The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions.
My primary issue with McMansions specifically (beyond the fact that they lost the thread on western architecture, which should be blamed on the academy[2]) is that the materials and workmanship are terrible: ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship. The flip culture that the mortgage-debt bubble of the last 15 years created has exacerbated this issue to almost comical levels.
EDIT: After reading another post[a] of his, it is worth mentioning another chronic problem with modern (again chronological, not stylistic) building: the buildings often look like they are about to fall over. A particular pet peeve of mine is the flashing gap found at the base of many houses and buildings, which introduces a disconcerting negative gap right where a soothing, wide foundation should be. Visual insanity.
One classic case of this is that the "landscaping" at these developments almost always consists of bagged and burlapped shrubs that are planted without removing the burlap.
The roots usually don't penetrate the burlap so after two years you can walk around this kind of place and see all the shrubs are yellow and dead.
Big picture I disagree with the general outlook of the article. If we've learned anything about architecture through anti-architects such as Jacobs and Venturi it is that buildings are meant for people to live and work in and not to prove a point about aesthetics or aggrandize the architect or whoever hired the architect. There are plenty of buildings that have "balance" and "rhythm" but the roof leaks or there are spots that get to 105F when the sun shines in.
McMansions fail because they are designed to be impressive for the first fifteen minutes when they are showing the house rather than to be effective and economical "machines for living" as Buckminister Fuller would have put it.
> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions.
And this is because most "modern" houses are about cramming the checklist of real-estate criteria (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2+ car garage, etc.) into a building that can then be stamped out the maximal number of times in the minimal amount of land area.
This is what happens when the value of land becomes the overriding factor.
In addition, architects derided the houses built during the post-war era, too. The difference was that the post WWII houses didn't have homeowner's associations enforcing "standards" so they evolved over time to become the "quaint" neghborhoods that everybody so loves today.
The McMansions showcased in the articles are well beyond cramming anything (they are huge) and does not look like the kind of house where the owners would appreciate having 12 other houses looking the same as neighbours. Indeed, as soon as you're stamping out houses, you'll want to hire a real architect to make them appealing to as many people as possible, which means balanced, proportioned and symmetric (if unoriginal, but that's not what the article is about).
If anything, the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.
I used to know an architect who designed stamped-out houses. According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof.
> the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.
It's easy - and fun - to scoff, but I think a lot of buyers and owners genuinely don't notice the difference between crapchitecture and something with real style and flair.
Also applies at the high end. Take a virtual drive around houses for sale in Beverley Hills. There are some real kitsch classics available - including some real architect-designed modernism-in-a-box neo-kitsch stand-outs.
I think that's a great point. It's an easy way out to frame a discussion like this. "McMansions exist because people are tacky and have bad taste".
I think it's more interesting to look at it from the other perspective. Why is it such a popular design?
Maybe the quaintness of pre-war/post-war housing did not keep up with the needs of modern life. Maybe we need more space, and more privacy from the ever expanding sprawl of suburbia to feel safe, and sheltered (in a mental sense). The cheesy facade could just be a simple tool to keep the building's quick-and-dirty plaster walls, within the scope of the suburban vernacular.
I actually grew up in a McMansion. I always thought it was a great house. We had a pool, and two concrete lion statues guarding the front door. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. How could my parent's buy a house like that? It oozed with tackiness.
But it got the job done.
It was large, had enough room for the whole family, and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.
When neighbors stopped talking to each other and only focused their attention on their own families, it became harder to flaunt wealth. Maybe the McMansions are just a clearer, and louder, cultural identifier, compared to things like gold watches and fine clothing?
> I actually grew up in a McMansion. I always thought it was a great house. We had a pool, and two concrete lion statues guarding the front door. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. How could my parent's buy a house like that? It oozed with tackiness.
If you’d grown up in a normal-sized house (maybe 1000–1800 sq. ft., depending on family size), you’d also have thought it was a “great house”.
Kids in general tend not to question their natural environment much. There are some amenities (electric lighting, hot showers, indoor plumbing, washing machines, telephones, HVAC, ...) which make a noticeable difference to quality of life compared to growing up in a wattle and daub shack with a dirt floor.
On the other hand, having an extra 6 miscellaneous rooms to store random crap, giant walk-in closets, 4 bathrooms, a huge home theater, or supersized bedrooms makes only a very slight difference to anyone, except insofar as it signals to the neighbors that you‘re rich and gives you 3x more cleaning to do.
My parents who grew up in families with 5 kids in tiny 3-bedroom 1-bathroom houses in the 50s thought their houses were great. I’m sure they would have appreciated 1–2 extra small bedrooms and an extra bathroom, but it wasn’t a big deal.
The much larger problem with McMansions is that they tend to be in suburbs with huge distances between places and streets actively hostile to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. Absolutely everything requires a car ride to get to: friends’ houses, the park, school, grocery stores, little shops, cafés, restaurants, the library, the doctor’s office, concert venues, museums, etc. Such an exterior/public environment is incredibly constricting for everyone, but especially for kids, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.
The conversation always seems to get very judgy when taking about American suburbia. Yes, most houses are ugly, and have too much shit packed into them, but I think you can find that anywhere. Rich people and poor people in cities and rural areas alike will probably keep stuff around that they don't need, and want more rooms than needed in their current home.
Suburbs are always going to be more hostle towards pedestrians and cyclists, and we are currently seeing a trend of people moving away from them.
Unfortunately design is often used as a tool to judge others. I had the chance to study art history, but that does not give me the right to make broad and generalized statements about where people live and what they choose to do with their lives and money.
If we want to see the ugly American McMansion go away, we should spend more time coming up with good designs that fit the needs of the people who buy them, rather than trying to convince them that what they currently own Is ugly.
Apple did this with great success. They built a product that the consumer didn't know they needed. They imparted their design principles on the public through a solid product line, rather than telling them their current computer were ugly.
People might not need McMansions, but they are still going to want then. Until there is a better design for the same price, people are going to buy them.
Rich people who live/ed in actual mansions often end up just using a mini apartment inside the thing and the number one complaint is how long it takes to walk somewhere. They where large for parties, to support staff, and look impressive not because people actually wanted a lot of space.
Mcmansions are designed to be cheap to construct while being easy to sell. Buyers are attracted to distinctive structures as houses blend together when you look at 20+ of the things. They also default to check boxes has a pool y/n not aesthetics. Thus, your idea of 'a few good designs' makes them harder to sell.
Interestingly people with a lot of money (10-100's of millions) now days often go for small but very distinctive buildings. Think frank lloyd wright not huge but art in large part because they don't need or want lot's of staff and will often just rent out structures for party's.
The suburbs that are gaining people are becoming more urban-like, or at least more old-school-small-town-like, since the newcomers expect urban amenities such as bike and pedestrian friendly streets.
I live in a mid-sized city. You can pretty correlate younger people moving away with school lottery results.
If you draw the Montessori-esque or really good conventional school, you stay. If you draw the schools in the hood, the for sale sign is up within 72 hours. If you draw one of the ok-ish schools, it's about 50-50 based on income.
>Apple did this with great success. They built a product that the consumer didn't know they needed. They imparted their design principles on the public through a solid product line, rather than telling them their current computer were ugly.
And look where that got us: we went from Windows XP, Vista, and finally 7, to the UGLY horror shows of Windows 8/8.1 and 10. You may think your Apple UI looks nice, but for 99% of office workers, they're now either stuck with the hideous Metro UI, or they're going to be really soon as soon as their IT department upgrades them.
This so much. I don't have a McMansion but I have a house that was added on to and has a total of 4bed 3 bath. The living room, 1 bathroom and 3 bedrooms would be like one "great room" in a McMansion. I feel like all we do is clean. We wouldn't even use the older side of our house if I didn't have my office in it, and my 5 month-old's future room. Before that we lived in the master suite/kitchen/utility room area.
Maybe people who have McMansions can hire cleaning staff or something? We basically spend every weekend cleaning and doing yard work. There really isn't any time during the week after working so many hours, especially when I'm traveling, and taking care of a kid.
Two kids under 4, a third on the way. We sweep the hardwoods an average of twice a day (dining room and kitchen are in the hardwood section), and it's still always gross. And that's just one thing. We burn probably 6-8 hours a week on cleaning, and definitely could do more.
And yardwork. Ugh. I hate it. I'd happily live in a house with a postage-stamp of a yard with 1/4 the total sqftage of our current one. Front yards especially. I mean, what the hell? Get rid of 'em. Especially since smaller yards would mean higher density, which means things like parks and pools are closer.
It sounds like you need to buy a Roomba for your hardwood floors.
As for smaller yards, not having a yard means your neighbors are looking in your windows from their houses, and traffic is driving right by your front door, and sometimes through your front door or living room window when a drunk driver loses control.
A shared pool now means you have to have an HOA to own and manage the pool and common spaces, and they're going to charge you outrageous fees because they're embezzling a lot of the money (by hiring contractors who are their cronies, and paying them way too much), plus they'll have all kinds of rules about what you can do with your house and you'll get fines for every little thing. If you're going to live like that, you might as well just rent an apartment; at least with an apartment you're not on the hook for any maintenance costs at all, and you can move out when your lease expires without penalty, instead of trying to find some new sucker to buy your place and put up with the HOA.
> It sounds like you need to buy a Roomba for your hardwood floors.
Considered it, but when I asked around with other parents, reviews were universally poor. Plus so much of the stuff that ends up on the floor in the dining area is (I'm guessing) too large for a Roomba to handle without burning out the motor inside a year (think a couple handfuls worth of whole peas) so we'd end up sweeping about as much anyway.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you spill a bunch of food all over your floor, you're supposed to sweep it up right away, before people step all over it and make a huge mess; that isn't something that's supposed to wait for a regular cleaning. At least, that's how normal people live.
The Roomba can handle a few stray peas here and there. I think you're underestimating it. But if you're making a huge mess on your floor every day, then it's not really meant for that, though you might want to look at why you're making such a mess in the first place; is someone in the family a huge klutz or something? I have hardwood floors on the first floor and barely do any cleaning at all, mainly I just sweep around the litter boxes more often. It just doesn't get that dirty, even with 3 adults.
I live on a 50 acre farm and work (mostly) remotely.
Most of the farm is hay fields and woodlot, but on 5 of the acres we raise pigs, sheep, and chickens, have a 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse, a vineyard, a berry patch, and two 3,000 ft^2 crop gardens.
If you're going to say "hey, I've got a solution to the hard work of mowing a lawn", we need to have a long conversation.
...perhaps while we remove rocks from one of the fields and use them to build a wall? Beverages are on me.
Completely off topic, but what happened to Smartflix and its assets (DVDs)? Is there a writeup/explaination somewhere (since the website is no longer available)?
Around the time I moved to a farm, I sold the firm to an employee for a nominal fee, she ran it for another year, and then shut it down.
As per the sale agreement, when it did shut down, I ended up with most of the DVDs. So now, on the farm, I've got a tractor, hay baling equipment, a chicken scalder, a chicken plucker, an industrial meat grinder, a welding rig... and 40,000 DVDs on various how-to topics. :)
40,000, wow. I guess it would be a lot of work to auction those off on ebay one at a time. Maybe you could bundle them up in ~10 DVD bundles for specific topic areas, like metalworking, etc..
I know what you mean. I have all hardwood and 4 dogs. I basically run our roomba everyday to help a little bit and still need to vacuum every weekend. The little guy doesn't do any damage, yet. I'm in the middle of nowhere so I cut about 5 acres out of the 15 I own. It used to take 4-5 hours to cut grass. I got a zero turn mower and it takes about 2 hours now. I guess that's the tradeoff for living on what basically looks like a national park.
Didn't have a house. Grew up in a tiny 1 room appartment with my parents, then moved to a 2 room appartment and actually had my own room since 2nd grade. And yes that was a "great house". The 2 room tiny appartment felt like so much space.
I'm reminded that in a lot of places outside of the US, flaunting your wealth is considered a big faux pas.
> and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.
Not being a home owner, or a car owner, or a gold watch owner, or fine clothing owner myself, does it seem necessary to have a physical manifestation of one's wealth to flaunt? Does it really speak positively about a person?
I'm not arguing that it's a positive signal. I'm saying they (the home owner) think it's a positive signal.
I also would say that flaunting your wealth is not an American invention. It's probably more common than you think around the globe. I would think that it's a common occurance in any rapidly expanding economy. China and India have some widely tacky architecture. Whole towns replicating iconic Western cities. I think it's an interesting pattern in developing economies. We all seem to look at Europe when trying to show how far we've come, or how successfull we've become. It's when people don't have an interest in, or don't
have time to have an interest in design, where we see things like McMansions.
In short - Why is all tacky architecture some sort of French or British knockoff?
Only other example I can think of that goes against this trend is the fake Adobe house, or the fake Spanish tile house... The American West's and Southwest's version of the McMansion. Houses that copy the look of traditional architecture without any of the actual benefits of the design, like good insulation.
All this stuff is fascinating to me. The cross roads of semiotics and contemporary, tacky architecture. What does it mean to build a mini Versailles? What does European classicism in American architecture say about our society?
> I'm reminded that in a lot of places outside of the US, flaunting your wealth is considered a big faux pas
Where is that? In all the countries I have been the wealthy like to wear special clothes, build large houses, drive expensive cars. In some countries they wear more jewlery, in others they talk about expensive trips they go to.
It's common enough. Outside of the US, it's referred to pretty commonly as 'Tall Poppy Syndrome' (especially AU and NZ) pr the 'Crab Mentality'. In Ireland, it's related to the twin concepts of 'Begrudgery' and 'Notions'. The Netherlands has 'Maaiveldcultuur'. And the Law of Jante has already been mentioned.
Fundamentally, it's a way to promote social cohesion, albeit in negative terms. It's not, however, against success, but against the idea that success inherently makes you a better person deserving of putting on superior airs: the successful should not rub the faces of others in their success.
In Berlin in particular, and Germany/Austria in general. There are some very fancy districts in Berlin but in most of it I think driving a very fancy car will cause more negative than positive reactions.
In Vienna in my experience it is very important to seem cultivated (knowledgeable in the arts, music, etc), but wealth doesn't seem to be as big a factor (more so than in Berlin though).
"The multi-millionaire and his pneumatic wife told us how they were hounded out of Germany for being too flashy, saying people would spit on their Ferrari and sneer at Maria's large breasts.
So Bastian packed up his life and settled in LA to fulfill his dream of living the 'Baywatch life' after he became obsessed with the show while growing up in cold, landlocked Munich."
The difference between the an American and an Irishman is that the American looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday, I'm gonna be that guy". The Irishman looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday... I'm gonna get that bastard".
(I'm sure this is an old joke and he didn't think of it, and it's probably been applied to many nationalities)
Its quite different how one shows their wealth country to country. Houses I thought were complete dumps in Rome are amazing to see at night - the lights go on and massive oil painting and amazing interiors are visible in what looked like near derelict buildings.
The Nordic countries, at least. In general you're not supposed to show your wealth, though wealth in any case isn't very common as the societies are very equalizing due to low income differences and progressive taxation.
Read about the "Law of Jante" for the extreme of this mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante). I think the first rule pretty well sums up the thought behind this:
I think this point of view is a bit exaggerated. For example, 1% of the world's USD billionaires live in Sweden. (More billionaires per capita than e.g. the US.) If you walk around in Swedish cities (at least the major cities) it’s not really hard to tell that some citizens are a lot more wealthy than others. I’m not sure about the other Nordic countries but I would guess the situation is similar in at least Norway and Denmark.
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is one of these fabulously rich Swedish people. He drives around in an old Volvo; and lives in a modest house. This is how he wishes to be seen.
The fact that he also owns several sports cars and a villa on the French Riviera, is not something he wants publicized.
>Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is one of these fabulously rich Swedish people. He drives around in an old Volvo;
That seems like a bad idea to me. Old Volvos were indeed very safe by the standards of the time, but compared to a modern car, they're simply not. Here in the US, 30,000 people die in auto accidents every year (it's somewhere around 250k/year worldwide). If you have a ton of money, you might as well get a new car and protect yourself. A brand-new bottom-of-the-line Volvo will let you walk away from crashes that some old Volvo would kill you in. And surely a new V60 or S60 (their lowest-end models IIRC, unless they still have S40s there) wouldn't look too out-of-place in Sweden of all places (where the cars come from).
As a casual observer, it seems to me that these countries have little income inequality. Wealth inequality certainly exists. I would argue that the latter is actually a bigger problem.
I guess it's no problem to be rich, as long as you don't pretend it makes you in any way superior to others. Enjoy it, but don't flaunt it. Don't make others jealous of what you've got and they don't.
America finds it acceptable to flaunt wealth in a few places: Vegas. LA. Miami. SV, some. New York, kind of. But what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
In day-to-day America, claimed frugality wins. Most Americans will tell you their house was a "deal" in a place with good schools. Our cars are huge because we drive long distances with large families. Our warehouse memberships are to gain purchasing power over toilet paper and peanut butter - not gulfstreams or penthouses.
Granted, as Tom Wolfe observed in another place, our plumbers now live better than most Roman emperors. But you don't want to see an America that actually internalizes wealth flaunting.
> According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof.
Couldn't it then be argued that her design did not fit the specification? If these houses need to be produced as cheaply as possible, wouldn't it then be better to focus on achieving aesthetics using the minimal amount of extra materials, ensuring that there is nothing to trim away?
No, she was hired specifically to make something that looked good with a reasonable budget.
Then when she made something that looked good, someone else was hired to cut costs further.
You might think this makes no sense at all. But to a certain kind of business-oriented mind, it's perfectly logical.
A huge problem with traditional business process thinking is lack of organic understanding. It's incredibly hard to find people who can understand a project/process in the round with a deep understanding of cause and effect, and not just as a collection of formulas - one of which always seems to be "cut costs" - applied mechanically.
Of course it can appear to make sense in pure financial terms. But there are social and environmental costs which don't appear on the balance sheet, and possibly also opportunity costs in lost customer goodwill.
Would most houses in Beverley Hills or Bel Air be considering McMansions? I thought the vast majority are pretty far from that style. When I think McMansions I think Hollywood Hills or Atherton or even Los Gatos.
McMansions look asymmetrical and have terrible "rhythm" on purpose, because it makes it MUCH more difficult for a casual observer to tell they are cookie cutter.
I'm a bit confused about what McMansion refers to. Is it cheaper-than-they-look 13-a-dozen suburban hell houses? Or is it gigantic sprawling mansions for those with more money than taste?
Are you actually using that as an example of ugly houses?
Because to me, it looks infinitely better than the endless and faceless American suburbia.
And frankly, some of those are low-blows that look like they are about to be torn down or aren't actively being inhabited or maintained. And they still manage to look on par (at least in uniqueness if not in presentability)
I live in an apartment in a major city for the utility and because it makes me happy. I am within walking distance of a cooperative food market, a Trader Joe's, and four supermarkets. I am within walking distance of dozens of bars, restaurants, concert venues, cafes, and bookstores.
I can walk to my community darkroom, where I spend hours developing film and black and white prints.
I can walk to work. It's between 1.67 and 2.5 miles each way, depending on the route. The walk back includes an elevation gain of about 300 feet, giving me a pretty decent cardio workout just by commuting.
I drove briefly today because I had to go to purchase containers to store my overflowing material possessions (oh, irony). I was stuck in traffic, and it sucked. I love getting to bus, or take the light rail, or the street car, or walking.
