23 ms·

The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simpl

The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions. My primary issue with McMansions specifically (beyond the fact that they lost the thread on western architecture, which should be blamed on the academy[2]) is that the materials and workmanship are terrible: ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship. The flip culture that the mortgage-debt bubble of the last 15 years created has exacerbated this issue to almost comical levels. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Old-Way-Seeing-Architecture-Magic/dp/039574010X https://www.amazon.com/Old-Way-Seeing-Architecture-Magic/dp/... [2] - https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312429142/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242... EDIT: After reading another post[a] of his, it is worth mentioning another chronic problem with modern (again chronological, not stylistic) building: the buildings often look like they are about to fall over. A particular pet peeve of mine is the flashing gap found at the base of many houses and buildings, which introduces a disconcerting negative gap right where a soothing, wide foundation should be. Visual insanity. [a] - http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148935246684/mcmansions-101-columns http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148935246684/mcmansions...

monk_e_boy 10y ago
I'd never heard of the tern McMansion before reading the article (I'm from the UK.) These poorly designed houses seem to have huge, vast amounts of land around them. In the UK plots are much smaller. Do you think cheap houses filling large plots is the issue?
- carsongross 10y ago
  It certainly doesn't help, but there are plenty of packed-in developments with similar issues. In fact I would say that the platonic American McMansion is on a fairly small plot of land and is built up absurdly close to the property line.
  - azernik 10y ago
    Similar to the concept of the Persian Palace in the areas I grew up - build quality was quite high in those cases, but as much of the lot as zoning rules allowed was used for two stories of house.
  - mturmon 10y ago
    Yes, in fact, I always assumed the derogatory nature of the term (McX for X = mansion) is a dig at wanting an impressive-looking facade, but not being able to pay for a larger plot of land or the architect to design that big facade.
    - codeddesign 10y ago
      Well of course it has to do with money, what you are referring to would increase the property cost by 2-3x. The same house but custom built home on an acre of land in the city in the u.s. east would run you $1million+, or have a prefab home on .3 acres (subdivision) for $400,000.
    - whoopdedo 10y ago
      To me, "McX" evokes the image of fast food. Something bland, unappealing, and one-size-fits-all that sacrifices quality for mass production. The later McMansions may have evolved as a response to the perception of them being generic by slapping on superficial and poorly designed accents. It doesn't change the low quality. Burger King isn't considered any better than McDonalds just because you can "have it your way". But mostly it's about the houses being unnecessarily large. Now that I think about it, the McDonalds metaphor here is probably meant to be that they're Super-Sized houses.
- nvarsj 10y ago
  There are plenty of "mcmansions" in the U.K. as well. Just take a look around some areas of Bucks, such as Beaconsfield, and other commuter belt areas. The plots of land are tiny as well. It really ruins the natural beauty of those areas.
  - hellweaver666 10y ago
    I used to live in a very small town in the Midlands, just off the M5. It's expanding rapidly because of the attraction of commuter types and all of the new properties they're building are as big as possible, on small plots of land exactly as this article describes (with the exception of the small 1/2 bed properties the developers are forced to build to meet government large-scale development regulations.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Depending on local zoning and "offset" rules, McMansions can be built on very small plots. Rows of McMansion-style houses have been built with very little offset by abusing rules intended for townhouses. In the cases I've seen, a single shared wall -- often just a token wall made of brick connecting two structures on the outside -- allows the McMansions to qualify as a multiple-family dwellings and obtain higher density, dramatically increasing profit.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    'Dwellings' and 'units', two words I often see in articles about housing in the United States, are very grim and cold ways to refer to people's homes.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Oh c'mon. Everything's "product". . . . ... yes, I'm agreeing with you. And cringing as I remember a visit to a friend who'd taken up wine cellaring some years back, describing various vintages as "product". You'll hear that in media, app design, clothing, food, restuarants. Pretty much everything. MBA-speak gone mad.
    - derefr 10y ago
      A "unit" isn't necessarily residential. There are mixed-use "units" on the market that might be used as homes or as offices/shops. A "dwelling" mostly comes up in the contexts of censuses and elections. One census form needs to be filed per "dwelling", and should include information about everyone who has dwelled there for the majority of the last year. This includes, for example, people just crashing on the couch, even if they're just on vacation and "live" somewhere else. For another example, this includes homeless shelters: the people staying in them can say the shelter is their "dwelling", though they're unlikely to feel like it's their home. (Also, a "dwelling" is not necessarily residentially zoned. You might be dwelling in a storage unit. It's not necessarily legal, but the government still needs a word to describe "places people live" that includes such cases.) There's also "residence", which is just "dwelling" in fancier clothes, though usually implies residential zoning.
