I totally understand the whole "McMansions are bad architecture" thing...
However, something about it really bothers me. There was an episode of 99% Invisible where the guest was talking about their McMansions blog and how it makes fun of these Horrid dwellings. The whole thing stank of classist elitism. The Wrong Type of people were getting the chance to design and build large houses, and of course they're applying their Bad Taste that's neither Genuine nor Authentic. They don't know about the traditions of Fine Architecture so of course they were doing it all wrong...how embarrassing for them!
Edit: It sounds like a lot of the way I interpreted this could come from my background as someone who's transitioned from lower working class to solidly middle class, and so I'm applying that defensively even though (thank God!) I don't live in an Embarassing McMansion. In fact I'm now considering the blog as more of an educational campaign where an expert in the field is railing against problematic and widespread trends in that field. It has less to do with transitions between class and more to do with the decline of an important field of engineering and design as something that people value. I think the word McMansions itself is a bit of a disservice to the purpose of the blog, with its "slobs vs snobs" / Beverly Hillbillies connotations.
I grew up in Northern Virginia among these McMansions, and frankly I don't buy the elitism angle. These folks have a lot of money (top 5% at least, if not even top 1%) and are among the best educated in the country. And these aren't dwellings driven by the need for functionality. It's not like people here have big families they need to house (empty nesters can afford them more readily than people with families!). They're designed, instead, to be conspicuous consumption. If you can't ridicule them for lacking taste you're basically saying that taste doesn't exist and everything is always subjective.
Additionally, McMansions are often not very functional. As much as I would appreciate more space, I've been in enough McMansions to appreciate how important a well-built and well-designed house is. Completely ignoring scale doesn't just make McMansions aesthetically unpleasant, it them uncomfortable or completely unsuitable for most of the things we use a house for as well.
If you spend any time in a McMansion, you will start to notice little things that just feel wrong. The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it. Closets will be placed in the middle of a wall, creating a room where the bed cannot be placed against any walls. Rooms will be designed without any sense of a traffic pattern, and you'll find that it's impossible to place a couch in your den because it's basically a 30 foot wide hallway because of where the doors are. The dishwasher will block access to the sink when open.
A lot of these things are probably unnoticeable to the owners because of their lifestyle. I know friends whose parents have literally never used a single pot or pan that they own.
Around me McMansions seem to stay on the market forever compared to houses of a similar price. A ton were built where I grew up in the 2002-2007 time frame, and nobody wants to live in them. They neglect literally everything that makes a house a home for the sake of having as much space as possible. I would be surprised if the majority of them make it 50 years without being torn down.
> The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it.
This is actually proper kitchen design (the island being in the way would be a problem, though). It's called a "kitchen triangle" and the proper shape and size of it determines how efficient a kitchen is (the third vertex is the sink).
A properly sized and shaped kitchen triangle can help turn cooking into a very efficient experience. One too large, or with an island in the way, or not correctly shaped (or not even a triangle) can make it a horrible place to cook in.
I will grant, though, that in some cases the kitchen doesn't ever serve a practical purpose, but instead serves as an interior "conspicuous consumption" focal point. Easiest way to tell if this is the case is how well used the appliances are; if they look showroom shiny with nary a splatter, dent, scratch, etc on them - you are likely not looking at a working kitchen.
Finally - all of this is moot if the person cooking is skilled enough. My wife has cooked highly commented meals for hundreds of people out of a kitchen smaller than some McMansion's walk-in pantry, using a stove that only had "on" and "off" (where "on" was set at 500 degrees F), and a work surface smaller than her cutting board (this was a "commercial" kitchen at one of here former employers who had a strange sense of what was the best things to spend money on - maintenance was not one of them).
Kitchens are undeniably more important today than in the past. Their increased and expanded uses have driven larger sizes. As you suggest, too larger of a triangle is inefficient. To deal with this, the concept of Kitchen Zones has been taking root as an alternative. A zone for preparation, cooking, cleanup, entertaining, etc. [1] [2]
I hadn't run across zones before. I've always set up cooking areas for the flows of material. Ingredients come from storage, are prepped, put into holding, cooked, plated, served, and the dishes and remains returned afterwards. The kitchen triangle serves a wide range of flows for a single cook, thus its popularity. When you have multiple cooks, it changes.
If you have a lot of different things being cooked, you want the brigade system with individuals' prep, holding, and cooking areas distinct and the flow across their space minimized. That includes little things like having squeeze bottles of water at their station so they don't have to access a sink to add liquid to something and all the dishes they need to plate what they're working on. If you have labor intensive assembly of a few things, you want assembly line, and then it's more important to have lots of contiguous, double deep counter space so you can stage materials for each step and slide things along. For a brigade system, you usually have an aisle wide enough for someone to carry a hot pan past you while you're working without having to worry about bumping into you if you don't suddenly lurch backwards. Oh, and somewhere to step out of the zone where you have to be on alert for things like that. I've seen that both with one sided prep areas with eight feet or so to the other wall so you can physically back out of the line, or a four foot aisle and walking down the line to the storage freezers (which people aren't going into constantly once everything is prepped) to step away.
In either case, finished materials need to be staged to be removed from the kitchen, and a parallel path needs to bring dishes back without getting in path of the cooks.
But back to the primary topic, most of the kitchens I've seen in houses simply are not functional. When we were house hunting a few years ago I would say half the kitchens were laid out where, due to other constraints of the house, they could not be remodeled into something that wasn't a pain to work in. It's fine to have to cook in some place that's a pain once in a while, but in your own home? Yeesh.
Getting OT, but if you want a hilarious game simulation of dealing with poor kitchen design with multiple cooks (with a strong heaping of the brigade system), check out the game "Overcooked".
Boyfriend and I just beat Overcooked yesterday (three stars on every single level!), so lots of the kitchen design mistakes are still fresh in my mind (worst level imo was the kitchen with floating icebergs separating it into 3, mostly ice-covered partitions). Awesome game though :)
This is where I fall on the spectrum. I can understand someone wanting their house to evoke some notion of grandeur but really if it isn't functional the effort feels wasted to me.
That said, I have always felt ridiculing other people's taste to be fairly mean. And while there are/were some solid points in the blog about design and things that 'look right' and things that 'look wrong' it could often come across fairly harshly. And even if you disclaim that with "I'm talking about the house, not you." since the owner likes the house enough to own it and not change it, it really is kind of about them too.
All the more reason the blog is so useful. I'd hate to think with all the modern technology around us that the house I live in 'just doesn't feel right' because it was not built employing the past dozen millennia-worth of architectural knowledge at our social disposal. Just because I am not an architect doesn't mean I want to be swindled into an unknowingly unpleasant home. Just because I'm not an architect of CPUs doesn't mean I'd be willing to have a computer run poorly given my investment in a new computer - even if I like the processor's name and it has lots of gigahertzes.
No one finds the tech reviewer 'mean' for saying the processor is slower at particular benchmarks according to our present technological measure. Why is this so different - if in fact what is being put to the measure is a human technology and not simply taste. And even then, many 'tasteful' architectural features only exist because of some function - and missing that function they are actually only taste.
A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.
But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms.
Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger on it quickly enough to stop their purchase or possibly more cynically, don't care until they flip the house.
Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line?
One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood.
Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
While there may not be One True Definition, and there's room to agree and disagree, there are attributes people probably could agree are tasteless and help qualify a house as a McMansion:
* No clear architectural style, or a haphazard/incoherent mix of styles
* Brick or stone facades in front, and cheap siding on the (less visible) sides
* Non-structural arches and columns
* Oddly placed/sized windows
* Multiple roof lines, chimneys and dormers
To the extent that a "Recently built house in a more or less modern style" incorporates these elements, it can be considered more or less a McMansion.
