What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?
mcmansionhell.tumblr.com
mcmansionhell.tumblr.com
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/...
[2] - 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...
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.
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.
.
.
.
... 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.
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.
As in 'to dwell on' something. My dictionary says it comes from a norse word meaning 'to go astray'.
To my ears it's like 'hovel' and implies something like a hole in the ground - dark and dirty where an animal might live.
"To dwell on" something isn't inherently negative either, it simply means to spend a fair amount of time thinking or focusing on a single thing. Whether that's good or bad depends on the context, and is not implied by the word itself.
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.
Every house is different, but every house is the same. The only thing that really distinguishes one from the other is the finish work. The builder uses all the same parts and all the same subcontractors in each one.
The subdivisions are little more than an outdoor mass-production factory for houses. The assembly line is largely invisible, found only in the builder's sales and scheduling software.
Most small houses start at around 700k and go way up from there. There are still McMansions, but they're more like 1.5+++
That's the case in almost all European cities, too.
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.
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.
* 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.
Can you explain what that means? I'm assuming the linked book is to back up your claim, and not to explain it.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Ale...
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 ;)
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!
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.
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.
Google "advanced framing".
(Used to work for a tech startup providing services to green construction companies.)
On the other hand, when I realised that was the usual construction method in the U.S. it suddenly made sense of a whole bunch of movie moments when people smash into an damage or are thrown through walls.
Timber framing is just not the standard, so there are more brickies. The cost isn't that different, otherwise the crappy estates would be built in timber rather than blocks. Likewise plasterboard is skimmed rather than taped, because that's how it's always done and that's what the plasterers are used to, even if the work is more skilled. If the UK does move away from blockwork I'd imagine that as building regs change and the cost trade-offs move it'll switch more to SIPs rather than ever to timber framing.
In fact brick is NOT always as strong as wood! Brick is stronger under compression, and it feels harder, but under tension brick is much weaker than wood.
Anyhow, I've visited a McMansion or two, and I think in a few years we're all going to shudder at how badly dated the interiors are too. But which features age badly and which ones still seem charming after the fact remains to be seen. Granite countertops? Stainless steel appliances? Mammoth bathtubs? Closets you could sleep a family in? Two sinks in the bathroom?
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.
If anything, the absurdness of McMansions appears to be driven by a desire to be fancier than anything anyone has seen anywhere else.
> 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.
I think that's a great point. It's an easy way out to frame a discussion like this. "McMansions exist because people are tacky and have bad taste".
I think it's more interesting to look at it from the other perspective. Why is it such a popular design?
Maybe the quaintness of pre-war/post-war housing did not keep up with the needs of modern life. Maybe we need more space, and more privacy from the ever expanding sprawl of suburbia to feel safe, and sheltered (in a mental sense). The cheesy facade could just be a simple tool to keep the building's quick-and-dirty plaster walls, within the scope of the suburban vernacular.
I actually grew up in a McMansion. I always thought it was a great house. We had a pool, and two concrete lion statues guarding the front door. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. How could my parent's buy a house like that? It oozed with tackiness.
But it got the job done.
It was large, had enough room for the whole family, and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.
When neighbors stopped talking to each other and only focused their attention on their own families, it became harder to flaunt wealth. Maybe the McMansions are just a clearer, and louder, cultural identifier, compared to things like gold watches and fine clothing?
I'm reminded that in a lot of places outside of the US, flaunting your wealth is considered a big faux pas.
> and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.
Not being a home owner, or a car owner, or a gold watch owner, or fine clothing owner myself, does it seem necessary to have a physical manifestation of one's wealth to flaunt? Does it really speak positively about a person?
I also would say that flaunting your wealth is not an American invention. It's probably more common than you think around the globe. I would think that it's a common occurance in any rapidly expanding economy. China and India have some widely tacky architecture. Whole towns replicating iconic Western cities. I think it's an interesting pattern in developing economies. We all seem to look at Europe when trying to show how far we've come, or how successfull we've become. It's when people don't have an interest in, or don't have time to have an interest in design, where we see things like McMansions.
In short - Why is all tacky architecture some sort of French or British knockoff?
Only other example I can think of that goes against this trend is the fake Adobe house, or the fake Spanish tile house... The American West's and Southwest's version of the McMansion. Houses that copy the look of traditional architecture without any of the actual benefits of the design, like good insulation.
All this stuff is fascinating to me. The cross roads of semiotics and contemporary, tacky architecture. What does it mean to build a mini Versailles? What does European classicism in American architecture say about our society?
it's not just a pattern in developing economies. it also happens in las vegas, but that's different, somehow.
Where is that? In all the countries I have been the wealthy like to wear special clothes, build large houses, drive expensive cars. In some countries they wear more jewlery, in others they talk about expensive trips they go to.
Read about the "Law of Jante" for the extreme of this mentality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante). I think the first rule pretty well sums up the thought behind this:
You're not to think *you* are anything special.[Edited to add more ”meat” to the comment.]
The fact that he also owns several sports cars and a villa on the French Riviera, is not something he wants publicized.
Steve Jobs never swanked up his house either.
Bill Gates's mansion was built primarily to try to showcase Microsoft development efforts (don't laugh! okay, laugh).
That seems like a bad idea to me. Old Volvos were indeed very safe by the standards of the time, but compared to a modern car, they're simply not. Here in the US, 30,000 people die in auto accidents every year (it's somewhere around 250k/year worldwide). If you have a ton of money, you might as well get a new car and protect yourself. A brand-new bottom-of-the-line Volvo will let you walk away from crashes that some old Volvo would kill you in. And surely a new V60 or S60 (their lowest-end models IIRC, unless they still have S40s there) wouldn't look too out-of-place in Sweden of all places (where the cars come from).
I would rather someone who has legitimately made a billion dollars just go buy a yacht and a Ferrari and drive them around.
Kamprad has a pretty solid tax-avoidance scheme going on too. Completely legal but frowned upon by those who think he should "pay his fair share".
But he is the exception not the rule when it comes to how the wealthy live typically.
Fundamentally, it's a way to promote social cohesion, albeit in negative terms. It's not, however, against success, but against the idea that success inherently makes you a better person deserving of putting on superior airs: the successful should not rub the faces of others in their success.
In Vienna in my experience it is very important to seem cultivated (knowledgeable in the arts, music, etc), but wealth doesn't seem to be as big a factor (more so than in Berlin though).
Munich is supposedly a lot more wealth-focused but I think probably still not quite as much as some places in the US. Extreme but slightly relevant example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3260135/I-ve-created...
"The multi-millionaire and his pneumatic wife told us how they were hounded out of Germany for being too flashy, saying people would spit on their Ferrari and sneer at Maria's large breasts.
So Bastian packed up his life and settled in LA to fulfill his dream of living the 'Baywatch life' after he became obsessed with the show while growing up in cold, landlocked Munich."
The difference between the an American and an Irishman is that the American looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday, I'm gonna be that guy". The Irishman looks at the mansion on the hill and says, "someday... I'm gonna get that bastard".
(I'm sure this is an old joke and he didn't think of it, and it's probably been applied to many nationalities)
Here in Yankee-land, it is also frowned upon.
In day-to-day America, claimed frugality wins. Most Americans will tell you their house was a "deal" in a place with good schools. Our cars are huge because we drive long distances with large families. Our warehouse memberships are to gain purchasing power over toilet paper and peanut butter - not gulfstreams or penthouses.
Granted, as Tom Wolfe observed in another place, our plumbers now live better than most Roman emperors. But you don't want to see an America that actually internalizes wealth flaunting.
If you’d grown up in a normal-sized house (maybe 1000–1800 sq. ft., depending on family size), you’d also have thought it was a “great house”.
Kids in general tend not to question their natural environment much. There are some amenities (electric lighting, hot showers, indoor plumbing, washing machines, telephones, HVAC, ...) which make a noticeable difference to quality of life compared to growing up in a wattle and daub shack with a dirt floor.
On the other hand, having an extra 6 miscellaneous rooms to store random crap, giant walk-in closets, 4 bathrooms, a huge home theater, or supersized bedrooms makes only a very slight difference to anyone, except insofar as it signals to the neighbors that you‘re rich and gives you 3x more cleaning to do.
My parents who grew up in families with 5 kids in tiny 3-bedroom 1-bathroom houses in the 50s thought their houses were great. I’m sure they would have appreciated 1–2 extra small bedrooms and an extra bathroom, but it wasn’t a big deal.
The much larger problem with McMansions is that they tend to be in suburbs with huge distances between places and streets actively hostile to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. Absolutely everything requires a car ride to get to: friends’ houses, the park, school, grocery stores, little shops, cafés, restaurants, the library, the doctor’s office, concert venues, museums, etc. Such an exterior/public environment is incredibly constricting for everyone, but especially for kids, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.
This so much. I don't have a McMansion but I have a house that was added on to and has a total of 4bed 3 bath. The living room, 1 bathroom and 3 bedrooms would be like one "great room" in a McMansion. I feel like all we do is clean. We wouldn't even use the older side of our house if I didn't have my office in it, and my 5 month-old's future room. Before that we lived in the master suite/kitchen/utility room area.
Maybe people who have McMansions can hire cleaning staff or something? We basically spend every weekend cleaning and doing yard work. There really isn't any time during the week after working so many hours, especially when I'm traveling, and taking care of a kid.
> my 5 month-old
Oh boy. You haven't even begun to clean :-)
Two kids under 4, a third on the way. We sweep the hardwoods an average of twice a day (dining room and kitchen are in the hardwood section), and it's still always gross. And that's just one thing. We burn probably 6-8 hours a week on cleaning, and definitely could do more.
And yardwork. Ugh. I hate it. I'd happily live in a house with a postage-stamp of a yard with 1/4 the total sqftage of our current one. Front yards especially. I mean, what the hell? Get rid of 'em. Especially since smaller yards would mean higher density, which means things like parks and pools are closer.
The best use for a yard is to turn it into vegetable gardens and animal pens. Make it productive, not just pointless, wasted space.
Most of the farm is hay fields and woodlot, but on 5 of the acres we raise pigs, sheep, and chickens, have a 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse, a vineyard, a berry patch, and two 3,000 ft^2 crop gardens.
If you're going to say "hey, I've got a solution to the hard work of mowing a lawn", we need to have a long conversation.
...perhaps while we remove rocks from one of the fields and use them to build a wall? Beverages are on me.
Heh, it's not a way to reduce the hard work, but a way to actually get a return on all that work.