I love living in a dense neighborhood overflowing with interesting people and shops, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. If that makes me a special snowflake, then so be it.
That's great, and I'd certainly rather live somewhere with higher population density, but if there's anywhere in my city that 1) is not a horrible mcmansion suburb, 2) has good schools, and 3) isn't ZOMGWTF high priced, I haven't seen it.
Lots of people live in suburbia not because they love it, but because they can't afford a decent place in/near the city and a good private school for their kids. Probably 75% of the cool houses in my city are in high(ish) crime areas with awful schools, and the rest are way out of my price range (and often still have bad public schools)
Some people love suburbia. You don't have to worry about mugging, loud neighbors, the blight of most urban architecture, piss-stained subways, the ability to own space as opposed to rent it, and more. Being able to have woods in your backyard, being able to walk out to see a stream, being able to get in a car at any time you like and go out to explore...those are sizable benefits.
Oh, and you can bicycle for pleasure with far more safety in most suburban areas, and jog too. You can own your own garden, build a shed or workshop on your own property, and do a lot of things that the worker drone lifestyle of an urban apartment won't let you do.
"Oh, and you can bicycle for pleasure with far more safety in most suburban areas"
Cycling for transport, on the other hand, is hell on Earth. My rib still aches now and then from the driver who hit me while I rode home from work (and then was shocked I wanted to call the police).
You get "horrible mcmansion suburbs", in large part because they are cheap. People have to live somewhere, and anything that isn't a suburban detached house is unaffordable for 95+% of the American population. People pose this as a choice, but when the only alternative is crappy apartments or being homeless -- it's not really a choice.
I'd love to live in a Brownstone, or a Townhouse, or a Highrise, or a "dense urban area" that can support some form of functional public transit. Someday, I might be a millionaire who can afford that. Until that happens, I live in a suburban box, and drive everywhere, just like every other person in this entire state. Suburbs aren't cheap -- but they're the only somewhat-affordable housing option in the nation.
If it's a different discussion, it's extremely related. Storefronts with no doors on the street (because everyone uses the lot in the back), or buildings set back 80 feet from the sidewalk, all make a neighborhood more hostile.
As are zoning requirements, parking minimums, and HOA's, so apparently prescribing a particular lifestyle is something folks are quite fond of. Given that the winning side has generally been the one fond of low-density, sprawling, single-use architecture, it seems worthwhile to discuss the merits of said architecture and its impact on the people who live in it.
Many people dislike the congestion, noise, and higher expense of space of the city.
The average income of the US is like 50k. If you have a family of 4 the size of apartment you get on that income in a city is extremely cramped. Additionally, the allure of walking everywhere quickly disappears when you have a 2 and 5 year old.
> Additionally, the allure of walking everywhere quickly disappears when you have a 2 and 5 year old.
Does it? Many people have small children in my peer group, and I've seen them moving to walking through their neighborhood rather than driving to their errands. The difference might be that German cities are much more hospitable to pedestrians in general. Also, there is sane public transit which is helpful if your toddler doesn't like to walk anymore.
"German cities are much more hospitable to pedestrians in general"
From what I've seen, German cities are much more hospitable to _humans_ in general. Towns too, for that matter. And Germany isn't exactly hostile to automobiles, which is impressive considering there's usually a conflict between walkability and drivability.
Yes, walking 2 miles with a two and five year old is awful. I suppose the experience from person to person is different, but I find two-year-olds to be quite selfish with short legs making them bad walking companions.
>Also, there is sane public transit which is helpful if your toddler doesn't like to walk anymore.
This. Also, most small children here have a tricycle or something similar once they're old enough to walk on their own. Sometimes the parent will carry or pull the tricycle, sometimes the child will use it if it does not want to walk.
It's a common complaint people give. "Well I can't see carrying 8 bags of groceries a few miles without my car"
But within 2000 feet of my apartment I have at least 4 or 5 grocery stores. The main reason they're so damn far apart in suburban America is that a 15,000 square foot grocery store might have 60,000 square feet of parking. US Suburbia basically _is_ parking and roads, with the occasional building sprinkled here and there on top of the skidpad.
If you've never lived outside of it, though, you're blind to it. It's like trying to explain why you'd want an umbrella to someone on Arrakeen.
I feel like there's more to it. When Americans visit me in Dublin they ask, before they get here, how I get by without a car. I don't think they really fathom that not only can it be done, it's actually easier when the city is well-designed. And Dublin's not even particularly great in that regard!
you would if you had kids you cared about. the schools in suburban areas in the states are magnitudes better than comps in the city. there's a fucking reason people pay and pay dearly to live in those areas.
You didn't read what I said. I wouldn't want to live in US suburbia.
My wife and I actually live in two places right now because of our line of work:
There's a 2BR apartment in a German city with about a million residents. It's not exactly downtown but definitely urban. It's actually slightly less central than the place I grew up but it's where we mostly stay when working on-site for clients in the region.
We also live in a 3BR apartment in a German town with about 15k residents. When we have children, this is where they will grow up until we need a bigger place.
I wouldn't want to live in US cities either, but for completely unrelated reasons. I'm more inclined to believe that it's possible to find a bearable place in urban regions in the US than in the traditional American cliché suburbia. Either way I'd prefer almost any apartment I've lived in (except for the tiny 1BR place we stayed when we were studying) over that.
It sounds like you are judging the entire US based on almost no information. The snobbish condescension is almost insufferable. Maybe try providing some interesting information in your comments about what it is that you don't like about US suburbia.
Probably. But you choosing to have your kids go to a suburban school doesn't singlehandedly cause it, and you choosing to remain in an urban environment won't singlehandedly fix it.
So the choice remains, do you want your kids to go to a good school or a cruddy school? If you care about your kids and are mildly practical, this question answers itself.
i lived in chicago for 20 years. the city schools were funded just fine, the teachers' pensions (generous to say the least) weren't. i'm a lot more interested in my kid being safe and challenged at school than i am in paying for some retired teacher to take more vacations.
have you people never been to a suburb? obesity is definitely not a problem in the suburbs i've lived in. we're talking mcmansions here -- parents are likely climbers pushing their kids into every activity of every imaginable kind (good or bad).
Anecdotal, but I've noticed you can get a pretty good sense of the wealth level of neighborhoods in my city by who's out on the sidewalks on a summer weekday morning: skinny kids and overweight adults, all walking? Poor neighborhood. Skinny good-looking joggers? Rich neighborhood. The more attractive the average jogger, the richer it is.
I grew up in a tony suburb. Sure, the average kid who lived in one wasn't obese (although their parents are another matter), but for every McMansion there are 1000 people who work in the Walmarts, Home Depots, and AutoZones, and obesity rates among them are sky high.
In an inner ring burb, or a New England town, you don't have to enroll the kid in anything to avoid obesity. Mine has to climb down and back up an 80 foot hill any time she wants to go to the library or ice cream shop.
Though a 2 year old can still go in a stroller, and the 5 year old can walk. (And some strollers these days come with a platform where the 5 year old can stand.)
Lacks the crowded bustle of the city, it's generally quiet when I walk outside. Yet I'm close enough to the city to take a train there if need be. Major events aren't far away, but aren't in my backyard. Crime rate is lower, police response time is incredible.
I live in a condo, but even in a condo, drastically more space than you'd get in the city for less money.
I feel I have a better quality of life in the suburbs on my income than someone with twice my salary would have living in the city.
I get that it isn't for everyone, but every couple weeks HN has a 'the suburbs are awful' post, and I feel that's incredibly unwarranted. Urban vs. suburban vs. rural is a lifestyle choice and a preference.
the suburbs are mostly about crime (none) and schools (much better). this entire thread is filled with pedantic bullshit from people who haven't got a clue.
The problem here is not the ugliness of the houses, but the fact that they all look alike. But you've got the exact same thing in other countries, except that in the US, they are detached, which in Netherland tends to be too expensive for middle incomes. Those who can afford detached houses, can afford unique houses. Here, identical houses come in long rows: http://www.vansantvoort.nl/wp-content/uploads/46_rijtjeshuis...
Suburbs would be a lot better if they had shops and stuff instead of endless rows of houses. Low-density housing is ok, but why not put down a small mall every few blocks with stores and apothecaries that stocks essentials and maybe has a cinema or an arcade.
Builders often include business expansion lots between the residences and the arterial road, purportedly for businesses like that. Hardly anyone ever buys one of the lots to build there until long after the area is already too developed to build a business building anywhere else.
This indicates to me that developers tend to overvalue their owned lots near a neighborhood that they just filled with McMansions, almost as though they were selling lots that already had local businesses in them. They would do a lot better to just build the strip mall first, stick one franchised business in to anchor it, sell the house lots, then spin off the strip mall ownership into a separate business after 80% of the lots are built.
The home builders see it as someone else's problem. The houses are their moneymaker, and the businesses can take care of themselves. It's almost as though they have never heard of loss leaders.
You're describing Phoenix, Arizona there. The city (and most of the surrounding cities, with the exception of downtown Phoenix itself and downtown Tempe) is divided into streets along a 1-mile grid system. The low-density housing is usually located in the interiors of these 1-square-mile blocks, while the corners usually have strip malls with pharmacies, small shops, grocery stores, and sometimes cinemas. (Arcade? Those are extremely rare these days. Usually you'll only see them at a large mall.)
Because the city is full of fucking people. Crowds, lines, innumerable traffic jams. Or... I can live outside the city, with less of all those things, and more green space, and I don't have to hear my neighbors through the wall.
I know you're using that stock picture as an example of cookie-cutter-stepford-wives-american-hoa-creepiness, but taking a look at those from the air I see a really good use of interior space for low-slung structures, and some charming garden/enclosed deck/pool design going on. Looks like there's some real cozy gems in that neighborhood.
You gotta get in your car to get most places, sure. But it could be much worse.
It's ugly by my book. But it's not my house so it is not my business.
Risk is part of life. And the risk that your neighbour might build an ugly house is hardly one of the worst ones. (And the expected future value of your land is a guess, not a right).
Wow, that's hideous, thanks for sharing. I guess it's what you are more used to, European ugliness pains me much more than US.
The sameness of US suburbia does not bother me much, as I didn't grow up with it. Also, at least there is a lawn and place for a pool. With those Belgian catastrophes (though could be any European country really), there is no benefit.
The one with the "I'm puzzled" caption is actually kind of cool. It's not pretty, but they're on to something. With some polish from an architect it could have become really good, I think.
Some of those are ugly, but some paint and an artistic mind would get those less ugly. I admit, I like some of the houses on that list. But I'm pretty weird.
This is like saying computer manufactures are cramming the checklist (4-8 cores, 12 gb ram, terrbyte HD, etc) into any old case which can be stamped out the maximum number of times with the least overhead.
Yes it is true, and no there is nothing wrong about it. Complaining about the homes that other people choose to live in is just snobbishness.
If you want to own a nice looking computer because it appeases you in some intangible way, you can buy a mac (and many people do). But don't complain that many (most?) people buy a PC strictly for the checklist, and many people buy the mcmansion strictly for the checklist.
This is only true if the house is isolated, rather than in a neighborhood. The feel of a neighborhood—how welcoming it is, how it promotes healthy behaviors and discourages unhealthy ones (including crime), how neighbors interact with each other—is partly influenced by the architecture of the homes therein. Your neighbors absolutely are impacted by your home's design. While some of it no doubt is due to "snobbishness", much of it is also out of concern for the neighborhood as a whole. The same can't be said for a computer, which, even if it is in a highly visible area, won't impact anything outside of a dozen sqft or so.
I thought we were talking about McMansions? Do you really think that the shape of the support columns on the portico is what affects "healthy behaviors"?
This is exactly the kind of thought process that leads to HOAs dictating what color your siding can be, what materials your roof can be made out of, and whether or not you can have a flag in your front yard.
Of course, it can be taken too far. But that doesn't mean that reasonable restrictions aren't desirable. I could take your argument to its other extreme, and point out that the lack of any sort of HOA/neighborhood association/city code enforcement can lead to run-down slums.
I fail to understand the hatred towards HOAs, I swear that most people simply parrot what they have heard before and the story just reaches legendary proportions and becomes accepted as fact.
HOAs also protect quaint neighborhoods from becoming chain link fenced over grown slums too. They can protect some older homes from being razed or having a 6k square foot home replace a 1.5k house on the same lot. The can protect you from neighbors who won't maintain their homes, leave disabled cars out, and generally just make a neighborhood annoying. They are very little different from building management groups that keep people from making the high rise you live in hell.
Yes there are some bad ones but you can usually predict those by simply talking to people in the prospective neighborhood. Also read the HOA and architectural guidelines of any place that has them you look at, when it gets into details about what can be planted, ground cover, and down to the type of pine bark/straw use there is, well that is an indication you will have HOA Nazis.
Given what I have seen with subdivisions that ended their HOAs or didn't have them I would keep them in any small lot setup (once you pass an acre HOAs become less relevant as your neighbors are less noticeable)
I refused to move to a neighborhood with a compulsory HOA, and instead landed in an area with a voluntary HOA. We moved to an older suburban neighborhood that is just filled with community pride, and just exudes a neighborly feeling. We felt the same way about your 1+ acre rule, but man, were we wrong.
That said, while we've been here less than a year, we've had run-ins with the HOA. The HOA has determined that the big yellow recycling bins are 'ugly', and should be kept out of sight except when they are at the curb on pickup day. The HOA has been hounding my neighbor for having a three car garage, which they've determined to be tacky. HOA guidelines assert that none of the houses in the neighborhood should have garages larger in capacity than 2-car (which has led to the hilarity of my neighbor across the street having 2 2-car garages). He didn't put the three car garage in; he bought the house that way, and a part of the reason he bought the house was for the third bay. Regardless, the HOA has asked him to tear it down repeatedly, even though he's not an HOA member. Personally, I removed a tree from the front yard that was dead -- it probably wasn't dangerous yet, but if it had fallen, it would have gone into the road, so we took it down just to be safe. Since then, we've gotten three notes about 'unsightly tree stumps', even though we aren't HOA members.
The 'old-guard' seems to think that nextdoor.com was written by somebody in our neighborhood, and got mad when it was opened up to adjoining neighborhoods, posting a call to action on the site and insisting that "we've all agreed" not to let other people use Nextdoor.com, as it should only be used to report suspicious activity.
I could go on, but the point is that the HOA entails a shocking amount of drama. Thankfully, as non-members, we aren't bound to their terms, and even when I donated the membership fee, I made it a point to highlight that this donation was not a membership payment, because I refuse to be bound to their arbitrary standards, and membership means granting them force-of-law authority over me. In hindsight, it was the wisest possible choice.
HOAs are made up almost entirely of people who have nothing better to do. Retired school principals and dentist's spouses who have all the time in the world to think of things like "those bushes are too tall" or "those yellow recycling contains are ugly."
But if that were true, it would take only a small amount of effort to get the people who aren't like that, which usually outnumber the fuddy duddys, rally them behind one person, get that person elected head, and do away with crappy rules.
Those are all things the town should be doing, not some private organization. Fence needs to meet zoning rules and get a permit if it doesn't. Renovation, demolition, expansion, all something controlled through the permiting and zoning process. Disabled cars? The town again. Neighbor not mowing their lawn? Code enforcement.
No, no, no. Those are things that no one should be doing.
If you want to control an entire community to the extent that most zoning boards and HOAs do, the proper thing to do would be to retain ownership of the property and write the restrictions into your leases.
Your neighbors' property is not your property. If they wish to make their home into an eyesore, that's unfortunate for you, but they really like being able to dispose of their owned property as they see fit. If they wish to use their yard to grow nothing but dandelions, tamp down on your outrage and let them; for all you know, they will be using them for organic salads and floral wine, and to stop them would be taking food out of their mouths.
The only thing that the county/municipality should be doing is to assess and levy the costs of any externalities upon the property owners, and to ensure that no property owner can cause so much damage that they cannot subsequently pay to repair it. No amateur nuclear reactors in the backyards, for instance. No dumping PCBs into the creek.
That car on blocks should be fine, provided that any parts containing toxic pollutants have been removed and disposed of properly. Once you remove the lead-acid battery, gas tank, and exhaust system, then drain the fluids, there isn't much left in it to worry about.
You don't, after all, have any property interest whatsoever in the view from your front porch. The more you forcibly remove the illusion of control that people have over their own lives, the greater the number who will crack and become les petits Napoleons, seeking to control others in petty ways. Some number of HOA officers follow the mentality "if I can't have a purple garage door, then no one else can do what they want, either".
There are reasons for the town to control what you can build on your property. My neighbor should not be able to tear down his two story house and replace it with a five story apartment building built up to the property line. My neighbors should not be allowed to leave a rusting hulk in their front yard, nor should I. We shouldn't be allowed to not mow the lawn for a month, pissing everyone else off (they were not growing dandelions, they were simply neglecting their property out of laziness).
And no, I really do have a property interest in the view from my porch. And so do my neighbors. Which is why I don't care if you have a rusting hulk in your backyard, or you never mow it. There is a very large difference between "you cannot allow your property to go derelict" and "you must paint your house this shade of puce."
You do not have a property interest in your scenic view. That would require a view easement on someone else's property, which only some states have. California is one of them, but many of the US do not currently allow them.
But no state allows a negative prescriptive easement. That means if you want a (inherently negative) view easement, you have to buy it, create it on your own property before selling it, or convince a court to award it to you.
HOAs have their power because the subdivision developer put the easements and covenants in place before selling off the lots. Zoning or ordinance changes by the municipality are simply a [usually uncompensated] taking of your rights in your own property.
There may be an argument to be made that eminent domain allows a municipality to do this, but doing so without just compensation is illegal in the US. So if the town passes an ordinance banning storage of derelict cars wholly visible from every point on the road frontage property boundary, it needs to pay everyone something to compensate for that. The amount of such compensation may be as little as $1 per owner, but even that would place a limit on how many arbitrary property-use rules a town can impose on its residents. That's a good thing. It encourages governing bodies to prioritize their meddling, such that the derelict car rule goes in before the anti-dandelion rule.
Ownership rights and property laws are several of the foundation stones underlying all of human civilization. As such, there is a right way (pay for what you take) and a wrong way (take whatever you can) to manage property.
My opinion is that the number of vague and arbitrary rules that are placed into HOA covenants are such that they are more suited for leases, such that each lessee must read and agree to them each time they sign, and the market can respond more readily to discount the lease price in accord with the burden of the restrictions. Have you ever read any of those HOA covenants? I'm surprised anyone would buy property with even half the restrictions on it.
No, now this is far too far to the other side. You are not an island, and your actions can and will affect others. Therefore, in a community, you need to take that into account. Don't want to do that? Move out to the middle of nowhere, where you won't be affecting others.
And no, if you are in a neighborhood, a car on blocks should never be acceptable.
>Those are all things the town should be doing, not some private organization. [...] So I really really don't see the point of an HOA.
The private HOA of a particular neighborhood can enforce higher standards of appearance than the town/city codes.
For example, the HOA can require that any fence must be wrought-iron[1] instead of chain-link or wood, or brick&stone mailboxes instead wooden posts. A town can't formally codify such rules because many neighborhoods within the city limits will be lower-income homes that can't afford upscale building materials. It would be an unfair rule to enforce for the entire city. Therefore, town codes have to address the lowest common denominator. A town code will have some baseline standards such as disallowing cars to be propped up on cement blocks in the front yard. Therefore, an HOA would not have to specifically address that in its covenants.