The point is, with the effort and money spent, the houses are not even necessarily nice to live in when the designer just adds a hodge podge of features. The critique may sound elitist but the actual defects are concrete once you notice them and not just 'accept and adapt' to them.
There is a fundamental difference between a 17th century house with wing added in the 19th century and garage added in the 20th century, and a 21st century house trying to mimic that look.
> A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes
A lot of time on HN is spent mocking "gamer aesthetic" on hardware the commenter would have otherwise actually liked to use. Garish LED-lighting, bulky-looks and oblique angles aren't my thing either, but HN loves to complain about McKeyboards, McHeadphones, McLaptops and McCases.
"Gamer aesthetic" and "McMansion aethetic" are valid phenomena and people have the right to critique those tastes without invoking classism, despite the sense of superiorioty occasionally found in the consumers of both.
I totally agree. That website came off to me as very pretentious in that everyone should adhere to her personal taste when I actually liked how some of the homes looked.
Benchmarks are at least attempting to be objective.
Also, there's a difference between mocking a company's product and mocking a house that is 1) an individual's home 2) their largest investment and 3) is likely, these days, to represent a significant financial liability.
I don't like McMansions much myself, but I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family, etc. (Or people that have been sucked by the hedonic treadmill into a vortex of debt, high utility payments, etc.) They're probably suffering enough already.
> an affordable way to get more space for their family
Did you see the asking prices before the content was taken down? I don't remember any of the houses being affordable in any regard
> vortex of debt
It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
> It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
They'll suffer enough without help. The world is difficult enough without pushing people down because it's funny or a way to 'improve the quality of architecture' or whatever.
I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family
But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space. Also that house will almost certainly be better constructed.
> But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space.
Lots of variables there. Construction is usually estimated in terms of price per square feet, and property values can represent a substantial fraction of the total price of the house. A 'modest', 'old' house in a good location can be vastly more expensive than a 'McMansion' built out in the suburbs or something. Also McMansions are usually built where land is cheaper, so more space.
For families with children, there is also the cost of education to consider. There are scenarios where avoiding the need to use a private school to educate your children can completely pay the cost of a home in the suburbs. (Even considering property taxes). The house can effectively burn to the ground when you're done educating your kids and you'd wind up net money ahead compared to where you might have been with a more modest house and private schooling.
I live in a normal size house and opening the dishwasher blocks access to the sink, the two cupboards under the sink and two cupboards above.
The lounge is long and due to the door placement there is no sensible layout for the sofa that wouldn't have people sitting a long way from each other (in the end we used the furniture to effectively split the room into two smaller areas which were more sensibly shaped)
My previous house had a cupboard too close to a central breakfast bar that meant you couldn't access the cupboard if someone was sitting at the breakfast bar.
I'm living in NoVa in a zip code in the top 2% of wealth in the US. (Sadly, I'm not personally in the top 2%, I just rent an apartment here.) There are McMansions all around, and they are hideous. There's no sense of design or symmetry. And this is no aspirational neighborhood--if you're buying one of these houses, you are already at the top of society.
As much as I hate looking at these McMansions, they do give me one consolation: money can't buy taste. Maybe I'll never afford that monstrosity you call a house, but at least I've got the sense to not want it in the first place.
> As much as I hate looking at these McMansions, they do give me one consolation: money can't buy taste. Maybe I'll never afford that monstrosity you call a house, but at least I've got the sense to not want it in the first place.
My theory is that people who can afford such houses are usually very busy with their jobs or companies and don't have the time or mindspace to think about what kind of place they'd really like to live in, not to mention "details" like aesthetics. They're in perpetual hurry and thus they buy a house like the handle a project at their company.
Most of the McMansions around where I grew up in Northern Va. were fairly cookie cutter. Their lack of architectural unity seemed to be more of "We have X types of garages, Y types of base floorplans and Z types of entryways and so we'll just iterate on them for the whole neighborhood"
This combined with the rapidly rising real-estate costs meant the builders threw in some of the architectural versions of Hofmeister kinks[1] to make them look more luxurious which (IMO) only made them look worse.
I'm going to add this to my list of words for names of things that you never expected to have names. From aglet[1] to uvula[2], and now Hofmeister kink.
Maybe you'll appreciate Bangle Butt: the (usually chrome) strip across the trunk that modern cars have. It's named after the designer of the 2001 BMW 7 Series, Chris Bangle.
The design element was criticized so incessantly that Bangle eventually stepped down. But it turns out Bangle was just ahead of his time as most modern large sedans employ the eponymous chrome strip on their rear. The Accord, Camry, Mazda6, and Fusion all have the feature on their latest models.
While agree the Bangle Butt looks horrible, this does not refer to a chrome strip on the trunk of a car, it refers to the shape/proportions of the trunk and rear fenders/quarter panels on a specific set of BMW's:
http://www.bmwblog.com/2015/01/21/bangle-butt/
Subjective and arbitrary are not the same in this context. If it was arbitrary then you could randomize the outputs and see no correlation between experts and non-experts on determining what was tasteful and what wasn't. Thats not true of 'taste'. Taste is subjective in that it is highly influenced by society/culture/history but experts agree on what is tasteful and what isn't within those bounds.
Now preference is arbitrary and subjective. If you just like something even if its not tasteful that is fine, even for experts and I don't know that it is problematic in buying a house that isn't tasteful other than it is a signal that experts were skipped in certain design phases of the project.
If they're living on the other side of the country, I don't care. If they're knocking down perfectly fine, correctly-scaled houses in my neighborhood in order to build huge monstrosities that parasitize the aesthetic niceness of the neighborhood that is due in large part to correctly-sized and shaped houses then I get upset.
Example happening in my town: builder buys a normal-sized house on a large lot for $800K. Knocks the house down, subdivides the lot, and builds two bigger houses on each lot, and sells each for $950K. If anyone complains, they get written off as a NIMBY who is opposed to density.
Due to local regulations, you need more driveway curb cuts, so the tree-lined street starts to become less tree-lined. You now have two 3-story townhouse style homes right up next to mid-century ranches or bungalows or Cape Cods and it looks garish.
I live in a 150-unit apartment building that houses about 300 people, on the edge of the neighborhood. I have no financial stake in the outcome either way, I just don't want to see something beautiful destroyed. I would much rather they put up another 150-unit building than tear down 75-100 houses to achieve the same outcome.
Usually it seems that people who are moderately opposed to two houses on a lot would be rioting in the streets over a 150-unit building. But I agree, it's a better way to achieve the same outcome.
The term originated to describe opposition to the placement of unpleasant developments that wouldn't be objected to if placed elsewhere (think landfill or meat-packing plant).
It now roughly refers to anyone opposing greater density in urban environments. (This is different enough, already, that we should probably coin a new word for it.)
You're using it to mean -- what? -- opposition to any development on aesthetic grounds?
Opposing any level of density or capacity beyond single family houses with low lot coverage in your (urban/inner suburban) neighborhood is straight down the middle of any definition of NIMBYism I've seen in recent use. Particularly when you live somewhere that normal-sized houses go for $800k (!).
I'd also (tacitly) oppose large single family homes replacing small single family homes, but that's because I'd prefer to see even larger apartment/condo buildings. When each project is so politically expensive, it's important to get as many new units as possible out of each one. (Looks like defen is on board with this idea).
When two single family homes on a lot is encroaching on a community's threshold for permissible scale, usually a large apartment building would be out of the question. So I'll take what I can get.