Also, I am completely envious.
As per the sale agreement, when it did shut down, I ended up with most of the DVDs. So now, on the farm, I've got a tractor, hay baling equipment, a chicken scalder, a chicken plucker, an industrial meat grinder, a welding rig... and 40,000 DVDs on various how-to topics. :)
As for smaller yards, not having a yard means your neighbors are looking in your windows from their houses, and traffic is driving right by your front door, and sometimes through your front door or living room window when a drunk driver loses control.
A shared pool now means you have to have an HOA to own and manage the pool and common spaces, and they're going to charge you outrageous fees because they're embezzling a lot of the money (by hiring contractors who are their cronies, and paying them way too much), plus they'll have all kinds of rules about what you can do with your house and you'll get fines for every little thing. If you're going to live like that, you might as well just rent an apartment; at least with an apartment you're not on the hook for any maintenance costs at all, and you can move out when your lease expires without penalty, instead of trying to find some new sucker to buy your place and put up with the HOA.
Considered it, but when I asked around with other parents, reviews were universally poor. Plus so much of the stuff that ends up on the floor in the dining area is (I'm guessing) too large for a Roomba to handle without burning out the motor inside a year (think a couple handfuls worth of whole peas) so we'd end up sweeping about as much anyway.
The Roomba can handle a few stray peas here and there. I think you're underestimating it. But if you're making a huge mess on your floor every day, then it's not really meant for that, though you might want to look at why you're making such a mess in the first place; is someone in the family a huge klutz or something? I have hardwood floors on the first floor and barely do any cleaning at all, mainly I just sweep around the litter boxes more often. It just doesn't get that dirty, even with 3 adults.
(quoting myself)
> Two kids under 4
So, yes. :-)
Though this is a problem that time (and persistence) will fix, eventually.
Whoops, missed that part! That explains everything.
Suburbs are always going to be more hostle towards pedestrians and cyclists, and we are currently seeing a trend of people moving away from them.
Unfortunately design is often used as a tool to judge others. I had the chance to study art history, but that does not give me the right to make broad and generalized statements about where people live and what they choose to do with their lives and money.
If we want to see the ugly American McMansion go away, we should spend more time coming up with good designs that fit the needs of the people who buy them, rather than trying to convince them that what they currently own Is ugly.
Apple did this with great success. They built a product that the consumer didn't know they needed. They imparted their design principles on the public through a solid product line, rather than telling them their current computer were ugly.
People might not need McMansions, but they are still going to want then. Until there is a better design for the same price, people are going to buy them.
Mcmansions are designed to be cheap to construct while being easy to sell. Buyers are attracted to distinctive structures as houses blend together when you look at 20+ of the things. They also default to check boxes has a pool y/n not aesthetics. Thus, your idea of 'a few good designs' makes them harder to sell.
Interestingly people with a lot of money (10-100's of millions) now days often go for small but very distinctive buildings. Think frank lloyd wright not huge but art in large part because they don't need or want lot's of staff and will often just rent out structures for party's.
And look where that got us: we went from Windows XP, Vista, and finally 7, to the UGLY horror shows of Windows 8/8.1 and 10. You may think your Apple UI looks nice, but for 99% of office workers, they're now either stuck with the hideous Metro UI, or they're going to be really soon as soon as their IT department upgrades them.
That trend did not last very long:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/03/24/more-americans-are...
If you draw the Montessori-esque or really good conventional school, you stay. If you draw the schools in the hood, the for sale sign is up within 72 hours. If you draw one of the ok-ish schools, it's about 50-50 based on income.
Couldn't it then be argued that her design did not fit the specification? If these houses need to be produced as cheaply as possible, wouldn't it then be better to focus on achieving aesthetics using the minimal amount of extra materials, ensuring that there is nothing to trim away?
Then when she made something that looked good, someone else was hired to cut costs further.
You might think this makes no sense at all. But to a certain kind of business-oriented mind, it's perfectly logical.
A huge problem with traditional business process thinking is lack of organic understanding. It's incredibly hard to find people who can understand a project/process in the round with a deep understanding of cause and effect, and not just as a collection of formulas - one of which always seems to be "cut costs" - applied mechanically.
Of course it can appear to make sense in pure financial terms. But there are social and environmental costs which don't appear on the balance sheet, and possibly also opportunity costs in lost customer goodwill.
Belgium is well-known for that kind of freedom (for examples, see http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/)
Because to me, it looks infinitely better than the endless and faceless American suburbia.
And frankly, some of those are low-blows that look like they are about to be torn down or aren't actively being inhabited or maintained. And they still manage to look on par (at least in uniqueness if not in presentability)
The average income of the US is like 50k. If you have a family of 4 the size of apartment you get on that income in a city is extremely cramped. Additionally, the allure of walking everywhere quickly disappears when you have a 2 and 5 year old.
I'm European and I wouldn't want to live in a place like most US suburbs ever.
My wife and I actually live in two places right now because of our line of work:
There's a 2BR apartment in a German city with about a million residents. It's not exactly downtown but definitely urban. It's actually slightly less central than the place I grew up but it's where we mostly stay when working on-site for clients in the region.
We also live in a 3BR apartment in a German town with about 15k residents. When we have children, this is where they will grow up until we need a bigger place.
I wouldn't want to live in US cities either, but for completely unrelated reasons. I'm more inclined to believe that it's possible to find a bearable place in urban regions in the US than in the traditional American cliché suburbia. Either way I'd prefer almost any apartment I've lived in (except for the tiny 1BR place we stayed when we were studying) over that.
So the choice remains, do you want your kids to go to a good school or a cruddy school? If you care about your kids and are mildly practical, this question answers itself.
With that statement, you just lost any credibility your point had.
Does it? Many people have small children in my peer group, and I've seen them moving to walking through their neighborhood rather than driving to their errands. The difference might be that German cities are much more hospitable to pedestrians in general. Also, there is sane public transit which is helpful if your toddler doesn't like to walk anymore.
From what I've seen, German cities are much more hospitable to _humans_ in general. Towns too, for that matter. And Germany isn't exactly hostile to automobiles, which is impressive considering there's usually a conflict between walkability and drivability.
Yes, walking 2 miles with a two and five year old is awful. I suppose the experience from person to person is different, but I find two-year-olds to be quite selfish with short legs making them bad walking companions.
>Also, there is sane public transit which is helpful if your toddler doesn't like to walk anymore.
That sounds like not walking to me, but whatever.
If you're walking two miles for normal errands your city is poorly designed.
But within 2000 feet of my apartment I have at least 4 or 5 grocery stores. The main reason they're so damn far apart in suburban America is that a 15,000 square foot grocery store might have 60,000 square feet of parking. US Suburbia basically _is_ parking and roads, with the occasional building sprinkled here and there on top of the skidpad.
If you've never lived outside of it, though, you're blind to it. It's like trying to explain why you'd want an umbrella to someone on Arrakeen.
Or, in this case, like trying to explain distances in feet to a non-American. :)
Good thing there's units(1).
Here's how Dutch parents solve that problem: https://www.babboe.be/media/easyslide/Babboe-City-Bakfiets-T...
Though a 2 year old can still go in a stroller, and the 5 year old can walk. (And some strollers these days come with a platform where the 5 year old can stand.)
I live in a condo, but even in a condo, drastically more space than you'd get in the city for less money.
I feel I have a better quality of life in the suburbs on my income than someone with twice my salary would have living in the city.
I get that it isn't for everyone, but every couple weeks HN has a 'the suburbs are awful' post, and I feel that's incredibly unwarranted. Urban vs. suburban vs. rural is a lifestyle choice and a preference.
I can walk to my community darkroom, where I spend hours developing film and black and white prints.
I can walk to work. It's between 1.67 and 2.5 miles each way, depending on the route. The walk back includes an elevation gain of about 300 feet, giving me a pretty decent cardio workout just by commuting.
I drove briefly today because I had to go to purchase containers to store my overflowing material possessions (oh, irony). I was stuck in traffic, and it sucked. I love getting to bus, or take the light rail, or the street car, or walking.
I love living in a dense neighborhood overflowing with interesting people and shops, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. If that makes me a special snowflake, then so be it.
Lots of people live in suburbia not because they love it, but because they can't afford a decent place in/near the city and a good private school for their kids. Probably 75% of the cool houses in my city are in high(ish) crime areas with awful schools, and the rest are way out of my price range (and often still have bad public schools)
Oh, and you can bicycle for pleasure with far more safety in most suburban areas, and jog too. You can own your own garden, build a shed or workshop on your own property, and do a lot of things that the worker drone lifestyle of an urban apartment won't let you do.
Cycling for transport, on the other hand, is hell on Earth. My rib still aches now and then from the driver who hit me while I rode home from work (and then was shocked I wanted to call the police).
You get "horrible mcmansion suburbs", in large part because they are cheap. People have to live somewhere, and anything that isn't a suburban detached house is unaffordable for 95+% of the American population. People pose this as a choice, but when the only alternative is crappy apartments or being homeless -- it's not really a choice.
I'd love to live in a Brownstone, or a Townhouse, or a Highrise, or a "dense urban area" that can support some form of functional public transit. Someday, I might be a millionaire who can afford that. Until that happens, I live in a suburban box, and drive everywhere, just like every other person in this entire state. Suburbs aren't cheap -- but they're the only somewhat-affordable housing option in the nation.
Being on a suburb like that feels like puttying your house on its own prison for houses.
This indicates to me that developers tend to overvalue their owned lots near a neighborhood that they just filled with McMansions, almost as though they were selling lots that already had local businesses in them. They would do a lot better to just build the strip mall first, stick one franchised business in to anchor it, sell the house lots, then spin off the strip mall ownership into a separate business after 80% of the lots are built.
The home builders see it as someone else's problem. The houses are their moneymaker, and the businesses can take care of themselves. It's almost as though they have never heard of loss leaders.
You gotta get in your car to get most places, sure. But it could be much worse.
Risk is part of life. And the risk that your neighbour might build an ugly house is hardly one of the worst ones. (And the expected future value of your land is a guess, not a right).
Yes it is true, and no there is nothing wrong about it. Complaining about the homes that other people choose to live in is just snobbishness.
If you want to own a nice looking computer because it appeases you in some intangible way, you can buy a mac (and many people do). But don't complain that many (most?) people buy a PC strictly for the checklist, and many people buy the mcmansion strictly for the checklist.