- morganvachon 10y ago
  The connotation I've always had for "McMansion" is the object of a middle or upper-middle class obsession with a poorly built, absurdly huge, cookie cutter house that looks just like every other house on its street, packed together on 1/4 acre or smaller lots with no lawn, yet selling for upwards of $500,000. Not that I'm one to be snobbish, since I live in an old farmhouse that needs two issues fixed for every one that I tackle. But I'm happy that my only neighbors are a nice old lady in another little farmhouse, a church, and the animals that live in the woods behind me. It's not much to look at but it's within my means and in fact, my mortgage payment (tax and insurance escrow included) is less than a car payment for most of my peers. I'm happy that I don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and I can focus on my family's needs and my own hobbies instead.
  - kedean 10y ago
    Slight correction (that seems to be divisive on the issue), McMansions are generally characterized by not being cookie cutter. A neighborhood full of mcmansion's does have the distinguishing feature that each one is different, but they will all still feel the same. It's the result of each owner wanting something more unique and fancier than everyone else, and just smashing stuff on to do it.
    - morganvachon 10y ago
      Sorry, by "cookie cutter" I mean it's blatantly obvious they are all (within a neighborhood) designed and built by the same property developer. Around here, a developer will buy land for a subdivision, then hire one architectural firm and one construction crew to build 200+ houses all to the same general specs and overall theme. Yes, there are variations, but it's variations on the same theme.
      - nsxwolf 10y ago
        I call that "tract housing". That describes my house. It's the same 6 floor plans with a few options, with the occasional custom job here and there.
- shermozle 10y ago
  The British equivalent is the estates of hideous mock Tudor and cod Georgian houses on the outskirts of British cities. Same concept done on less land: poor design, poor construction.
- RobertKerans 10y ago
  Somewhat different socioeconomic strata maybe [?], but would be worthwhile comparing to Barratt-style stamped-out suburban estate houses in the uk. UK doesn't have the spare land that the US has, so generally can't do McMansion-style construction (the stuff that looks similar is normally on estates populated by footballers et al - eg Gosforth Park near Newcastle, there's a similar estate near every major city, but the eye-bleeding prices suggest better quality builds, if a similarly awful visual side to the architecture)
- wnmurphy 10y ago
  In my mind, a McMansion's defining characteristic has always been that it's far too much house on far too small of a plot. It has pretenses of elegance that are betrayed by a gaudy claustrophobia. It's like loudly proclaiming "LOOK HOW MUCH HOUSE I HAVE," while generally sticking out like a sore thumb from the other houses in the neighborhood.
  - ghostly_s 10y ago
    They are far too much house on far too small a budget. They are about maximizing those wealth-connotating features of a home which are comprehensible to the upper-middle-class laypeople who buy them: raw square footage, bed/bath count, "classical" architectural features (poorly executed, because the intent is to check "expensive-looking" boxes, not actually to execute a quality building). This same style is very consistently-expressed at differing scales in different housing markets across the U.S.; the lot size varies with land prices but the ethos is the same.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Example of this phenomenon: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html
  - prawn 10y ago
    Is that second paragraph unfair though? You buy/own a block and build a new house. You know there are a lot of useful things you need or might need in the future (garaging, bedrooms for future kids, etc) but your constraints of land size and budget remain so the result is often the efficient answer.
  - mcv 10y ago
    In what way can a house be too large for a plot? If it fits, it fits, right? A big garden is nice, but plenty of houses make do without a garden.
- asveikau 10y ago
  Since American TV and movies are popular, here are some pop culture examples I can think of to get a feel for the style: * The house that Tony Soprano lives in. * In the movie Juno, the title character drives though a sparse, affluent suburban development to meet prospective adoptive parents. The theme is unusually large, new construction, details that look out of place. They are often built on roads with large stretches of them. Although in the town where I grew up, they sprouted up very gradually over ~20 years as remodels/teardowns of modest 1950s homes.
wodenokoto 10y ago
> (beyond the fact that they lost the thread on western architecture, which should be blamed on the academy[2]) Can you explain what that means? I'm assuming the linked book is to back up your claim, and not to explain it.
- carsongross 10y ago
  I highly recommend the book (it is a quick and funny read) but to give you my short version: post WW2, academic architecture was taken over by anti-traditionalists, and purity spiraling lead to what Wolfe called "The Yale Box". People like Christopher Alexander[1] were ignored or shouted down as fascist, the craftsmen who were able to build the old way all died apprenticeless, and here we are. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028 https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Ale...
mirimir 10y ago
> ... the materials and workmanship are terrible ... They'll be easy to take down when farmland is needed again :) Also, one can cut a new door (or loading dock) with just a utility knife ;)
- Spooky23 10y ago
  A few years ago in my area, some kid was chased by the local sheriff for driving an ATV on he road. He drove into some subdivision of $500k homes, wiped out, and the ATV rolled into the side of a house that had no windows. He impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off!
  - dpark 10y ago
    > impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off! I don't believe this story can possibly be true. No one glues on plywood, sheeting, or siding. If you glued on the plywood sheathing, you'd have to nail it in place while the glue set anyway. Ditto for the siding. I guess you could glue the sheeting in place, but that's not structural so it wouldn't fall off as you describe here. Gluing the sheeting would probably cost considerably more than just stapling it in place, which is what actually happens. If this story is true, the builder is doubly stupid, first for building a house this way, and second for spending more money to do so.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      It was probably a decade ago, so the details may be foggy. But I recall shaking my head at the widely spaced studs that were very visible.
      - dpark 10y ago
        Fair enough. I can believe that a poorly built wall fell apart, even if all-glue construction of hard to imagine. There are some shady builders out there. Just a side note, widely spaced studs isn't necessarily a bad thing. My house is built 24 on center. Leaves more room for insulation on exterior walls, and you don't actually need studs every 16 for strength. I believe there are additional code requirements for houses built with studs spaced 24 on center, though I don't know the details.
bsder 10y ago
> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions. And this is because most "modern" houses are about cramming the checklist of real-estate criteria (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2+ car garage, etc.) into a building that can then be stamped out the maximal number of times in the minimal amount of land area. This is what happens when the value of land becomes the overriding factor. In addition, architects derided the houses built during the post-war era, too. The difference was that the post WWII houses didn't have homeowner's associations enforcing "standards" so they evolved over time to become the "quaint" neghborhoods that everybody so loves today.
- mseebach 10y ago
  The McMansions showcased in the articles are well beyond cramming anything (they are huge) and does not look like the kind of house where the owners would appreciate having 12 other houses looking the same as neighbours. Indeed, as soon as you're stamping out houses, you'll want to hire a real architect to make them appealing to as many people as possible, which means balanced, proportioned and symmetric (if unoriginal, but that's not what the article is about). If anything, the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    I used to know an architect who designed stamped-out houses. According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof. > the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else. It's easy - and fun - to scoff, but I think a lot of buyers and owners genuinely don't notice the difference between crapchitecture and something with real style and flair. Also applies at the high end. Take a virtual drive around houses for sale in Beverley Hills. There are some real kitsch classics available - including some real architect-designed modernism-in-a-box neo-kitsch stand-outs.
ssalazar 10y ago
> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions. Postmodern architecture is surely a controversial topic on its own, but I believe the issues with McMansions raised in the article is their amateurish mimicry of canonical architectural styles. They throw in a column here, a bay window there, without understanding the why or how of these design features in context. As someone else in the thread mentioned, its like a bad machine learning-generated version of the traditional architectural styles.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Would the amaturish aping of a high modernist style be better? The aping of traditional style is the most forgivable aspect of McMansions. At least they are trying to connect with the timeless way of building, however incompetently.
  - jonnathanson 10y ago
    Bad modernist architecture often places style over substance. Such houses subordinate the livability and logic of interior spaces to the needs of the exterior's aesthetic. So you end up with a "cool looking" house on the outside, whose living spaces are poorly laid out, disjointed, inharmoniously transitioned, or simply make odd choices out of necessity.
  - hx87 10y ago
    Trying and failing horribly, which is arguably worse than not trying at all. It's sad, really, because aping traditional style isn't difficult at all unless you're trying to tack on as much bling as possible. There are plenty of simple, elegant houses from the 1800s and early 1900s in every city in the United States that serve as excellent templates.
- wbillingsley 10y ago
  McMansions seem rather well designed for their brief (at least compared to smaller modern suburban homes). Pseudo-principles such as "balance" don't actually matter all that much -- people spend remarkably little time in the position those images are taken from. The principles that might suit, say, Chatsworth House laid out in picturesque English countryside (which really can be seen in all its glory from its surrounds) do not apply to a large suburban home on a relatively small plot. Most of the time, the observer is not far enough back to see the whole house at all. They are in a garden, not very far outside one of the doors, or inside the house. What many McManions do quite well is that if you travel around the house a short distance outside it (say 5m from the wall), it shows you a variety of interesting partial aspects. You can never see the whole thing but if it's well done then wherever you are in the garden will look fairly pleasant, and will feel slightly larger as the lack of continuity means you don't have a visual reminder of how short a distance you have travelled. And meanwhile, the many different secondary masses means you have different aspects from inside the house onto a small set of grounds. Feeling bigger and more luxurious than it is, or than it costs, close-up (rather than looking glorious when seen from a good distance) is the brief of a McMansion.
bradleyjg 10y ago