At a 2:1 or better multiple (new units : demolished units), these conversions might be decent. You could increase a city's housing stock 2x that way, and it'd be a less drastic change than dozens-hundreds of skyscrapers needed for the same effect.
> They're designed, instead, to be conspicuous consumption
This is the key point in the thread. The legitimate criticism of McMansions isn't about their architecture per se, it's about the owners. I'd go so far as to say that the bad architecture is deliberate -- its senseless variation and useless ornaments call attention to the house. This is crass ostentation and nothing more. It says, "look at me, I can afford a big ugly house (and you can't)."
yeah. i especially agree with the fact that the people who buy these huge homes don't have big families. their families are the same size as the folks down the street in a house with 1/3 the square footage.
in Los Angeles, city government keeps on approving these extremely large homes without even requiring rooftop solar panels -- houses with not just one but TWO air conditioning condensers -- because ... uh ... wait, why?
because they save energy per capita? no.
because they will house more people than the single family homes they replaced? no.
because large homes are basically high capacity production assets which empower the city to be even more globally competitive (like a state-of-the-art rechargeable-battery factory, a digital movie production facility, a high-tech startup office, etc)? no.
AFAIK, we just have a distorted capital market. Federal government policies support home loans and the ownership society. there's also a local shortage of other viable ways for investors to make a quick $500,000 profit.
As engineers and designers, we should side with her on this one. The core conceit of McMansion Hell is that these are this homes built without experts, particularly architects (but any kind of designer is absent from them). These are often big, expensive homes, where the builder and the buyer thought they didn't need the help of an actual professional.
This isn't just an American thing, but it seems particularly bad here. People spend a lot of money on homes, but try to cheap out as much as possible in expertise. No architects, no designers for the interior, no landscape architects for the yard (many greenfield McMansions are delivered with zero landscaping!) and even sometimes skipping electricians and other skilled tradesmen for upgrades and additions.
Post college I had a mentor that was in the real estate development business, not for McMansions, first time homebuyer and some developments in the next price point up (<$500K) in a major metro so I got to learn quite a lot about how this works. I am no fan of McMansions although my primary complaint is that many of them are just built so close together, not that their aesthetics are particularly bad. The style of home that I would build is not typically built by major developers like KHov or whoever.
Houses are a bit like software. Builders will typically have base plans and then depending on the price point a varying number of customizations that can be applied. The more expensive the home the more customizations offered. A really great thing about people buying McMansions is that they are all experts and know far more about building a house than someone who literally owns a company that does this. So people who sell to this demographic let the customer do a lot of driving especially on the interior. Builders can also mark up these customizations to increase margins. So really I guess bottom line here is that people want these houses. The architecture (or lack there of depending on your view) is carefully researched to appeal to people with the right amount of money to spend. Having watched this process from the builder side there seems to be little to be gained from trying to for design on to the customers as they don't want it.
I think it's a bit forward for criticizing the purchasers of these homes for the aesthetics alone. They wanted these homes and there is going to be someone who will provide it. I am yet to find modern art that I can appreciate but I am happy that others can. I love classical sculpture which I am sure someone would have a bit to say about if I stuck one in my house. If someone wants a non-functioning balcony (this I just cannot understand) to each his own. One nice feature these homes have is that they are all built together in large developments where I will rarely ever venture.
>I am no fan of McMansions although my primary complaint is that many of them are just built so close together, not that their aesthetics are particularly bad.
I guess I'd argue that the aesthetics are bad for the reasons the blog in question points out--lack of unifying design principles, etc. At least to my eye.
However, I also agree with your point about space. This may not be popular with the density crowd, but a few acres with lots of trees and other landscaping hide a lot of architectural faults. Cram big houses assembled from random architectural styles on a half acre with just a garden or two and it's not attractive.
I think you bring up an important point: there is a class of homebuyer who is both wealthy (or at least high-income) and a control freak. McMansion (or more specifically McMansion builders) target this demographic with empty shells, then let the homebuyer customize to their heart's content (even if said customization is stupid).
For some, it appears that the control is an important purchase consideration. The bank is the only one taking the risk.
A lot of times such houses are built by large homebuilder companies. They employ architects and landscape designers. Why does it still seem like things are in such poor taste? Maybe it's because that's not what people want to buy.
>The Wrong Type of people were getting the chance to design and build large houses, and of course they're applying their Bad Taste that's neither Genuine nor Authentic. They don't know about the traditions of Fine Architecture so of course they were doing it all wrong...how embarrassing for them!
Leave out the "wrong type of people" part and you got pretty much every criticism ever. Bad movies, bad books, bad food...
The thing is, I don't believe McMansion owners need our pity. They're clearly well off and not afraid to show it. Speaking of "elitism", I'm pretty sure the author of the McMansion blog is poorer than any of the reviewed houses' owners. It's not like we're making fun of homeless people for having dirty clothes. Plus those damn houses are visible, they're part of our environment and not something you do for fun in your hobby room.
I can't get myself to feel sorry, even though I can understand a general opposition against "calling out" private individuals so publicly on the internet.
Yeah, poorer people can be elitist, but that doesn't necessarily make what McMansionHell is doing some elitist sort of enterprise. It's a guy/girl pointing out architectural flaws in buildings and discussing why they are flaws. It's as elitist as movie critic talking about a new film, and in that sense it's ridiculous that the site is being pulled down over this. You aren't entitled to have somebody agree with your taste.
Edit: You're right, nobody is arguing that it was pulled down for that and I didn't realize until I read a bit more. My point about entitlement still stands though.
I don't think very many (or any) people are defending Zillow's attempt to take down the site. Most of the critiques expressed in this thread specifically address the content of the site itself not whether it should stay up.
One big difference between McMansion Hell and media criticism in general is that the former relies much more on appeals to canon, e.g. "You should never put one of /these/ next to one of /these/."
The guest on that article and the blog author are the same person.
How can you "understand that mcmansions are bad architecture" and also say "the whole thing stank of classist elitism"? The blog points fun at clearly bad buildings. Fake columns, unnecessary rooms, poor placement of re-used furniture, etc. Sarcasm is funny. The blog is sarcastic in nature. What's wrong with that?
It's a good question. I'm not well-versed enough in design theory to answer, but I'll offer my opinion anyway. :-)
The fins on a 1959 Cadillac are well-integrated (design-wise) on the car. It's a theme of the era and the car was designed from the ground up to look like a jet or a rocket.
The design elements in a McMansion are not well integrated (see the posts on the site) - they are added on as an afterthought because "nice houses have these things". There is no coherent style or design.
If I had to guess, I would say the "gaudy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaud%C3%AD !!) design of a Cadillac will be well-regarded for at least 100 years. I don't think the design of McMansions will ever be well-regarded.
I couldn't help looking it up because the idea that a single artist could stand out so much to be singularly associated with that term was tempting. I expect that is why such a false association persists.
I'm no designer either, but I think Caddy fins were great examples of baroque flourishes -- excessive extensions to past design motifs that give a heightened sense of motion or flow or accent. Future designs can't build on such flourishes. They were stylistic endpoints, like the accents in Art Deco, but often use a coherent set of design principles within a time period and thus create a harmony of their own.
But McMansions lack common flourishes or motifs. They share only size and a brutal ostentation intended only to say, "I have money, and taste be damned."
The best exposition I know on the suburban blight AKA McMansions is "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler.
I'm in the Stewart Brand camp that is pretty much built on the taste be damned ethos. The idea of a McMansion appeals to me because I'm not afraid to move walls and plumbing to make the space exactly what I want.
McMansions more resemble the car Homer Simpson designed than a 1959 Cadillac. One of the main distinguishing features of a McMansion is that it doesn't have any unified design aesthetic. They just glom a bunch of random things together.