HOAs also protect quaint neighborhoods from becoming chain link fenced over grown slums too. They can protect some older homes from being razed or having a 6k square foot home replace a 1.5k house on the same lot. The can protect you from neighbors who won't maintain their homes, leave disabled cars out, and generally just make a neighborhood annoying. They are very little different from building management groups that keep people from making the high rise you live in hell.
Yes there are some bad ones but you can usually predict those by simply talking to people in the prospective neighborhood. Also read the HOA and architectural guidelines of any place that has them you look at, when it gets into details about what can be planted, ground cover, and down to the type of pine bark/straw use there is, well that is an indication you will have HOA Nazis.
Given what I have seen with subdivisions that ended their HOAs or didn't have them I would keep them in any small lot setup (once you pass an acre HOAs become less relevant as your neighbors are less noticeable)
That said, while we've been here less than a year, we've had run-ins with the HOA. The HOA has determined that the big yellow recycling bins are 'ugly', and should be kept out of sight except when they are at the curb on pickup day. The HOA has been hounding my neighbor for having a three car garage, which they've determined to be tacky. HOA guidelines assert that none of the houses in the neighborhood should have garages larger in capacity than 2-car (which has led to the hilarity of my neighbor across the street having 2 2-car garages). He didn't put the three car garage in; he bought the house that way, and a part of the reason he bought the house was for the third bay. Regardless, the HOA has asked him to tear it down repeatedly, even though he's not an HOA member. Personally, I removed a tree from the front yard that was dead -- it probably wasn't dangerous yet, but if it had fallen, it would have gone into the road, so we took it down just to be safe. Since then, we've gotten three notes about 'unsightly tree stumps', even though we aren't HOA members.
The 'old-guard' seems to think that nextdoor.com was written by somebody in our neighborhood, and got mad when it was opened up to adjoining neighborhoods, posting a call to action on the site and insisting that "we've all agreed" not to let other people use Nextdoor.com, as it should only be used to report suspicious activity.
I could go on, but the point is that the HOA entails a shocking amount of drama. Thankfully, as non-members, we aren't bound to their terms, and even when I donated the membership fee, I made it a point to highlight that this donation was not a membership payment, because I refuse to be bound to their arbitrary standards, and membership means granting them force-of-law authority over me. In hindsight, it was the wisest possible choice.
So I really really don't see the point of an HOA.
If you want to control an entire community to the extent that most zoning boards and HOAs do, the proper thing to do would be to retain ownership of the property and write the restrictions into your leases.
Your neighbors' property is not your property. If they wish to make their home into an eyesore, that's unfortunate for you, but they really like being able to dispose of their owned property as they see fit. If they wish to use their yard to grow nothing but dandelions, tamp down on your outrage and let them; for all you know, they will be using them for organic salads and floral wine, and to stop them would be taking food out of their mouths.
The only thing that the county/municipality should be doing is to assess and levy the costs of any externalities upon the property owners, and to ensure that no property owner can cause so much damage that they cannot subsequently pay to repair it. No amateur nuclear reactors in the backyards, for instance. No dumping PCBs into the creek.
That car on blocks should be fine, provided that any parts containing toxic pollutants have been removed and disposed of properly. Once you remove the lead-acid battery, gas tank, and exhaust system, then drain the fluids, there isn't much left in it to worry about.
You don't, after all, have any property interest whatsoever in the view from your front porch. The more you forcibly remove the illusion of control that people have over their own lives, the greater the number who will crack and become les petits Napoleons, seeking to control others in petty ways. Some number of HOA officers follow the mentality "if I can't have a purple garage door, then no one else can do what they want, either".
There are reasons for the town to control what you can build on your property. My neighbor should not be able to tear down his two story house and replace it with a five story apartment building built up to the property line. My neighbors should not be allowed to leave a rusting hulk in their front yard, nor should I. We shouldn't be allowed to not mow the lawn for a month, pissing everyone else off (they were not growing dandelions, they were simply neglecting their property out of laziness).
And no, I really do have a property interest in the view from my porch. And so do my neighbors. Which is why I don't care if you have a rusting hulk in your backyard, or you never mow it. There is a very large difference between "you cannot allow your property to go derelict" and "you must paint your house this shade of puce."
But no state allows a negative prescriptive easement. That means if you want a (inherently negative) view easement, you have to buy it, create it on your own property before selling it, or convince a court to award it to you.
HOAs have their power because the subdivision developer put the easements and covenants in place before selling off the lots. Zoning or ordinance changes by the municipality are simply a [usually uncompensated] taking of your rights in your own property.
There may be an argument to be made that eminent domain allows a municipality to do this, but doing so without just compensation is illegal in the US. So if the town passes an ordinance banning storage of derelict cars wholly visible from every point on the road frontage property boundary, it needs to pay everyone something to compensate for that. The amount of such compensation may be as little as $1 per owner, but even that would place a limit on how many arbitrary property-use rules a town can impose on its residents. That's a good thing. It encourages governing bodies to prioritize their meddling, such that the derelict car rule goes in before the anti-dandelion rule.
Ownership rights and property laws are several of the foundation stones underlying all of human civilization. As such, there is a right way (pay for what you take) and a wrong way (take whatever you can) to manage property.
My opinion is that the number of vague and arbitrary rules that are placed into HOA covenants are such that they are more suited for leases, such that each lessee must read and agree to them each time they sign, and the market can respond more readily to discount the lease price in accord with the burden of the restrictions. Have you ever read any of those HOA covenants? I'm surprised anyone would buy property with even half the restrictions on it.
And no, if you are in a neighborhood, a car on blocks should never be acceptable.
The private HOA of a particular neighborhood can enforce higher standards of appearance than the town/city codes.
For example, the HOA can require that any fence must be wrought-iron[1] instead of chain-link or wood, or brick&stone mailboxes instead wooden posts. A town can't formally codify such rules because many neighborhoods within the city limits will be lower-income homes that can't afford upscale building materials. It would be an unfair rule to enforce for the entire city. Therefore, town codes have to address the lowest common denominator. A town code will have some baseline standards such as disallowing cars to be propped up on cement blocks in the front yard. Therefore, an HOA would not have to specifically address that in its covenants.
Another reason for HOAs is gated neighborhoods. The town typically is not required to spend tax dollars to maintain roads inside the gates. Therefore, the HOA is the entity that accumulates money in the treasury for any road repairs.
Also, keep in mind that HOA is a voluntary organization and many people willingly buy into HOA neighborhoods. They don't want their neighbors' homes to degrade into a substandard appearance which would negatively affect their property values.
If the majority of homeowners truly hated their HOA, they could vote to remove all cosmetic covenants from the bylaws and only keep the HOA corporate entity to maintain the common landscaping areas. However, no HOA voters choose that path so there must be a reason why.
All that said, the HOA has a board and although the members are voted in by the homeowners (usually annually), the positions often does seem to attract a peculiar type of tyrannical overzealous personality.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=wrought+iron+fence+yards&biw...
That's not entirely true. If the only homes in the area that you can buy within a reasonable commute to work are HOA properties, you didn't exactly choose to be a part of an HOA, did you?
"If the majority of homeowners truly hated their HOA, they could vote to remove all cosmetic covenants from the bylaws and only keep the HOA corporate entity to maintain the common landscaping areas. However, no HOA voters choose that path so there must be a reason why."
Not every HOA allows such things.
"All that said, the HOA has a board and although the members are voted in by the homeowners (usually annually), the positions often does seem to attract a peculiar type of tyrannical overzealous personality."
Not every HOA allows such things.
Well I guess "choice" is in the eye of the beholder. You prioritize the short commute over the restrictions of HOA. Somebody else who felt even more disdain about HOA than you would prioritize living HOA-free and suffer the unreasonable commute. And there yet others who chose both unreasonable commute combined with HOA deed restrictions. All 3 choices are voluntary. Not every voluntary choice optimizes "convenience" across all dimensions.
Anyway... If your sentiment was the majority, residential developers would be building HOA-free neighborhoods to exploit that pent up frustration and plastering billboards with "Come to XYZ Estates with no HOA restrictions!!!" Greed is a wonderful motivator and I'm guessing there's some other market force preventing that scenario from playing out.
>Not every HOA allows such things.
Which HOA doesn't? Every HOA with deed restrictions I've seen for homes and condominiums in Florida, Manhattan, and California are agreed to and voted by the residents living under it. What overriding authority is higher than the residents telling them they can't remove a deed restriction? E.g. The neighbors need to convince each other that the restriction on visible trampolines is a bad idea and the majority vote to remove it.
There's no HOA, so the only thing you can do about it is help them. There's no option for bossing the geezers around. And I'm okay with that.
If your home value can be ruined by a little bit of yard neglect, the problem isn't the neighbor's yard. It's a neighborhood designed on such a brittle basis that the yard becomes a problem.
You say this like it's a bad thing.
Basically, in truth the HOA has little power over people who don't (or can't) play along. They can make life hell for people who are trying to be good neighbors with tons of arbitrary rules that do nothing but make the board members feel better about themselves, but if someone wants to be a deadbeat their options are limited.
About the worst they can do is put a lien on a house, but even that threat is of little effect against someone who is letting his house fall apart because he's planning to default on it anyway. The paperwork to put a lien on a house costs money too, so the HOA has to decide if it is worth the effort, especially if it ends up being dismissed in the foreclosure anyway.
HOAs are basically good for one thing: maintaining common areas. If your development has a private park or a clubhouse or something like that then the HOA can be useful. If they only exist to collect dues and boss you around about the exact shade of tan on your mailbox post then they should be disbanded.
HOAs and the restrictive covenants that enforce them became popular for the purpose of keeping out Blacks (well, and other undesirable minorities, but mostly Blacks), and while they've been prohibited from actually (directly, at least) doing that for some decades, they continue to represent (because of who is willing to devote energy to regulating their neighbors through them) the same kind of cultural identity enforcement and homogenization by narrowminded elites that would keep out the "other" if they could.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They do photograph well and win you architectural awards, however.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
For engineering purposes, you don't, since plywood and OSB are far more dimensionally consistent than the best of old growth lumber. Aesthetically, old growth wood is superior, but in most cases wood is covered in drywall & plaster anyway.
You cannot find (significant) lumber from 300+ year old trees anymore. That's what the original poster was referring to. I don't think aesthetics has anything to do with it.