I'm not an architectural expert, not even an interested amateur really. But it strikes me that there's some tension between the beauty of the exterior and the usability of the interior. Take giant glass boxes, I know some people think they are wonderful, I think they are quite ugly. But an office where one entire wall is a window and light can flood in is a much more pleasant working environment than an office in a beautiful neo-gothic masterpiece with tiny windows.
- carsongross 10y ago
  Glass walls are rarely that enjoyable, even on the inside. You need to set the glass back from direct sun to get indirect light or you end up with a solar oven, and a huge amount of air conditioning to deal with it. They do photograph well and win you architectural awards, however.
  - nl 10y ago
    There are solutions to this, though. Shading glass surfaces and double glazing work well.
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      Wouldn't double-glazing just make the greenhouse problem worse?
      - robin_reala 10y ago
        Not necessarily - you can get low emissivity windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emissivity#Low-emissivity_windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emissivity#Low-emissivity_...
      - hx87 10y ago
        It wouldn't, since each layer of glazing reduces the amount of solar energy that arrives inside the window, and energy loss from buildings is an overwhelmingly convective and conductive phenomenon.
dclowd9901 10y ago
Right there with you; I could give or take the architecture (though I am a huge fan of '50s era modern and '20s era craftsman), I like homes that we well-built. It's funny, but it seems like the majority of these early 19th century Sears specials that are all over Portland are better built than any modern home.
theoh 10y ago
Le Corbusier used controlling lines in some of his houses. It's important to appreciate that good modern architecture grew out of an established architectural culture. Many principles were retained. It's not comparable to dada in art or punk in music, where the foundations of the activity were thrown away. I'm an architectural historian and all I can say is that feeling is important. Rules are not so important, even the rule implied by the controlling lines technique. So I don't really endorse that tumblr's approach. I love the way Andrés Duany (famous architecturally conservative guy, "new Urbanist") says he "adores" Le Corbusier's work: "I can't help it." You KNOW he's telling the truth, that he has a feeling for architecture.
PaulHoule 10y ago
One classic case of this is that the "landscaping" at these developments almost always consists of bagged and burlapped shrubs that are planted without removing the burlap. The roots usually don't penetrate the burlap so after two years you can walk around this kind of place and see all the shrubs are yellow and dead. Big picture I disagree with the general outlook of the article. If we've learned anything about architecture through anti-architects such as Jacobs and Venturi it is that buildings are meant for people to live and work in and not to prove a point about aesthetics or aggrandize the architect or whoever hired the architect. There are plenty of buildings that have "balance" and "rhythm" but the roof leaks or there are spots that get to 105F when the sun shines in. McMansions fail because they are designed to be impressive for the first fifteen minutes when they are showing the house rather than to be effective and economical "machines for living" as Buckminister Fuller would have put it.
ashark 10y ago
> ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship. I lived for a couple years in a slowly-deteriorating house on the national historic registry. Upper middle class when it was built in 1907. Big by the standards of the time, but not huge. You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house. And despite never having had air conditioning and having very bad heating, every joint in that house was so tight you couldn't fit paper between the boards. Beautiful solid wood doors throughout, which would cost a fortune to put in a new house.
- rsync 10y ago
  "You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house." This meme about old wood and big wood and scarcity, etc., is oft-repeated, but I find it's not true. Granted, there are some very specific woods that you can't buy new (old growth redwood, etc.) but you will have no problem at all picking up the phone and buying kiln-dried 12x12 beams, 24 feet long, etc., etc. ... no problem at all. And they're not really that expensive, either. We had to buy a lot of 8x12 KD doug fir beams and 8x12 KD cedar beams for a barn renovation this past year and it wasn't budget-busting.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Faster growing trees make worse wood. Tree farms flood the market with cheap wood that's vastly worse from a materials perspective than old growth. A 24 foot long beam of high quality wood takes ~300 years to grow, 'nobody has time for that'. At the high end ebony costs ~150x the cost of pine, though there are cheaper related species. It's also dense enough to sink in water. Mostly you find Gaboon ebony which while pricey is mostly comparable. http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon.html http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon....
at-fates-hands 10y ago
How much of this is the architect giving a well thought out design and the client simply saying, "No, I want it to look this way." and the architect simply gives in and does it the way the client wants because of the amount of money involved. Usually as a web developer, I can use the old adage, "Well, if we do it your way, it's going to cost X times more time and money." but when the client has unlimited resources, I would think it would be hard to simply dismiss them with this approach. When I was in school for architecture, I only had one professor who gave us a reality check on this scenario and it was pretty humbling for a few of my fellow students to imagine a client would think they knew better than you with all your schooling and deep knowledge.