> The blog is sarcastic in nature. What's wrong with that?
It's punching down: the builders/purchasers didn't know/care how to make architecturally sophisticated dwellings, which is no reason to make fun of someone. The commentary applies equally-well to pre-fab apartments, shotgun shacks, suburban housing developments, etc. It's poorly-targeted.
It's also elitist a.f. "Look at these gauche bungalows, drawn up no doubt by someone who never heard of Falling Water, let alone ever showered"
I generally reject the premise of punching up versus down; but McMansion Hell is emphatically not punching down. Anyone who can afford a $1 million 5000+ square foot house deserves very little sympathy for their bad taste.
It's OK to be mean to people because of the socioeconomic class they belong to? They're all humans just like each other. I bet half of poorer people would opt to design their own house in an ugly way if they had the chance. They just don't have the chance. Some of them certainly try hard though: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/543809723727647414
> It's OK to be mean to people because of the socioeconomic class they belong to?
No, see the first sentence where I say I generally reject the premise of the whole concept of punching up and down (I think there is such a thing as bad tactics). My point was, however, that if you're gonna use that framework, perhaps one percenters buying ugly houses aren't exactly a sympathetic group. Even more importantly, the OP misses the entire reason punching up and down is a thing. Being rich enough to afford a McMansion means you're pretty much guaranteed to be highly privileged. It'd be pretty silly, if you're going to talk about punching up and down, to believe that ridiculing the rich with bad taste is anything but a big ol' shoryuken. I mean, even I, someone who thinks you should treat people kindly regardless of background, roll my eyes at the thought of McMansion owners feelings being hurt because people think their houses are ugly.
Also, the blogger skewers the exact pretensions of this class with hilarious skill and deftness. I can't tell you how many times I've seen some very motel-like painting or elaborately framed print up there captioned 'An Art', and that always makes me grin: it criticises a very real and troubling class tendency to commoditize and stupefy art, and to see this tendency called out for mockery pleases me.
Thanks for making my point, but thank you to the undeservingly moneyed lumpenproles who spend their wealth on the wrong things and also in a way which deserves ridicule.
Your point was that it's punching down. Careersuicide [correctly] responded that it's not punching down, it's punching up. Tell me again how that make your point?
> Anyone who can afford a $1 million 5000+ square foot house deserves very little sympathy for their bad taste
You are disparaging people who are not as knowledgeable as you (elitist); they didn't design the homes, nor approve the development, nor set the zoning. Their casus belli is that they are wealthier than you, and unaware that they're buying the wrong kind of house.
Making fun of rich people for buying stupid stuff isn't punching up; it's making fun of their ignorance, regardless of whether they have more or less money than you, and can be equally applied to poor people making poor purchasing decisions.
> The commentary applies equally-well to pre-fab apartments, shotgun shacks, suburban housing developments, etc. It's poorly-targeted.
That's a false equivalence. Shotgun shacks and suburban housing developments aren't trying to be something they're not. And that is why you don't find ironic commentary like this directed at them.
When you put on airs, you get cut down. Is that mean? Probably. Sometimes it's also appropriate.
The person you're describing is a 23-year old woman who comes from a working-class background. Hardly elitist. McMansions are/were a status-symbol of the upper-middle class, and now they're being attacked from the bottom.
She appears to be quite well-educated in the realm of architecture and its history. I personally enjoy her blog, but you don't have to be old and rich to be a snob.
She's also a socialist, for what it's worth, and involved in lobbying for quality affordable housing. That doesn't make her immune from attacks of classism, but it might affect how one judges what she says.
(Also worth noting that McMansions are typically homes to the upper middle class and the rich, not the poor.)
I understand the concern over elitism, and many of the good examples shown on the blog are very nice houses, but in my experience there are many humbler homes that are better than mcMansions.
You can have homes that are 1200-1800 sqft. that are very easy to live in, aesthetically pleasing and (in non-metropolitan areas) quite affordable for a middle-class family.
For me, it's about homes that are easy to sell (because they check off all the boxes on some generic list) vs. homes that are a joy to live in. My impression is that there was some wisdom regarding the latter that has been lost in the last 40 years.
I thought I was the only bothered by that blog (the 99pi episode was based on it).
I agree with practically all of its conclusions (ugly, oversized, out of place, generic, etc.), but the entire thing was a bunch of worthless value judgements: this is bad, that is bad. Not: this is bad because of function, but literally "this should never happen" -- no explanation.
Real example from way back machine, from the blog's most recent post there:
A transom should never overwhelm the door or window it’s sitting above.
Here’s an example of how to transom:
And how to…not:
... that's it. No explanation, just "I'm right, they're wrong." It's just lousy, valueless criticism. Nobody would take this lazy opinion drivel from any other kind of critic.
(Separate: Do I think zillow was right here? Of course not).
I think there is a fair dose of irony in your value judgement of her value judgement of the buyers' value judgement of McMansions.
Her main points are basically unified theme and form follows function and how McMansions often break those rules (a hodgepodge of different elements, columns too large for the things they support).
Her blog also informs fundamentals of good taste in architecture. It's no different from learning what makes a classical painting good or good pacing in movies.
>>A transom should never overwhelm the door or window [...]
>... that's it. No explanation [...]
The explanation is ~'it shouldn't overwhelm it'. Of course that's a value judgement. Like saying the front bumper (aka "fender") shouldn't be too big on a car; or a persons hat shouldn't be too big for their hat (tell that to JK, https://goo.gl/images/ztdusQ).
The implicit point is that the transom is ostentatiously large, enlarged beyond the reviewer's sense of propriety.
Surely there is nothing else. It's a judgement of style?
The blog works on two levels. The first is pointing out established architectural principles and traditions.
The second is poking the US tradition of "I have money and therefore I'm right about everything, even when I have no idea what I'm doing" squarely in both eyes.
For the first, there is an embryonic science of aesthetics. Features like self-similarity, scale coherence, integration, and symmetry tend to score more highly than random content blobbery and mash-ups.
For the second - of course it's political. But in a country where freedom of speech is supposed to be a thing, I see that as a feature, not a bug.
I made the same complaints when this blog was first posted on HN. All of their rules are entirely arbitrary and subjective opinions. They give very little argument or reasoning to support them. The best they have is side by side comparisons. Where they say "Isn't the one on the left so much better?" And on all of them I completely disagree and think the McMansion actually looks better. I just don't like the "simple, old fashioned, perfectly symmetrical" aesthetic that the author worships.
Worse is that most of their advice is actually harmful. For instance they don't like windows, especially asymmetrical ones. But lots of scientific studies have found that windows improve mental health significantly in a number of ways. Sunlight is very good. Or they demand houses be symmetrical. But if I've learned anything from games like dwarf fortress and Minecraft, that's not true. While symmetry might look nice, it generally creates designs that are less practical than if you weren't constrained by it. And every rule they have is like that. Just purely aesthetic constraints that trade off against other more practical values.
Thanks, that's actually pretty helpful. I think the term McMansions has a bit of a marketing problem now that I understand the purpose of the movement a bit better.
The only relevant question is: do the people living in these houses enjoy them? Because if they do, then who cares?
I look at some of the houses on the blog and think they're really pretty. Sorry I don't have the correct sort of taste in windows or whatever. Maybe it's because I'm one of those dumb idiots that grew up in a flyover state (Iowa).
In the one you pointed out, the question arises: "Which part is the actual house?" It has a feeling of "someone stuck on this extra part here, this stairwell here, ..." particularly with the mix of the stone and stucco'd/painted exterior, the multiple incoherent roof angles, and the inconsistent Z-depth of the front of the house.