Another reason for HOAs is gated neighborhoods. The town typically is not required to spend tax dollars to maintain roads inside the gates. Therefore, the HOA is the entity that accumulates money in the treasury for any road repairs.
Also, keep in mind that HOA is a voluntary organization and many people willingly buy into HOA neighborhoods. They don't want their neighbors' homes to degrade into a substandard appearance which would negatively affect their property values.
If the majority of homeowners truly hated their HOA, they could vote to remove all cosmetic covenants from the bylaws and only keep the HOA corporate entity to maintain the common landscaping areas. However, no HOA voters choose that path so there must be a reason why.
All that said, the HOA has a board and although the members are voted in by the homeowners (usually annually), the positions often does seem to attract a peculiar type of tyrannical overzealous personality.
"Also, keep in mind that HOA is a voluntary organization and many people willingly buy into HOA neighborhoods."
That's not entirely true. If the only homes in the area that you can buy within a reasonable commute to work are HOA properties, you didn't exactly choose to be a part of an HOA, did you?
"If the majority of homeowners truly hated their HOA, they could vote to remove all cosmetic covenants from the bylaws and only keep the HOA corporate entity to maintain the common landscaping areas. However, no HOA voters choose that path so there must be a reason why."
Not every HOA allows such things.
"All that said, the HOA has a board and although the members are voted in by the homeowners (usually annually), the positions often does seem to attract a peculiar type of tyrannical overzealous personality."
>If the only homes in the area that you can buy within a reasonable commute to work are HOA properties, you didn't exactly choose to be a part of an HOA, did you?
Well I guess "choice" is in the eye of the beholder. You prioritize the short commute over the restrictions of HOA. Somebody else who felt even more disdain about HOA than you would prioritize living HOA-free and suffer the unreasonable commute. And there yet others who chose both unreasonable commute combined with HOA deed restrictions. All 3 choices are voluntary. Not every voluntary choice optimizes "convenience" across all dimensions.
Anyway... If your sentiment was the majority, residential developers would be building HOA-free neighborhoods to exploit that pent up frustration and plastering billboards with "Come to XYZ Estates with no HOA restrictions!!!" Greed is a wonderful motivator and I'm guessing there's some other market force preventing that scenario from playing out.
>Not every HOA allows such things.
Which HOA doesn't? Every HOA with deed restrictions I've seen for homes and condominiums in Florida, Manhattan, and California are agreed to and voted by the residents living under it. What overriding authority is higher than the residents telling them they can't remove a deed restriction? E.g. The neighbors need to convince each other that the restriction on visible trampolines is a bad idea and the majority vote to remove it.
Where I live, the biggest source of blight is elderly residents who are getting too old and frail to properly maintain their yards.
There's no HOA, so the only thing you can do about it is help them. There's no option for bossing the geezers around. And I'm okay with that.
If your home value can be ruined by a little bit of yard neglect, the problem isn't the neighbor's yard. It's a neighborhood designed on such a brittle basis that the yard becomes a problem.
Having been in a couple of HOA now I can say that they just don't work as advertised.
Basically, in truth the HOA has little power over people who don't (or can't) play along. They can make life hell for people who are trying to be good neighbors with tons of arbitrary rules that do nothing but make the board members feel better about themselves, but if someone wants to be a deadbeat their options are limited.
About the worst they can do is put a lien on a house, but even that threat is of little effect against someone who is letting his house fall apart because he's planning to default on it anyway. The paperwork to put a lien on a house costs money too, so the HOA has to decide if it is worth the effort, especially if it ends up being dismissed in the foreclosure anyway.
HOAs are basically good for one thing: maintaining common areas. If your development has a private park or a clubhouse or something like that then the HOA can be useful. If they only exist to collect dues and boss you around about the exact shade of tan on your mailbox post then they should be disbanded.
HOAs and the restrictive covenants that enforce them became popular for the purpose of keeping out Blacks (well, and other undesirable minorities, but mostly Blacks), and while they've been prohibited from actually (directly, at least) doing that for some decades, they continue to represent (because of who is willing to devote energy to regulating their neighbors through them) the same kind of cultural identity enforcement and homogenization by narrowminded elites that would keep out the "other" if they could.
HOAs are great in theory, but in practice they're staffed by people with no sense of aesthetics whatsoever, and too often define "aesthetically inappropriate" as "different from my house". Thus overcomplicated monstrosities with squiggly hip roofs, no lintels or arches over openings in masonry walls, and fake historical details are allowed while a simple, elegant box house with gables and a standing seam metal roof isn't.
The land in the far unincorporated subdivisions of Texas are nothing but houses exactly like the photos in the OP, and the land there is so cheap it's practically free.
> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions.
Postmodern architecture is surely a controversial topic on its own, but I believe the issues with McMansions raised in the article is their amateurish mimicry of canonical architectural styles.
They throw in a column here, a bay window there, without understanding the why or how of these design features in context.
As someone else in the thread mentioned, its like a bad machine learning-generated version of the traditional architectural styles.
McMansions seem rather well designed for their brief (at least compared to smaller modern suburban homes). Pseudo-principles such as "balance" don't actually matter all that much -- people spend remarkably little time in the position those images are taken from. The principles that might suit, say, Chatsworth House laid out in picturesque English countryside (which really can be seen in all its glory from its surrounds) do not apply to a large suburban home on a relatively small plot. Most of the time, the observer is not far enough back to see the whole house at all. They are in a garden, not very far outside one of the doors, or inside the house.
What many McManions do quite well is that if you travel around the house a short distance outside it (say 5m from the wall), it shows you a variety of interesting partial aspects. You can never see the whole thing but if it's well done then wherever you are in the garden will look fairly pleasant, and will feel slightly larger as the lack of continuity means you don't have a visual reminder of how short a distance you have travelled. And meanwhile, the many different secondary masses means you have different aspects from inside the house onto a small set of grounds.
Feeling bigger and more luxurious than it is, or than it costs, close-up (rather than looking glorious when seen from a good distance) is the brief of a McMansion.
Would the amaturish aping of a high modernist style be better?
The aping of traditional style is the most forgivable aspect of McMansions. At least they are trying to connect with the timeless way of building, however incompetently.
Bad modernist architecture often places style over substance. Such houses subordinate the livability and logic of interior spaces to the needs of the exterior's aesthetic. So you end up with a "cool looking" house on the outside, whose living spaces are poorly laid out, disjointed, inharmoniously transitioned, or simply make odd choices out of necessity.
Trying and failing horribly, which is arguably worse than not trying at all. It's sad, really, because aping traditional style isn't difficult at all unless you're trying to tack on as much bling as possible. There are plenty of simple, elegant houses from the 1800s and early 1900s in every city in the United States that serve as excellent templates.
> ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship.
I lived for a couple years in a slowly-deteriorating house on the national historic registry. Upper middle class when it was built in 1907. Big by the standards of the time, but not huge.
You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house. And despite never having had air conditioning and having very bad heating, every joint in that house was so tight you couldn't fit paper between the boards. Beautiful solid wood doors throughout, which would cost a fortune to put in a new house.
"You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house."
This meme about old wood and big wood and scarcity, etc., is oft-repeated, but I find it's not true.
Granted, there are some very specific woods that you can't buy new (old growth redwood, etc.) but you will have no problem at all picking up the phone and buying kiln-dried 12x12 beams, 24 feet long, etc., etc. ... no problem at all.
And they're not really that expensive, either. We had to buy a lot of 8x12 KD doug fir beams and 8x12 KD cedar beams for a barn renovation this past year and it wasn't budget-busting.
Faster growing trees make worse wood. Tree farms flood the market with cheap wood that's vastly worse from a materials perspective than old growth. A 24 foot long beam of high quality wood takes ~300 years to grow, 'nobody has time for that'.
At the high end ebony costs ~150x the cost of pine, though there are cheaper related species. It's also dense enough to sink in water.
The finishing millwork stuff is crazy. We had an insect infestation on our front porch behind the beadboard. I pulled it out to get rid of the ants, and some jerk stole it from my driveway. Replacing those boards would cost something like $5,000 today.
> You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality
For engineering purposes, you don't, since plywood and OSB are far more dimensionally consistent than the best of old growth lumber. Aesthetically, old growth wood is superior, but in most cases wood is covered in drywall & plaster anyway.
Old growth wood is just plain stronger than the type of wood you'd find in modern buildings. How much stronger? About 2-3x depending on the wood. Also, heartwood (from the center of the tree) is stronger than wood from the outer portions.
You cannot find (significant) lumber from 300+ year old trees anymore. That's what the original poster was referring to. I don't think aesthetics has anything to do with it.
> Old growth wood is just plain stronger than the type of wood you'd find in modern buildings.
That's true only if you discount engineered wood products, which are superior in strength to even the best of old growth lumber. For resistance to shear stress, nothing beats plywood or OSB; for bending stress, LVL; for tensile stress, LSL; for compressive stress, finger joined lumber.
I'm not an architectural expert, not even an interested amateur really. But it strikes me that there's some tension between the beauty of the exterior and the usability of the interior.
Take giant glass boxes, I know some people think they are wonderful, I think they are quite ugly. But an office where one entire wall is a window and light can flood in is a much more pleasant working environment than an office in a beautiful neo-gothic masterpiece with tiny windows.
Glass walls are rarely that enjoyable, even on the inside. You need to set the glass back from direct sun to get indirect light or you end up with a solar oven, and a huge amount of air conditioning to deal with it.
They do photograph well and win you architectural awards, however.
It wouldn't, since each layer of glazing reduces the amount of solar energy that arrives inside the window, and energy loss from buildings is an overwhelmingly convective and conductive phenomenon.
Le Corbusier used controlling lines in some of his houses. It's important to appreciate that good modern architecture grew out of an established architectural culture. Many principles were retained. It's not comparable to dada in art or punk in music, where the foundations of the activity were thrown away.
I'm an architectural historian and all I can say is that feeling is important. Rules are not so important, even the rule implied by the controlling lines technique. So I don't really endorse that tumblr's approach.
I love the way Andrés Duany (famous architecturally conservative guy, "new Urbanist") says he "adores" Le Corbusier's work: "I can't help it." You KNOW he's telling the truth, that he has a feeling for architecture.
Coming from a country where double-brick-and-tile is the gold standard, the concept of building your houses out of what is essentially cardboard tacked onto scaffolding is mindblowing.
On the other hand, when I realised that was the usual construction method in the U.S. it suddenly made sense of a whole bunch of movie moments when people smash into an damage or are thrown through walls.
You know that modern construction techniques in the US date back like over 70 years? It's not like the houses fall down. My house was built in like 1960, framed and drywalled, it's here still and perfectly solid. So I'm not sure what your complaint is.
"Cardboard tacked onto scaffolding" is plenty strong, especially in an earthquake when brick and tile tend to crumble into dust due to excessive rigidity. Remember, skyscrapers are built using the same "cardboard tacked onto scaffolding", except the scaffolding is steel instead of wood.
In the UK brick may be gold standard, but basic level would be block work with render or brick facing. Really it's just what builders are used to, and the skills that are available. Bear in mind too that there are a lot of old houses here (by which I mean over 100 years old) and they're not just the high-end ones. There are lots of shoddily-built victorian terraces with single skin brickwork and no foundations, but survivor bias means that somehow they're still standing, even if it is a bit scary when you realise how many are built directly onto bare earth with bricks that fall apart and old mines underneath. They've survived the Luftwaffe and 150 years or so of subsidence, so they're probably fine for another 100 more.
Timber framing is just not the standard, so there are more brickies. The cost isn't that different, otherwise the crappy estates would be built in timber rather than blocks. Likewise plasterboard is skimmed rather than taped, because that's how it's always done and that's what the plasterers are used to, even if the work is more skilled. If the UK does move away from blockwork I'd imagine that as building regs change and the cost trade-offs move it'll switch more to SIPs rather than ever to timber framing.
I'd guess this has a lot to do with the availability of resources, too. Timber is much cheaper in the US, so it's not economical to build with sturdier materials. Even some of the larger apartment complexes I've lived in were wood-framed.
Brick is not used in England because of cost or strength. Brick is used because historically London has burned down completely leaving many people homeless. Brick ensures that a fire will not spread from one hour to another. When you build a densely packed city it makes perfect sense to use fireproof material at any cost. When your houses are spread farther apart you rely your neighbor's house fire not taking your house down so flammable building materials is much less risk.
In fact brick is NOT always as strong as wood! Brick is stronger under compression, and it feels harder, but under tension brick is much weaker than wood.
Maybe I should just have said "standard", then. All except for very old, very cheap houses have at least single brick walls and tile or corrugated iron roofing. Nicer ('average' rather than 'high end') houses are double brick and tile.
A few years ago in my area, some kid was chased by the local sheriff for driving an ATV on he road.
He drove into some subdivision of $500k homes, wiped out, and the ATV rolled into the side of a house that had no windows. He impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off!
> impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off!
I don't believe this story can possibly be true. No one glues on plywood, sheeting, or siding. If you glued on the plywood sheathing, you'd have to nail it in place while the glue set anyway. Ditto for the siding. I guess you could glue the sheeting in place, but that's not structural so it wouldn't fall off as you describe here. Gluing the sheeting would probably cost considerably more than just stapling it in place, which is what actually happens.
If this story is true, the builder is doubly stupid, first for building a house this way, and second for spending more money to do so.
Fair enough. I can believe that a poorly built wall fell apart, even if all-glue construction of hard to imagine. There are some shady builders out there.
Just a side note, widely spaced studs isn't necessarily a bad thing. My house is built 24 on center. Leaves more room for insulation on exterior walls, and you don't actually need studs every 16 for strength. I believe there are additional code requirements for houses built with studs spaced 24 on center, though I don't know the details.
Can you imagine how many of these things are probably going to be torn down in 20 years? I can still appreciate most houses built in the 70's and 80's due to the fact that they follow a lot of the basic tenets in the article. These things are going to be like those weird commercial building eyesores that were big during the 80's.
I've seen some really gross houses from that era. Weird angles, massive blank windowless walls, and I lived in a 1982 condo for a while that had gypcrete floors that were crumbling away to powder under the carpet. A lot of the mistakes of the 70s and 80s have either been torn down already or remedied at the owner's expense.
The interiors from the '70s and '80s were far worse than the structures themselves. Whoever though that shag carpeting (i.e. mold food) in bathrooms (i.e. the wettest room in the house) was a great idea?
Ugh! That reminds me -- the condo with gypcrete floors had carpeted bathrooms.
Anyhow, I've visited a McMansion or two, and I think in a few years we're all going to shudder at how badly dated the interiors are too. But which features age badly and which ones still seem charming after the fact remains to be seen. Granite countertops? Stainless steel appliances? Mammoth bathtubs? Closets you could sleep a family in? Two sinks in the bathroom?
All of those features are here to stay, especially the latter three since they're mostly a function of having lots of space. One feature that will date badly is the bland white/beige/peace/flesh/etc paint palette; in a effort not to offend anyone, it ends up pleasing no one. How about some, blue, red, and green, as so many gorgeous 19th century houses had?
I highly recommend the book (it is a quick and funny read) but to give you my short version: post WW2, academic architecture was taken over by anti-traditionalists, and purity spiraling lead to what Wolfe called "The Yale Box". People like Christopher Alexander[1] were ignored or shouted down as fascist, the craftsmen who were able to build the old way all died apprenticeless, and here we are.
Right there with you; I could give or take the architecture (though I am a huge fan of '50s era modern and '20s era craftsman), I like homes that we well-built. It's funny, but it seems like the majority of these early 19th century Sears specials that are all over Portland are better built than any modern home.
I'd never heard of the tern McMansion before reading the article (I'm from the UK.) These poorly designed houses seem to have huge, vast amounts of land around them. In the UK plots are much smaller. Do you think cheap houses filling large plots is the issue?
The connotation I've always had for "McMansion" is the object of a middle or upper-middle class obsession with a poorly built, absurdly huge, cookie cutter house that looks just like every other house on its street, packed together on 1/4 acre or smaller lots with no lawn, yet selling for upwards of $500,000.
Not that I'm one to be snobbish, since I live in an old farmhouse that needs two issues fixed for every one that I tackle. But I'm happy that my only neighbors are a nice old lady in another little farmhouse, a church, and the animals that live in the woods behind me. It's not much to look at but it's within my means and in fact, my mortgage payment (tax and insurance escrow included) is less than a car payment for most of my peers. I'm happy that I don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and I can focus on my family's needs and my own hobbies instead.
Slight correction (that seems to be divisive on the issue), McMansions are generally characterized by not being cookie cutter. A neighborhood full of mcmansion's does have the distinguishing feature that each one is different, but they will all still feel the same. It's the result of each owner wanting something more unique and fancier than everyone else, and just smashing stuff on to do it.
Sorry, by "cookie cutter" I mean it's blatantly obvious they are all (within a neighborhood) designed and built by the same property developer. Around here, a developer will buy land for a subdivision, then hire one architectural firm and one construction crew to build 200+ houses all to the same general specs and overall theme. Yes, there are variations, but it's variations on the same theme.
They're houses built like cars. You have the six basic models. Then each of those models can have upgrade options and trim packages. Floor plan C with bay windows, sun room, and gabled roof here; floor plan E with 3-car garage expansion there; floor plan F with cupola feature and two-story deck package somewhere else.
Every house is different, but every house is the same. The only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is the finish work. The builder uses all the same parts and all the same subcontractors in each one.
The subdivisions are little more than an outdoor mass-production factory for houses. The assembly line is largely invisible, found only in the builder's sales and scheduling software.
Ah ok, when I think of a cookie cutter house I imagine neighborhoods where every house is the same with maybe an extra gable on some of them. Little boxes, and such.
It certainly doesn't help, but there are plenty of packed-in developments with similar issues. In fact I would say that the platonic American McMansion is on a fairly small plot of land and is built up absurdly close to the property line.
Yes, in fact, I always assumed the derogatory nature of the term (McX for X = mansion) is a dig at wanting an impressive-looking facade, but not being able to pay for a larger plot of land or the architect to design that big facade.
To me, "McX" evokes the image of fast food. Something bland, unappealing, and one-size-fits-all that sacrifices quality for mass production.
The later McMansions may have evolved as a response to the perception of them being generic by slapping on superficial and poorly designed accents. It doesn't change the low quality. Burger King isn't considered any better than McDonalds just because you can "have it your way".
But mostly it's about the houses being unnecessarily large. Now that I think about it, the McDonalds metaphor here is probably meant to be that they're Super-Sized houses.
Well of course it has to do with money, what you are referring to would increase the property cost by 2-3x. The same house but custom built home on an acre of land in the city in the u.s. east would run you $1million+, or have a prefab home on .3 acres (subdivision) for $400,000.
Similar to the concept of the Persian Palace in the areas I grew up - build quality was quite high in those cases, but as much of the lot as zoning rules allowed was used for two stories of house.
Depending on local zoning and "offset" rules, McMansions can be built on very small plots.
Rows of McMansion-style houses have been built with very little offset by abusing rules intended for townhouses. In the cases I've seen, a single shared wall -- often just a token wall made of brick connecting two structures on the outside -- allows the McMansions to qualify as a multiple-family dwellings and obtain higher density, dramatically increasing profit.