monk_e_boy 10y ago

I'd never heard of the tern McMansion before reading the article (I'm from the UK.) These poorly designed houses seem to have huge, vast amounts of land around them. In the UK plots are much smaller. Do you think cheap houses filling large plots is the issue?

carsongross 10y ago
It certainly doesn't help, but there are plenty of packed-in developments with similar issues. In fact I would say that the platonic American McMansion is on a fairly small plot of land and is built up absurdly close to the property line.
- azernik 10y ago
  Similar to the concept of the Persian Palace in the areas I grew up - build quality was quite high in those cases, but as much of the lot as zoning rules allowed was used for two stories of house.
- mturmon 10y ago
  Yes, in fact, I always assumed the derogatory nature of the term (McX for X = mansion) is a dig at wanting an impressive-looking facade, but not being able to pay for a larger plot of land or the architect to design that big facade.
  - codeddesign 10y ago
    Well of course it has to do with money, what you are referring to would increase the property cost by 2-3x. The same house but custom built home on an acre of land in the city in the u.s. east would run you $1million+, or have a prefab home on .3 acres (subdivision) for $400,000.
  - whoopdedo 10y ago
    To me, "McX" evokes the image of fast food. Something bland, unappealing, and one-size-fits-all that sacrifices quality for mass production. The later McMansions may have evolved as a response to the perception of them being generic by slapping on superficial and poorly designed accents. It doesn't change the low quality. Burger King isn't considered any better than McDonalds just because you can "have it your way". But mostly it's about the houses being unnecessarily large. Now that I think about it, the McDonalds metaphor here is probably meant to be that they're Super-Sized houses.
nvarsj 10y ago
There are plenty of "mcmansions" in the U.K. as well. Just take a look around some areas of Bucks, such as Beaconsfield, and other commuter belt areas. The plots of land are tiny as well. It really ruins the natural beauty of those areas.
- hellweaver666 10y ago
  I used to live in a very small town in the Midlands, just off the M5. It's expanding rapidly because of the attraction of commuter types and all of the new properties they're building are as big as possible, on small plots of land exactly as this article describes (with the exception of the small 1/2 bed properties the developers are forced to build to meet government large-scale development regulations.
kabdib 10y ago
Depending on local zoning and "offset" rules, McMansions can be built on very small plots. Rows of McMansion-style houses have been built with very little offset by abusing rules intended for townhouses. In the cases I've seen, a single shared wall -- often just a token wall made of brick connecting two structures on the outside -- allows the McMansions to qualify as a multiple-family dwellings and obtain higher density, dramatically increasing profit.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  'Dwellings' and 'units', two words I often see in articles about housing in the United States, are very grim and cold ways to refer to people's homes.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Oh c'mon. Everything's "product". . . . ... yes, I'm agreeing with you. And cringing as I remember a visit to a friend who'd taken up wine cellaring some years back, describing various vintages as "product". You'll hear that in media, app design, clothing, food, restuarants. Pretty much everything. MBA-speak gone mad.
  - derefr 10y ago
    A "unit" isn't necessarily residential. There are mixed-use "units" on the market that might be used as homes or as offices/shops. A "dwelling" mostly comes up in the contexts of censuses and elections. One census form needs to be filed per "dwelling", and should include information about everyone who has dwelled there for the majority of the last year. This includes, for example, people just crashing on the couch, even if they're just on vacation and "live" somewhere else. For another example, this includes homeless shelters: the people staying in them can say the shelter is their "dwelling", though they're unlikely to feel like it's their home. (Also, a "dwelling" is not necessarily residentially zoned. You might be dwelling in a storage unit. It's not necessarily legal, but the government still needs a word to describe "places people live" that includes such cases.) There's also "residence", which is just "dwelling" in fancier clothes, though usually implies residential zoning.
morganvachon 10y ago
The connotation I've always had for "McMansion" is the object of a middle or upper-middle class obsession with a poorly built, absurdly huge, cookie cutter house that looks just like every other house on its street, packed together on 1/4 acre or smaller lots with no lawn, yet selling for upwards of $500,000. Not that I'm one to be snobbish, since I live in an old farmhouse that needs two issues fixed for every one that I tackle. But I'm happy that my only neighbors are a nice old lady in another little farmhouse, a church, and the animals that live in the woods behind me. It's not much to look at but it's within my means and in fact, my mortgage payment (tax and insurance escrow included) is less than a car payment for most of my peers. I'm happy that I don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and I can focus on my family's needs and my own hobbies instead.
- kedean 10y ago
  Slight correction (that seems to be divisive on the issue), McMansions are generally characterized by not being cookie cutter. A neighborhood full of mcmansion's does have the distinguishing feature that each one is different, but they will all still feel the same. It's the result of each owner wanting something more unique and fancier than everyone else, and just smashing stuff on to do it.
  - morganvachon 10y ago
    Sorry, by "cookie cutter" I mean it's blatantly obvious they are all (within a neighborhood) designed and built by the same property developer. Around here, a developer will buy land for a subdivision, then hire one architectural firm and one construction crew to build 200+ houses all to the same general specs and overall theme. Yes, there are variations, but it's variations on the same theme.
    - nsxwolf 10y ago
      I call that "tract housing". That describes my house. It's the same 6 floor plans with a few options, with the occasional custom job here and there.
shermozle 10y ago
The British equivalent is the estates of hideous mock Tudor and cod Georgian houses on the outskirts of British cities. Same concept done on less land: poor design, poor construction.
RobertKerans 10y ago
Somewhat different socioeconomic strata maybe [?], but would be worthwhile comparing to Barratt-style stamped-out suburban estate houses in the uk. UK doesn't have the spare land that the US has, so generally can't do McMansion-style construction (the stuff that looks similar is normally on estates populated by footballers et al - eg Gosforth Park near Newcastle, there's a similar estate near every major city, but the eye-bleeding prices suggest better quality builds, if a similarly awful visual side to the architecture)
wnmurphy 10y ago
In my mind, a McMansion's defining characteristic has always been that it's far too much house on far too small of a plot. It has pretenses of elegance that are betrayed by a gaudy claustrophobia. It's like loudly proclaiming "LOOK HOW MUCH HOUSE I HAVE," while generally sticking out like a sore thumb from the other houses in the neighborhood.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  They are far too much house on far too small a budget. They are about maximizing those wealth-connotating features of a home which are comprehensible to the upper-middle-class laypeople who buy them: raw square footage, bed/bath count, "classical" architectural features (poorly executed, because the intent is to check "expensive-looking" boxes, not actually to execute a quality building). This same style is very consistently-expressed at differing scales in different housing markets across the U.S.; the lot size varies with land prices but the ethos is the same.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Example of this phenomenon: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html
- prawn 10y ago
  Is that second paragraph unfair though? You buy/own a block and build a new house. You know there are a lot of useful things you need or might need in the future (garaging, bedrooms for future kids, etc) but your constraints of land size and budget remain so the result is often the efficient answer.
- mcv 10y ago
  In what way can a house be too large for a plot? If it fits, it fits, right? A big garden is nice, but plenty of houses make do without a garden.
asveikau 10y ago
Since American TV and movies are popular, here are some pop culture examples I can think of to get a feel for the style: * The house that Tony Soprano lives in. * In the movie Juno, the title character drives though a sparse, affluent suburban development to meet prospective adoptive parents. The theme is unusually large, new construction, details that look out of place. They are often built on roads with large stretches of them. Although in the town where I grew up, they sprouted up very gradually over ~20 years as remodels/teardowns of modest 1950s homes.