With some architecture, the more you look at it, the more it grows on you. With the picture you posted, at first glance, I had the same reaction you did -- but after I really looked at it for a while, it started to bug the heck out of me. Kind of the same thing that happens after listening to too much auto-tuned music. The effect is cool the first time you hear it, but after a while, ...
Concur. The FLW houses I've seen have all been quite consistent. I like Kentuck Knob as an example more than Fallingwater, because it doesn't have the super-obvious "cantilevered over the water" thing as a focus point, so you have to look at the whole a little more:
Consistent roofline, consistently repeated window motif, re-use of the horizontal stonework for the house, the exterior wall, and the chimneys.
The drawback of his Usonian houses is that the ceiling height is ridiculous by 2017 standards. At 6'3", I have to duck in several of the rooms, much less the doorways. Oof.
It's the other way round. The people who are living in these houses don't have to look at them. It's the people who don't live in those houses that have to look at them.
It's an insult to society when somebody builds an ugly house and everybody else has to look at it.
Settled neighborhoods are more expensive than new ones because you can avoid living next to an ugly house.
So, I tend to agree that this house does not immediately jump out as ugly, and the suggestion that it is obviously flawed does come over as snobbish.
I'm not sure I mind the mixed stone and stucco that another comment mentions. It seems like a valid aesthetic style, especially with the chosen colours.
However, there are a few weird things I do notice. The double roof gable on the right seems unnecessary and unbalanced. And there are also many random windows in different styles, and in strange places. The ones below the double roof seem particularly obviously mismatched, and the window on the diagonal portion above the main door really looks out of position.
I propose an experiement to test the elitism hypothesis: Ask a random selection of people to rate various types of houses. If McMansions are rated poorly only by "elites", then the hypothesis is true. If they're rated poorly by everyone, it's false.
There are some metro areas where your only choices are basically McMansions or obsolete post-war housing. Given those limited options, it's no surprise why people prefer them.
There's definitely rampant classism going on here, but not in the direction you seem to think.
Her blog has an extremely mean-spirited tone, she's downright attacking people.
Her audience is accepting of that because it's directed at people who own large houses, and people who own large houses have money and are successful. In her world, it's acceptable to treat people poorly, as long as they're successful and have money.
If she were applying the same architectural critique to poorly-designed small crappy houses (which exist by the millions), she'd be getting a very, very different reaction.
Her Patreon might not be as successful, let's just put it that way.
I actually think that's a big part of the appeal of the content. Large houses are typically a source of envy, but if you can turn that large house into something to be embarrassed about, the envy dissipates and the viewership gets to feel built-up by the tearing down of the wealthy person.
My standard for how people should be treated doesn't change based on their income level, so to me this just seems mean, I think much less of her, and I don't want to read more of it.
The very nature of the houses in question are built for the sole purpose of showing some sort of opulence to the viewer. The people who buy these kind of houses look at that sort of opulence and say "yep it's got all that opulence I want" and they buy it. Now that same exact person could potentially buy something with taste, or potentially even design a house. It's not like these people are forced into having a stupid looking house.
On the contrary, you'd be hard pressed to find a lower class person with the financial freedom to buy whichever house they please, and because of that they kind of have to live in houses that are made in a more functional sense of "a place where humans can live."
The blog isn't about tearing down wealthy people, it's about tearing down shitty architecture. She showcases really great architecture as well that obviously isn't affordable.
> The blog isn't about tearing down wealthy people, it's about tearing down shitty architecture. She showcases really great architecture as well that obviously isn't affordable.
It's about tearing down shitty architecture, in a way that directly criticizes the owner's purchase and taste while making endless derogatory assumptions and claims about them, and that's only ok because that owner has money.
She, for example, thinks it's sexist for a bathroom to have two sinks, and a bathroom having two sinks is an appeal to the owner's sexism. You can take this person seriously if you want to, but to act like there's no malice here is a little absurd, and it's clear (at least to me) that that malice is only accepted because it's directed at the wealthy.
And it's totally unwarranted, she doesn't know these people and she doesn't know their political affiliations or their positions on social issues. They're just people who like a house you don't like. I don't see how that's a justification to draw insults on pictures of their house and post it on the internet.
I kind of like the McMansion property of looking like the house was built piecewise. It's a little endearing, I find. Actually, Castle Neuschwanstein was built that way - it was all built in one go with modern techniques but has a lot of different submasses. But I have to say the execution is often lacking. Proportions have never been the strong suit of evolved buildings, but there's an obsession with traditional markers of wealth (roman columns, etc) that don't really work when you don't have the money to build the other things equally large.
I felt the same way you did when I first read McMansion Hell, but despite my initial reaction I was compelled to keep reading. I came around to really like Kate. What is interesting to me is how polarizing she can be. Reading these comments confirms it.
Doesn't the whole blog specifically point out examples on each house of why they think it is bad architecture? It's not like she just makes a blanket statement that they're bad with no supporting evidence. Every single post has a ton of valid critiques. I don't really know what there is to get.
Let's be real. I'm not an architect. I'm a layperson with a decent sense of aesthetics.
60%+ of what McMansion complained about I was oblivious to.
Sure, there are some obvious things but the majority would not be accessible to someone unless they were educated in the field and taught what 'proper' aesthetics are.
Is it still a crime in some circles to wear a blazer with denim?
Not at all. A well-chosen semi-formal jacket can be serve as a great contrast to worn denim lowers. But without attention to detail, you get a pale blue polyester leisure suit jacket over black stretch "jeans". And that doesn't express playfulness, so much as a doubling down on bad taste of biblical proportions.
Robert Schumann started a magazine in which he railed against the musical Philistines of his day. We're still listening to the music of Schumann and those who he admired. The Philistines? Not so much.
Was that "classist elitism," or did Schumann just know what he was talking about?
I mean, to be fair, there isn't anything wrong with Geocities-style websites. Some of us have fond memories of the mid-90s web, and dislike the trend of shoving 20MB of JavaScript down the reader's throat before they can get to the 20KB of text they're actually looking for.
So, first, a lot of the architectural choices (especially if they were picked out by the homeowners and not by the architects) are done to ape (poorly) aristocratic and "Old Money" sorts of dwellings...so, making fun of them on a classist line is semi-acceptable.
The real problem is that the architecture is just plain bad. Space is wasted, exterior are marred by design details meant only to suggest a style of building without any of the things that make them useful, interiors waste space and destroy any efficient attempts at heating and cooling--there is no defending that.
Agreed. Driving a Mercedes is a status symbol, I don't see her complaining about the unnecessary Swarovski crystals in the headlights of an S class, but oh no those columns that "serve no function and remind of me of a bank where I keep my money" they are fundamentally different and must go.
The Washington Post ran an article/video combo today[1] about Kate and McMansion Hell, and while Kate herself didn't mention Zillow the article itself did a few times. I imagine this is what prompted the legal threat. It's an entertaining video if you have five minutes.
Also of note: Kate's twitter posts from this morning also indicate she has received threatening emails following the video[2], which is sadly not surprising.
It's pretty conventional in these types of cases. I've received a similar C&D and read several others and they all invoke the CFAA. It seems boilerplate for C&D related to online activities.
The CFAA makes it unlawful to exceed authorized access to any protected computer system (essentially, any computer in the United States). If someone claims that you've violated their ToS, they almost always also claim that by so doing, you've also violated the CFAA, since your access "exceeded authorization" as granted within the ToS, which they'll claim you've agreed to.
Now your breach of contract is upgraded to a federal crime. Better hope you don't make the wrong MegaCorp mad.