A "unit" isn't necessarily residential. There are mixed-use "units" on the market that might be used as homes or as offices/shops.
A "dwelling" mostly comes up in the contexts of censuses and elections. One census form needs to be filed per "dwelling", and should include information about everyone who has dwelled there for the majority of the last year. This includes, for example, people just crashing on the couch, even if they're just on vacation and "live" somewhere else. For another example, this includes homeless shelters: the people staying in them can say the shelter is their "dwelling", though they're unlikely to feel like it's their home. (Also, a "dwelling" is not necessarily residentially zoned. You might be dwelling in a storage unit. It's not necessarily legal, but the government still needs a word to describe "places people live" that includes such cases.)
There's also "residence", which is just "dwelling" in fancier clothes, though usually implies residential zoning.
I'm not sure where you got that connotative sense for "dwelling". It shouldn't carry negative value - it's a very neutral term for a place someone lives.
"To dwell on" something isn't inherently negative either, it simply means to spend a fair amount of time thinking or focusing on a single thing. Whether that's good or bad depends on the context, and is not implied by the word itself.
... yes, I'm agreeing with you. And cringing as I remember a visit to a friend who'd taken up wine cellaring some years back, describing various vintages as "product". You'll hear that in media, app design, clothing, food, restuarants. Pretty much everything. MBA-speak gone mad.
I don't know much but in US I see home is very much used in type of house sense e.g. town homes, single family homes. Home does not give any warm fuzzy feelings here.
The British equivalent is the estates of hideous mock Tudor and cod Georgian houses on the outskirts of British cities. Same concept done on less land: poor design, poor construction.
Since American TV and movies are popular, here are some pop culture examples I can think of to get a feel for the style:
* The house that Tony Soprano lives in.
* In the movie Juno, the title character drives though a sparse, affluent suburban development to meet prospective adoptive parents.
The theme is unusually large, new construction, details that look out of place. They are often built on roads with large stretches of them. Although in the town where I grew up, they sprouted up very gradually over ~20 years as remodels/teardowns of modest 1950s homes.
There are plenty of "mcmansions" in the U.K. as well. Just take a look around some areas of Bucks, such as Beaconsfield, and other commuter belt areas. The plots of land are tiny as well. It really ruins the natural beauty of those areas.
I used to live in a very small town in the Midlands, just off the M5. It's expanding rapidly because of the attraction of commuter types and all of the new properties they're building are as big as possible, on small plots of land exactly as this article describes (with the exception of the small 1/2 bed properties the developers are forced to build to meet government large-scale development regulations.
In my mind, a McMansion's defining characteristic has always been that it's far too much house on far too small of a plot.
It has pretenses of elegance that are betrayed by a gaudy claustrophobia. It's like loudly proclaiming "LOOK HOW MUCH HOUSE I HAVE," while generally sticking out like a sore thumb from the other houses in the neighborhood.
They are far too much house on far too small a budget. They are about maximizing those wealth-connotating features of a home which are comprehensible to the upper-middle-class laypeople who buy them: raw square footage, bed/bath count, "classical" architectural features (poorly executed, because the intent is to check "expensive-looking" boxes, not actually to execute a quality building).
This same style is very consistently-expressed at differing scales in different housing markets across the U.S.; the lot size varies with land prices but the ethos is the same.
Is that second paragraph unfair though? You buy/own a block and build a new house. You know there are a lot of useful things you need or might need in the future (garaging, bedrooms for future kids, etc) but your constraints of land size and budget remain so the result is often the efficient answer.
Somewhat different socioeconomic strata maybe [?], but would be worthwhile comparing to Barratt-style stamped-out suburban estate houses in the uk. UK doesn't have the spare land that the US has, so generally can't do McMansion-style construction (the stuff that looks similar is normally on estates populated by footballers et al - eg Gosforth Park near Newcastle, there's a similar estate near every major city, but the eye-bleeding prices suggest better quality builds, if a similarly awful visual side to the architecture)
How much of this is the architect giving a well thought out design and the client simply saying, "No, I want it to look this way." and the architect simply gives in and does it the way the client wants because of the amount of money involved. Usually as a web developer, I can use the old adage, "Well, if we do it your way, it's going to cost X times more time and money." but when the client has unlimited resources, I would think it would be hard to simply dismiss them with this approach.
When I was in school for architecture, I only had one professor who gave us a reality check on this scenario and it was pretty humbling for a few of my fellow students to imagine a client would think they knew better than you with all your schooling and deep knowledge.
I conjecture that the entirety of architectural design theory is just an attempt to create a formal system such that the styles preferred by people that architects don't like are "bad", and the styles preferred by people that architects do like are "good".
The class of people who own McMansions are not very popular among the class of people who write about architectural design on tumblr.
If the conjecture is true then it should be possible to find cases of houses that clearly defy these principles of "mass", "balance" etc., but which are deemed "good" through a series of ad-hoc exceptions and explanations. Those houses will probably not be suburban.
De gustibus non est disputandum. This is equally true when you can create a low-dimensional approximation to your taste in terms of abstract principles such as "mass" and "balance".
This guy didn't just make up the rule of thirds, symmetry, or spatial rhythm.
Its not unreasonable to try to understand why some types of architecture might be preferred over others.
Rather than dismiss an entire field of inquiry, maybe try to see why it exists and if there is anything you can learn from it.
Like much aesthetic theory, a lot of these analyses are post-hoc, but this isnt really a problem; its better to ask "why do people like this" than to state "people should like this because..."
And sure, like much aesthetic theory, it can be a pretext for sociopolitical critique, but don't let that mar the whole thing.
But a lot of these rules are silly pseudoscience. I am strongly reminded of the history of people obsessed with fitting everything into the golden ratio. Because it's "god's ratio" and supposedly appears everywhere in nature. It turns out a lot of that was BS. And it certainly didn't make paintings that didn't fit the golden ratio bad or inferior.
There isn't any evidence to support that any of these rules actually make the architecture "better", whatever that even means. Even if a survey found that people prefer one style to another, it's still a highly subjective personal preference. There can be people with different preferences. If people didn't like this style of houses, they wouldn't be buying or producing them.
I think the general idea is that following the rules doesn't make your architecture good, it's that breaking them (probably) makes it bad.
But if you break them in the right way in the right place for the right reason, it can be awesome.
I guess code style can be a useful analogy: you can write absolutely horrendous, unmaintainable, unreadable code that follows all the best style practices, and you can have awesome code that breaks them. But when writing code in your day-to-day work, following the best practices, only breaking them when they're irretrievably in your way, is undoubtedly the best advice for not-super human non-geniuses to write good code.
Most of the mansions showcased are well within the range of having been salvageable had the architect run checkstyle on the drafts.
But my point is nothing about breaking these rules makes it "bad". At least OP didn't present any evidence that it does. Just that he, personally, doesn't like it.
At least with code one could make an argument that a certain style increases readability and makes it easier to follow. Although even there I think it's a lot of subjective preference, and it doesn't really matter as long as you are consistent.
With these buildings, changing the style to fit these arbitrary rules could make them worse. Like reducing the number of windows just so it fits into a certain style. Windows are nice and provide better natural lighting. Studies have found windows and natural lighting have a a very positive effect on mental health.
Or forcing the house to be symmetrical. That could make the layout suboptimal. As opposed to if it was allowed to be built without that constraint. And so on for the other rules. Every rule adds more constraints, which requires sacrificing other aspects to satisfy.
> But my point is nothing about breaking these rules makes it "bad". At least OP didn't present any evidence that it does.
This is a commonly expressed notion on HN, and one I've never understood. As if every blog post in the world were being evaluated as a doctoral thesis. I personally prefer it when people do me the courtesy of assuming,absent evidence to the contrary, that I am competent in my profession and a reasonable reporter of my own experience. Perhaps we could do the same for others?
Regardless, here it's wrongly applied. He did give evidence: photos. A couple I didn't quite get, but several gave me "aha" reactions. In seeing houses like these previously, I knew there was some problem, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I forwarded the article to my dad, whose immediate reaction was, "I like the McMansion article. It explains the problem I have with the back of our house."
You also seem to have a notion that subjective preference is arbitrary and random, shifting with every viewer. But there are at least two kinds of subjective preference involved here that are neither: the cultural context of architecture and the human perceptual system. Whether his rules are somehow "objective" or merely about what current neurotypical American humans generally prefer doesn't really matter for his point. Either way, he's explaining an important regularity relevant to, among other things, the building and buying of houses.
I didn't find the pictures of "bad" houses to be particularly less attractive or off-putting compared to the "good" houses, both before and after reading the justification for why one was supposedly bad. As a result, the evidence presented left me with the impression that the rules being given were just arbitrary declarations made to justify the author's taste. I suspect Houshalter's reaction was similar.
Maybe you [and everyone who thinks like you] lacks taste...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You like one better than the other, I like the other better than the one. There is no right or wrong. God is not going to send lightening down on you for the wrong home design. (no matter which god you pick)
An engineering I can look at a design and construction method and objectively state that one is better than the other - but there is no reason the "ugly house" cannot come out better.
Looking at a math equation or a bit of software code and being able to identify it as elegant and beautiful is having and expressing taste. Given that you can look at two implementations that are functionally equivalent. But see that one is (more) elegant than the other. It's nothing objective. It's a sense of aesthetic, aka taste.
There are certain shapes, proportions, arrangements, etc. that most (not all) humans find pleasing. The majority have declared this to be "taste". It's not fair. But it exists and you can't wipe it away by reciting a trite aphorism.
>The survey of mathematicians conducted by Wells (1990) provides a more empirically-based challenge to the intrinsic view of the mathematical aesthetic. Wells obtained responses from over 80 mathematicians, who were asked to identify the most beautiful theorem from a given set of 24 theorems. (These theorems were chosen because they were ‘famous’, in the sense that Wells judged them to be well-known by most mathematicians, and of interest to the discipline in general, rather than to a particular subfield.) Wells finds that the mathematicians varied widely in their judgments. More interestingly, in explaining their choices, the mathematicians revealed a wide range of personal responses affecting their aesthetic responses to the theorems. Wells effectively puts to rest the belief that mathematicians have some kind of secret agreement on what counts as beautiful in mathematics…
I looked at the pictures and didn't find them convincing I preferred the "McMansions" in every case. The author provided no argument for why my preferences are wrong or his are right. But he talks as if his preferences are objective facts, and seemed condescending to anyone that disagrees (which would seem to be a decent percentage of Americans that are buying these houses.)
Anyway there is a long history of weird superstitions and made up rules in subjective arts like this. I mentioned the golden ratio BS which also affected architecture. There is only vague handwavy reasoning behind it, but many architects really believed in it and tried to force it in everywhere.
Note that you have changed your complaint from "OP didn't present any evidence" to that you "didn't find them convincing". (I note that you don't provide any evidence for that claim. Shocking! What, are we supposed to just take you at you word?)
But if that's the case, so what? His article aside, it's undeniable that A) some people like McMansions and that B) a lot of people don't. He also notes right up front, "These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after." He is trying to make clearer what's going on in case B.
Your liking the McMansions is only proof that you're in category A. Maybe you don't know much about architecture. Maybe you're not a big fan of classical architecture. Maybe you're a fan of something else entirely. It is not proof that he is wrong about what makes something good classical architecture, that his explanation of category-B reactions is useless.
> Anyway there is a long history of weird superstitions and made up rules in subjective arts like this.
Yes, thank god we work in technology, where there are never any fads, superstitions, or made up rules that people really believe and try to enforce inappropriately. </sarcasm>
That technology has a lot of fads, superstitions, and misapplied rules doesn't mean there is no objective reality, that all opinions are arbitrary, that educated taste is meaningless. The same is true of architecture. The same is true of most human activities. Just because a domain is too complicated to be reduced to a small, human-comprehensible set of "objective" axioms doesn't mean there's nothing smart or interesting there. And it certainly doesn't mean we have to be condescending about any attempt to increase clarity.
> Note that you have changed your complaint from "OP didn't present any evidence" to that you "didn't find them convincing". (I note that you don't provide any evidence for that claim. Shocking! What, are we supposed to just take you at you word?)
Houshalter didn't change the complaint. Their original complaint was that the author did not provide evidence for why breaking the rules is inherently bad, not that the author did not provide evidence for why the pictured McMansions were bad. The comment you are replying to restated this:
> I looked at the pictures and didn't find them convincing I preferred the "McMansions" in every case [this refers to the houses themselves, not the rules]. The author provided no argument for why my preferences are wrong or his are right [this is the original complaint].
The rules aren't convincing because there is no evidence that they are anything other than semi-arbitrary preferences that the architecture world, or at least a subset of it, as coalesced around. I agree with Houshalter, which is why I am responding.
The article's author did not claim that the rules were anything inherent about the universe, or anything other than "semi-arbitrary preferences" of a particular set of humans. I also note that the author didn't claim that they were rules, but rather principles, which is an important difference. And there's even an explicit disclaimer saying that they only apply to a particular style of architecture. If Houshalter is complaining that the article didn't prove something it didn't claim to prove, I have no idea why that's relevant to anybody.
But assuming instead that he is asking for something actually related to the scope of the article, then yes, evidence was provided. For each principle, there are photos showing exactly how the principle is violated in typical McMansion architecture. For those with an eye for architecture who have spent time puzzling over McMansions, that is sufficient to demonstrate the principles.
You're welcome to complain that you didn't understand the evidence, didn't find it convincing. But I reject the assumption that is a problem with the article. This was clearly written for people with an interest in and some knowledge of residential architecture. There's no reason an article has to explain everything to everybody.
>, then yes, evidence was provided. For each principle, there are photos showing exactly how the principle is violated in typical McMansion architecture. For those with an eye for architecture who have spent time puzzling over McMansions, that is sufficient to demonstrate the principles.
No, it was insufficient evidence. The author didn't show photos (or is unaware) of non-McMansion-non-modern counterexamples to his "mass/voids/asymmetry" principles and explain why his guidelines are inconsistent. Therefore, his theory is incoherent.
The magazines including Architectural Digest and Veranda are the most anti-McMansion publications you can get and they feature homes that violate his principles. Secondary mass all over the place. Abundant voids and asymmetry too.
Yes, the distaste for McMansions is a real phenomenon but the author's explanations about what it _is_ by measuring geometries is incorrect.
>Your liking the McMansions is only proof that you're in category A... It is not proof that he is wrong about what makes something good classical architecture, that his explanation of category-B reactions is useless.
Exactly. We can have different preferences. His rules are not objective facts about what is "bad" or "good". If it was just an explanation why two architectural styles are different, then that would be fine. But it's worded more like "how one architectural style is right and the other is wrong".
>Yes, thank god we work in technology, where there are never any fads, superstitions, or made up rules that people really believe and try to enforce inappropriately.
I don't know why you think this is an argument against it. I oppose snobbery and superstitions about technology just as much. I don't think it's quite as bad in technology though. At least one could argue technology rules actually matter. Better user interfaces can make it easier for users to find what they want, and better code styles can make code more readable. Whereas the aesthetic of a house has zero effect on anything and doesn't matter.
OK. Hopefully I'm not putting words in your mouth. You think the author's explanation of why McMansions look like garbage is too soft and squishy. Too "subjective." In reality, it's all just personal taste, and as we know, there's no accounting for taste.
I agree with everything laretluval and Houshalter have said about the topic, and since they haven't answered your question, I'll do it.
1. I don't think it's fair to compare the two houses. The person who built the second house seems to have spent a lot more money than the person who build the first.
2. The first one gives the appearance that it has many tiny rooms, which I don't like.
3. I don't like the styling of either house. They both have weird styling elements (I don't the technical terms).
And above all, picking holes in an architect's work is easy. I'm really not convinced that many people would consider this house with its oversized, overbearing gable and clumsy porch with ludicrously oversized pillars to be a model of a "properly proportioned house", regardless of the author's delight at it as an example of how to balance the top and bottom halves of an elevation
http://66.media.tumblr.com/aacf83efd66eded7cffe5f42716fbe36/...
Architects can easily ignore centre-lines and rules of thirds and concepts of primary and secondary massing and matching windows and produce great houses, and they can easily follow them rigidly and produce something which is a shoddily-built mixture of poor imitations of different historical styles that's not built to a human friendly scale.
P.S. I see your Monticello and raise you Fallingwater...
Problem is Monticello red brick and neoclassical style is what a lot of public buildings in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to ape. Many US people might like the former because the latter reminds them a bit too much of a courthouse, the DMV, or a church.
I'm sorry to be the smug guy linking PG on HN, but this essay [0] directly engages your point here and IMHO pretty conclusively refutes it. This is the money quote:
"As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong."
If the people buying and living in the house prefer it, how can you tell them their taste is wrong? What does it even mean for taste to be "wrong"? What are the actual consequences of it?
If you go to a different culture, that has different food, architecture, music, art, etc, would you tell them they are wrong about everything and need to change? Would you listen to them if they told you your tastes were wrong?
There is nothing objective about taste. It's entirely determined by associations you make in the brain. The author has associated "McMansion" architecture with things he doesn't like. Maybe the cheap construction they are associated with, or the people who live in those houses, etc. But other people can have completely different associations.
I don't think they are psuedoscience, but it might be that architecture is an unusual case.
With other art forms, yes they use these rules, but there's also things like line, texture, color, and other rules that disguise or soften them. With architecture, I think they don't have much technique to do so, and the symmetry, golden ratio, etc, come through much stronger. Many of the examples he gave in his blog of good symmetry were actually fairly boring houses, and the problem with too much symmetry is a boring picture.
I mean the rules work, but in functional forms like houses, you have less ability to make them visually interesting overall. The McMansions might be the same principle in opposite-there isn't enough to make the non-symmetrical, almost abstract design less chaotic while keeping the visual interest.
>, a lot of these analyses are post-hoc, but this isnt really a problem;
It actually is the source of the problem because his rules end up being inconsistent. There are billionaire estates in the ultra expensive zipcodes of the Hamptons[1] (NY) and Atherton[2] (near Silicon Valley) that people would not call "McMansions" that violate the author's principles about "voids and masses".
Put another way... as a thought experiment, suppose we had the AutoCAD drawings of every house from modest cabins to mega estates. We attempt to write a computer program that has a boolean function called IsMcMansion(AutoCAD_file) that returns either TRUE or FALSE using the blog author's criteria. We can attempt to tweak the logic of the program to analyze and weigh the geometries of the "masses" and calculate the proportion of "voids" but we'll never end up with a program that 100% correctly predicts what humans label as "McMansion" Why? Because, those rules don't work! E.g.... IsMcMansion(famous_novelist_house)==TRUE is determined to be wrong because us humans look at that house and say "that house isn't a McMansion because it was built in 1914 and has so much _character_"
That's what we humans do. We post-hoc a lot of judgments with a veneer of authoritative-sounding logic. We actually arrive at "McMansion" by combining a bunch of other attributes like: lot size, building materials, builder, socioeconomic rank of buyers, year of construction, trendy styles, etc. E.g. IsMcMansion(Graceland)==TRUE because of the algorithm penalized its oversized portico. However, it is judged by humans to be misclassified because... Elvis once lived there. Hence nobody calls the Graceland Estate a McMansion. If the exact same house was built by a national builder like Toll Brothers[3] and the people living in it were social-ladder-climbing yuppies, we very well might call it a "McMansion."
It actually is the source of the problem because his rules end up being inconsistent.