wodenokoto 10y ago

> (beyond the fact that they lost the thread on western architecture, which should be blamed on the academy[2]) Can you explain what that means? I'm assuming the linked book is to back up your claim, and not to explain it.

carsongross 10y ago
I highly recommend the book (it is a quick and funny read) but to give you my short version: post WW2, academic architecture was taken over by anti-traditionalists, and purity spiraling lead to what Wolfe called "The Yale Box". People like Christopher Alexander[1] were ignored or shouted down as fascist, the craftsmen who were able to build the old way all died apprenticeless, and here we are. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028 https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Ale...

mirimir 10y ago

> ... the materials and workmanship are terrible ... They'll be easy to take down when farmland is needed again :) Also, one can cut a new door (or loading dock) with just a utility knife ;)

Spooky23 10y ago
A few years ago in my area, some kid was chased by the local sheriff for driving an ATV on he road. He drove into some subdivision of $500k homes, wiped out, and the ATV rolled into the side of a house that had no windows. He impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off!
- dpark 10y ago
  > impact disrupted the glue and be whole side of the house (plywood, sheeting, siding) just fell off! I don't believe this story can possibly be true. No one glues on plywood, sheeting, or siding. If you glued on the plywood sheathing, you'd have to nail it in place while the glue set anyway. Ditto for the siding. I guess you could glue the sheeting in place, but that's not structural so it wouldn't fall off as you describe here. Gluing the sheeting would probably cost considerably more than just stapling it in place, which is what actually happens. If this story is true, the builder is doubly stupid, first for building a house this way, and second for spending more money to do so.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    It was probably a decade ago, so the details may be foggy. But I recall shaking my head at the widely spaced studs that were very visible.
    - dpark 10y ago
      Fair enough. I can believe that a poorly built wall fell apart, even if all-glue construction of hard to imagine. There are some shady builders out there. Just a side note, widely spaced studs isn't necessarily a bad thing. My house is built 24 on center. Leaves more room for insulation on exterior walls, and you don't actually need studs every 16 for strength. I believe there are additional code requirements for houses built with studs spaced 24 on center, though I don't know the details.