I should have given a little more context. Take a look at the statement that Zillow gave the Verge:
“Zillow has a legal obligation to honor the agreements we make with our listing providers about how photos can be used,” Zillow tells The Verge in a statement. “We are asking this blogger to take down the photos that are protected by copyright rules, but we did not demand she shut down her blog and hope she can find a way to continue her work.”
The public face of Zillow says they hope she can find a way to continue her work, yet the corporate counsel pulls out a piece of legislation that could see her spending the rest of her twenties in a jail cell. That's dirty pool...
Point in your favour though, the Verge didn't even mention the CFAA in their coverage of this. So, I would agree that it's common, but just because something is common doesn't make it right.
Yeah, I'm not trying to imply that Zillow's conduct is morally justified or correct. However, based on my experience (I'm not a lawyer), it is conventional conduct.
It is probably less likely that Zillow is intentionally trying to play hardball, and more likely that they pulled out the "Terms of Use violation" boilerplate and made the necessary adjustments.
People are successfully sued under the civil provisions of the CFAA on a regular basis and they rarely have to face the possibility of spending their twenties in a jail cell for conventional scraping or copyright infringement (another thing that has both criminal and civil penalties).
weev is an exception presumably because his disclosure contained a bunch of personally identifiable information from Very Important People. Swartz was an exception probably because he was apprehended by police for illegally breaking and entering a network closet at MIT, triggering the prosecutor's question "What crimes did this guy commit to justify his arrest?".
The CFAA is terrible law, and I say that on HN so much that it will probably be the next thing dang yells at me for saying too much. Large companies like Zillow abuse the legal system to strongarm small entrepreneurs and publishers, and that's disgusting. The fact that it's possible shows that, in large measure, we've lost the plot.
We need serious reform not just for the CFAA, but the legal processes that allow this state of affairs.
The US Justice Dept. tested that theory (violation of ToS is a violation of the CFAA) in court, but it didn't fly. The judge correctly pointed out that this basically gives companies carte blanche to make something a Federal crime via their Terms of Service.
weev was convicted and sent to prison for violating the CFAA, based on his "unauthorized access" to AT&T's site (the limits of which are presumably defined by the ToS). His conviction was reversed on the technicality of improper venue, not the dubious nature of the conviction or the belief that ToS should not be eval'd into federal law.
Did ATT's TOS say e.g. "we have a bunch of customers' PII posted online; please don't read those"? It seems, rather, that the court considered the act itself bad enough to punish regardless of any implied agreement forbidding or allowing the act. (Of course I think the court is wrong.)
IANAL, but my feeling is that eventually the evil companies will come up with a TOS so awful that even the Supreme Court will be sickened by it and be inspired to thoroughly reevaluate CFAA. They won't throw it out entirely, but they'll pick out a particular set of valid terms, and we'll learn to live with TOSes built with those.
A standard ToS prohibits most types of access; in many cases, a literal reading of a ToS would prohibit any access (one ToS I read says that their site should not be accessed by "any method, automated or manual" (in the context of banning robots/scrapers)). They arrange it that way so that they can demand that you stop talking to their server whenever they dislike something you've done.
The CFAA is a critical component in maintaining highly significant tech monopolies like Facebook. I don't think that SCOTUS will clamp it down. Computer access is abstract enough that it is hard to get a political fervor generated, and most people are able to use their computers without impediment, so they're never going to really care (cf. copyright, which is possibly the most widely violated law today, yet the function of which most people continue to remain completely ignorant).
The parties that are interested in these things are going to be large companies that are paying lobbyists to get stricter restrictions pushed through, not political grassroots mobilizing to reverse it.
As an example, last year Congress passed and President Obama signed a law strengthening the CFAA's restrictions by prohibiting the circumvention of "any technological control on an Internet website or online service ... used to enforce online ticket purchasing limits or to maintain the integrity of posted online ticket purchasing order rules".
Like many laws, at a superficial reading, this looks fine, but then we get into the details. What constitutes an "event" or a "ticket"? Is a restaurant reservation an event, and does one circumvent a technological control if they inform a user that a reservation may be available (compare OpenTable)? Is hailing an Uber an event that creates a ticket, and if so, how would this impact third party applications that interface with Uber in some way? etc.
Like copyright, the CFAA, in some form or another, is here to stay, because it is a major part in the legal force used to prevent direct competition against the entrenched interests/incumbent players. It's really hard to get a political upswell over abstract, rarely-deployed concepts (even then, they make a token change and the meat of the policy remains intact).
Health coverage is a much more pressing abstract issue that negatively impacts a much larger percentage of the citizenry and we still can't find a way to agree on that, I'm not optimistic about copyright and/or network access.
It is possible that the CFAA will go away in many years after there is much more cross-generational technical awareness, but I'm personally doubtful. Would someone have been having the same kind of discussion re: copyright in the 18th century, as legal frameworks allowing people to own information emerged?
The ability to eval a ToS into federal law and get people sent to prison for it will probably go away, but the ability of a site's owner to pursue someone who won't quit asking their server for information in an undetectable-server-side, non-disruptive manner probably won't.
I'm referring to the case where that woman posed as a high school student and drove a girl that her daughter didn't like to suicide via cyber bullying. They tried to charge her under the CFAA for violating Facebook's ToS against misrepresenting yourself.
> United States v. Drew[1] is the final decision in a criminal case that charged Lori Drew of violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) over the alleged cyberbullying of a 13-year-old, Megan Meier, who committed suicide.
Also:
> On September 4, 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief in support of Drew's motion to dismiss the indictment.[10] The brief argued that Drew's indictment was wrongful because Drew's alleged violation of the Myspace terms and conditions was not an "unauthorized access" or a use that "exceeds authorized access" under the CFAA statute; that applying the CFAA to Drew's conduct would constitute a serious encroachment of civil liberties; and that interpreting the CFAA to apply to a breach of a website's Terms of Service would violate the Due Process protections of the Constitution and thereby render the statute void on the grounds of vagueness and lack of fair notice.
Thanks for the reference. It's great that that the absurdity of the CFAA was reigned in on that case.
My understanding is that since this decision occurred at the district court level, it does not have a precedential effect, so I don't think anyone with a pending case can necessarily relax or assume that a similar outcome will be easily obtained.
Note also that in this case, a guilty verdict was entered for the defendant before being vacated by the district court almost a year later. If other CFAA cases have to go through the same process to get a similar outcome, that's better than nothing, but not really something to get excited about from the perspective of someone who has not yet been convicted.
Obviously I'm not privy to the details of weev's legal strategy, but this case didn't seem to help him either in preventing his conviction or in securing his exoneration. His conviction was overturned on unrelated grounds. Perhaps this would've been significant if the venue was not improper. (I haven't read the decision overturning weev's conviction, so it may discuss the applicability of this case regardless).
---
re the EFF's amicus brief, amicus briefs are an opportunity for the public to file their comments on the case for the court's consideration. They merely express the author's opinion and hold no value. The EFF opposes the CFAA as written as well as several other bad laws, but that's nothing new.
You're probably right about the WaPo article being the trigger. I received a C&D from a massive company shortly after a mainstream news outlet covered a competitor that was engaging in shady tactics. As the entire sector depended on non-copyrightable factual data that was only available from the large company's site, everyone was shut down by a wave of C&Ds that hit over a span of 3 days.
Makes me wonder if PR firms are complicit with large companies looking to shut down small players. They feed a story upstream to someone and then the company can pursue legal action without looking petty or like they're picking on the little guy, providing some defense against the negative PR of "punching down" while still allowing them to accomplish their goal of harassing/silencing defenseless bloggers and entrepreneurs.
