3 ms·

I live in a 100 year old neighborhood. Over the past decade or so, there's been new construction - old houses with bad bones are torn down, and new ones built o

by beat 8y ago

I live in a 100 year old neighborhood. Over the past decade or so, there's been new construction - old houses with bad bones are torn down, and new ones built on their lots. But the new houses, try though they may, don't fit the aesthetic of the neighborhood very well. First, none of them use stucco, although stucco is by far the dominant surface material for older houses. It's too expensive for new. And while they have porches, they're made with these ridiculous oversized columns with plastic rocks and fake wood. And the windows! The side windows of our old bungalows are elegantly symmetric. The new ones have the rococo randomness of mcmansions in their windows. They just don't look right at all. Then again, in 50 more years, who knows?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Not only is the utter cheapness of materials a problem, but the complete lack of architectural integrity as well. I walk around some places and they are a total mishmash. Guess what - there are no architects for most of these things, just CAD guys grabbing stuff from here and there without thinking, mishmashing it together. Our homes are like poorly cropped photoshop mishmashes of random photos from the internet. I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously. This guy was not educated, I'm not sure how literate he was, and yet even he could point out basic architectural issues. The world is such a mix we forget what the components are, and are unfortunately not able to forge our own. I feel it's not quite a 'nice mix' but 'lowest / cheapest common denominator' in most things.
- beat 8y ago
  Yeah. Those awful porch columns are clearly a product of being able to buy cheap off-the-shelf molded plastic columns and wrap them around equally cheap metal posts. They're trying to look "impressive", but they just look unbalanced, at the scale of the house. Then again, each generation has its own problems. Housing for all but the rich is built around cheapness and available technology. Ours is a bungalow neighborhood because in the early 1900s, that was the cheap way to build houses. Balloon-frame construction with 2x4s and factory nails would have been anathema to previous generations - how could that possibly last? (Answer? About a hundred years.) My kitchen door is crooked because the door frame was crooked, built by relatively low-skilled laborers with poor measurements and tools, and the guy putting in the door just trimmed it to fit. No replacing that.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously. This is an interesting subject to me. There's value in preserving traditional styles. When I look at one of those bad-architecture blogs, certainly there are things that are obviously tasteless or mismatched to me. But there's also a lot of things where I can't see the problem until it's explained, and even then it just sounds like an arbitrary list of rules that you're supposed to follow because the cool people do it. The architectural equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day. If it performs the functions of a home and makes the people who live in it happy, how much does architectural integrity really matter?
  - spc476 8y ago
    On McMansion Hell [1] one of the common criticisms is the mismatched windows. Aesthetic considerations aside, having mismatched windows can be a maintenance issue. One example might be hurricane shutters for homes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts---if all the windows are of the same style, it's cheaper (or easier) to obtain the proper shutters (you don't have to obtain six different sizes) and eases installation when required. Complex roof lines (another symptom of McMansion Hell) leads to leaky roofs [2] and expensive repairs. [1] http://mcmansionhell.com/ http://mcmansionhell.com/ [2] Frank Lloyd Wright's houses notoriously leaked along the roofs. When called upon it, he is recorded as having remarked, "That's how you tell it's a roof!"
    - Hextinium 8y ago
      I just laughed out loud because I have never heard of the term McMansion before but every single house that I have been seeing go up in Dallas lately fits that description so elegantly. They do look like a mish mash of wierd things but when organized into clusters of hundreds its somewhat normalizing to see them all so wierd.

by beat 8y ago

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Not only is the utter cheapness of materials a problem, but the complete lack of architectural integrity as well. I walk around some places and they are a total mishmash. Guess what - there are no architects for most of these things, just CAD guys grabbing stuff from here and there without thinking, mishmashing it together. Our homes are like poorly cropped photoshop mishmashes of random photos from the internet. I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously. This guy was not educated, I'm not sure how literate he was, and yet even he could point out basic architectural issues. The world is such a mix we forget what the components are, and are unfortunately not able to forge our own. I feel it's not quite a 'nice mix' but 'lowest / cheapest common denominator' in most things.

beat 8y ago
Yeah. Those awful porch columns are clearly a product of being able to buy cheap off-the-shelf molded plastic columns and wrap them around equally cheap metal posts. They're trying to look "impressive", but they just look unbalanced, at the scale of the house. Then again, each generation has its own problems. Housing for all but the rich is built around cheapness and available technology. Ours is a bungalow neighborhood because in the early 1900s, that was the cheap way to build houses. Balloon-frame construction with 2x4s and factory nails would have been anathema to previous generations - how could that possibly last? (Answer? About a hundred years.) My kitchen door is crooked because the door frame was crooked, built by relatively low-skilled laborers with poor measurements and tools, and the guy putting in the door just trimmed it to fit. No replacing that.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously. This is an interesting subject to me. There's value in preserving traditional styles. When I look at one of those bad-architecture blogs, certainly there are things that are obviously tasteless or mismatched to me. But there's also a lot of things where I can't see the problem until it's explained, and even then it just sounds like an arbitrary list of rules that you're supposed to follow because the cool people do it. The architectural equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day. If it performs the functions of a home and makes the people who live in it happy, how much does architectural integrity really matter?
- spc476 8y ago
  On McMansion Hell [1] one of the common criticisms is the mismatched windows. Aesthetic considerations aside, having mismatched windows can be a maintenance issue. One example might be hurricane shutters for homes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts---if all the windows are of the same style, it's cheaper (or easier) to obtain the proper shutters (you don't have to obtain six different sizes) and eases installation when required. Complex roof lines (another symptom of McMansion Hell) leads to leaky roofs [2] and expensive repairs. [1] http://mcmansionhell.com/ http://mcmansionhell.com/ [2] Frank Lloyd Wright's houses notoriously leaked along the roofs. When called upon it, he is recorded as having remarked, "That's how you tell it's a roof!"
  - Hextinium 8y ago
    I just laughed out loud because I have never heard of the term McMansion before but every single house that I have been seeing go up in Dallas lately fits that description so elegantly. They do look like a mish mash of wierd things but when organized into clusters of hundreds its somewhat normalizing to see them all so wierd.