Generally, rules about what constitutes "good taste" or "aesthetically pleasing" are derived not just from wealthy people but from established wealthy people. This is something that goes back centuries, to when Western cultures first started having a bit more mobility and it was possible for a person who wasn't born into a family of hereditary land-owning aristocrats to accumulate enough wealth to start having nice clothes, a large house with servants, etc.
The hereditary aristocrats, of course, didn't care much for this and so wanted some way to distinguish themselves from the jumped-up nouveaux riches, some of whom even became rich enough to buy (or obtain through rendering financial "service" to a monarch) their own heritable noble titles. And so began a complex, inconsistent and ever-changing set of standards of aesthetics and behavior, designed to act as a kind of shibboleth: if you hadn't been brought up among people who'd been doing this their whole lives (and who in turn were brought up by people who'd been doing it their whole lives), you'd never quite get it right and the older established noble families would be able to tell you didn't really belong to their social class (and would treat you accordingly).
Many of these rules about architecture are artifacts of this system: they are the evolved result of established wealthy families trying to find ways to make sure their homes were distinguishable from the homes of the vulgar arrivistes.
And in fact this is precisely what the backlash against the "McMansion" is about. Newly upper-middle-class people, and even newly-extremely-wealthy people, can still be singled out by the way their homes merely imitate the homes of established old-money people, and by picking out the ways the imitation fails. And remember that to the old money, a Silicon Valley billionaire who started out in a working-class family is worse -- because they jumped far too many social classes in one generation -- than someone who merely hopped into upper-middle-class suburbia. So just looking at recently-built megahouses won't tell you much because many of them will be built to the tastes of people who, by definition, cannot have good taste (remember: if you haven't had it for at least three generations, you don't have it at all).
I don't quite get your point here. Nobody is suggesting that the term McMansion is purely about architecture. There have surely been terrible buildings as long as there have been buildings. But this particular kind of terrible building is notable because of the socioeconomic factors that created so many of them.
The point of a McMansion is essentially social. Once you get past the structural basics, the point of most architecture is social. Humans are social primates. Yes, of course, if you construct a program without regard to sociality it will not be very good at understanding social phenomena.
He assumes that the design of dwellings should be determined by the aesthetic quality of their exterior front view. But the owners spend the most time in the interior, and second most in the back yard.
If you want to make the best use of the interior space, you don't carve up a half dozen secondary masses (using the article's term). You do this because you have bad taste and think it looks fancy/expensive. i.e. You think it looks like a proper mansion when in reality your 3000 sqft house should not be carved up into half a dozen independent chunks as if it's a palace built up over 4 centuries.
Maxing out the use of the interior space means one huge box, which is what most "ultramodern" houses in cities are. It's not my aesthetic, but it least it makes sense, unlike putting tacky form over function in the mcmansion style.
I too wish he'd written about more than the façade, but this piece is only the first in a series. He goes on to talk about garages and columns, so perhaps he'll get to interiors.
The thing that's crappy about McMansions isn't the people, it's that they're built by consciously aping a style, and then ignoring all of the rules of the style. If you regard architecture as a language, McMansions are composed entirely of pidgin.
It's akin to people calling their development process "agile" but following none of the rules of agile. They have "stand-up" meetings that don't go anywhere, retrospectives that are meaningless, and sprints that constantly expand in scope. Superficially it's agile, except that it violates all of the actual rules of agile development.
I think its worse than pidgin. McMansions look like they were autogenerated using Markov chains composed of bits of "real" architecture. The elements are there but they have no meaning.
The most infuriating thing about them in my opinion is that when they are made more expensive for more "upmarket" neighborhoods, the fundamentals don't change at all. The generator is just run for longer with more and more bits of house growing like warts on the main structure at random. They look... cancer-like.
Ha - that would be kind of awesome. A dynamically generated housing estate with each property unique based on a catalog of styles (kind of like No Mans Sky for housing!)
It's a tricky area to define, but it is definitely not irreducibly a matter of taste.
Take some of the music in the world which has stood the test of time, and you'll notice certain aspects (such as good use of dynamics, rather than blasting every sound as loud as it can go) that stand out above the other rabble of popular music of the time period it came from. This isn't a coincidence, nor is it irreducibly a matter of taste. There are some elements to artistic things which are objectively better than others.
Good architectural elements stand out in subtle ways. Following some of these patterns tastefully makes a difference.
> Take some of the music in the world which has stood the test of time, and you'll notice certain aspects
>There are some elements to artistic things which are objectively better than others.
"objectively good" == "aligned with the tastes of a great enough variety of people to be widely popular over space and time"?
Sure, and some peoples' taste will fetch millions of dollars and last for centuries whereas others will be demolished and forgotten within a decade.
Don't you think that phenomenon is worth trying to understand?
Most certainly. Here is my hypothesis. Each individual has some taste function f which assigns an aesthetic enjoyment value to some house appearance. It is unlikely that f varies uniformly or without bound across people, as a certain kind of aesthetic nihilist might think: there are clearly universal trends in aesthetic judgments across cultures. But these trends are weak in comparison to culture-specific preferences. In music, for example, most cultures agree that an octave sounds more pleasant than other intervals, but the other intervals considered consonant/dissonant in Western music are not universal, nor is the concept that dissonance creates tension that needs to be resolved. These concepts form the core of what makes Western music seem good or bad, but they are entirely culturally learned from other people in your social network.
I hypothesize a person's f varies primarily as a function of the social networks they move in. Most people who are into architectural design theory are in very separate social networks from people who buy McMansions, comprising different social classes. So it is likely that they will dislike the things that McMansion people like.
Furthermore, I hypothesize that social groups develop fs partially to foster in-group cohesion and out-group separation, which requires making the out-group seem bad. As such, the people who are into architectural design theory will develop fs which penalize the kinds of things that McMansion people like. So under this theory, this tumblr is just a sophisticated way for one social group to put down another social group.
The question of what tastes fetch millions of dollars and last centuries and what tastes die out, then has to do with which social group ends up having more influence (in addition to the probably very weak universal aesthetic factors).
From this perspective, the screeds against McMansions seem especially distasteful, because the group that has more influence is putting down the taste of the group that has less. It seems like punching down.
An effective argument against this point would be to show that people who buy McMansions don't like them either, and are just forced to buy them because there's nothing better available. That would suggest McMansions violate the aesthetic principles even of the social group that buys them, and contribute to human misery, rather than just violating the aesthetic principles of a highly-educated privileged class.
The above obviously has lots of statements needing qualification and support, which is why it's just a conjecture.
This is your shakiest assumption. Art tends to reflect modes of human experience (how could it avoid doing so) and richly, sensitively evoked experience makes for art that has very broad appeal. Something like Shakespeare is universally popular not for colonial reasons or because it's somehow multivalent (in the sense of being specifically compatible with multiple cultures). It's a deeply satisfying reflection of human nature and a consummate engagement with human experience, which is what architecture should be too.
McDonalds food doesn't claim to be a high-point of human creativity, and it's not. Same story with McMansions.
This is the most intelligent post I've read in the entire thread, and that includes the original blog post. I read through the entire essay, thinking that at some point, the author would mention functional factors such as livability, room-proximity, space and natural light, but it was instead entirely about aesthetic preferences. There's something very off-putting about writing an entire essay insulting people for having aesthetic preferences that differ from yours and your friends'.
It's an interesting conjecture and probably has some merit, but looking at the examples in the article, I, as someone who is not an architect (but do like nice looking things) find that the McMansion examples are generally pretty ugly things that bother me for some reason I can't define (though it is thoroughly defined in the article of course).
I've seen houses designed by architects before, both internally and externally, and usually they exude a sense of balance and peace that is not present in the average house.
I offer an alternative conjecture: most people have poor taste. The majority taste is therefore generally condemned by people who actually know what they're talking about.
It seems to me this alternative conjecture is borne out in things like music (pop music, with a few exceptions, is generally simplistic and crass compared to many more refined sub-genre), literature (again with rare exceptions, books that "everyone likes" are generally awful - see 50 shades, Bourne, etc), though interestingly not movies (at least my impression is that there are a lot of very popular movies which are also quite good).
I offer an alternative conjecture: most people have poor taste. The majority taste is therefore generally condemned by people who actually know what they're talking about.
An alternative to your alternative: not everyone shares the same values as you, and there is no objective basis to say that your values are more important than theirs.
I think a counter-example of that type of architectural criticism is the work of Christopher Alexander; he's extremely opinionated about what he likes and doesn't like, but in "A Pattern Language", he lays out a bunch of design principles and explains what problem they solve and why he thinks they're the optimal solution to that particular problem.
Any other architect can come along and say "I don't think that's a real problem" or "I think I have a better solution to that problem". There's no appeal to authority (e.g. "this is how architectural tradition says you're supposed to design things, and anything that breaks these rules is wrong"). Everyone is encouraged to work things out on their own from first principles and see if they come to the same conclusion. I think this is especially important in Architecture, where anything beyond basic utilitarian functionality is very tied to psychology and is therefore in a realm of conjecture where very little is definitively provable and yet many people seem to react very similarly to certain design elements.
In "A Timeless Way of Building", Alexander talks about cultivating the mental discipline of separating what you think ought to be a good design from analyzing your actual emotional response to that design. Learning to pay attention to the latter instead of the former can often lead in unexpected directions and result in better design.
A Timeless Way of Building is a fantastic read for architecture enthusiasts. Also, it's easy to see how that book influenced software since the GoF book is very much the same idea applied to software.
It's amazing how persuasive completely reductive relativism sounds until you realize it's totally useless and utterly fails to explain powerful and general patterns in preference.
I am no architect, but based on the definitions of the article this building has no symmetry or balance whatsoever,
and secondary masses dominate the primary masses:
"These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after."
I live in a house that has been built more than 100 years ago and people still enjoy living in it today. Houses from that era have been popular throughout the times.
Other architectural styles failed just after ten or twenty years. The flats became cheap, the crime rate high.
When I ask myself whether something is good taste, I really just want to know: Will I still like it in ten years from now? Will my kids like it in fifty years? Will I be able to sell it when fashion changes?
Finding what made the houses from the 1900 good and houses from 1980 bad is important and can help us build things that last.
You are right though to distrust architecture teachings. These houses from the late nineteenth / early twentieth century were considered bad taste by main architects in the post-WWII era in Germany (and other countries) up until the 80's. Old houses had been torn down and replaced by minimalist, modernist and brutalist visions [1]. Today it's obvious they were wrong.
Early Bauhaus buildings on the other hands are still popular, though to me it's not quite obvious what makes them beautiful in my eyes, and what makes me dislike later modern houses.
Anyway, I think it's interesting to find out why some buildings are timeless and others are not.
"Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after."
At least some of the modernist styles explicitly rejects aesthetics, so it's hard to fault them for being so fiendishly ugly.
I think this Tumblr walks a very fine line. On one hand, it seems to want to be brutishly "haw-haw rich people have horrible taste and are bad people". This is echoed in the tone of some of the text (but only some, it also emphasise some mansions as being very pretty), and in the profile picture of Reagan. On the other hand, on the surface, it retreats into an extremely narrow trench of claiming to only and specifically critiquing the half-assed imitation of classical styles.
I think a more constructive critique of McMansions would be on the quality of their building materials, and how their design will hold up to the elements through time. I am not an expert on architecture by any means, but I believe that what is worse than their poor aesthetic sense is their lack of quality material.
These structures were designed to be built as quickly as possible, for the least amount of money. Will they hold up in the wind? Will they succumb to gravity? A house could be ugly as sin and not follow any sort of aesthetic pattern, but if it is a sound stricture, I think it is a good structure.
The points the author spelled out are just field agnostic design principles with brief examples.
Re: Focus on the exterior vs the interior
I don't think it makes sense to talk about interiors in this post. An architect might focus on structure inside and outside, but his focus on design is mostly outside. Once you get inside a home that someone lives in, it's hard to isolate the architect's work from the interior designer's in a photo.
In my mind, Bad Architecture means the form doesn't function. This critique is entirely aesthetic. I agree, they don't look nice, but I've seen plenty of buildings that look nice, and are terrible to be in (hello commercial bathroom with tons of afternoon sun, poor ventilation, and the toilet paper dispenser glued to the window; it was pretty though). Moreover, if it's my house, I don't care too much what it looks like on the outside, cause I'll be inside for much more time than i spend looking at the outside.
> Bad Architecture means the form doesn't function
Well said. This person who wrote this must despise Stewart Brand and his work on How Buildings Learn. Primary vs secondary mass? Voids on the facade? Symmetry? Ha! Brand sees somebody who adds on a new room on the side of their house because they want a workshop as a wonderful thing. I don't think he ever scolded anybody about maintaining symmetry or mass.
In these types of houses, these things aren't added after the fact (like a workshop) or designed to be used as on offshoot space (like a workshop) in the original development.
The homes are unbalanced, you enter on one side, and then you go down long, strangely winding halls to find the bedrooms. They have weird angles for the walls (why does this bedroom have 7 walls? Why does it have 4 ceiling planes?). They have poor functioning practical spaces (same angle issues in bathrooms and kitchens, which inhibit the use of functional elements like drawers that don't open all the way, if at all).
Those external visual artifacts are like cabinetry that pretends it has drawers or doors but really just has the hardware for the knobs or handles.
These buildings look like they were built in one pass. If a building expands piecemeal, "learning" as it goes, I imagine the end result would look better even if nobody was thinking of masses and voids along the way.
I think I got this idea from the documentary based on that book, but something that's stuck with me is the idea that if you can ruin the visual design of a building by attaching a shed (or doing something else that throws off its symmetry), then the design was bad to begin with; it was designed as an art piece and not as a usable building.
> I don't care too much what it looks like on the outside, cause I'll be inside for much more time than i spend looking at the outside.
But if your'e in a development of McMansions your view outside will be onto a bunch of ugly houses.
Buildings like this are disrespectful to posterity.
When someone builds a house like this, they are building something that will be around for years, being an eyesore the whole time, and not even functioning well on the inside either most of the time.[1]
[1] Or maybe that's the point, nothing in north america is built to last. Probably they will be torn down in 40 years anyway.
> Probably they will be torn down in 40 years anyway.
You say that like that's a bad thing. IMO, the ability to tear down and rebuild on a 40 year timescale is a feature, not a bug. We get better design, more energy efficient, safer, easier to maintain, etc. etc. homes for each new generation. That's a good thing.
If the materials in a house can be easily recycled, sure, but I suspect that most of the timber, drywall, and plywood will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere. Environmentally, its usually a better deal to upgrade rather than rebuild.
Your note has it right. These are all piles of pine sticks and drywall. (I've lived in several of them.) They aren't designed, built, or purchased for posterity.
In the case of McMansions, that's often also true. While the author didn't address it, generally the craftsmanship follows the (lack of) design. Subpar stucco, heavy use of quarter round because cutting floors and walls that fit is time-consuming, poor use of interior space, etc.
McMansions are a great example of form over function. They meet the buyers notion how a "fancy" house should appear. But, they stop there.
I don't care too much what it looks like on the outside, cause I'll be inside for much more time than i spend looking at the outside.
I had this exact thought. My primary concern about a house is how well the interior has been designed for my needs. The exterior appearance is way down on my list.
Unfortunately the article didn't even mention interior. I've seen a lot of absolutely awful interior floor plans.
The modern home's interior spaces are even more abusive of the client's reasonable desires as opposed to a rational integration of these desires into a whole. I toured a development's model homes at the beginning of the current big-screen TV era. I looked in vain for a place on a wall that could hold a 55-inch flat screen. I did find a cubbie hole near the dining table that was described as intended for a 32-inch tube TV. And if you own several paintings, better board up several windows.
I looked in vain for a place on a wall that could hold a 55-inch flat screen
I don't think this has gotten better. I toured some homes last year, and the flat screen TVs were placed above the fireplace. Two problems: 1) you wind up constantly craning your neck to watch TV, and 2) if you actually use the fireplace the TV probably gets much warmer than it should.
And yet these houses all sell for $500,000 or more. Or even a few million dollars in expensive places like the Bay Area.
I agree that the TV-above-the-fireplace thing is insane for exactly the reasons you mentioned, but I fear that the real problem there is that too many homeowners haven't really thought it through and want to do exactly that. :( I can almost guarantee that there will be angry replies in this thread from people who have done this and will defend it to the death in large part because they committed to it years ago and don't want to believe that they made a terrible mistake, especially now that they're used to it.
As someone who thinks about this stuff way too much, TVs above fireplaces are up there with leaving high frame rate supersampling (i.e., the "soap opera effect") turned on, and people who leave horizontal stretching enabled because that distortion is somehow less visually disturbing to them than pillarboxing when viewing SD content on an HD display. Needless to say, I'm really fun at parties. :)
I have my TV above the fireplace. I was concerned about overheating but in practice it's not a problem. Modern gas fireplaces don't actually give off much heat. They're designed to look nice and burn minimal fuel.
Your argument sounds reasonable but I can't see how these homes have sane floor plans based on the rooms we can see.
I've seen a lot of property and general the homes I like the most generally make sensible and efficient use of the space with minimal or no weird angles. This kinda limits the general shape a house can have.
My beef with these mcMansions is having such branching house.
That means lot's of outer shell that's going to leak heat to both directions. So you will pay unnecessary amount of money in heating/cooling. Also windows that don't really give you nice views etc. Just wasted dollars.
Concaves in roof are risky spots for leaks. And especially tricky/expencive to fix.
Good houses often look boring. Lot's of architecture goes batshit crazy because there is very limiter amount of sensible ways to put a vedge on top of a box.
I've seen plenty of badly software architecture that meets the functional spec, and vice versa. Abstract theory let's us understand what ideal solutions look like, providing a framework to consciously manage form vs function in a resource-constrained world.
The issue isn't so much the design, but the cultural attitudes towards the upper middle class. Looked down upon by the truly wealthy, and viewed with suspicion and derision by the middle and lower classes. There's a lot of emotional hostility towards the people that buy these houses that spills over into the critiques of the structures themselves.
That said, this person isn't necessarily wrong. Having a lot of visual interest in your home isn't a bad thing, but you have to have visual interest surrounding the home as well. The issue I have with McMansions personally is having a 4000 square foot house on a postage stamp lot looks ridiculous.
I was once told many years ago the following quote: "Rich people have big houses, but wealthy people have land".
4k sq/ft home on 1 acre? Probably not the best looking neighborhood. 4k sq/ft home on 5 acres? Probably a very wealthy, upscale area.
Put another way, it's not upper middle class people designing these houses. They are merely out to get a house that's "their house" and possibly "finally a house of our own".
The real estate industry, architects and agents and developers who are designing these terrible houses to fit checklists rather than deliver a better value are at least part of the problem.
I am upper middle class and a fan of good architecture (all I knew was I liked modern) but I didn't realize a lot of what this blog points out. I have seen McMansions before and thought they were ugly in some vague way that I couldn't identify... but now I understand why.
Having attempted to get "my" house, I concluded that the only way I would get something up to my standards was to go custom and find an architect who would do things right. Which is a whole other level of expense, requires lower upper class levels of funds.
What the heck is upper middle class and lower upper class?? What's next? Upper lower middle class? How many bands of affluence do we need to construct in order to properly classify the same rich people?
