5 ms·

I'm not sold on this. Some of the criticisms levied seem valid, and there's /some/ sensibility to the scale -- but the whole thing smacks of a post-hoc attempt

I'm not sold on this. Some of the criticisms levied seem valid, and there's /some/ sensibility to the scale -- but the whole thing smacks of a post-hoc attempt to define why McMansions are in poor taste in non-socioeconomic terms. It's sufficient to just say "McMansions are tremendously wasteful symptoms of American decadence" -- but that might be psychologically hard if you've spent years in architecture school learning how to design status symbols for the upper classes.

danharaj 10y ago
Architecture has rules of composition like any other craft. McMansions shit all over them. There's nothing post-hoc about calling them shit. A McMansion only look sensible and aesthetically pleasing if you try to imagine one as a well designed house covered in tumors. The fact that they are an example of American decadence stems from the fact that they are cargo culting opulence.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  "McMansions shit all over them." How is it any of your business? The people who buy them like them. Their tastes are not yours, and they're the ones paying the bills.
  - 542458 10y ago
    There's an entire post on how, aesthetics aside, mcmansion-style houses are rife with problems. The tl;dr of it is that they're a very bad investment, massively energy and co2 inefficient, maintenance intensive (due to large size and low-quality materials) and often have badly cut corners. There's also a final point about the size being isolating, but that's a bit more subjective IMHO. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
  - danharaj 10y ago
    It's my business in the sense that I can have an opinion about how ugly their house is and I do. There's nothing more to it. It's not like I think McMansions should be illegal because they are ugly, although I don't see what's fundamentally unjust about a community not wanting eyesores in their neighborhoods if enough McMansion haters congregated in one place. There are other reasons why they suck that a sibling comment mentioned. I don't believe just because aesthetics involve personal preferences that we can't discuss them and come to common conclusions regarding the good and the bad. Aesthetics are very important to me as a programmer, for example, and I am an unhappy programmer if I cannot write pretty code for whatever reason. I certainly wouldn't want to be a programmer if I couldn't write pretty code as often as I do. Crunch time hurts me twice: the extra work, but also the resource constraints that mean I have to satisfy beauty in code. If I didn't care about what is beautiful and what is not, I would feel like a very flat person. If that makes me an asshole then, well, I mean I wouldn't disagree.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  > cargo culting opulence Well, that's the thing, right? They're a middle-class person's idea of what a rich person's house looks like, built on an upper-middle-class budget. It's basically the American ideology as simulacrum.
  - wott 10y ago
    The budget can explain the fake materials, but not the bad taste. Keep the same materials, add bit of simplicity (i.e. get rid of some of the monstrosities) and the result would be both better-looking and cheaper. And more classy, compared to these archetypes of American vulgarity.
    - billmalarky 10y ago
      The budget explains the bad taste because a expert professional designer was not involved in the process. The budget is allocated mainly towards size. Build quality and design come second (or third).
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        ...expert professional designer was not involved in the process. Haha they might not be experts but we can be sure that the architects of every one of those got paid.
stephen_g 10y ago
I'm not a architect (and I'm not in/from the US) but it seems pretty spot-on to me... Maybe I'a just a snob, but I have always found it sort of comical that people in the US build houses that are (in my opinion) so terribly ugly imitations/mishmashes of what would otherwise be nice styles.. It is very subjective, but most of the points match up well with what I find ugly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 10y ago
I'm not convinced that's really the point; some of the non-McMansion houses look pretty expensive to me.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
The author isn't an architect, merely an architecture buff. However, she does explain quite well why the McMansion phenomenon deserves the criticism: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-101-what-makes-a-mcmansion-bad http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-10... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
- bertiewhykovich 10y ago
  Perhaps my point is better illustrated by this series: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150926055196/mcmansion-hell-from-a-to-z-part-one-a-h http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150926055196/mcmansion-hel... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151254239061/mcmansion-hell-from-a-to-z-part-two-i-p http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151254239061/mcmansion-hel... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151565621727/mcmansionhell-from-a-to-z-part-three-q-z http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151565621727/mcmansionhell... There is some clear sense to these criticisms. Some of the issues raised constitute hard-to-deny aesthetic flaws: they simply look bad. But many more seem to be less about hard aesthetic truths and more about "taste" -- a significantly less defensible concept. It's not that these architectural elements look bad, it's that they don't look the way they're "supposed" to look, where the way that they're "supposed" to look is determined by the way that they've historically looked (and, critically, nothing more). The author is clearly confused about their own motivations, too: he or she slides regularly into moralizing about the social evil of McMansions and the McMansion lifestyle, while being seemingly entirely unaware that the "good" mansions that these homes so negatively contrast with are symbols of excess and luxury that are just as morally indefensible. The rich have always secluded themselves, they've always wasted their resources in spectacular fashion, they've always wanted to demonstrate their success -- these aren't new phenomena. But the author seems irked simultaneously by conspicuous consumption, classism, and so forth and the same time that he or she rakes McMansion owners over the coals for daring to aspire to the true upper class. It's bizarre -- but that's taste for you.

danharaj 10y ago

Architecture has rules of composition like any other craft. McMansions shit all over them. There's nothing post-hoc about calling them shit. A McMansion only look sensible and aesthetically pleasing if you try to imagine one as a well designed house covered in tumors. The fact that they are an example of American decadence stems from the fact that they are cargo culting opulence.