May also help them if they get to the stage of assessing damages, since they can say "This was not just some obscure thing in the corner that nobody noticed; they got national press exposure."
I watched it all the way through. I'm baffled as to why anyone would think she's pretentious (is it because she has a zany hairstyle?)
She's knowledgeable. She knows architecture, and she's communicating her knowledge. I don't think that makes her pretentious. It's just that we don't know as much as she does. Let's face it, a blog critiquing the shitty web design/UI choices clients make would be an absolute hit on HN.
You don't see any pretentiousness in driving around judging a bunch of people on their houses and just ragging on how terrible they are? Really? You might want to look harder.
It'd be pretentious to just arbitrarily say "Those houses are ugly". But she says "Those houses are ugly, and this is why". While I don't agree with her opinion on all the houses she features, but the vast majority -- yeah, they're pretty bad, and for the reasons she states.
* Odd proportions and asymmetry.
* Strange roof lines (the "nub" - it's like a Mansard that didn't know when to stop).
* Bizarre bump-outs, because the exterior was wrapped around an interior designed to have crazily large rooms.
* Columns that hold up nothing.
* And my personal favorite - shutters that don't have a prayer of covering the window when closed. Except they can't close, because they're glued and/or screwed to the wall and have no hinges.
No, but I don't like it when people do in a very public manner as a way to pressure people to conform.
How would you feel about a blog that openly criticizes workplace clothing (I bring this up as lots of people in my office wear things like toe shoes and some males even where quilts)?
I try and be accepting of other people's personal tastes and don't want to enforce through rules/laws/social pressure some common clothing standard that people have to conform to. Same goes for houses in that I don't like publicly mocking them for how they look in order to socially pressure people to build their houses so that they conform to some standard.
*edit: obviously this shouldn't be taken to the extreme as houses do emit externalities on those that surround them which can decrease the value of the surrounding houses. Thus, I think some conformity in a town by town basis is good. However, I find blogs like this and some home owners associations (HOA) to be ridiculous with how far they try and enforce their rules and opinions on how homes/town should look.
I don't think it's meant to pressure the owners to confirm. The owners have a relatively small likelihood of ever realizing that their home is on the blog. I think it's to try to diminish the trend, and get builders to focus more on making smaller, higher quality houses that consider the climate in which they're built. Just my guess, though.
There are design rules for a reason. They're not just arbitrary things that someone just made up out of nothing - the human brain has preferences for visual stimulus so things like the "rule of thirds" are based on how people prefer to see things.
So yes, her opinion has more value because it's backed up by proven design rules. It's not as subjective as you're implying.
You gotta look up the word pretentious. Critiquing bad design isn't pretentious if you know what you're talking about. Living in a poorly made house designed to look more expensive than it is the embodiment of pretentiousness.
pre·ten·tious - adjective - attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.
The irony here is that her blog rags on the pretentiousness of houses designed to look like better built/designed houses. McMansions are by definition pretentious.
She explicitly pointed out in multiple posts that she is judging the houses themselves, not the people who own them. How is it not ok to criticize an object?
That's a critic. Those who find her criticism speaks to them, are allowed to run with it and hoover up her pronouncements with delight, especially as they're snarky and funny pronouncements. There's very little point in being a critic and then saying 'but you know, your mileage may vary'.
Remembering that is YOUR responsibility, and if a bunch of people seem to prefer the critic's point of view and it clashes with yours… perhaps you have things to learn, even from the arrogant. :)
she stretches a bit into hyperbole at times and her tone of voice isn't the best which may convey the wrong impression. throw in that a few of the homes which flashed by are actual real standards and mcmansions. Size isn't the real determinant factor even when compared with lot size. I have run into some row home remodels that will make you flinch.
I think the bulk of the problem stems from some just being too gaudy, instead of adopting what is in the region they try to bring another region in or a tv show impression home.
if by size alone then my neighborhood would qualify but the homes here are very basic and large to support big families; 4/5/6 bedroom and square footage starting in the 3k range to 5.5k. Go a few miles and you can find some 2.5k-4k homes that fit her styling fail bill just fine and they are that too inside as well.
So I tend to lump this in gaudy on the outside and just as bad inside. the idea good architects are not involved is just an industry trying their best to redirect
IANAL but we can do some harmless armchair lawyering...
The 4 Factors of "fair use"[1]:
>1. the purpose and character of your use.
Criticism, critique.
>2. the nature of the copyrighted work.
Published photos used in website blog without ads. Also, the photos were not put into a compilation book to be sold at Amazon. However, Kate Wagner does say in twitter that "this blog is my entire livelihood" so it seems that some commercial activity is happening.
>3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
Kate Wagner took a tiny percentage in proportion to Zillow's entire photo database. If the proportion measurement is a particular photographer's portfolio, she may have taken most or 100%.
>4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.
Does KW's usage of the photos cause economic harm to the photographers of real estate? Do the McHell photos reduce the value of photographers' other photos in their portfolio?
Doesn't seem so but there may be some additional cause & effect that damages photographers' works.
Seems like (3) and (4) would be Zillow's strongest arguments.
I looked at the Four Factors Fair Use instead of Terms of Service because the twitter image of the Zillow cease & desist letter[1] mentioned it in their arguments.
Also, one can use Zillow without ever clicking "I Agree" to a ToS so I'm not sure if that's even contractually binding or has been tested in court.
It is also possible that the courts would rule that Zillow's particular terms of service are unenforceable, without answering the broader question about the enforceability of terms of service in general. That happened to Zappos in 2013.
As an interesting [to me] aside you can probably get all the images and content without even visiting the site - Google Images and page caches for example. Wonder what that would do for arguments based on agreeing to ToS on the site.
Which seems fishy to me… IANAL but without signing or hitting "I accept" to the terms, I haven't accepted the terms… I assume anyway. I could be wrong.
IANAL either but I've researched this issue some. Still, nothing I say should be construed as reliable legal information.
Automatic acceptance of ToS is described as "clickwrap" or "browsewrap", depending on whether the ToS is expected to be accepted by going to any page deeper than the home page (browsewrap) or whether it's accepted by, say, clicking a button. This is determined by the text on the site. For example, clickwrap would say "By clicking 'Search', you accept our terms of use." Browsewrap would be some text that reads "By using this site, you accept our terms of use."
At present, it's mostly case-by-case, and it generally hinges on whether or not the consumer had sufficient notice that taking an action resulted in acceptance of the contract. If that claim were to go to court, the argument would be about the location of the notice and whether or not a reasonable person would've realized they were agreeing to the terms (assuming that the accused's knowledge of the terms cannot be directly established, e.g., the author states that she was not aware she was bound by the Terms of Use).
People have a bad habit of assuming that technology law is somewhat reasonable. That's not the case. Because technology is foreign and magical to most people, and also because technology is very fast-paced and law is very slow-paced, and thirdly because most people don't have to be aware of these legal technicalities and can violate them without ever running into trouble or even realizing they've broken the law, ensuring that these things remain obscure political issues, tech law is in a pretty sorry state.
They did say that. But the true nature of their actions are intimidating an under-funded adversary who actually does have fair use rights to criticize their work.
Think of the slippery slope- TOS of car, can't complain about defects, TOS of prescription drug, can't say grandpa died while using it as noted in the side effects of the drug. And that's why the courts have shot down these "TOS trumps the First Amendment" cases every time.
Funny. One of the homes they showed is in my area, and I had driven by it recently (since we're thinking about moving). And they're definitely right. It's a weird mix of horribleness. Especially the kitchen with its "update", aka let's throw in a couple of premium appliances and $2k worth of marble and call it a day.