bsder 10y ago

> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions. And this is because most "modern" houses are about cramming the checklist of real-estate criteria (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2+ car garage, etc.) into a building that can then be stamped out the maximal number of times in the minimal amount of land area. This is what happens when the value of land becomes the overriding factor. In addition, architects derided the houses built during the post-war era, too. The difference was that the post WWII houses didn't have homeowner's associations enforcing "standards" so they evolved over time to become the "quaint" neghborhoods that everybody so loves today.

mseebach 10y ago
The McMansions showcased in the articles are well beyond cramming anything (they are huge) and does not look like the kind of house where the owners would appreciate having 12 other houses looking the same as neighbours. Indeed, as soon as you're stamping out houses, you'll want to hire a real architect to make them appealing to as many people as possible, which means balanced, proportioned and symmetric (if unoriginal, but that's not what the article is about). If anything, the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  I used to know an architect who designed stamped-out houses. According to her, she'd present an aesthetic design, and then the building corporation would trim away all the better elements to cut costs, leaving an ugly vaguely historical-looking box with windows, a door, and a roof. > the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else. It's easy - and fun - to scoff, but I think a lot of buyers and owners genuinely don't notice the difference between crapchitecture and something with real style and flair. Also applies at the high end. Take a virtual drive around houses for sale in Beverley Hills. There are some real kitsch classics available - including some real architect-designed modernism-in-a-box neo-kitsch stand-outs.

ssalazar 10y ago

> The lack of balance, proportion, controlling lines[1] and symmetry are all bad aspects of nearly all modern (in the chronological sense) architecture, not simply McMansions. Postmodern architecture is surely a controversial topic on its own, but I believe the issues with McMansions raised in the article is their amateurish mimicry of canonical architectural styles. They throw in a column here, a bay window there, without understanding the why or how of these design features in context. As someone else in the thread mentioned, its like a bad machine learning-generated version of the traditional architectural styles.

carsongross 10y ago
Would the amaturish aping of a high modernist style be better? The aping of traditional style is the most forgivable aspect of McMansions. At least they are trying to connect with the timeless way of building, however incompetently.
- jonnathanson 10y ago
  Bad modernist architecture often places style over substance. Such houses subordinate the livability and logic of interior spaces to the needs of the exterior's aesthetic. So you end up with a "cool looking" house on the outside, whose living spaces are poorly laid out, disjointed, inharmoniously transitioned, or simply make odd choices out of necessity.
- hx87 10y ago
  Trying and failing horribly, which is arguably worse than not trying at all. It's sad, really, because aping traditional style isn't difficult at all unless you're trying to tack on as much bling as possible. There are plenty of simple, elegant houses from the 1800s and early 1900s in every city in the United States that serve as excellent templates.
wbillingsley 10y ago
McMansions seem rather well designed for their brief (at least compared to smaller modern suburban homes). Pseudo-principles such as "balance" don't actually matter all that much -- people spend remarkably little time in the position those images are taken from. The principles that might suit, say, Chatsworth House laid out in picturesque English countryside (which really can be seen in all its glory from its surrounds) do not apply to a large suburban home on a relatively small plot. Most of the time, the observer is not far enough back to see the whole house at all. They are in a garden, not very far outside one of the doors, or inside the house. What many McManions do quite well is that if you travel around the house a short distance outside it (say 5m from the wall), it shows you a variety of interesting partial aspects. You can never see the whole thing but if it's well done then wherever you are in the garden will look fairly pleasant, and will feel slightly larger as the lack of continuity means you don't have a visual reminder of how short a distance you have travelled. And meanwhile, the many different secondary masses means you have different aspects from inside the house onto a small set of grounds. Feeling bigger and more luxurious than it is, or than it costs, close-up (rather than looking glorious when seen from a good distance) is the brief of a McMansion.

bradleyjg 10y ago

I'm not an architectural expert, not even an interested amateur really. But it strikes me that there's some tension between the beauty of the exterior and the usability of the interior. Take giant glass boxes, I know some people think they are wonderful, I think they are quite ugly. But an office where one entire wall is a window and light can flood in is a much more pleasant working environment than an office in a beautiful neo-gothic masterpiece with tiny windows.