Turing_Machine 10y ago
"McMansions shit all over them." How is it any of your business? The people who buy them like them. Their tastes are not yours, and they're the ones paying the bills.
- 542458 10y ago
  There's an entire post on how, aesthetics aside, mcmansion-style houses are rife with problems. The tl;dr of it is that they're a very bad investment, massively energy and co2 inefficient, maintenance intensive (due to large size and low-quality materials) and often have badly cut corners. There's also a final point about the size being isolating, but that's a bit more subjective IMHO. http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...
- danharaj 10y ago
  It's my business in the sense that I can have an opinion about how ugly their house is and I do. There's nothing more to it. It's not like I think McMansions should be illegal because they are ugly, although I don't see what's fundamentally unjust about a community not wanting eyesores in their neighborhoods if enough McMansion haters congregated in one place. There are other reasons why they suck that a sibling comment mentioned. I don't believe just because aesthetics involve personal preferences that we can't discuss them and come to common conclusions regarding the good and the bad. Aesthetics are very important to me as a programmer, for example, and I am an unhappy programmer if I cannot write pretty code for whatever reason. I certainly wouldn't want to be a programmer if I couldn't write pretty code as often as I do. Crunch time hurts me twice: the extra work, but also the resource constraints that mean I have to satisfy beauty in code. If I didn't care about what is beautiful and what is not, I would feel like a very flat person. If that makes me an asshole then, well, I mean I wouldn't disagree.
NoGravitas 10y ago
> cargo culting opulence Well, that's the thing, right? They're a middle-class person's idea of what a rich person's house looks like, built on an upper-middle-class budget. It's basically the American ideology as simulacrum.
- wott 10y ago
  The budget can explain the fake materials, but not the bad taste. Keep the same materials, add bit of simplicity (i.e. get rid of some of the monstrosities) and the result would be both better-looking and cheaper. And more classy, compared to these archetypes of American vulgarity.
  - billmalarky 10y ago
    The budget explains the bad taste because a expert professional designer was not involved in the process. The budget is allocated mainly towards size. Build quality and design come second (or third).
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      ...expert professional designer was not involved in the process. Haha they might not be experts but we can be sure that the architects of every one of those got paid.

stephen_g 10y ago

I'm not a architect (and I'm not in/from the US) but it seems pretty spot-on to me... Maybe I'a just a snob, but I have always found it sort of comical that people in the US build houses that are (in my opinion) so terribly ugly imitations/mishmashes of what would otherwise be nice styles.. It is very subjective, but most of the points match up well with what I find ugly.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

DennisP 10y ago

I'm not convinced that's really the point; some of the non-McMansion houses look pretty expensive to me.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

The author isn't an architect, merely an architecture buff. However, she does explain quite well why the McMansion phenomenon deserves the criticism: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-101-what-makes-a-mcmansion-bad http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions-10... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-101-revisited-aesthetics-aside-why http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150597521816/mcmansions-10...

bertiewhykovich 10y ago
Perhaps my point is better illustrated by this series: http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150926055196/mcmansion-hell-from-a-to-z-part-one-a-h http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/150926055196/mcmansion-hel... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151254239061/mcmansion-hell-from-a-to-z-part-two-i-p http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151254239061/mcmansion-hel... http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151565621727/mcmansionhell-from-a-to-z-part-three-q-z http://www.mcmansionhell.com/post/151565621727/mcmansionhell... There is some clear sense to these criticisms. Some of the issues raised constitute hard-to-deny aesthetic flaws: they simply look bad. But many more seem to be less about hard aesthetic truths and more about "taste" -- a significantly less defensible concept. It's not that these architectural elements look bad, it's that they don't look the way they're "supposed" to look, where the way that they're "supposed" to look is determined by the way that they've historically looked (and, critically, nothing more). The author is clearly confused about their own motivations, too: he or she slides regularly into moralizing about the social evil of McMansions and the McMansion lifestyle, while being seemingly entirely unaware that the "good" mansions that these homes so negatively contrast with are symbols of excess and luxury that are just as morally indefensible. The rich have always secluded themselves, they've always wasted their resources in spectacular fashion, they've always wanted to demonstrate their success -- these aren't new phenomena. But the author seems irked simultaneously by conspicuous consumption, classism, and so forth and the same time that he or she rakes McMansion owners over the coals for daring to aspire to the true upper class. It's bizarre -- but that's taste for you.