Most people stratify economic class into three or four bands (sometimes using different names):
1. Upper class/Wealthy/Elite
2. Middle Class
3. Lower Class/Working Class
4. Poor/Working Poor (some people lump this in with #3 above)
The problem is there are huge gradients of affluence even in these individual bands (and obviously more-so the higher you get). Poor would include most unemployed and part-time workers. Working poor would include people in debt living paycheck to paycheck, typically paid hourly, who depend on OT or multiple jobs to pay their bills. Working class is generally more of the same, but able to pay one's bills with a single job, maybe without overtime. Middle class can include everyone from the brand new teacher making $30k a year to the physician making $90k a year but paying $4k/mo in student loans. Upper class typically means people who don't have to work in order to put food on the table but it can also mean people who just have extremely high incomes (think the Fortune 5 EVP or other corporate big shot making $600k but may spend 98% of that every year)
The difference between "upper middle" (90% of the people reading this, excluding students) and "lower upper" (maybe 9% of the people reading this, excluding students) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars in income or millions in total net worth so I think it's a valid distinction.
So here near Cleveland, about 20 years ago a development went up called Barrington. It was full of McMansions and was bought up by sports stars, music stars, a variety of rich and nearly-rich people.
The problem is that for houses of that size, they need a LOT of room between them. Even with 3/4th acre and full acre lots, the end result was what looked like a bunch of big houses essentially stacked right next to each other. There are other developments in other towns nearby that are similar. Large houses but not more than an acre between them. While what you say is technically correct, the overall look is not attractive.
It really depends on the context. An urban street lined with massive brownstones is nice. A nice little cottage in the woods by itself is nice. Large houses all bunched up, in some random suburban setting, is usually going to look kind of goofy. It would be better to have homes in a range of sizes, with some variation in lot sizes as well. That's going to blend in better with whatever surrounds the homes.
Correct. There are parts of Cleveland that still have large houses from when Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse that are close together, but it looks nicer. Part of that though is absolutely the cultural derision of "nouveau riche" vs "old money" seeping into our perceptions of what looks good and what does not.
I live in an area (East Sacramento) with many homes in the 3k sq/ft range built on 10,000 foot or smaller lots, and it is lovely. Mid-town sacramento has even larger victorian buildings on even smaller lots, also lovely.
The problem with todays building is not building-to-lot ratios.
The wiki example has the siding that covers the entire side combined with the Greek columns in the front entry. It's a weird mismash of gaudiness. The garage also overwhelms of rest of the house.
Like another poster mentioned, some of the awkward boxiness is due to homeowners wanting 3500+ sq ft homes on small lots that are 1/3 and 1/2 acre. An architect no matter how talented is too constrained by the lot dimensions to avoid designing an oversized out-of-proportion box.
To clarify, I wasn't criticizing the "names" he calls things. It was the criteria. For example, he has this rule:
The secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass.
Whether he wrote it as "secondary outlines should never compete with primary outlines" or "secondary shapes should never compete with primary shapes" ... it doesn't matter what the labels are. I disagree with the rule as of the defining features of what makes a house a "McMansion". It's an inconsistent guideline.
I'm not against using a rule-based language. I disagree with his particular rules.
We are bikeshedding on the word "science" so I regret using that phrase because it diverted the replies from my point. Perhaps it would have been better to say I disagree with his opinion on house design presented as some kind of universal aesthetic. His condescending tone[1] used throughout the article in an attempt to sound "authoritative" seems strange considering many professionally trained architects deliberately design houses with the "voids" and "masses" he dislikes.
In another example he writes, "another issue with McMansions and mass is the use of too many voids". For some reason, the author doesn't acknowledge that many classically trained architects will deliberately put in "too many voids" so it brightens the interior of the house with light. The other reason for extensive windows/voids is to provide an expansive view of an outdoor feature such as a lake from inside the house. Smaller windows or no windows as the author advises detracts from these desirable design goals.
[1] e.g. "it means that they are simply not educated in basic architectural concepts."
>For some reason, the author doesn't acknowledge that many classically trained architects will deliberately put in "too many voids" so it brightens the interior of the house with light.
This strikes me as a reasonable argument, but then the issue isn't the author's vocabulary; it's the contents of his analysis!
That's still not scientific, or pseudo-scientific. I'm starting to wonder if you know what "scientific" even means. What you quoted is a design principle, and just because you may not understand the reason for the principle (which is probably just "houses that violate this are ugly") doesn't make it invalid.
It reads like an appeal to authority. "This house has too many windows" is clearly an opinion. "This mass of this house has too many voids" sounds weighty and important, like a technical critique, a proven rule, a fact.
But architectural aesthetics aren't a quantitative field of study, so it's obvious from the get-go that we're not dealing with the same kinds of facts as in the natural sciences. From there, it's fairly obvious that these terms describe principles, not authoritative laws of nature.
It's quite strange to get hung up on this issue. Yes, those principles are subject to interpretation/taste/subjectivit/etc, but that's hardly the point.
I mean no disrespect to anyone in this comment thread, but this line of criticism is pedantic.
He leads off by essentially saying "If you don't share my tastes, don't worry, you're not stupid, just uneducated." It all comes off as quite certain that his taste in architecture is objectively, factually correct, not merely a matter of opinion. That's why people are getting rubbed the wrong way over it.
> It's hard to talk about the specifics of a problem if you don't have names for things, don't you agree?
Strongly disagree. In my experience, people who like to use highly specific domain vocabulary are far more concerned with appearing intelligent than they are with actually being intelligent.
I've heard so many senior engineers speak in Buzzword Babble that I no longer take seriously the opinion of someone who cannot have a conversation in plain English.
I agree. This article echoes my sentiment with a class of articles that try to boil down whole crafts like painting, photography, cinematography[1] or here architecture to simple guidelines out of a beginners handbook aimed at amateurs to produce acceptable results with arbitrary, but accepted, rules.
This is no different to use of grids and rhythm in web design. These are not arbitrary pseudo-scientific rules imposed by snobbish architects and designers. They're rules of thumb that have been developed over centuries, because they work. It's helpful to have terms of art to describe them. You can certainly break them, but to do that you should know them, and know why you're breaking them. That's why he's said these same rules don't apply to modernist or post-modernist architecture. The examples here are trying to copy a style without understanding what makes the style. They're taking superficial "Georgian" (etc) details and randomly slapping them together. That's why they look so ugly.
Could summarize the design choices to malignancy, fakeness, and excess. Those are best avoided in programming BTW, its not just a house architecture problem. Also bad always crowds out good.
The design pattern of mcmansions is malignant. Oh you still have money, lets slap on an asymmetric ugly random whatever, any old place till you run out of money. The design scheme is tumor like. Ah the underlying tissue must have had a good blood supply in that direction as the tumor expanded in that direction. They're almost organically gross as opposed to simply random.
The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly. Also there's the fast food cookie cutter nature of McMansions where even if a single Big Mac isn't repulsive, an entire subdivision of identical ones is repellent, endless roads of ticky tacky. A semi-competent architect could make a nice looking Georgian pretty easily, but it doesn't flow to have dozens of CCR enforced utterly identical ones packed into a small area. Shotgun shack townhouse from Boston, yeah those look right when packed together like books on a shelf. If you must have lot spacing of 3 feet between houses, at least select matching appropriate styles, shotgun shack instead of southern plantation on LSD.
The excess is very much fast food like. Well, yeah, it sucks, and it sucks just like everyone elses, and you have no choice in some areas of the country, but the excess is very 128 oz big gulp or super size frys like. Oh you still got money, well, lets put more columns and weird dormers and rooflines until you run out of money. Sure it'll be ugly but the point is to show off how big of a subprime balloon payment adjustable rate mortgage you can take out, and ugly does get noticed...
The offensiveness of a mcmansion is bad always crowds out good. If you don't have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice looking row of boston style townhouses? If you do have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice plantation era with luxurious porches and stuff?
> The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly.
Class signalling. It's important to keep the new money in their place.
Insinuating that it's merely a tactic to silence debate of architectural principles strikes me as an effective way to curtail discussion of the use of architecture to signal class.
I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes?! :D
For my part, I've lived in a lot of houses where the exteriors looked like that those of the houses lauded in the OP, and a few whose design more closely mimicked the "awful" McMansion styles.
I absolutely detested the interior spaces of the "good" houses, and the placement of "voids" on the house's frontal exterior had primary blame for that. I STRONGLY preferred the interior spaces of the McMansion-type homes, looking at the exteriors on the blog there, I abhor the "good" ones and actually kind of like most of the McMansions.
I assert that while the criticisms appear to be valid at first glance, that virtually ALL of the derision for McMansions comes because of class differences and their reputation for shoddy workmanship, and almost NONE of it is due to actual, objective architectural issues. There's no accounting for taste, taste accounts for 99% of the derision towards McMansions, and this particular taste is associated by most with the upwardly mobile yuppies who tend to buy them, which marks it for nigh-universal hate - as strongly as I feel about the "good" house photos on the blog, exteriors of houses I great up in and around that were nearly unusable inside, people feel that way about McMansions, and this is just a (noble) attempt at explaining that subtle, almost unconscious derision for this type of home.
Insinuating that aesthetic architectural principles are anything other than class signalling is a good way to silence a debate on class signalling which makes you uncomfortable
I know, right? Look at [Other Group] with their [Thing They Like]. Can't they see how it goes against [Thing Our Group Wants To Signal]?
If only they had cultivated [Subjective Taste We've Cultivated] they would be ashamed.
It's almost like they watch Television. Or Sports on Television. Or eat Fast Food and enjoy it. Or prefer sandwich bread to crusty artisanal bread.
Or drive Big Flashy Cars. Or drive pedestrian affordable cars. Or support Obama. Or support Trump. Or drink instant coffee or take public transportation.
There's no end to the list of things that the Other People do that Our People can look down on and laugh. If only they knew better.
Upvoted from my sensibly balanced Craftsman home while eating crusty artisanal bread and drinking pour-over Blue Bottle coffee before I head to work in my 2012 Volvo XC90 while listening to NPR.
My objection -- visible in nearly every one of the listed McMansions, but also a few of the 'classic' buildings -- is that a roof is a functional object, and every time you create a valley between two neighboring rooflines, you increase the likelihood of failure.
Housing should be built for the climate of the area where it is placed. A SoCal-style flat roof built around a central courtyard and pool is perfectly reasonable there... and a really bad idea in Minnesota or Maine. There's no reason to put a two-story barn pseudo-conversion in a place where they never had that style of barn and will never need to shed snow quickly.
Useful! I live in a neighborhood of mixed age houses and it is interesting how many of newer houses make me wince. This article helps me understand why. They lack harmony with themselves and their surroundings because of these failings. But here's another thing. I think these criteria (which are based in couple thousand years of western design principles) all fundamentally rely on the restraint of self-expression in favor of impersonal principles. Lots of the asymmetry and weird bulkiness I see around me seems to come with an attitude of 'Hey ma, I'm expressing myself!' Asymmetry is like loud, brash rock music. As I've gotten older I'm bored with a lot of the crudeness that is passed off as self expression and I wish for more restraint. Fat chance, I know.
I'll tack onto this, I think one of the issues with the McMansion 'style' is taking it in creates a large cognitive load. As in doesn't blend in with the surroundings and doesn't actually blend it with itself. So processing it to make a short term mental map is hard.
Need to throw in the mandatory pointer to Christopher Alexanders "Timeless way of building" [1]. The text is also available at Archive.org, see [2]. I originally bought his books because they were mentioned to be behind the software design patterns "movement" that was quite popular some years ago.
Reading his books changed the way I'm looking at houses and apartments. Not from outside, but the layout. I guess (some of) the patterns are quite obvious, but as usual, it helps when somebody points them out. Two example things that stuck to me:
1) Intimacy gradient: Public areas where you host guests, meet people and closer to the front door. The deeper you go, the more private it gets.
2) Parents and children's realms: Separate areas for parents and kids, common area that connect them.
When shopping for apartment and browsing through many different layouts, this kind of simple things help rule out many of them.
After reading this author's criteria, look at Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous house. Secondary masses all over the place, dominating the structure. No center of symmetry. So much window area that it's more voids than structure.
The problem with McMansions is usually too much house on too little land, with no visual relationship with neighboring houses. On a bigger lot with more trees and space around the house, most of them wouldn't look bad.
Most of the images of Fallingwater on the Internet have so many trees that it's a little bit hard to see the whole structure as an architect would. I found a site though which has photos of an architectural model of it[1] as well as a spinnable 360 view. I would say based on looking at that model that it actually does embody the principles in this post.
The primary mass is formed by the central column and the two main wings that stick out to the sides (primary mass should be evaluated as an artist would, not by simplistically the largest box of the house). It has asymmetry, but it's cohesive, not awkward, asymmetry, and it's definitely balanced. The proportions make sense in the context of the terrain, because the widest portion is drawn along the edge of the hill, melding with the ground, and the bottom portion is filling the gap in the valley. It definitely has rhythm, because all of the balconies and windows are drawn from the same palette, cohesive again.
Literally the second paragraph is a disclaimer that you shouldn't try and apply these runs universally, particularly modernist (e.g. Falling water). The claim is more narrow, and aimed at the architectural traditions on which these houses are based.
Fallingwater follows different set of rules. Or maybe more accurately its rhythm, proportion, etc. are achieved using different means.
Classical mansion typically has more details and larger number of different visual elements than Fallingwater. Mansions make them fit by using the rules mentioned in the article. Fallingwater uses smaller number of plain elements to create organic arrangement.
"The problem with McMansions is usually too much house on too little land"
On the other hand, the problem with Fallingwater is that it leaked, was full of mold and mildew, and was structurally unsound. It failed at the most essential functions of a house: standing up and keeping the rain out.
If you want to be a sculptor, you should be a sculptor. If you want to be an architect, you need to design stuff that keeps the rain out, the heat in or out (depending on climate and season) and the noise and odors of the neighbors away. Yes, Frank Gehry, I'm looking in your direction, as well as that of FLW.
Fallingwater does look nice. And completely different than anything built before. You get aesthethics and novelty in single punch.
Then we had every architecture student and their dog doing something bit similar. Some of that stuff got pass because of Fallingwater is nice. But most are hideous.
Exactly my thoughts. If we give FLW, modernist, and postmodernist architecture a pass on those criteria... why not to the McMansions? After all, they weren't designed in the 19th century... The problem might be the lack of coherent design, the cookie cuter approach, and the cardboard construction, but I don't really buy this critique ...
Because one of the characteristics of McMansions is that they (poorly) copy the style elements of classic designs while ignoring the rules that governed those designs.
Modernist and postmodernist architecture isn't trying to imitate classical mansion architecture.
But then, "copy the style elements of classic designs while ignoring the rules that governed those designs" will make it automatically bad, and IMHO many aesthetic trends started like that
> Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after.
Those bungalows were definitely not modeled after classical or traditional architecture, so the principles in the article wouldn't apply. I'm sure the author has different opinions about modern architecture (i.e. the style that FLW defined).
The difference is that McMansions are (poorly) aping traditional architecture, whereas FLW was creating his own style.
From what I see in this picture, the bungalows obey the principles of the article.
For example, all the windows are similar, the house appears designed in thirds, the bottom floor clearly visually supports the top floor.
The house is an example of what the article calls an "assymetrically balanced house." Wright was even kind enough to point out the balance point with that flower-podium feature.
I don't really agree that most of what he says is a bad thing. E.g.:
"
Another issue with McMansions and mass is the use of too many voids. Some McMansions are so guilty of this they resemble swiss cheese in appearance. In the below example, the masses are so pockmarked with voids, they give the façade an overall appearance of emptiness.
"
So what? Personally, I'd prefer the 26 voids example he gives because it looks like a nice place to sit in a chair reading a book by sunlight. He's recommending making a much worse lighted set of rooms just to change the outside appearance, which I couldn't care less about.
Similarly his complaints about secondary masses. His example photo shows a big offshoot of a house sticking forward, but I'd rather have the extra room than cut it off and have less space, or make it a separate garage I have to put my shoes on a trek out to instead of just being able to walk over there inside.
The whole thing sounds like what programmers and designers get up to if we don't have usability studies with users showing us how stupid we are, thinking the huge buttons we make are titles and never pressing them, or not finding actions we think are obvious in our apps. Sounds like he's just going on without caring about the people who live in the house.
The whole thing is an aesthetic argument. You aren't obliged to agree or defend yourself if you disagree.
Similarly, some people get value from the simplicity and symmetry of the MacBook Pro/Air design, while others don't care at all what the bottom of a laptop looks like if the tech specs and price are good.
The principles the author describes are not telling you what you should think, but rather they are patterns that predict the reactions people have had historically.
As other commenters describe, some well-regarded designs have come about by people deliberately acting against the accepted principles. But it doesn't hurt to know what they are.
Tastes in design change over time. I have seen plenty very ugly houses, but some of those examples actually look great to me. Not everyone wants to live in a symmetrical box without a garage.
People like garages, but at least with the parcels of land discussed in TFA, it ought to be possible not to make the garage the focus of the house. That is probably my biggest complaint about contemporary residential architecture.
Quite the contrary, as someone who has spent a lot of time doing and testing GUIs in complex applications, the things he talked about was very relatable from a GUI design perspective.
People who are poor at GUI design do exactly the same sort of things as has been done with the McMansions.
When you do usability tests and people don't like a GUI, they often don't know why. But if you know design principles you can tell almost right away why they don't like it. It is because common design principles have been broken.
Like with a house, a magazine page or a GUI design should have visual balance e.g.
Your complaints really show that you didn't fully comprehend the problems and their potential solutions. The solution to the off-shoot sticking out isn't necessarily cutting it off. You could have achieved balance in multiple ways: Cut it off, expand the central mass, reduce secondary masses, simplify overall design. A big box of a house would have had better balance and more space.
You could have solved the problem with excessive amounts of voids by simply having larger windows and simpler design. That would have had the opposite effect and given you more light, not less.
McMansions look cheap -- this is their defining quality imo, more so than any of the more abstract qualities the article discusses.
Even people without much formal knowledge of architecture (like myself) have an intuitive sense of what cheap wood or ersatz brick look like. You can just immediately sense the economy of the construction.
There's an urbanist podcast/nonprofit that releases really good, approachable content, and I recently saw a video they did where they went into a typical subdivision and just looked at the houses. In particular, he singled out the complete lack of any porches, saying "these are people who can't afford their houses. If you live out in this countryside place, the absolute highest-returning space is the deck/porch. It wouldn't take more than maybe 10k to construct really good porches (less than 10% even in this cheap area), and not a single house has one. That means they built a huge house and ran out of money before they could build the most important part."
I guess that's just a different way of saying what you're saying. I think buyers choose mcmansions for a couple reasons. The first are the ones sucked into it by the school or proximity to work (where proximity is VERY subjective.) The others actually want those houses, either because it's a cheap structure in which they can imitate the many nice interiors they've collected in their heads, or because they want to build their walls to encompass a maximum volume, hoping that their house will insulate them from all the shit in their work and commute while they're in it.
I remember noticing this back when MTV Cribs was a thing. So many of the people on there had these big houses that had huge bare white walls everywhere and the same staircase and living room with the 15 foot ceiling and one wall of windows.
When they showed a house that was older and was better quality it was a stark difference.
To me a McMansion is built like a suburban tract house, but has façade features that make it look vaguely mansion-like. The architectural equivalent of Imari Stevenson's "Lamborghini", which is a fiberglass shell on a Pontiac Fiero chassis and powertrain.