That's true only if you discount engineered wood products, which are superior in strength to even the best of old growth lumber. For resistance to shear stress, nothing beats plywood or OSB; for bending stress, LVL; for tensile stress, LSL; for compressive stress, finger joined lumber.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
This is your shakiest assumption. Art tends to reflect modes of human experience (how could it avoid doing so) and richly, sensitively evoked experience makes for art that has very broad appeal. Something like Shakespeare is universally popular not for colonial reasons or because it's somehow multivalent (in the sense of being specifically compatible with multiple cultures). It's a deeply satisfying reflection of human nature and a consummate engagement with human experience, which is what architecture should be too.
McDonalds food doesn't claim to be a high-point of human creativity, and it's not. Same story with McMansions.
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.
"objectively good" == "aligned with the tastes of a great enough variety of people to be widely popular over space and time"?
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.
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).
After all, that is just their equally valueless opinion.
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.
Most of the examples of good architecture in the article are suburban.
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.
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.
At least with code one could make an argument that a certain style increases readability and makes it easier to follow. Although even there I think it's a lot of subjective preference, and it doesn't really matter as long as you are consistent.
With these buildings, changing the style to fit these arbitrary rules could make them worse. Like reducing the number of windows just so it fits into a certain style. Windows are nice and provide better natural lighting. Studies have found windows and natural lighting have a a very positive effect on mental health.
Or forcing the house to be symmetrical. That could make the layout suboptimal. As opposed to if it was allowed to be built without that constraint. And so on for the other rules. Every rule adds more constraints, which requires sacrificing other aspects to satisfy.
Serious question: do you think this house looks beautiful? http://65.media.tumblr.com/5cfa243ca7f2997cf794ed190c24c38b/...
Does it look better, worse, or the same as this house? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Thomas_J...
Do you think a large majority of people would agree with your personal, subjective taste in this case?
1. I don't think it's fair to compare the two houses. The person who built the second house seems to have spent a lot more money than the person who build the first.
2. The first one gives the appearance that it has many tiny rooms, which I don't like.
3. I don't like the styling of either house. They both have weird styling elements (I don't the technical terms).
I mean, I don't think you'll have problems finding people who think the purposeful asymmetry and complexity of the form of this McMansion (horrible details, but that's beside the point) http://66.media.tumblr.com/985ce3af7d99be6789a3d60733d87bdb/... is less jarring than the oversized porch and rather forced symmetry of this house http://66.media.tumblr.com/985ce3af7d99be6789a3d60733d87bdb/...
I suspect that you won't find a majority who think this architecturally interesting but rather disconcerting house which seems almost to be split into two discrete components http://66.media.tumblr.com/ef085492f16fa90eca55b34c2edb4f6e/... is more balanced and harmonious than this bland McMansion with a rather more subtle asymmetry of styling and no centreline http://66.media.tumblr.com/b60dfce3f94da6a03ded2c7c1acd2f34/...
And above all, picking holes in an architect's work is easy. I'm really not convinced that many people would consider this house with its oversized, overbearing gable and clumsy porch with ludicrously oversized pillars to be a model of a "properly proportioned house", regardless of the author's delight at it as an example of how to balance the top and bottom halves of an elevation http://66.media.tumblr.com/aacf83efd66eded7cffe5f42716fbe36/...
Architects can easily ignore centre-lines and rules of thirds and concepts of primary and secondary massing and matching windows and produce great houses, and they can easily follow them rigidly and produce something which is a shoddily-built mixture of poor imitations of different historical styles that's not built to a human friendly scale.
P.S. I see your Monticello and raise you Fallingwater...
This is a commonly expressed notion on HN, and one I've never understood. As if every blog post in the world were being evaluated as a doctoral thesis. I personally prefer it when people do me the courtesy of assuming,absent evidence to the contrary, that I am competent in my profession and a reasonable reporter of my own experience. Perhaps we could do the same for others?
Regardless, here it's wrongly applied. He did give evidence: photos. A couple I didn't quite get, but several gave me "aha" reactions. In seeing houses like these previously, I knew there was some problem, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I forwarded the article to my dad, whose immediate reaction was, "I like the McMansion article. It explains the problem I have with the back of our house."
You also seem to have a notion that subjective preference is arbitrary and random, shifting with every viewer. But there are at least two kinds of subjective preference involved here that are neither: the cultural context of architecture and the human perceptual system. Whether his rules are somehow "objective" or merely about what current neurotypical American humans generally prefer doesn't really matter for his point. Either way, he's explaining an important regularity relevant to, among other things, the building and buying of houses.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You like one better than the other, I like the other better than the one. There is no right or wrong. God is not going to send lightening down on you for the wrong home design. (no matter which god you pick)
An engineering I can look at a design and construction method and objectively state that one is better than the other - but there is no reason the "ugly house" cannot come out better.
There are certain shapes, proportions, arrangements, etc. that most (not all) humans find pleasing. The majority have declared this to be "taste". It's not fair. But it exists and you can't wipe it away by reciting a trite aphorism.
>The survey of mathematicians conducted by Wells (1990) provides a more empirically-based challenge to the intrinsic view of the mathematical aesthetic. Wells obtained responses from over 80 mathematicians, who were asked to identify the most beautiful theorem from a given set of 24 theorems. (These theorems were chosen because they were ‘famous’, in the sense that Wells judged them to be well-known by most mathematicians, and of interest to the discipline in general, rather than to a particular subfield.) Wells finds that the mathematicians varied widely in their judgments. More interestingly, in explaining their choices, the mathematicians revealed a wide range of personal responses affecting their aesthetic responses to the theorems. Wells effectively puts to rest the belief that mathematicians have some kind of secret agreement on what counts as beautiful in mathematics…
Anyway there is a long history of weird superstitions and made up rules in subjective arts like this. I mentioned the golden ratio BS which also affected architecture. There is only vague handwavy reasoning behind it, but many architects really believed in it and tried to force it in everywhere.
But if that's the case, so what? His article aside, it's undeniable that A) some people like McMansions and that B) a lot of people don't. He also notes right up front, "These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after." He is trying to make clearer what's going on in case B.
Your liking the McMansions is only proof that you're in category A. Maybe you don't know much about architecture. Maybe you're not a big fan of classical architecture. Maybe you're a fan of something else entirely. It is not proof that he is wrong about what makes something good classical architecture, that his explanation of category-B reactions is useless.
> Anyway there is a long history of weird superstitions and made up rules in subjective arts like this.
Yes, thank god we work in technology, where there are never any fads, superstitions, or made up rules that people really believe and try to enforce inappropriately. </sarcasm>
That technology has a lot of fads, superstitions, and misapplied rules doesn't mean there is no objective reality, that all opinions are arbitrary, that educated taste is meaningless. The same is true of architecture. The same is true of most human activities. Just because a domain is too complicated to be reduced to a small, human-comprehensible set of "objective" axioms doesn't mean there's nothing smart or interesting there. And it certainly doesn't mean we have to be condescending about any attempt to increase clarity.
Houshalter didn't change the complaint. Their original complaint was that the author did not provide evidence for why breaking the rules is inherently bad, not that the author did not provide evidence for why the pictured McMansions were bad. The comment you are replying to restated this:
> I looked at the pictures and didn't find them convincing I preferred the "McMansions" in every case [this refers to the houses themselves, not the rules]. The author provided no argument for why my preferences are wrong or his are right [this is the original complaint].
The rules aren't convincing because there is no evidence that they are anything other than semi-arbitrary preferences that the architecture world, or at least a subset of it, as coalesced around. I agree with Houshalter, which is why I am responding.
But assuming instead that he is asking for something actually related to the scope of the article, then yes, evidence was provided. For each principle, there are photos showing exactly how the principle is violated in typical McMansion architecture. For those with an eye for architecture who have spent time puzzling over McMansions, that is sufficient to demonstrate the principles.
You're welcome to complain that you didn't understand the evidence, didn't find it convincing. But I reject the assumption that is a problem with the article. This was clearly written for people with an interest in and some knowledge of residential architecture. There's no reason an article has to explain everything to everybody.
No, it was insufficient evidence. The author didn't show photos (or is unaware) of non-McMansion-non-modern counterexamples to his "mass/voids/asymmetry" principles and explain why his guidelines are inconsistent. Therefore, his theory is incoherent.
The magazines including Architectural Digest and Veranda are the most anti-McMansion publications you can get and they feature homes that violate his principles. Secondary mass all over the place. Abundant voids and asymmetry too.
Yes, the distaste for McMansions is a real phenomenon but the author's explanations about what it _is_ by measuring geometries is incorrect.
Exactly. We can have different preferences. His rules are not objective facts about what is "bad" or "good". If it was just an explanation why two architectural styles are different, then that would be fine. But it's worded more like "how one architectural style is right and the other is wrong".
>Yes, thank god we work in technology, where there are never any fads, superstitions, or made up rules that people really believe and try to enforce inappropriately.
I don't know why you think this is an argument against it. I oppose snobbery and superstitions about technology just as much. I don't think it's quite as bad in technology though. At least one could argue technology rules actually matter. Better user interfaces can make it easier for users to find what they want, and better code styles can make code more readable. Whereas the aesthetic of a house has zero effect on anything and doesn't matter.
I'm sorry to be the smug guy linking PG on HN, but this essay [0] directly engages your point here and IMHO pretty conclusively refutes it. This is the money quote:
"As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong."
If you go to a different culture, that has different food, architecture, music, art, etc, would you tell them they are wrong about everything and need to change? Would you listen to them if they told you your tastes were wrong?
There is nothing objective about taste. It's entirely determined by associations you make in the brain. The author has associated "McMansion" architecture with things he doesn't like. Maybe the cheap construction they are associated with, or the people who live in those houses, etc. But other people can have completely different associations.
With other art forms, yes they use these rules, but there's also things like line, texture, color, and other rules that disguise or soften them. With architecture, I think they don't have much technique to do so, and the symmetry, golden ratio, etc, come through much stronger. Many of the examples he gave in his blog of good symmetry were actually fairly boring houses, and the problem with too much symmetry is a boring picture.
I mean the rules work, but in functional forms like houses, you have less ability to make them visually interesting overall. The McMansions might be the same principle in opposite-there isn't enough to make the non-symmetrical, almost abstract design less chaotic while keeping the visual interest.
Maxing out the use of the interior space means one huge box, which is what most "ultramodern" houses in cities are. It's not my aesthetic, but it least it makes sense, unlike putting tacky form over function in the mcmansion style.
It actually is the source of the problem because his rules end up being inconsistent. There are billionaire estates in the ultra expensive zipcodes of the Hamptons[1] (NY) and Atherton[2] (near Silicon Valley) that people would not call "McMansions" that violate the author's principles about "voids and masses".