Wow. I really expected you were exaggerating but it really is terrible. There's not much square footage why the hell didn't they put in new cabinets at least?
Didn't the writer say this was one of the only kitchens shown on the blog that she likes? That doesn't mean you have to agree of course, I Just don't really know what makes a good kitchen :)
Could this be an approach to defend the blog? Community project to take fresh images of the same houses, make the images available to the site under a liberal license.
What I don't get is that the images themselves aren't even owned by Zillow. They get the pictures from the governing Multiple Listing Service (MLS). In this case, that's NorthstarMLS.
These images are available absolutely everywhere, on every real estate site imaginable.
She does have a Patreon. As much as I hate the fact that we now need to crowsource these things, I think this is one avenue for us non-lawyer-adjacent folks.
He would show photos from listings of excessively large, poorly made mansions (or 'McMansions'). He'd point out all the design flaws, and architectural mistakes, then laugh at the excessive price tag.
Apart from the humour, it was super interesting. If I look at a picture of a house, there's no way I can notice water damage, mis-matched windows, or just shitty door placement.
I guess Zwillo is salty as it could lead to lower valuations.
Keep up the good fight, Kate. You've taught me how to appreciate good (and bad! ) architecture. Also I question the construction of houses now which is something I've never done before, so thank you.
The blog was great. I learned a huge amount about architecture by reading it. I also laughed my ass off for hours. It was very funny, but had lots of explanation of architecture that provided the right words to google.
Likely copyright over the photographs. Realistically, it's fair use since it's transformative and used for critique. Unfortunately, fair use laws only apply in the US if you have lots of lawyer money, so they don't really matter for normal folks.
I wonder if Zillow even has standing to sue over copyright because, as far as I can tell, Zillow gains the right to use agents' photos but there is no copyright transfer.
Maybe their agreement allows them to act as an "enforcement arm" of the agents?
What I find interesting is the choice to threatening them rather than just sending a DMCA takedown to Tumblr. Then again, the people (bots?) sending these emails may have no idea where it's hosted.
Zillow is almost certainly not granted an exclusive license. Listing photos are posted on many sites simultaneously.
For example, this is the first listing I clicked on in Zillow. Immediately found the same listing on Redfin with the same photo watermarked by a 3rd party.
I'm sure it's on various other MLS sites with photos as well. The real copyright holder is most likely the listing agent or possibly even the photographer, and chances are they have no desire to send C&D notices because "any publicity is good publicity."
Many states have SLAPP laws that allow frivolous claims like this to be quickly shot down. It still costs money to defend against them, but it's a lot cheaper and the victim can win it back. Unfortunately, there's no Federal equivalent, so all it takes to get around it would be to sue in Federal court. A Federal SLAPP law would really help.
Why wouldn't a judge throw this out as spurious if it clearly falls under fair use? (procedural question; not asserting that it does or does not meet fair use in this case).
While people here are making an argument that this is fair use, it's not quite so simple. You have to pay money to argue in front of a judge, and unless no counter-argument is provided, summary judgement is far from an inevitability.
> Why wouldn't a judge throw this out as spurious if it clearly falls under fair use?
If there is no colorable argument against fair use, then it would presumably be thrown out at summary judgment on a motion by the defendant.
But fair use analysis is rarely cut-and-dried, unless the fact pattern and context very closely mirrors something that has been previously litigated, and typically involves disputed questions of fact regarding impact, which would call for a trial.
The goal of the plaintiff's lawyer is to make dozens and dozens of claims, so that hopefully one of them sticks while the others are thrown out. This is the common practice.
I'm curious how just using a photo makes it "transformative". Those photos look straight up taken from one site and used on the next.
(I ask as someones who's flickr photos ended up on the front page of a local paper... and was mildly annoyed, but it was promoting an event I work on.. had they just asked....)
News organizations and documentaries pay lots of money to clear and use old stock news photos.
For one, she frequently marks up the photos with arrows and text, most of which is uniquely humorous while also being educational. No one would mistake her images for a promotional piece, or anything other than satire, comedy, and education.
Her use does not compete with the copyright holder's use -- no one is going to buy her house or fail to license the photos because of the blog. (They may decide not to buy the McMansion because of the blog, but trying to use copyright to silence critiques of a house won't fly in court).
That argument does not apply to your photo, or stock photos from an archive. The distinction matters in the eyes of the law.
Does "used in critique" apply? If the critique was of the photos themselves that would seem to be in the spirit, but the photos are just lifted in order to critique the house.
There's still a few hits going to Tumblr and fonts.gstatic.com , but all the actual content is safely inside IPFS and being served from in there. I'll let someone else rip the external calls out.
That CFAA threat is absolutely disgusting. Seriously, what is wrong with Zillow that they think this response is even remotely okay? When you combine that threat with a response they gave the Verge, this is an absolutely chilling example of corporate malfeasance:
“Zillow has a legal obligation to honor the agreements we make with our listing providers about how photos can be used,” Zillow tells The Verge in a statement. “We are asking this blogger to take down the photos that are protected by copyright rules, but we did not demand she shut down her blog and hope she can find a way to continue her work.”
You hope she can continue her work....from a fucking jail cell?
At the same time a $600M company would be worried about bad publicity at least somewhat.
So there are many ways of fighting them. Maybe not a direct "let's see who can outspend who over a lawsuit" but something along the lines of "Are you sure you want your name on Twitter as bullying a fun and popular blogger?" kinda fight.
Most of the photos McMansion Hell posts are copyrighted by someone else. That's why most of their posts have this disclaimer in the middle:
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Zillow might simply be suing for infringement, in which case the Fair Use would have to hold up in court (as it is an affirmative defense)
Agreed. Looking at the wikipedia definition of fair use, it's hard to say that this doesn't apply. But zillow is not a very nice company imo so I am unsurprised.
A few minutes ago it looked like the content had been deleted. Right now I tried twice; first time I got a Tumblr error page, the second time I got a redirect to an "Enter Password" field on a Tumblr blog page.
I'm going to suggest that the owner is migrating the domain to point at a Tumblr page. Right Now. Maybe his servers were having trouble with the increased interest?
That's hilarious. Zillow used someone else's images without consent to sell remodelling programs and thought that the subsequent lawsuit against them was "without merit" (quoting above link).
Bonus points to McMansionHell if they use only quotes from Zillow in their defence!
She might want to double check with Zillow. The Cease and Desist is signed 'Christopher Poole', which happens to be the real name of Moot of 4chan fame?
There is a Christopher Poole on Linkedin that is Corporate Counsel at Zillow Group. I'm not going to post a link here because it might be considered doxxing, but that person is real.
However, something about it really bothers me. There was an episode of 99% Invisible where the guest was talking about their McMansions blog and how it makes fun of these Horrid dwellings. The whole thing stank of classist elitism. The Wrong Type of people were getting the chance to design and build large houses, and of course they're applying their Bad Taste that's neither Genuine nor Authentic. They don't know about the traditions of Fine Architecture so of course they were doing it all wrong...how embarrassing for them!
Edit: It sounds like a lot of the way I interpreted this could come from my background as someone who's transitioned from lower working class to solidly middle class, and so I'm applying that defensively even though (thank God!) I don't live in an Embarassing McMansion. In fact I'm now considering the blog as more of an educational campaign where an expert in the field is railing against problematic and widespread trends in that field. It has less to do with transitions between class and more to do with the decline of an important field of engineering and design as something that people value. I think the word McMansions itself is a bit of a disservice to the purpose of the blog, with its "slobs vs snobs" / Beverly Hillbillies connotations.