True. Visually they might look the same but one is built from cheap wood, cardboard and gypsum with some faux brick panels glued on the front, while other would be built with brick for example.
But just like people who can't afford a Lamborghini would buy a car that has a similar shape and look, so someone who can't afford a $10M mansion would be buy a $2M McMansion just feel like they live in a mansion.
No amount of architects of HN-ers guilting them with practicalities of construction materials, or aesthetic debates is going to change that market.
My point was that construction is what makes the McMansion, not masses and voids. Though the two are related in that solid construction lends itself well to some designs and layouts, and poorly to others.
From a purely functional perspective, complex roof lines and the multiplication of volumes suck for durability and energy use. The more complex the roof, the more vulnerable areas it contains. The more edges and transitions you have, the harder it is to properly flash and air seal the enclosure.
And huge voids suck too: windows have poor thermal resistance and large glazed areas mean overheating due to the sun's radiation.
Add cheap material and poor construction practices (the famed "ductopus" is often found in million dollar homes) and you get crap housing, even without taking aesthetics into account.
McMansions are striver homes, and they throw too many prestige elements at the house. It's like when you look at a home with an over the top 80s kitchen -- they don't age well.
The other thing is that they really aren't architected. Builders drive the design vs clients, and the bling is there to hide the lousy construction material and craftsmanship. The insides of these things are an even bigger shitshow -- all cheap Home Depot fixtures and millwork.
I'm not an architect, and I probably wouldn't have even noticed how ugly these houses are if I spotted them in the wild, but having read this article, it seems mind-boggling that someone would spend the money it takes to make a house and not adhere to basic architectural principles. Can someone explain how this happens?
These homes tend to be pre-built in bulk by developers, or offered as purchase options in developed communities.
The builder is simply trying to deliver the most product for the lowest cost: a giant inoffensive box. To this day, buyers believe more square footage is better, even if it is mostly garage. The "grand foyer" implies fewer rooms to spec, support, plumb, and wire.
I've never understood single-family buyers who look at 5000sq ft and up...you end up with empty rooms or ridiculously underutilized rooms ("gift wrapping room" etc)
My wife and I once looked at homes in a Portland development that were 6500 sq feet and up. I could afford them....but WHY? We wanted a house, not a mall.
It's a consequence of excessive land costs. If the lot costs half a million, it seems appropriate to put a big fancy house on it. This leads to too much house for the lot.
Most people's idea of a house is rather conservative. It includes slanted roofs and modest sized windows with small panes. If you build a modernist steel and glass house with stone elements in a suburban setting, you may get a writeup in Architectural Record, but it will be hard to sell.
In addition to newer regulations aimed at exclusion. After a burst of new development of upper-middle-class homes in my town, the new residents voted in a new mayor and aldermen, and the new leadership passed a law preventing the construction of any home within city limits of less than 2000 square feet. The old part of the city would be mostly illegal to build under current regulations.
And this happens everywhere. When you realize that most of the desirable places to live in the US are illegal to build, it really makes you wonder what the hell we're doing. The answer is that we'll suffer an immense burden of stupidity in return for order. If you've ever sat at a red light at midnight, you should know that feeling.
Two critical parts of the McMansion phenomena were half of all architects (house and software and any other design craft) are below median in skill. So they produce a parody or meme version of architecture but pass it off as something real. The other problem is the bottom half of architects will normally find employment as waiters or bartenders as they should, but during multi-generational level market booms they'll find architectural work and everyone's stuck with the consequences.
I don't understand. They looked fine to you until someone with authority told you they were actually ugly, and now you can't understand how anyone could think they look fine? Perhaps yourself-of-two-hours-ago could offer some insight?
I'm saying I wouldn't have noticed any problems on my own, but I agree that the authors examples of what he considers good look nicer than the examples of what he considers bad. The house with lots of windows looks particularly unpleasant to me, but I normally wouldn't stop to notice or care because I'm not an artist or anything like that. I hope that's more clear.
It's a least partly like any other fad. There's no rational basis for it, but the look becomes popular for a period of time. Then years later people scratch their heads and say "what were they thinking?"
>I probably wouldn't have even noticed how ugly these houses are if I spotted them in the wild
That's because they're not. The vast amount of people buying them didn't think so either. It's just classic elitism: you get to feel more "sophisticated" if you can say people's taste is wrong with made up but smart sounding criteria. None of the author's criteria foe making architecture look good are actually so.
This is basically an article of the form "I believe the status of X should be lowered," giving some reasons why.
I'm sure they believe it. Everyone always thinks their own culture has better taste. That's pretty much what culture is, a loose agreement on what the best X is for a wide variety of X.
The best way out is not to play. Why have any opinion at all about "mcmansions?" Also, why a special term? Why not just call them mansions?
> Also, why a special term? Why not just call them mansions?
Because they do share characteristics distinctive from large homes (e.g. mansions). The wikipedia article takes a nice crack at it, "The term 'McMansion' is generally used to denote a new, or recent, multi-story house of no clear architectural style,[8] which prizes superficial appearance, and sheer size, over quality."
Or in other words, conspicuous consumption without commensurate quality.
> Also, why a special term? Why not just call them mansions?
This one's pretty straightforward. McDonald's is low status. Therefore, mcmansions are also low status.
(I believe the term originates in the desire to mock mass-produced buildings, e.g. a big tract where all the houses basically share a form. That is clearly not how it's being used here.)
I don't think the status of McMansions was particularly high to begin with, so there's no sense trying to lower it. It's more like explaining the cause for their low status.
Sometimes people do a better job explaining why you should care about X even if it's not something you'd normally care about. (There probably are some good reasons why so-called McMansions are interesting, but these aesthetic concerns aren't really doing it for me.)
2) In several cases I feel that the "bad" architecture is aesthetically more appealing than the "good architecture.
For example, when the author discusses how "secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass"; what that seems to mean in practice is "ugly, squat, lumpen buildings are good; interesting, attractive silhouettes are bad". No doubt the author would disagree with my characterisation, but then, that's sort of the point. It feels very subjective.
Of all the examples given, the one I unambiguously agreed with was the one where none of the windows styles matched.
This whole article reeks of magical thinking (as do many of the comments here).
I have been looking for information on what constitutes a McMansion vs a non-McMansion and the arguments parallel the same sort of stuff that made Feng Shui so popular: there are magical rules that make things right or wrong.
Would love so see a real test done on these assumptions. If there are real rules that are being violated with these homes, then an unbiased test should be easy to put together.
I suspect you're looking for a more absolutist set of principles than exist when, in fact, these things exist on a continuum and opinions vary. I think there are certain overall factors that trigger the broad McMansion dislike but they're not universal.
(From an architectural perspective) a lot of mishmashing of architectural styles and features without any sort of unifying aesthetic. Yes, that's a matter of taste, and there are ugly buildings with unified modernist aesthetics but we can probably agree that architecture should be more than pich two from column A, one from column B, and one from column C.
In many cases, McMansions are in large developments with big houses on small property lots with, often, minimal landscaping both for reasons of space and because they're fairly new, which accentuates all that there is to not like about the houses themselves.
I suspect that the McMansion style gets wrapped up in a lot of cultural biases and attitudes such as you see here.
[ADDED: The OP did make an effort to offer some tests. My untrained paraphrase would be that McMansions tend to be sort of a jumble of often seemingly random design elements.]
If you like McMansions and think they constitute good design, you are more than welcome to spend your money on one.
The "Mc" part comes because they are cheaply mass produced with little thought or effort put into the design. The didn't decide to "break the rules" because they were pursuing some artistic vision. It was just a matter of expediency to create the most volume for the least money.
Bad architecture and good architecture are like good software and bad software. For non-IT folks it doesn't matter once the software works, for IT folks, it matters, they can 'see' things that the others can't. With architecture is the same.
Disclaimer: I'm an architect.
edit: this is the best blog I (didn't) know explaining what makes architecture good. There is a lack of short articles on this subject. Thanks for posting this.
Having had several visits to Italy recently, I value their sense of what is beautiful. Firstly, it feels great to be there. Secondly, the lot of them look really cool no matter what they do.
My take on this is that these McMansions are an in-between step. They look like a Picasso - and not in a good way - because they are not designed as a whole.
Once complex manual labour (most importantly: masonry) can be automated, and once one figures out how to combine a modern, relaxed lifestyle with architecture, these "mansions" will come to be seen as barbarous monstrosities.
People don't buy these for curb appeal. They buy them because of interior features. Also, the exterior appeal only matters in relation to the architecture around it. My wife knows the difference between good architecture and bad, we just haven't seen a new neighborhood that resembles the old rich parts of town. So as long as we keep buying vaulted ceilings, open lofts, big kitchens, and game rooms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Source: I own one and I did mortgages for a while. Was product manager for a company that sold some tech to home builders.
This seems incorrect. If it were true, then there would be no reason for the exteriors to be so god-awful. If all you care about is a lot of good interior space, then why pay for misplaced Roman columns? In fact, some McMansions can be identified by their poor handling of interior space, mostly due to having too many disjoint or poorly connected masses.
This is entirely subjective preferences for the appearance and aesthetic. Personally I liked the "McMansion" examples better and found the arguments for why they were bad unconvincing. The rules seem arbitrary and made up.
They are not. As someone who does GUI design, I recognized many of the rules. If you look at GUIs that don't follow rules for balance e.g. they clearly looks worse than balanced ones.
The McMansions look cool in a theme park way. But there is nothing timeless about them. It is like the things we thought looked cool in the 80s like big shiny metal fonts. It was cool then, but today we are like "oh my, how did we ever think this was good!"
Your second paragraph kind of contradicts the first. If you admit that aesthetics can change over time, then they aren't objectively true. Aesthetic preference is all about what associations you have, not the features themselves.
Personally I don't think the examples looked good. And while some of these features might work well for GUIs, forcing them on houses can cause problems. E.g. limiting the number of windows to fit the style. Windows and natural lighting have been shown to have a huge beneficial effect on mental health. Or forcing the house to be symmetrical could make the room layouts suboptimal. Form should follow function, and these rules oppose function.
I should have known what was coming when the article kicked off with, essentially, "If your tastes differ from mine, don't worry! You're not stupid, just uneducated."
But even then I was expecting him to list things like shoddy construction, or dull featurelessness, or cookie-cutter tract construction. No, his #1 issue is houses that are (gasp) not perfectly rectangular. #2 is houses that are are asymmetrical, but not in a cool way. He actually calls out one house specifically for having too many windows. I thought windows were for letting sunlight in, but apparently they're actually intended for class signalling.
And class signalling is all this is. He gives the game away when he specifies that these rules are very important unless you're using a cool, [m/M]odern style where rule-breaking is socially approved. This is no different than the byzantine fashion codes manufactured by society matrons around the turn of the last century to exclude the vulgar nouveau riche. Never wear white after Labor Day; never have too many windows on your house.
Most of these homes have awful interior features like oversized entryways that feature giant voids. The heat flows to the ceiling, which is a terrible waste. Similarly, the "great rooms" of these homes tend to have too-high ceilings which once again is wasteful as furnaces must work even harder.
These homes tend to also have ridiculously oversized garages that are fashioned to make the home look much larger than it is.
Could it be the case that people actually want large garages that can fit their cars, a second fridge, their bikes, strollers, and other items? Could the oversize entryways provide an easy way to move furniture into the house? Might it be the case that people enjoy large rooms with tall ceilings? Or is everyone buying all of these houses despite all of these "negatives"? If you prefer to live in a small house with low ceilings and a tiny garage, that's great. But don't assume that everyone else has the same preferences.
What do you mean by "preferences"? Buyers have no choice...builders are plopping out these communities in one fell swoop, buyers have no input. When you buy in a KB, Toll Brothers etc community, you get to buy design A, B or C. Buyer tastes are dictated to them. Custom building in new developments is extremely rare.
That's only partially true. The big home builders actually do a lot of research to determine what prospective customers want before building spec homes. They conduct focus group sessions and even hire social scientists to observe people (with their consent) going about their daily lives. McMansions are designed specifically to fit how upper-middle class Americans actually live. My friends and relatives who have purchased them seem to generally like them, despite the high heating costs.
Of course they have a choice. You don't have to buy a new KB or Toll Brothers home and you don't have to buy a home in a new development. Around where I live even the new developments is just the builders buying and tearing down old homes. If none of the existing inventory on the market suits your needs, or if you really want new construction, you can either buy an empty lot or buy an old house and tear it down. Also, if you have the budget to pay for it the builders can go to great lengths to customize even a cookie cutter home.
My garage is too small, it's hard to maneuver tools around the car. Worse, the ceiling isn't high enough to have a lift installed. I regret that every time I have to work under the car.
I owned a home with a lift (previous owner was a classic car nut, I never used it)...but we lived in an unincorporated part of the Bay Area...in most city zoning, lifts are disallowed by residential zoning code.
How many transmissions do you rebuild in the average year? If this is to change the oil, just use a couple of small ramps like a normal person. I once changed the oil on my old Integra by driving one tire up on a regular red brick. b^)
When I was a kid, the biggest barrier to working on my car was I had no money for proper tools, and was always making do. Having good tools makes things much more fun, and I get better results, too. A lift falls into that category, it makes working under the car fun rather than a painful bitch. It's especially bad as I get older and I am not able to move my head back and forth to get what I'm looking at in focus :-) And I am tired of setting my hair on fire with the lamp (fortunately, that at least isn't a problem anymore as my hair has decamped for the fjords).
Getting the car up on jack stands takes about 10 minutes, off is another 10 minutes. It just takes away from the fun, whereas a lift is boom! it's up.
So it doesn't really matter how much I'd use it, a used one isn't that expensive and I am willing to spend the bucks on it.
A piece of advice - never ever support your car on brick. It can crush unexpectedly and then the car falls on you, you die. I once used cinder blocks to hold the car up (making do), and they suddenly turned to dust and the car fell, fortunately before I got under it.
Now I use two sets of jackstands (the extra set as backup), and I give the car good shoves before getting under it.
Definition of "McMansion": a large modern house that is considered ostentatious and lacking in architectural integrity.
The architectural integrity I guess is the problem. The house can be sprawling (no well defined center) or has to many windows (that may be of different sizes).
It sounds like designers hating on Comic Sans or programmers arguing over tabs vs spaces.
But worry not...
This rounds up post #1 of McMansions 101 - but don’t worry, there are many more factors that make an otherwise normal suburban house a McMansion, and each will be covered in their own special posts.
>It sounds like designers hating on Comic Sans or programmers arguing over tabs vs spaces
This, basically. I find it darkly humourous that HN's commentariat, in this thread and indeed whenever confronted with domain-specific jargon from non-computron fields [0], analyzes said field and finds 'obvious' problems. Have you ever tried to explain, say, 'tabs vs spaces' to some mundane? Its history, from makefiles to Python, seems uninteresting to someone peering over their iPhone N+1; "why don't you guys just decide on one? Why is this a big deal?" They can say this because 'tabs vs spaces' is a triviality -- to those who don't have to deal with the consequences of the argument.
Inasmuch as HN is explicitly for interesting tidbits of info that don't necessarily have to do with hacker-style nerdery, I'd expect that we who ostensibly know so much would be able to appreciate that there are aspects of the world, and of other intellectual professions, that we don't necessarily wot of.
I mean, unless, of course, one's own buzzsaw-mind is capable of intuiting and then dismissing the well-cited terms of an artisanal field that has been around for many centuries longer than has the idea of computers, but cognitive empathy is a useful practice for everyone.
[0] With the exception of economics, because bike-shedding, because everyone knows about money; they spend it every day!
Every article about apartment buildings complains that new buildings are simple, ugly boxes and should be more artistic flowing examples of the character of the neighborhood. In private homes everything is too complex, unbalanced and disproportionate. Homes should be simple proportionate boxes where all the windows are the same size and line up. Architects think individuals should live in their designated worker eat-sleep unit pods while large classes of people as a whole deserve unique and inspiring works of art. To break it down even further, I will just guess that commercial architecture pays better than residential and this is manifesting as a hatred of "McMansions". There are always going to be both ugly and beautiful homes.
While McMansions do seem kitschy and aesthetically unappealing to me, that is my subjective feeling.
I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?
All of this sounds to me like arrogant ramblings of people who like authoritarianism and can't grasp the concept of personal freedom and that people like homes that are wacky and extension of their own egos and sense of pride in their financial success.
>I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?
This is a straw man. The author isn't against interesting designs, just careless ones. And interpreting this article as a advocating authoritarianism is reading a lot into it.
Exploring the wider picture and integrating the issues at hand isn't a straw man argument, it's called thinking as well as not being naive to the ominous specter of slowly creeping authoritarianism.
People find "careless" designs interesting. Who is he to dictate how private property should look? He is utterly intolerant of personal freedom and promotes sterile, totalitarian looking architecture.
In another post, the author states outright that she likes many styles [0], so the idea she promotes "sterile, totalitarian looking architecture" is off the mark. The original post itself includes a diversity of good examples, so I'm not sure where that came from.
I guess I find it hard to take your claims seriously until you explain why you've concluded the author wants to enact her tastes into law rather than just discuss them.
>People find "careless" designs interesting.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. It just that in some (many?) cases, careless designs are less likely to be widely appealing or stand up to scrutiny.
> All of this sounds to me like arrogant ramblings of people who like authoritarianism and can't grasp the concept of personal freedom and that people like homes that are wacky and extension of their own egos and sense of pride in their financial success.
He's complaining about stupidity such as having a row of windows, with each window being a different random style.
If I was a web designer, and I insisted that every letter on a website was in a different font, everyone else would tell me to stop being such an asshole.
These homes aren't wacky, they are built by builders who kept cutting costs and cutting costs until they were left with the most cost efficient subset of features.
Another analogy to software, imagine if to save on dev time, a random half of every dialog box in an app was just left blank. Maybe some of those buttons were needed, maybe they weren't, whatever, it got out on time!
The author explains what good design principles are, but not why they are important. So what if a house had too many 'secondary masses'? Why exactly is that such a bad thing? The author fails to answer such basic questions.
In architecture and most other forms of art, the principles are not based on objective truths. Instead, they are the result of centuries of what is subjectively pleasing. It's survival of the fittest, but "fittest" is determined by subjective values.
The article's approach is to list a series of hard aesthetic rules, then show how some McMansions break them.
That would be a valid critique, but the article never fully establishes that those aesthetic rules are universally desirable. In aesthetics, rules are made to be broken.
If standards are broken haphazardly or unintentionally, that may be a sign of poor aesthetics. But I'm convinced McMansions intentionally break several of those rules.
Breaking those rules is the only way to convey something that the author somehow completely fails to notice.
A better aesthetic test of McMansions would only involve two questions:
1) Are McMansions effectively conveying some idea, and,
2) Is that idea is worth conveying?
Setting (2) aside for the moment, I think McMansions meet (1) very well, primarily by breaking the author's "rules."
Think about who buys these. The architects and the purchasers are not ultra-rich, but are still in a class that wants to display wealth.
When purchasers in this group compare several homes, they are most likely to buy the one that makes them feel like they're displaying the most wealth and power for their price point.
Wait, why would a tangled mess of asymmetrical nonsense achieve that?
Because the aesthetic McMansions are shooting for is "this is more than one house."
Bits crop up all over the place and the masses are obscured so that the building gives the appearance of multiple dwellings.
What does it look most like? Villages that have cropped up around a central castle, organically growing in different heights and orientations without much central planning. (Maybe more from fairy tales than real world villages.)