carsongross 10y ago
Glass walls are rarely that enjoyable, even on the inside. You need to set the glass back from direct sun to get indirect light or you end up with a solar oven, and a huge amount of air conditioning to deal with it. They do photograph well and win you architectural awards, however.
- nl 10y ago
  There are solutions to this, though. Shading glass surfaces and double glazing work well.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Wouldn't double-glazing just make the greenhouse problem worse?
    - robin_reala 10y ago
      Not necessarily - you can get low emissivity windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emissivity#Low-emissivity_windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emissivity#Low-emissivity_...
    - hx87 10y ago
      It wouldn't, since each layer of glazing reduces the amount of solar energy that arrives inside the window, and energy loss from buildings is an overwhelmingly convective and conductive phenomenon.

dclowd9901 10y ago

Right there with you; I could give or take the architecture (though I am a huge fan of '50s era modern and '20s era craftsman), I like homes that we well-built. It's funny, but it seems like the majority of these early 19th century Sears specials that are all over Portland are better built than any modern home.

theoh 10y ago

Le Corbusier used controlling lines in some of his houses. It's important to appreciate that good modern architecture grew out of an established architectural culture. Many principles were retained. It's not comparable to dada in art or punk in music, where the foundations of the activity were thrown away. I'm an architectural historian and all I can say is that feeling is important. Rules are not so important, even the rule implied by the controlling lines technique. So I don't really endorse that tumblr's approach. I love the way Andrés Duany (famous architecturally conservative guy, "new Urbanist") says he "adores" Le Corbusier's work: "I can't help it." You KNOW he's telling the truth, that he has a feeling for architecture.

PaulHoule 10y ago

One classic case of this is that the "landscaping" at these developments almost always consists of bagged and burlapped shrubs that are planted without removing the burlap. The roots usually don't penetrate the burlap so after two years you can walk around this kind of place and see all the shrubs are yellow and dead. Big picture I disagree with the general outlook of the article. If we've learned anything about architecture through anti-architects such as Jacobs and Venturi it is that buildings are meant for people to live and work in and not to prove a point about aesthetics or aggrandize the architect or whoever hired the architect. There are plenty of buildings that have "balance" and "rhythm" but the roof leaks or there are spots that get to 105F when the sun shines in. McMansions fail because they are designed to be impressive for the first fifteen minutes when they are showing the house rather than to be effective and economical "machines for living" as Buckminister Fuller would have put it.

ashark 10y ago

> ugly gaps, quick to stain stuccos and metals, slapdash construction and very little craftsmanship. I lived for a couple years in a slowly-deteriorating house on the national historic registry. Upper middle class when it was built in 1907. Big by the standards of the time, but not huge. You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house. And despite never having had air conditioning and having very bad heating, every joint in that house was so tight you couldn't fit paper between the boards. Beautiful solid wood doors throughout, which would cost a fortune to put in a new house.

rsync 10y ago
"You'd have to be very wealthy to afford the lumber quality (even the lumber under the floors and inside walls was excellent by modern standards) and the woodwork in that house these days, assuming you could even find such without simply ripping it out of an older house." This meme about old wood and big wood and scarcity, etc., is oft-repeated, but I find it's not true. Granted, there are some very specific woods that you can't buy new (old growth redwood, etc.) but you will have no problem at all picking up the phone and buying kiln-dried 12x12 beams, 24 feet long, etc., etc. ... no problem at all. And they're not really that expensive, either. We had to buy a lot of 8x12 KD doug fir beams and 8x12 KD cedar beams for a barn renovation this past year and it wasn't budget-busting.
- Retric 10y ago
  Faster growing trees make worse wood. Tree farms flood the market with cheap wood that's vastly worse from a materials perspective than old growth. A 24 foot long beam of high quality wood takes ~300 years to grow, 'nobody has time for that'. At the high end ebony costs ~150x the cost of pine, though there are cheaper related species. It's also dense enough to sink in water. Mostly you find Gaboon ebony which while pricey is mostly comparable. http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon.html http://www.woodworkerssource.com/shop/category/ebony_gaboon....

at-fates-hands 10y ago

How much of this is the architect giving a well thought out design and the client simply saying, "No, I want it to look this way." and the architect simply gives in and does it the way the client wants because of the amount of money involved. Usually as a web developer, I can use the old adage, "Well, if we do it your way, it's going to cost X times more time and money." but when the client has unlimited resources, I would think it would be hard to simply dismiss them with this approach. When I was in school for architecture, I only had one professor who gave us a reality check on this scenario and it was pretty humbling for a few of my fellow students to imagine a client would think they knew better than you with all your schooling and deep knowledge.