7 ms·

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 archite

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".

jschwartzi 10y ago
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.
- laretluval 10y ago
  No, it is irreducibly a matter of taste.
  - ssalazar 10y ago
    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?
    - laretluval 10y ago
      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.
      - scribu 10y ago
        > Furthermore, I hypothesize that social groups develop [particular tastes] partially to foster in-group cohesion and out-group separation I'm pretty sure this hypothesis has substantial support from sociological studies. > which requires making the out-group seem bad. That's certainly a tactic that can be used, but it's not required. The article states that McMansions are ugly, which implies that their owners have bad taste, not that they're bad people.
  - edgyswingset 10y ago
    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.
    - mac01021 10y ago
      > 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"?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- noonespecial 10y ago
  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.
  - hellweaver666 10y ago
    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!)
  - leephillips 10y ago
    This is a brilliant analogy. That's just what they look like to me!
swombat 10y ago
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).
- carsongross 10y ago
  There is no way to argue someone out of the position that all aesthetic judgements are just equally valueless opinions. After all, that is just their equally valueless opinion.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  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.
aaronblohowiak 10y ago
>Those houses will probably not be suburban. Most of the examples of good architecture in the article are suburban.
Angostura 10y ago
Why are you limiting that to architectural design? Surely your conjecture could be extended to encompass all aspects of design, literature, art.
ssalazar 10y ago
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.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  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.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    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.
lazzlazzlazz 10y ago
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.
beefield 10y ago
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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#/media/File:The_Sydney_Opera_House_at_dusk.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#/media/File... Or then I just misunderstood the article completely.
- beefield 10y ago
  Or maybe this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim-bilbao-jan05.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim-bilbao-ja...
- cpr 10y ago
  No, you're right. The Opera House is a visual disaster.
- mcphage 10y ago
  I think you misunderstood the article completely.
  - beefield 10y ago
    Yes. I just noted following sentence: "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."
    - mcphage 10y ago
      Oh, good. I would have pasted it in but I'm on my phone and it's a pain in the butt :-)
- scribu 10y ago
  I think the picture you posted is of the side of the building. This would be the facade, which looks pretty balanced to me: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CgY4n5BsK9o/VafsZ-ccfcI/AAAAAAAAVSE/hwiiUfAjLnA/s1600/Sydney%2BOpera%2BHouse.JPG http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CgY4n5BsK9o/VafsZ-ccfcI/AAAAAAAAVS...
mseebach 10y ago
Here it is: "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 guess you can call it a kind of dog whistling.
elihu 10y ago
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.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  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.
tedmiston 10y ago
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.
Jean-Philipe 10y ago
> De gustibus non est disputandum. Actually, I disagree. 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. [1] pardon me if I used any terms the wrong way
dzmien 10y ago
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.

jschwartzi 10y ago

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.

laretluval 10y ago
No, it is irreducibly a matter of taste.
- ssalazar 10y ago
  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?
  - laretluval 10y ago
    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.
    - scribu 10y ago
      > Furthermore, I hypothesize that social groups develop [particular tastes] partially to foster in-group cohesion and out-group separation I'm pretty sure this hypothesis has substantial support from sociological studies. > which requires making the out-group seem bad. That's certainly a tactic that can be used, but it's not required. The article states that McMansions are ugly, which implies that their owners have bad taste, not that they're bad people.
- edgyswingset 10y ago
  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.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    > 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"?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
noonespecial 10y ago
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.
- hellweaver666 10y ago
  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!)
- leephillips 10y ago
  This is a brilliant analogy. That's just what they look like to me!

swombat 10y ago

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).

carsongross 10y ago
There is no way to argue someone out of the position that all aesthetic judgements are just equally valueless opinions. After all, that is just their equally valueless opinion.
mindcrime 10y ago
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.

aaronblohowiak 10y ago

>Those houses will probably not be suburban. Most of the examples of good architecture in the article are suburban.

Angostura 10y ago

Why are you limiting that to architectural design? Surely your conjecture could be extended to encompass all aspects of design, literature, art.

ssalazar 10y ago

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.

Houshalter 10y ago
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.
- mseebach 10y ago
  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.

lazzlazzlazz 10y ago

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.

beefield 10y ago

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#/media/File:The_Sydney_Opera_House_at_dusk.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#/media/File... Or then I just misunderstood the article completely.

beefield 10y ago
Or maybe this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim-bilbao-jan05.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guggenheim-bilbao-ja...
cpr 10y ago
No, you're right. The Opera House is a visual disaster.
mcphage 10y ago
I think you misunderstood the article completely.
- beefield 10y ago
  Yes. I just noted following sentence: "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."
  - mcphage 10y ago
    Oh, good. I would have pasted it in but I'm on my phone and it's a pain in the butt :-)
scribu 10y ago
I think the picture you posted is of the side of the building. This would be the facade, which looks pretty balanced to me: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CgY4n5BsK9o/VafsZ-ccfcI/AAAAAAAAVSE/hwiiUfAjLnA/s1600/Sydney%2BOpera%2BHouse.JPG http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CgY4n5BsK9o/VafsZ-ccfcI/AAAAAAAAVS...

mseebach 10y ago

Here it is: "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 guess you can call it a kind of dog whistling.

elihu 10y ago

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.

meddlepal 10y ago
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.

tedmiston 10y ago

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.

Jean-Philipe 10y ago

> De gustibus non est disputandum. Actually, I disagree. 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. [1] pardon me if I used any terms the wrong way

dzmien 10y ago

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.