Put another way... as a thought experiment, suppose we had the AutoCAD drawings of every house from modest cabins to mega estates. We attempt to write a computer program that has a boolean function called IsMcMansion(AutoCAD_file) that returns either TRUE or FALSE using the blog author's criteria. We can attempt to tweak the logic of the program to analyze and weigh the geometries of the "masses" and calculate the proportion of "voids" but we'll never end up with a program that 100% correctly predicts what humans label as "McMansion" Why? Because, those rules don't work! E.g.... IsMcMansion(famous_novelist_house)==TRUE is determined to be wrong because us humans look at that house and say "that house isn't a McMansion because it was built in 1914 and has so much _character_"
That's what we humans do. We post-hoc a lot of judgments with a veneer of authoritative-sounding logic. We actually arrive at "McMansion" by combining a bunch of other attributes like: lot size, building materials, builder, socioeconomic rank of buyers, year of construction, trendy styles, etc. E.g. IsMcMansion(Graceland)==TRUE because of the algorithm penalized its oversized portico. However, it is judged by humans to be misclassified because... Elvis once lived there. Hence nobody calls the Graceland Estate a McMansion. If the exact same house was built by a national builder like Toll Brothers[3] and the people living in it were social-ladder-climbing yuppies, we very well might call it a "McMansion."
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=mansions+hamptons&source=lnm...
[2]https://www.google.com/search?q=mansions+atherton&source=lnm...
The point of a McMansion is essentially social. Once you get past the structural basics, the point of most architecture is social. Humans are social primates. Yes, of course, if you construct a program without regard to sociality it will not be very good at understanding social phenomena.
Generally, rules about what constitutes "good taste" or "aesthetically pleasing" are derived not just from wealthy people but from established wealthy people. This is something that goes back centuries, to when Western cultures first started having a bit more mobility and it was possible for a person who wasn't born into a family of hereditary land-owning aristocrats to accumulate enough wealth to start having nice clothes, a large house with servants, etc.
The hereditary aristocrats, of course, didn't care much for this and so wanted some way to distinguish themselves from the jumped-up nouveaux riches, some of whom even became rich enough to buy (or obtain through rendering financial "service" to a monarch) their own heritable noble titles. And so began a complex, inconsistent and ever-changing set of standards of aesthetics and behavior, designed to act as a kind of shibboleth: if you hadn't been brought up among people who'd been doing this their whole lives (and who in turn were brought up by people who'd been doing it their whole lives), you'd never quite get it right and the older established noble families would be able to tell you didn't really belong to their social class (and would treat you accordingly).
Many of these rules about architecture are artifacts of this system: they are the evolved result of established wealthy families trying to find ways to make sure their homes were distinguishable from the homes of the vulgar arrivistes.
And in fact this is precisely what the backlash against the "McMansion" is about. Newly upper-middle-class people, and even newly-extremely-wealthy people, can still be singled out by the way their homes merely imitate the homes of established old-money people, and by picking out the ways the imitation fails. And remember that to the old money, a Silicon Valley billionaire who started out in a working-class family is worse -- because they jumped far too many social classes in one generation -- than someone who merely hopped into upper-middle-class suburbia. So just looking at recently-built megahouses won't tell you much because many of them will be built to the tastes of people who, by definition, cannot have good taste (remember: if you haven't had it for at least three generations, you don't have it at all).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#/media/File...
Or then I just misunderstood the article completely.
"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."
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CgY4n5BsK9o/VafsZ-ccfcI/AAAAAAAAVS...
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I had this exact thought. My primary concern about a house is how well the interior has been designed for my needs. The exterior appearance is way down on my list.
Unfortunately the article didn't even mention interior. I've seen a lot of absolutely awful interior floor plans.
I don't think this has gotten better. I toured some homes last year, and the flat screen TVs were placed above the fireplace. Two problems: 1) you wind up constantly craning your neck to watch TV, and 2) if you actually use the fireplace the TV probably gets much warmer than it should.
And yet these houses all sell for $500,000 or more. Or even a few million dollars in expensive places like the Bay Area.
As someone who thinks about this stuff way too much, TVs above fireplaces are up there with leaving high frame rate supersampling (i.e., the "soap opera effect") turned on, and people who leave horizontal stretching enabled because that distortion is somehow less visually disturbing to them than pillarboxing when viewing SD content on an HD display. Needless to say, I'm really fun at parties. :)
Well said. This person who wrote this must despise Stewart Brand and his work on How Buildings Learn. Primary vs secondary mass? Voids on the facade? Symmetry? Ha! Brand sees somebody who adds on a new room on the side of their house because they want a workshop as a wonderful thing. I don't think he ever scolded anybody about maintaining symmetry or mass.
The homes are unbalanced, you enter on one side, and then you go down long, strangely winding halls to find the bedrooms. They have weird angles for the walls (why does this bedroom have 7 walls? Why does it have 4 ceiling planes?). They have poor functioning practical spaces (same angle issues in bathrooms and kitchens, which inhibit the use of functional elements like drawers that don't open all the way, if at all).
Those external visual artifacts are like cabinetry that pretends it has drawers or doors but really just has the hardware for the knobs or handles.
I've seen a lot of property and general the homes I like the most generally make sensible and efficient use of the space with minimal or no weird angles. This kinda limits the general shape a house can have.
But if your'e in a development of McMansions your view outside will be onto a bunch of ugly houses.
Buildings like this are disrespectful to posterity.
When someone builds a house like this, they are building something that will be around for years, being an eyesore the whole time, and not even functioning well on the inside either most of the time.[1]
[1] Or maybe that's the point, nothing in north america is built to last. Probably they will be torn down in 40 years anyway.
You say that like that's a bad thing. IMO, the ability to tear down and rebuild on a 40 year timescale is a feature, not a bug. We get better design, more energy efficient, safer, easier to maintain, etc. etc. homes for each new generation. That's a good thing.
McMansions are a great example of form over function. They meet the buyers notion how a "fancy" house should appear. But, they stop there.
That means lot's of outer shell that's going to leak heat to both directions. So you will pay unnecessary amount of money in heating/cooling. Also windows that don't really give you nice views etc. Just wasted dollars.
Concaves in roof are risky spots for leaks. And especially tricky/expencive to fix.
Good houses often look boring. Lot's of architecture goes batshit crazy because there is very limiter amount of sensible ways to put a vedge on top of a box.
That said, this person isn't necessarily wrong. Having a lot of visual interest in your home isn't a bad thing, but you have to have visual interest surrounding the home as well. The issue I have with McMansions personally is having a 4000 square foot house on a postage stamp lot looks ridiculous.
I was once told many years ago the following quote: "Rich people have big houses, but wealthy people have land".
4k sq/ft home on 1 acre? Probably not the best looking neighborhood. 4k sq/ft home on 5 acres? Probably a very wealthy, upscale area.
The problem with todays building is not building-to-lot ratios.
The problem is that for houses of that size, they need a LOT of room between them. Even with 3/4th acre and full acre lots, the end result was what looked like a bunch of big houses essentially stacked right next to each other. There are other developments in other towns nearby that are similar. Large houses but not more than an acre between them. While what you say is technically correct, the overall look is not attractive.
The real estate industry, architects and agents and developers who are designing these terrible houses to fit checklists rather than deliver a better value are at least part of the problem.
I am upper middle class and a fan of good architecture (all I knew was I liked modern) but I didn't realize a lot of what this blog points out. I have seen McMansions before and thought they were ugly in some vague way that I couldn't identify... but now I understand why.
Having attempted to get "my" house, I concluded that the only way I would get something up to my standards was to go custom and find an architect who would do things right. Which is a whole other level of expense, requires lower upper class levels of funds.
1. Upper class/Wealthy/Elite
2. Middle Class
3. Lower Class/Working Class
4. Poor/Working Poor (some people lump this in with #3 above)
The problem is there are huge gradients of affluence even in these individual bands (and obviously more-so the higher you get). Poor would include most unemployed and part-time workers. Working poor would include people in debt living paycheck to paycheck, typically paid hourly, who depend on OT or multiple jobs to pay their bills. Working class is generally more of the same, but able to pay one's bills with a single job, maybe without overtime. Middle class can include everyone from the brand new teacher making $30k a year to the physician making $90k a year but paying $4k/mo in student loans. Upper class typically means people who don't have to work in order to put food on the table but it can also mean people who just have extremely high incomes (think the Fortune 5 EVP or other corporate big shot making $600k but may spend 98% of that every year)
The difference between "upper middle" (90% of the people reading this, excluding students) and "lower upper" (maybe 9% of the people reading this, excluding students) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars in income or millions in total net worth so I think it's a valid distinction.
The bungalow home and the colonial homes that he praised, I didn't find the aesthetics to be pleasing.
To me, the photo from wikipedia is more like the McMansions I think of as ugly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMansion#/media/File:McMansio...
The wiki example has the siding that covers the entire side combined with the Greek columns in the front entry. It's a weird mismash of gaudiness. The garage also overwhelms of rest of the house.
Like another poster mentioned, some of the awkward boxiness is due to homeowners wanting 3500+ sq ft homes on small lots that are 1/3 and 1/2 acre. An architect no matter how talented is too constrained by the lot dimensions to avoid designing an oversized out-of-proportion box.
Having domain-specific vocabulary doesn't imply something is scientific, much less pretentiously pseudo-scientific.
It's hard to talk about the specifics of a problem if you don't have names for things, don't you agree?
The secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass.
We are bikeshedding on the word "science" so I regret using that phrase because it diverted the replies from my point. Perhaps it would have been better to say I disagree with his opinion on house design presented as some kind of universal aesthetic. His condescending tone[1] used throughout the article in an attempt to sound "authoritative" seems strange considering many professionally trained architects deliberately design houses with the "voids" and "masses" he dislikes.
In another example he writes, "another issue with McMansions and mass is the use of too many voids". For some reason, the author doesn't acknowledge that many classically trained architects will deliberately put in "too many voids" so it brightens the interior of the house with light. The other reason for extensive windows/voids is to provide an expansive view of an outdoor feature such as a lake from inside the house. Smaller windows or no windows as the author advises detracts from these desirable design goals.
[1] e.g. "it means that they are simply not educated in basic architectural concepts."
This strikes me as a reasonable argument, but then the issue isn't the author's vocabulary; it's the contents of his analysis!