The image the McMansion tries to convey is one of dominion over a territory or a population. I think McMansions succeed, primarily through the subversion of the author's favored aesthetic tropes.
But even if McMansions successfully evoke small villages, part (2) is the more important question.
Is mimicry of an order of magnitude of wealth and power beyond one's reach aesthetically appealing, or desperate and ostentatious?
I'd find a critique along those lines far more compelling. The fact that some buildings fail to satisfy some arbitrary checklist is not the more important thing, what the building says about the owner's character and insecurity is far more interesting.
Go to any blog about "good" modern architecture. As it turns out "good" architecture these days is roof-less bauhaus with windows that take the entire front wall, including the bedroom. Looks good on Tumblr, impossible to live in, expensive to build, and insane heating bll. No, thanks.
Those homes are beautiful, but Seattle might be a bit tough with the flat roofs. I grew up in a house like that in a rainy area and we had standing water issues on the roof.
It was a beautiful design that was completely inappropriate for the region.
I'm not sure this is true. I know of several communities without strong regulations on what can be built (beyond perhaps size limits), and they tend to be pretty interesting. They also tend to develop their own individual character, due either to engineering limitations or social mimesis.
For example, Japanese houses are pretty disposable, but you can build more or less anything you like. (Here's a great article on it. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm... ) If you combine this with the fact that Japanese depreciation rules promote 30-year disposable housing, you get a lot of very interesting homes. The result is that a ridiculous fraction of the interesting houses you see on archdaily are Japanese.
Or if you look at modern wealthy residential areas in north Delhi, you get a lot of interesting buildings. The neighborhoods again have their own unique character; it's a lot more heterogeneous than typical US suburbs, but it's clearly got it's own character. I can't find many pictures online, but I'll try to take a few next time I go.
Is it just me, or is Tumblr's UX absolutely terrible?
You reach the bottom and it says "keep reading". Keep reading what, the last post in the list or pagination to more posts? So I click it, takes me to the last post (fine), so I scroll down to look at some of the pictures, etc., and then at the bottom it seems to continue back at the top of the prior post list. So I go back, scroll back down to the bottom of the page and notice a "See mcmansionhell's whole Tumblr" link. Perfect. I click it... App Store.
As a foreigner, what i find myself thinking is that the mcmansions are trying to catch the feel of a generational dwelling while being brand new.
Meaning that if you look at old houses in Europe or similar you very often find extensions and whatsnot that have been added without any overall design in mind. Instead they were going by the time and resources at hand at the time of addition.
There is a huge cheap build going on next door. It is two stories with 7 bedrooms with no back yard because pool. The contractors I talked to joked it will be knocked down in 20 years because of the low build quality.
The overarching theme of American architecture gone wrong is the lack of supporting real community. It used to be that supporting commerce did that as well, but the car changed this.
People have already mentioned Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language and Timeless Way, but I'll note that he has further distilled those ideas in his The Nature of Order Series: http://amzn.to/2b4XYf5
1. Levels of Scale
2. Strong Centers
3. Thick Boundaries
4. Alternating Repetition
5. Positive Space
6. Local Symmetry
7. Good Shape
8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
9. Gradients
10. Contrast
11. Echos
12. Roughness
13. The Void
14. Simplicity and Inner Calm
15. Each in the Other
That's a great blog. I don't like the term MacMansion. Everyone seems to have their own definition and sometimes it's applied to anything new and big that someone is envious of.
I'm not a big fan of the McMansion houses, but I'm sure they mean the world to their owners, who have made large sacrifices to get the house of 'their' dreams.
Personally I like the Georgian style; big windows and look decent when they're kept simple, or something a little more modern depending on the location. Yes, money doesn't buy happiness, but I'm sure we all have a picture on our mind of a dream house. Nothing wrong with aspirations, excuse me while I do more than just dream!
That all sounds like opinion to me. When I look at the examples of what I'm supposed to think looks awful, I just see a house. The one with so much overwhelming "secondary mass" looks nice to me.
If you need to study architecture to "realize" how bad those look, maybe they actually don't look bad. All the people buying them seem to agree.
There are legitimate problems with the construction quality, as others have pointed out, but trying to claim they objectively look bad is clearly wrong.
And others I could certainly see what they were talking about aesthetically, but many of them came with concrete benefits - all those "voids" in the second story of that one I'm sure let in a lot of beautiful light and scenery for the people actually using the house.
You've got to know to the rules before you break the rules.
I don't know about McMansions. Certainly (~20th century) Dutch architecture follows somewhat different design guidelines. We don't have as much space, sometimes sacrificing balance or even proportion. We definitely have much bigger windows (voids), it's a cultural thing. Similarly, fig.2 "Secondary Masses: 6" looks to me like it could be a Mediterranean communal farm, grown organically (truly don't see what's wrong with that one tbh).
But I don't want to go into details. The most important rule of design is:
You've got to know to the rules before you break the rules.
Some of these rules are grown by circumstance, and you can't always break them (or build a shitty house--but sometimes you can be clever).
Some of the rules are grown by taste or preference. These you can play with.
Some of the rules are grown by circumstance, turned into preference, because technology advanced and preference didn't. These you can also play with.
Relating this to HN: The above holds just as much for designing webpages or app user interfaces.
This conversation has gone in a very interesting direction. It's true that on one level the perspective of this blog author corresponds to a sort of class-based tutting of the nouveau riche, but on another level I can't shake the feeling that he is pointing to something that's real.
I have much more experience doing web design (some) than I do evaluating architecture (none). The principles he is describing apply in a similar manner to web design, and they are similarly hard to articulate. When you see a block of text without enough space between paragraphs, you know it doesn't have enough space, even though you would be hard-pressed to provide an objective reason why a paragraph needs 20 px vs. 5 px vs. 100px vs. 500px. Only one of those distances feels right, and it has almost nothing to do with how much vertical space is available on your screen or the relative ease of reading paragraphs with that precise distance between them.
Similarly, you can feel a wrongness when a similar visual element is repeated, but without consistency, like a second text box that has a grey that is just slightly bluer than the last text box, even though they contain text of the same type at the same level of semantic importance. That is the equivalent of including windows with wooden shutters, and a set of windows with blinds, and a set of bay windows on the same facade. (For a visual-design example of his masses and voids principle, see the BeOS UI window, but I think this is the weakest of his principles)
It is easy to be a contrarian and say "this guy is wrong, all of this is subjective," but I think that contrariness is more wrong than right. The best functional (not purely artistic) designs, whether they are web designs or architectural designs, hold to a set of quasi-universal aesthetic standards, including balance (symmetry or balanced asymmetry), repetition (consistency in web development terms, repeated elements in musical terms), and appropriate blank space. I suspect that these core principles reflect aspects of human cognition that are not subject to pure subjectivity.
I think if you were designing from first aesthetic principles, you would probably retain balance and thematic cohesiveness (repetition). What you would lose is the trappings of particular eras, like roman columns or those shutter windows. Even if your house was based on a geodesic dome you'd want it to have a certain proportionality and space between visual elements. The problem with McMansions is that they take ONLY those trappings, and discard the principles, and that's what this article should really be about. The reason for this is obvious: the uneducated consumer sees only the trappings, because they are concrete and obvious, thus easy to evaluate. They are associated in the minds of buyers with high class, and so they seem high class in this particular instance.
I read from start of the thread till the end when I hit your post. Thank you for lowering my blood pressure.
This is not 'snobbish higher class looking down on middle class.' When you see tens of thousands of anything, you start to pick up on best-practices.
For example, in Vancouver, where the house prices _start_ at $1.7 million, there are tons of $5+ million McMansion here. Due to my line of work, I see and enter them every day. Their owners are likely 1000x wealthier than me, but I can tell you confidently that I think their houses are ugly.
Would I get the house if I can afford it? Sure. I need a house to live in, and a McMansion is a good functional house.
To make a somewhat inappropriate analogy- An Indian outsourcing company' programmers have written some terrible , but functional code. Other people took a look at the source files and point out that, yes, they are indeed terrible (maybe too many goto? Or global variables.)
It is not ethnic discrimination to point out the code is terrible.
Along a similar vein, 'you spend most of your time indoor anyway. Why do you care what the house look like externally?'
Just because something is functional, doesn't mean it shouldn't (or can't) look good to most people. You might not care, and I wish I don't care how your house look either. But general art principles exist because most people _do_ care, at least subconsciously.
As an aside- If you dare to build it, then be prepared to have others critique it.
Another argument, 'the author should concentrate on the general poor build quality of McMansion.'
In Vancouver, I've seen $5+ million McMansion built with the best material and craftsmanship anyone could find. They are McMansion due to their design, not their quality.
Finally, 'I like the McMansion in the article better!'
Well, good for you. This is like different computer languages- some people like all the features a language provide them (eg. C++0x), while others like language that adheres to what it does best (Heskell, Lisp etc.)
Thank you for the kind comment. It's interesting that you say that the build quality is very high on some of these homes. I was debating the issue with someone before writing this comment and that was a question I had. I was thinking about how craftsmanship and art exist on somewhat different dimensions for creative endeavors. For example, someone who is poor at the craft of music won't be able to create a song that's listenable, but someone who is excellent at the craft but poor at the art will create something that is technically excellently but unmoving emotionally. Or in web design, this would be a site which very carefully recreates any of a million expensive corporate landing pages but doesn't have any character of its own. There are also examples the other way, of imperfectly executed creative works that nonetheless are effective on an emotional level[1].
I don't know enough about architecture to say, but it seems possible that the people who build these homes may be lacking in this second, artistic aspect.
1: I recently watched Hachi: A Dog's Tale. It is notable in that the craftsmanship of the film is merely adequate, by traditional film metrics, but it's so incredibly emotional that it has won a place on the IMDB Top 250 films. I would also point to Stephen King, who is one of the most impactful people alive when it comes to TV and film, not to mention his prolific writings, but his stories don't show the craftsmanship of one of the literary greats.
From what I've seen in Vancouver, quality and design are separate. You can hire a first-class designer, then hire a third-rate builder to construct the building, and vice versa. These events happen every day. It all depends on how much the developer wants to spend.
As an aside (Flame suit on: I am Chinese), most extreme high-end houses ($3 mill and up) here are bought by wealthy Chinese immigrants/investors. This leads to 2 situations-
If the house is built by a developer, then the quality tends to be low. Even the worst Vancouver builder's craftsmanship is better than what you would normally get in China. This means that the developers have no incentive to pay extra as the buyer would be impressed regardless. So McMansion with low quality.
If the house is built by wealthy immigrants, however, then the quality tend to be very high. When money is no objection, it's amazing how much quality you can get... So McMansion with high quality.
It always amazes me that the people I know who are financially well-off almost always choose to live in an ugly McMansion. Voluntarily. I've determined that if I ever become well-off I'll buy an old Craftsman or Spanish style home. They may be smaller, but I can always buy sheds or storage space.
Most of these houses, and most McMansions, would look and function much better if they just rid of two features:
1) Gables that don't terminate a wing of the house
2) Massive hip roofs
#1 makes no sense from either an aesthetic or functional point of view and ends up doing nothing besides adding cost and making solar panel installation more difficult.
#2 also makes solar panel installation more difficult, is harder to ventilate (or air seal and insulate, in the case of cathedral ceilings), and unless labor is extremely cheap, more expensive to build compared to trussed gable roofs.
I get what the author is saying. But as a home owner, I'll be spending 98% of my time in the house, not staring at the exterior. I'd like to see criticisms of the experience of living in a McMansion.
Yeah that sounds like a lot of architects. They have an ideal home in their head, and if clients let them they'd only ever draw one plan. Every request is a deviation from the ideal, so it would be better if clients didn't communicate such banalities as how many children there are or how big the home office should be.
Unlike architects, clients have to actually live in the houses (or at least convince other clients to do so). So clients are entitled to meddle. Let's not pretend that architecture is fine art.
As I mentioned in another response, I meant to specify that meddling here means asking for specific features in a house in a specific place.
Again, if you are a real estate developer of McMansions who knows what people buying McMansions want it might be a perfectly rational decision to meddle and ask for these features.
From what I understand it is about 20-30% of the customers who are the meddlers.
Meddling means being unreasonable about specific features(I want a bathroom here! where it is a really bad idea because of a multitude of reasons) in a building/house.
The problem for architects without FU money is that they have to be very tactful about handling these needy customers.
There are plenty of great looking "mcmansions" - bad design for some houses (of any type) shouldnt be generalized to an entire construction and development approach.
In common use MacMansion seems to mean "big new house which I don't like", and the reason can be anything from looks, to environmental footprint, to simple envy.
The author made some good points but focused solely on the outside appearance of the home. Another critical aspect of architecture is the layout and use of interior space - a point where many beloved designs - such as colonial - have weaknesses. For example, long hallways.
McMansions seem to be designed from the inside out, which is almost a given for an overtly modern (Bauhaus) style, then a traditional skin applied.
This seems to be an unpopular opinion - but I agree.
The word 'energy' doesn't appear anywhere in the original article, and only a couple of times, en passant, on the HN discussion. However the wanton misuse of materials (including energy) and on-going misuse of same, is the thing I find least attractive about these structures. Sure, it's not a purely aesthetic response, but it's hard to look at one of those things going up in the neighbourhood and not think about these aspects.
They all face the street, too. (Thoughtfully designed structures would be aligned, as appropriate for the region, with north / south.) It's a weak line, but the owners aren't the ones who have to look at the outside all the time, so they aren't as impacted.
It would be a large piece of software, built to time and budget, that was perfectly functional, met the user's requirements and that they were happy with.
As someone who has done a lot of GUI design, I recognize many of the design principles. The point of balance and symmetry e.g. is very relevant for GUI design as well.
It is very useful to know these sorts of principles because without them you notice stuff looks wrong but you don't know why and you don't quite know how to fix it.
All his examples of presumably 'good' architecture strike me as hideous and in many instances depressing. I'd take the McMansion over those hands down.
Well, if you need education to understand why your house is not aesthetically pleasing, maybe you should just forego the education and be happy with it.
This post wades into an area normally met with knee-jerk comments and defensive house owners, but I think there's some really subtle points being made here -- I don't agree with some of them, but I think the author is really trying to figure out what exactly is going on with some of the really terrible McMansions shown. However, these problems extend up through real mansions as well.
After spending some time thinking about the problem, I've come to the following hypothesis: architecture schools aren't producing architects trained to produce quality designs that match the desires of the vast majority of the marketplace.
Most consumers don't want these kinds of buildings and the ones who do buy them because they're custom architected and that acts as a status symbol. Consumers want classic "house" shapes on various degrees of "fanciness".
Most consumers also don't know good from bad architecture. But it's okay, because it appears most architects don't know good from bad either or else we wouldn't be getting endless variants of boxes-with-mixed-materials. The last time the kind of design this blog is looking for was actively used was during the American colonial period. And that wasn't always a successful meme -- America is littered with old homes with huge pillared entrances on otherwise modest homes. http://www.house-design-coffee.com/porch-columns-disaster.ht...
It could be worse, America could be littered with craptastic hyper-modernism and weird vestigial bits of unintersting history http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/ But Europe isn't immune to this nonsense either, McMansions have started infecting everywhere from Ireland to Germany.
Asia has it's own entirely unique series of architectural sins.
I think there's a number of forces at play here that have all led up to where we are.
- A growing desire in industry to find ways to minimize materials usage in new construction (older homes are sometimes hilariously overbuilt)
- A rising and increasingly affluent middle class
- A lack of good examples to educate people on -- most buildings are crap...even the ones that are well considered often fall apart quickly http://failures.wikispaces.com/Fallingwater
- A lack of architects who can produce something other than boxes-with-mixed-materials
- Continued cost cutting as plans go to market
- Consumers who are fine settling with "nice enough" if it saves them $100k-$200k on a similarly specc'd home
- Most people don't give a crap about gardening or yard maintenance. Who cares what your house looks like or how small the property is if you're spending all day inside your climate controlled 5000 sq ft personal facility with movie theater, gym, gourmet kitchen and jacuzzi?
It also turns out most McMansions are actually pretty nice places to spend time: well lit, nice materials on the surfaces you interact with, tons of space so you don't have to make too many compromises, open floor plans and so on.
They are worlds better than the 60's, 70's and 80's era homes I grew up in and later owned. The 70s and 80s were particularly abysmal for material quality and energy use. Holy crap the heating/cooling bills on those homes.
Americans are really snooty imho. I suspect the snootiness is both the reason these houses exist (I have a bigger house than you) and the reason this criticism exists (I have a nicer looking house than you).
I feel like it's a rather toxic cultural thing to care at all about other people's houses. Likewise with cars. It's also something that's not nearly as prevalent in mainstream culture outside the US (snobbery is the domain of the upper classes exclusively).
you would think 101 would tell you what the hell a mcmansion is, instead of me needing to google it to find out half way through what is otherwise an interesting article.
I interpreted this as design critique. The author doesn't seem to have anything against large houses and uses lots of them as counter-examples for good architectural design.
The author uses a very specific style of houses, and that's fine. But for example none of the houses listed as great design have a garage upfront (and some look like they don't have a garage at all). A front facing garage is a huge convenience but it makes it much harder to have the symmetry the author wants. When it comes to houses form should follow function and that seems to be completely ignored in this critique.
The author seemed to go out of his way to ground all of his critique in well-cited design principles. It's depressingly indicative of modern internet discourse that the first recourse is a lazy ad hom.
I'm sure it's a component for some people, but really those houses do suck. If you have a million dollars to burn on a house, just hire an architect.
These houses are often built en masse to hit marketable squarefootage numbers and get noticed in listings, for the cheapest possible cost of construction.
You're hallucinating an argument right now. Nobody here wants to infringe on someone's property rights. It's a submission about why some houses are ugly, with a comment thread about why they're ugly.
Your comment is bad, but by that I don't mean "punishable by 15 years' hard labor in a Siberian gulag." Is that hard to believe?
Where was anything said about putting restrictions onto what people do with their property? I skimmed the article again just to make sure, and I can't find any argument in that direction.
Saying "X is ugly" or "X is ugly, here is a rule to try to explain why" does not mean "X should not be allowed to exist".
Jealousy would imply some sort of want on the part of the jealous. If someone doesn't like a McMansion they surely can't be jealous of someone who does...
Functional and aesthetic design affects the surrounding neighbourhood. So, you get to live on the inside, but you inflict these design choices on everyone else.
Entire neighborhoods are built in this style because people like these houses and buy them. You might not, but don't assume that everyone else shares your taste in housing. Sure, if one house is built in this style amid a neighborhood with a different aesthetic the complaint might be warranted, but complaining about the design in general being inflicted upon neighbors in all cases is not.
My primary issue with McMansions specifically (beyond the fact that they lost the thread on western architecture, which should be blamed on the academy[2]) is that the materials and workmanship are terrible: ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship. The flip culture that the mortgage-debt bubble of the last 15 years created has exacerbated this issue to almost comical levels.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Old-Way-Seeing-Architecture-Magic/dp/...
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242...
EDIT: After reading another post[a] of his, it is worth mentioning another chronic problem with modern (again chronological, not stylistic) building: the buildings often look like they are about to fall over. A particular pet peeve of mine is the flashing gap found at the base of many houses and buildings, which introduces a disconcerting negative gap right where a soothing, wide foundation should be. Visual insanity.
[a] - http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148935246684/mcmansions...