7 ms·

All the more reason the blog is so useful. I'd hate to think with all the modern technology around us that the house I live in 'just doesn't feel right' becaus

by toufka 9y ago

All the more reason the blog is so useful. I'd hate to think with all the modern technology around us that the house I live in 'just doesn't feel right' because it was not built employing the past dozen millennia-worth of architectural knowledge at our social disposal. Just because I am not an architect doesn't mean I want to be swindled into an unknowingly unpleasant home. Just because I'm not an architect of CPUs doesn't mean I'd be willing to have a computer run poorly given my investment in a new computer - even if I like the processor's name and it has lots of gigahertzes. No one finds the tech reviewer 'mean' for saying the processor is slower at particular benchmarks according to our present technological measure. Why is this so different - if in fact what is being put to the measure is a human technology and not simply taste. And even then, many 'tasteful' architectural features only exist because of some function - and missing that function they are actually only taste.

emodendroket 9y ago
A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.
- mrep 9y ago
  I totally agree. That website came off to me as very pretentious in that everyone should adhere to her personal taste when I actually liked how some of the homes looked.
- dnautics 9y ago
  But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger on it quickly enough to stop their purchase or possibly more cynically, don't care until they flip the house.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
    - eropple 9y ago
      This is a pretty good architectural round-up: https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line? One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood. Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
      - 9y ago
- sangnoir 9y ago
  > A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes A lot of time on HN is spent mocking "gamer aesthetic" on hardware the commenter would have otherwise actually liked to use. Garish LED-lighting, bulky-looks and oblique angles aren't my thing either, but HN loves to complain about McKeyboards, McHeadphones, McLaptops and McCases. "Gamer aesthetic" and "McMansion aethetic" are valid phenomena and people have the right to critique those tastes without invoking classism, despite the sense of superiorioty occasionally found in the consumers of both.
mschaef 9y ago
> Why is this so different Benchmarks are at least attempting to be objective. Also, there's a difference between mocking a company's product and mocking a house that is 1) an individual's home 2) their largest investment and 3) is likely, these days, to represent a significant financial liability. I don't like McMansions much myself, but I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family, etc. (Or people that have been sucked by the hedonic treadmill into a vortex of debt, high utility payments, etc.) They're probably suffering enough already.
- prklmn 9y ago
  > an affordable way to get more space for their family Did you see the asking prices before the content was taken down? I don't remember any of the houses being affordable in any regard > vortex of debt It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mschaef 9y ago
    > It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford They'll suffer enough without help. The world is difficult enough without pushing people down because it's funny or a way to 'improve the quality of architecture' or whatever.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dagw 9y ago
  I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space. Also that house will almost certainly be better constructed.

by toufka 9y ago

emodendroket 9y ago

A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.

mrep 9y ago
I totally agree. That website came off to me as very pretentious in that everyone should adhere to her personal taste when I actually liked how some of the homes looked.
dnautics 9y ago
But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger on it quickly enough to stop their purchase or possibly more cynically, don't care until they flip the house.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
  - eropple 9y ago
    This is a pretty good architectural round-up: https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/ If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line? One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood. Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
    - 9y ago
sangnoir 9y ago
> A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes A lot of time on HN is spent mocking "gamer aesthetic" on hardware the commenter would have otherwise actually liked to use. Garish LED-lighting, bulky-looks and oblique angles aren't my thing either, but HN loves to complain about McKeyboards, McHeadphones, McLaptops and McCases. "Gamer aesthetic" and "McMansion aethetic" are valid phenomena and people have the right to critique those tastes without invoking classism, despite the sense of superiorioty occasionally found in the consumers of both.

mschaef 9y ago

> Why is this so different Benchmarks are at least attempting to be objective. Also, there's a difference between mocking a company's product and mocking a house that is 1) an individual's home 2) their largest investment and 3) is likely, these days, to represent a significant financial liability. I don't like McMansions much myself, but I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family, etc. (Or people that have been sucked by the hedonic treadmill into a vortex of debt, high utility payments, etc.) They're probably suffering enough already.

prklmn 9y ago
> an affordable way to get more space for their family Did you see the asking prices before the content was taken down? I don't remember any of the houses being affordable in any regard > vortex of debt It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mschaef 9y ago
  > It takes a special person to sympathize with someone living so far beyond their means that they take a $1 million (my average price estimate from the website) mortgage that they can't actually afford They'll suffer enough without help. The world is difficult enough without pushing people down because it's funny or a way to 'improve the quality of architecture' or whatever.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dagw 9y ago
I can absolutely sympathize with people that want an affordable way to get more space for their family But a McMansion will almost always cost you more than a more 'modest' house offering the same amount of space. Also that house will almost certainly be better constructed.