It's quite strange to get hung up on this issue. Yes, those principles are subject to interpretation/taste/subjectivit/etc, but that's hardly the point.
I mean no disrespect to anyone in this comment thread, but this line of criticism is pedantic.
Strongly disagree. In my experience, people who like to use highly specific domain vocabulary are far more concerned with appearing intelligent than they are with actually being intelligent.
I've heard so many senior engineers speak in Buzzword Babble that I no longer take seriously the opinion of someone who cannot have a conversation in plain English.
At least he didn't drag out the golden ratio.
The design pattern of mcmansions is malignant. Oh you still have money, lets slap on an asymmetric ugly random whatever, any old place till you run out of money. The design scheme is tumor like. Ah the underlying tissue must have had a good blood supply in that direction as the tumor expanded in that direction. They're almost organically gross as opposed to simply random.
The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly. Also there's the fast food cookie cutter nature of McMansions where even if a single Big Mac isn't repulsive, an entire subdivision of identical ones is repellent, endless roads of ticky tacky. A semi-competent architect could make a nice looking Georgian pretty easily, but it doesn't flow to have dozens of CCR enforced utterly identical ones packed into a small area. Shotgun shack townhouse from Boston, yeah those look right when packed together like books on a shelf. If you must have lot spacing of 3 feet between houses, at least select matching appropriate styles, shotgun shack instead of southern plantation on LSD.
The excess is very much fast food like. Well, yeah, it sucks, and it sucks just like everyone elses, and you have no choice in some areas of the country, but the excess is very 128 oz big gulp or super size frys like. Oh you still got money, well, lets put more columns and weird dormers and rooflines until you run out of money. Sure it'll be ugly but the point is to show off how big of a subprime balloon payment adjustable rate mortgage you can take out, and ugly does get noticed...
The offensiveness of a mcmansion is bad always crowds out good. If you don't have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice looking row of boston style townhouses? If you do have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice plantation era with luxurious porches and stuff?
Class signalling. It's important to keep the new money in their place.
I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes?! :D
For my part, I've lived in a lot of houses where the exteriors looked like that those of the houses lauded in the OP, and a few whose design more closely mimicked the "awful" McMansion styles.
I absolutely detested the interior spaces of the "good" houses, and the placement of "voids" on the house's frontal exterior had primary blame for that. I STRONGLY preferred the interior spaces of the McMansion-type homes, looking at the exteriors on the blog there, I abhor the "good" ones and actually kind of like most of the McMansions.
I assert that while the criticisms appear to be valid at first glance, that virtually ALL of the derision for McMansions comes because of class differences and their reputation for shoddy workmanship, and almost NONE of it is due to actual, objective architectural issues. There's no accounting for taste, taste accounts for 99% of the derision towards McMansions, and this particular taste is associated by most with the upwardly mobile yuppies who tend to buy them, which marks it for nigh-universal hate - as strongly as I feel about the "good" house photos on the blog, exteriors of houses I great up in and around that were nearly unusable inside, people feel that way about McMansions, and this is just a (noble) attempt at explaining that subtle, almost unconscious derision for this type of home.
If only they had cultivated [Subjective Taste We've Cultivated] they would be ashamed.
It's almost like they watch Television. Or Sports on Television. Or eat Fast Food and enjoy it. Or prefer sandwich bread to crusty artisanal bread.
Or drive Big Flashy Cars. Or drive pedestrian affordable cars. Or support Obama. Or support Trump. Or drink instant coffee or take public transportation.
There's no end to the list of things that the Other People do that Our People can look down on and laugh. If only they knew better.
Housing should be built for the climate of the area where it is placed. A SoCal-style flat roof built around a central courtyard and pool is perfectly reasonable there... and a really bad idea in Minnesota or Maine. There's no reason to put a two-story barn pseudo-conversion in a place where they never had that style of barn and will never need to shed snow quickly.
First function, then play around with form.
Though, I'm a form follows function guy.
Reading his books changed the way I'm looking at houses and apartments. Not from outside, but the layout. I guess (some of) the patterns are quite obvious, but as usual, it helps when somebody points them out. Two example things that stuck to me:
1) Intimacy gradient: Public areas where you host guests, meet people and closer to the front door. The deeper you go, the more private it gets.
2) Parents and children's realms: Separate areas for parents and kids, common area that connect them.
When shopping for apartment and browsing through many different layouts, this kind of simple things help rule out many of them.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Ale... [2] https://archive.org/stream/APatternLanguage/A_Pattern_Langua...
The problem with McMansions is usually too much house on too little land, with no visual relationship with neighboring houses. On a bigger lot with more trees and space around the house, most of them wouldn't look bad.
> 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.
Those bungalows were definitely not modeled after classical or traditional architecture, so the principles in the article wouldn't apply. I'm sure the author has different opinions about modern architecture (i.e. the style that FLW defined).
The difference is that McMansions are (poorly) aping traditional architecture, whereas FLW was creating his own style.
For example, all the windows are similar, the house appears designed in thirds, the bottom floor clearly visually supports the top floor.
The house is an example of what the article calls an "assymetrically balanced house." Wright was even kind enough to point out the balance point with that flower-podium feature.
Classical mansion typically has more details and larger number of different visual elements than Fallingwater. Mansions make them fit by using the rules mentioned in the article. Fallingwater uses smaller number of plain elements to create organic arrangement.
The primary mass is formed by the central column and the two main wings that stick out to the sides (primary mass should be evaluated as an artist would, not by simplistically the largest box of the house). It has asymmetry, but it's cohesive, not awkward, asymmetry, and it's definitely balanced. The proportions make sense in the context of the terrain, because the widest portion is drawn along the edge of the hill, melding with the ground, and the bottom portion is filling the gap in the valley. It definitely has rhythm, because all of the balconies and windows are drawn from the same palette, cohesive again.
1: http://architectural-models.com/newsite/galfallwat.html
Edit: I just noticed that model is $61,000!
Once you know the rules, you know how to break them Personally, I dodge the bullet by simply going for Bauhaus. Farnsworth > McMansion.
On the other hand, the problem with Fallingwater is that it leaked, was full of mold and mildew, and was structurally unsound. It failed at the most essential functions of a house: standing up and keeping the rain out.
If you want to be a sculptor, you should be a sculptor. If you want to be an architect, you need to design stuff that keeps the rain out, the heat in or out (depending on climate and season) and the noise and odors of the neighbors away. Yes, Frank Gehry, I'm looking in your direction, as well as that of FLW.
Then we had every architecture student and their dog doing something bit similar. Some of that stuff got pass because of Fallingwater is nice. But most are hideous.
Modernist and postmodernist architecture isn't trying to imitate classical mansion architecture.
Similarly his complaints about secondary masses. His example photo shows a big offshoot of a house sticking forward, but I'd rather have the extra room than cut it off and have less space, or make it a separate garage I have to put my shoes on a trek out to instead of just being able to walk over there inside.
The whole thing sounds like what programmers and designers get up to if we don't have usability studies with users showing us how stupid we are, thinking the huge buttons we make are titles and never pressing them, or not finding actions we think are obvious in our apps. Sounds like he's just going on without caring about the people who live in the house.
Similarly, some people get value from the simplicity and symmetry of the MacBook Pro/Air design, while others don't care at all what the bottom of a laptop looks like if the tech specs and price are good.
https://tektype.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/laptop-bottom.jp...
http://www.ishootshows.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/apple-...
The principles the author describes are not telling you what you should think, but rather they are patterns that predict the reactions people have had historically.
As other commenters describe, some well-regarded designs have come about by people deliberately acting against the accepted principles. But it doesn't hurt to know what they are.
People who are poor at GUI design do exactly the same sort of things as has been done with the McMansions.
When you do usability tests and people don't like a GUI, they often don't know why. But if you know design principles you can tell almost right away why they don't like it. It is because common design principles have been broken.
Like with a house, a magazine page or a GUI design should have visual balance e.g.
Your complaints really show that you didn't fully comprehend the problems and their potential solutions. The solution to the off-shoot sticking out isn't necessarily cutting it off. You could have achieved balance in multiple ways: Cut it off, expand the central mass, reduce secondary masses, simplify overall design. A big box of a house would have had better balance and more space.
You could have solved the problem with excessive amounts of voids by simply having larger windows and simpler design. That would have had the opposite effect and given you more light, not less.
Even people without much formal knowledge of architecture (like myself) have an intuitive sense of what cheap wood or ersatz brick look like. You can just immediately sense the economy of the construction.
I guess that's just a different way of saying what you're saying. I think buyers choose mcmansions for a couple reasons. The first are the ones sucked into it by the school or proximity to work (where proximity is VERY subjective.) The others actually want those houses, either because it's a cheap structure in which they can imitate the many nice interiors they've collected in their heads, or because they want to build their walls to encompass a maximum volume, hoping that their house will insulate them from all the shit in their work and commute while they're in it.
When they showed a house that was older and was better quality it was a stark difference.
But just like people who can't afford a Lamborghini would buy a car that has a similar shape and look, so someone who can't afford a $10M mansion would be buy a $2M McMansion just feel like they live in a mansion.
No amount of architects of HN-ers guilting them with practicalities of construction materials, or aesthetic debates is going to change that market.
And huge voids suck too: windows have poor thermal resistance and large glazed areas mean overheating due to the sun's radiation.
Add cheap material and poor construction practices (the famed "ductopus" is often found in million dollar homes) and you get crap housing, even without taking aesthetics into account.
The other thing is that they really aren't architected. Builders drive the design vs clients, and the bling is there to hide the lousy construction material and craftsmanship. The insides of these things are an even bigger shitshow -- all cheap Home Depot fixtures and millwork.
Principles aren't facts?
People hold different sets of principles?
I guess what I'm asking is: are these principles culturally universal?
If land is expensive and you want a lot of space, isn't a "McMansion" the ideal building for you?
I don't have any stake in this fight, but I also don't have a lot of sympathy for people who want to control what their neighbors' houses look like.
Most people's idea of a house is rather conservative. It includes slanted roofs and modest sized windows with small panes. If you build a modernist steel and glass house with stone elements in a suburban setting, you may get a writeup in Architectural Record, but it will be hard to sell.
The builder is simply trying to deliver the most product for the lowest cost: a giant inoffensive box. To this day, buyers believe more square footage is better, even if it is mostly garage. The "grand foyer" implies fewer rooms to spec, support, plumb, and wire.
