monumental architecture in California. Moore wrote, by way of introduction, that he was about to zig, where the editors of Perspecta had thought he would zag: The “editors suspected, I presume, that I would discover that in California there is no contemporary monumental architecture, or that there is no urban scene (except in a sector of San Francisco), or more probably, that both monumental architecture and the urban scene are missing.”
But rather than dismissing everything in California, Moore delivered his classic essay “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” an uneasy celebration of privatized public spaces, of “what we have instead”: a new kind of public sphere, for a new kind of public. He described downtown Santa Barbara as one of the few great public spaces of Southern California, “a public realm filled with architectural nuance and, even more importantly, filled with the public.” But apart from a few isolated examples like that one, Moore argued that this Californian public life was often to be found in paid-entry spaces, and its epitome was Disneyland, “the most important single piece of construction in the West in the past several decades.” This theme park, he wrote, was a blueprint for the future. “To create a public realm,” Moore wrote, “we depend, in part, on more Disneys, on men willing to submerge their own Mickey Mouse visions in a broader vision of greater public interest, and who are nonetheless willing and able to focus their attention on a particular problem and a particular place.”
In the past few days, another wannabe Disney has been in the news, and we’ve had the chance, once again, to see how California has borne out Moore’s midcentury prophecies about the risks and benefits of privatization. News of Munger Hall, UC Santa Barbara’s planned 4,500-student dorm, “designed” and partly funded by nonagenarian billionaire and untrained architect Charlie Munger, has exploded on Twitter and beyond after an architecture consultant resigned in protest over the lack of windows in 94 percent of its rooms. As shocking as this project is, it is the result of two long-standing processes: the defunding of public education, and the surrender of our public realm to private donors that Moore foresaw 55 years ago.