I've never understood single-family buyers who look at 5000sq ft and up...you end up with empty rooms or ridiculously underutilized rooms ("gift wrapping room" etc)
My wife and I once looked at homes in a Portland development that were 6500 sq feet and up. I could afford them....but WHY? We wanted a house, not a mall.
The houses the author likes are inoffensive boxes. The rambling, varied, multifaceted ones are what he doesn't like.
Which part of the US counts the garage as "square footage"?
That's because they're not. The vast amount of people buying them didn't think so either. It's just classic elitism: you get to feel more "sophisticated" if you can say people's taste is wrong with made up but smart sounding criteria. None of the author's criteria foe making architecture look good are actually so.
ie. It involves spending a lot of money. It should be complex. Columns are a sign of taste.
So they are easy to "fool", they only look at bits they can tick off. They don't have the knowledge to get the overall concept.
So even through they might not subliminally love the design they get enjoyment from thinking it is great through their criteria.
I'm sure they believe it. Everyone always thinks their own culture has better taste. That's pretty much what culture is, a loose agreement on what the best X is for a wide variety of X.
The best way out is not to play. Why have any opinion at all about "mcmansions?" Also, why a special term? Why not just call them mansions?
This one's pretty straightforward. McDonald's is low status. Therefore, mcmansions are also low status.
(I believe the term originates in the desire to mock mass-produced buildings, e.g. a big tract where all the houses basically share a form. That is clearly not how it's being used here.)
Because they do share characteristics distinctive from large homes (e.g. mansions). The wikipedia article takes a nice crack at it, "The term 'McMansion' is generally used to denote a new, or recent, multi-story house of no clear architectural style,[8] which prizes superficial appearance, and sheer size, over quality."
Or in other words, conspicuous consumption without commensurate quality.
I'm sure you believe it. Everyone always thinks articles that agree with their opinions are superior.
The best way out is not to play. Why have any opinion at all about "articles?"
Isn't this the form of every opinion piece?
Because they are mass-produced and consistently pretty much the same everywhere -- just like McDonald's products.
1) Making purely aesthetic arguments
2) In several cases I feel that the "bad" architecture is aesthetically more appealing than the "good architecture.
For example, when the author discusses how "secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass"; what that seems to mean in practice is "ugly, squat, lumpen buildings are good; interesting, attractive silhouettes are bad". No doubt the author would disagree with my characterisation, but then, that's sort of the point. It feels very subjective.
Of all the examples given, the one I unambiguously agreed with was the one where none of the windows styles matched.
I have been looking for information on what constitutes a McMansion vs a non-McMansion and the arguments parallel the same sort of stuff that made Feng Shui so popular: there are magical rules that make things right or wrong.
Would love so see a real test done on these assumptions. If there are real rules that are being violated with these homes, then an unbiased test should be easy to put together.
The "Mc" part comes because they are cheaply mass produced with little thought or effort put into the design. The didn't decide to "break the rules" because they were pursuing some artistic vision. It was just a matter of expediency to create the most volume for the least money.
(From an architectural perspective) a lot of mishmashing of architectural styles and features without any sort of unifying aesthetic. Yes, that's a matter of taste, and there are ugly buildings with unified modernist aesthetics but we can probably agree that architecture should be more than pich two from column A, one from column B, and one from column C.
In many cases, McMansions are in large developments with big houses on small property lots with, often, minimal landscaping both for reasons of space and because they're fairly new, which accentuates all that there is to not like about the houses themselves.
I suspect that the McMansion style gets wrapped up in a lot of cultural biases and attitudes such as you see here.
[ADDED: The OP did make an effort to offer some tests. My untrained paraphrase would be that McMansions tend to be sort of a jumble of often seemingly random design elements.]
Disclaimer: I'm an architect.
edit: this is the best blog I (didn't) know explaining what makes architecture good. There is a lack of short articles on this subject. Thanks for posting this.
My take on this is that these McMansions are an in-between step. They look like a Picasso - and not in a good way - because they are not designed as a whole.
Once complex manual labour (most importantly: masonry) can be automated, and once one figures out how to combine a modern, relaxed lifestyle with architecture, these "mansions" will come to be seen as barbarous monstrosities.
Source: I own one and I did mortgages for a while. Was product manager for a company that sold some tech to home builders.
This seems incorrect. If it were true, then there would be no reason for the exteriors to be so god-awful. If all you care about is a lot of good interior space, then why pay for misplaced Roman columns? In fact, some McMansions can be identified by their poor handling of interior space, mostly due to having too many disjoint or poorly connected masses.
The McMansions look cool in a theme park way. But there is nothing timeless about them. It is like the things we thought looked cool in the 80s like big shiny metal fonts. It was cool then, but today we are like "oh my, how did we ever think this was good!"
Personally I don't think the examples looked good. And while some of these features might work well for GUIs, forcing them on houses can cause problems. E.g. limiting the number of windows to fit the style. Windows and natural lighting have been shown to have a huge beneficial effect on mental health. Or forcing the house to be symmetrical could make the room layouts suboptimal. Form should follow function, and these rules oppose function.
But even then I was expecting him to list things like shoddy construction, or dull featurelessness, or cookie-cutter tract construction. No, his #1 issue is houses that are (gasp) not perfectly rectangular. #2 is houses that are are asymmetrical, but not in a cool way. He actually calls out one house specifically for having too many windows. I thought windows were for letting sunlight in, but apparently they're actually intended for class signalling.
And class signalling is all this is. He gives the game away when he specifies that these rules are very important unless you're using a cool, [m/M]odern style where rule-breaking is socially approved. This is no different than the byzantine fashion codes manufactured by society matrons around the turn of the last century to exclude the vulgar nouveau riche. Never wear white after Labor Day; never have too many windows on your house.
* energy efficiency/re-cycling of building materials used
* integration of passive/active energy saving power
* poor design in creating buildings capable of whole life existence
* improved use of natural light and air flow
* use of factory built, prefabricated frames (ie: Holland)
If you watch or catch Kevin McCloud's, Grand Designs (BBC) would appreciate this. [0] Any others you can think of?
[0] Though even best intentions have problems: cf "Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud's eco-development 'riddled with building errors" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/conservati...
These homes tend to also have ridiculously oversized garages that are fashioned to make the home look much larger than it is.
Getting the car up on jack stands takes about 10 minutes, off is another 10 minutes. It just takes away from the fun, whereas a lift is boom! it's up.
So it doesn't really matter how much I'd use it, a used one isn't that expensive and I am willing to spend the bucks on it.
A piece of advice - never ever support your car on brick. It can crush unexpectedly and then the car falls on you, you die. I once used cinder blocks to hold the car up (making do), and they suddenly turned to dust and the car fell, fortunately before I got under it.
Now I use two sets of jackstands (the extra set as backup), and I give the car good shoves before getting under it.
The architectural integrity I guess is the problem. The house can be sprawling (no well defined center) or has to many windows (that may be of different sizes).
It sounds like designers hating on Comic Sans or programmers arguing over tabs vs spaces.
But worry not...
This rounds up post #1 of McMansions 101 - but don’t worry, there are many more factors that make an otherwise normal suburban house a McMansion, and each will be covered in their own special posts.
This, basically. I find it darkly humourous that HN's commentariat, in this thread and indeed whenever confronted with domain-specific jargon from non-computron fields [0], analyzes said field and finds 'obvious' problems. Have you ever tried to explain, say, 'tabs vs spaces' to some mundane? Its history, from makefiles to Python, seems uninteresting to someone peering over their iPhone N+1; "why don't you guys just decide on one? Why is this a big deal?" They can say this because 'tabs vs spaces' is a triviality -- to those who don't have to deal with the consequences of the argument.
Inasmuch as HN is explicitly for interesting tidbits of info that don't necessarily have to do with hacker-style nerdery, I'd expect that we who ostensibly know so much would be able to appreciate that there are aspects of the world, and of other intellectual professions, that we don't necessarily wot of.
I mean, unless, of course, one's own buzzsaw-mind is capable of intuiting and then dismissing the well-cited terms of an artisanal field that has been around for many centuries longer than has the idea of computers, but cognitive empathy is a useful practice for everyone.
[0] With the exception of economics, because bike-shedding, because everyone knows about money; they spend it every day!
It would be nice to write out the passive voice. Who considers that the building is lacking in architectural integrity?
I find it inappropriate and offensive that this author decides to be the sole authority on aesthetics of PRIVATE properties, appealing to some sort of an unassailable, celestial authority that mainstream architecture is and promoting boring, utilitarian designs. Just how far down the slippery slope of the rabbit hole do you want to go? Why not box people in grey Soviet apartment buildings?
All of this sounds to me like arrogant ramblings of people who like authoritarianism and can't grasp the concept of personal freedom and that people like homes that are wacky and extension of their own egos and sense of pride in their financial success.
This is a straw man. The author isn't against interesting designs, just careless ones. And interpreting this article as a advocating authoritarianism is reading a lot into it.
People find "careless" designs interesting. Who is he to dictate how private property should look? He is utterly intolerant of personal freedom and promotes sterile, totalitarian looking architecture.
I guess I find it hard to take your claims seriously until you explain why you've concluded the author wants to enact her tastes into law rather than just discuss them.
>People find "careless" designs interesting.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. It just that in some (many?) cases, careless designs are less likely to be widely appealing or stand up to scrutiny.
[0]: http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148836824926/man-i-love...
He's complaining about stupidity such as having a row of windows, with each window being a different random style.
If I was a web designer, and I insisted that every letter on a website was in a different font, everyone else would tell me to stop being such an asshole.
These homes aren't wacky, they are built by builders who kept cutting costs and cutting costs until they were left with the most cost efficient subset of features.
Another analogy to software, imagine if to save on dev time, a random half of every dialog box in an app was just left blank. Maybe some of those buttons were needed, maybe they weren't, whatever, it got out on time!
The article's approach is to list a series of hard aesthetic rules, then show how some McMansions break them.
That would be a valid critique, but the article never fully establishes that those aesthetic rules are universally desirable. In aesthetics, rules are made to be broken.
If standards are broken haphazardly or unintentionally, that may be a sign of poor aesthetics. But I'm convinced McMansions intentionally break several of those rules.
Breaking those rules is the only way to convey something that the author somehow completely fails to notice.
A better aesthetic test of McMansions would only involve two questions:
1) Are McMansions effectively conveying some idea, and,
2) Is that idea is worth conveying?
Setting (2) aside for the moment, I think McMansions meet (1) very well, primarily by breaking the author's "rules."
Think about who buys these. The architects and the purchasers are not ultra-rich, but are still in a class that wants to display wealth.
When purchasers in this group compare several homes, they are most likely to buy the one that makes them feel like they're displaying the most wealth and power for their price point.
Wait, why would a tangled mess of asymmetrical nonsense achieve that?
Because the aesthetic McMansions are shooting for is "this is more than one house."
Bits crop up all over the place and the masses are obscured so that the building gives the appearance of multiple dwellings.
What does it look most like? Villages that have cropped up around a central castle, organically growing in different heights and orientations without much central planning. (Maybe more from fairy tales than real world villages.)
The image the McMansion tries to convey is one of dominion over a territory or a population. I think McMansions succeed, primarily through the subversion of the author's favored aesthetic tropes.
But even if McMansions successfully evoke small villages, part (2) is the more important question.
Is mimicry of an order of magnitude of wealth and power beyond one's reach aesthetically appealing, or desperate and ostentatious?
I'd find a critique along those lines far more compelling. The fact that some buildings fail to satisfy some arbitrary checklist is not the more important thing, what the building says about the owner's character and insecurity is far more interesting.
Case in point: http://designhomes.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mid-centu...
I despise traditional architecture. Give me something so modern that it makes the neighbors puke.
It was a beautiful design that was completely inappropriate for the region.
The layout of these McMansions is often just as bad as the external appearance.
If everyone can just build anything they want, then you end up with Second Life, and everything looks like crap, all the time.
For example, Japanese houses are pretty disposable, but you can build more or less anything you like. (Here's a great article on it. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm... ) If you combine this with the fact that Japanese depreciation rules promote 30-year disposable housing, you get a lot of very interesting homes. The result is that a ridiculous fraction of the interesting houses you see on archdaily are Japanese.
Or if you look at modern wealthy residential areas in north Delhi, you get a lot of interesting buildings. The neighborhoods again have their own unique character; it's a lot more heterogeneous than typical US suburbs, but it's clearly got it's own character. I can't find many pictures online, but I'll try to take a few next time I go.
You reach the bottom and it says "keep reading". Keep reading what, the last post in the list or pagination to more posts? So I click it, takes me to the last post (fine), so I scroll down to look at some of the pictures, etc., and then at the bottom it seems to continue back at the top of the prior post list. So I go back, scroll back down to the bottom of the page and notice a "See mcmansionhell's whole Tumblr" link. Perfect. I click it... App Store.
Meaning that if you look at old houses in Europe or similar you very often find extensions and whatsnot that have been added without any overall design in mind. Instead they were going by the time and resources at hand at the time of addition.
http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/
Doesn't try explaining anything though.
I'm happy to see there are other aesthetic reasons, too.
1. Levels of Scale 2. Strong Centers 3. Thick Boundaries 4. Alternating Repetition 5. Positive Space 6. Local Symmetry 7. Good Shape 8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity 9. Gradients 10. Contrast 11. Echos 12. Roughness 13. The Void 14. Simplicity and Inner Calm 15. Each in the Other
Personally I like the Georgian style; big windows and look decent when they're kept simple, or something a little more modern depending on the location. Yes, money doesn't buy happiness, but I'm sure we all have a picture on our mind of a dream house. Nothing wrong with aspirations, excuse me while I do more than just dream!
If you need to study architecture to "realize" how bad those look, maybe they actually don't look bad. All the people buying them seem to agree.
There are legitimate problems with the construction quality, as others have pointed out, but trying to claim they objectively look bad is clearly wrong.
And others I could certainly see what they were talking about aesthetically, but many of them came with concrete benefits - all those "voids" in the second story of that one I'm sure let in a lot of beautiful light and scenery for the people actually using the house.
I don't know about McMansions. Certainly (~20th century) Dutch architecture follows somewhat different design guidelines. We don't have as much space, sometimes sacrificing balance or even proportion. We definitely have much bigger windows (voids), it's a cultural thing. Similarly, fig.2 "Secondary Masses: 6" looks to me like it could be a Mediterranean communal farm, grown organically (truly don't see what's wrong with that one tbh).
But I don't want to go into details. The most important rule of design is:
You've got to know to the rules before you break the rules.
Some of these rules are grown by circumstance, and you can't always break them (or build a shitty house--but sometimes you can be clever).
Some of the rules are grown by taste or preference. These you can play with.
Some of the rules are grown by circumstance, turned into preference, because technology advanced and preference didn't. These you can also play with.
Relating this to HN: The above holds just as much for designing webpages or app user interfaces.
I have much more experience doing web design (some) than I do evaluating architecture (none). The principles he is describing apply in a similar manner to web design, and they are similarly hard to articulate. When you see a block of text without enough space between paragraphs, you know it doesn't have enough space, even though you would be hard-pressed to provide an objective reason why a paragraph needs 20 px vs. 5 px vs. 100px vs. 500px. Only one of those distances feels right, and it has almost nothing to do with how much vertical space is available on your screen or the relative ease of reading paragraphs with that precise distance between them.
Similarly, you can feel a wrongness when a similar visual element is repeated, but without consistency, like a second text box that has a grey that is just slightly bluer than the last text box, even though they contain text of the same type at the same level of semantic importance. That is the equivalent of including windows with wooden shutters, and a set of windows with blinds, and a set of bay windows on the same facade. (For a visual-design example of his masses and voids principle, see the BeOS UI window, but I think this is the weakest of his principles)
It is easy to be a contrarian and say "this guy is wrong, all of this is subjective," but I think that contrariness is more wrong than right. The best functional (not purely artistic) designs, whether they are web designs or architectural designs, hold to a set of quasi-universal aesthetic standards, including balance (symmetry or balanced asymmetry), repetition (consistency in web development terms, repeated elements in musical terms), and appropriate blank space. I suspect that these core principles reflect aspects of human cognition that are not subject to pure subjectivity.
I think if you were designing from first aesthetic principles, you would probably retain balance and thematic cohesiveness (repetition). What you would lose is the trappings of particular eras, like roman columns or those shutter windows. Even if your house was based on a geodesic dome you'd want it to have a certain proportionality and space between visual elements. The problem with McMansions is that they take ONLY those trappings, and discard the principles, and that's what this article should really be about. The reason for this is obvious: the uneducated consumer sees only the trappings, because they are concrete and obvious, thus easy to evaluate. They are associated in the minds of buyers with high class, and so they seem high class in this particular instance.
This is not 'snobbish higher class looking down on middle class.' When you see tens of thousands of anything, you start to pick up on best-practices.
For example, in Vancouver, where the house prices _start_ at $1.7 million, there are tons of $5+ million McMansion here. Due to my line of work, I see and enter them every day. Their owners are likely 1000x wealthier than me, but I can tell you confidently that I think their houses are ugly.
Would I get the house if I can afford it? Sure. I need a house to live in, and a McMansion is a good functional house.
To make a somewhat inappropriate analogy- An Indian outsourcing company' programmers have written some terrible , but functional code. Other people took a look at the source files and point out that, yes, they are indeed terrible (maybe too many goto? Or global variables.)
It is not ethnic discrimination to point out the code is terrible.
Along a similar vein, 'you spend most of your time indoor anyway. Why do you care what the house look like externally?'
Just because something is functional, doesn't mean it shouldn't (or can't) look good to most people. You might not care, and I wish I don't care how your house look either. But general art principles exist because most people _do_ care, at least subconsciously.
As an aside- If you dare to build it, then be prepared to have others critique it.
Another argument, 'the author should concentrate on the general poor build quality of McMansion.'
In Vancouver, I've seen $5+ million McMansion built with the best material and craftsmanship anyone could find. They are McMansion due to their design, not their quality.
Finally, 'I like the McMansion in the article better!'
Well, good for you. This is like different computer languages- some people like all the features a language provide them (eg. C++0x), while others like language that adheres to what it does best (Heskell, Lisp etc.)
Most people prefer orderly items.
I don't know enough about architecture to say, but it seems possible that the people who build these homes may be lacking in this second, artistic aspect.
1: I recently watched Hachi: A Dog's Tale. It is notable in that the craftsmanship of the film is merely adequate, by traditional film metrics, but it's so incredibly emotional that it has won a place on the IMDB Top 250 films. I would also point to Stephen King, who is one of the most impactful people alive when it comes to TV and film, not to mention his prolific writings, but his stories don't show the craftsmanship of one of the literary greats.
As an aside (Flame suit on: I am Chinese), most extreme high-end houses ($3 mill and up) here are bought by wealthy Chinese immigrants/investors. This leads to 2 situations-
If the house is built by a developer, then the quality tends to be low. Even the worst Vancouver builder's craftsmanship is better than what you would normally get in China. This means that the developers have no incentive to pay extra as the buyer would be impressed regardless. So McMansion with low quality.
If the house is built by wealthy immigrants, however, then the quality tend to be very high. When money is no objection, it's amazing how much quality you can get... So McMansion with high quality.
More aside: This particular style of house is all the rage in Vancouver suburbia in the last 5 years. http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/drastic-pruning-of-200-year-old...
Imagine seeing 20 of these new houses in 1 suburbia street :( It's quite dispiriting.
1) Gables that don't terminate a wing of the house 2) Massive hip roofs
#1 makes no sense from either an aesthetic or functional point of view and ends up doing nothing besides adding cost and making solar panel installation more difficult.
#2 also makes solar panel installation more difficult, is harder to ventilate (or air seal and insulate, in the case of cathedral ceilings), and unless labor is extremely cheap, more expensive to build compared to trussed gable roofs.
Common complaint of theirs: clients like to meddle
Analogy would be asking for <blink> tags to a web developer or for gold incisors to your dentist instead of ceramics
Again, if you are a real estate developer of McMansions who knows what people buying McMansions want it might be a perfectly rational decision to meddle and ask for these features.
Meddling means being unreasonable about specific features(I want a bathroom here! where it is a really bad idea because of a multitude of reasons) in a building/house.
The problem for architects without FU money is that they have to be very tactful about handling these needy customers.
Clients communicating their wishes about their requirements is a normal process of a workflow for programmers and architects alike.
What all the architects that I know of are upset about are clients that frequently specify some features (a column, a window etc) which is "wrong".
By wrong I mean it is contrary to the years of experience and learning that architects have had in their craft.
An analogy would be a client requesting programmer to move close window X to the lower right without a good justification.
In common use MacMansion seems to mean "big new house which I don't like", and the reason can be anything from looks, to environmental footprint, to simple envy.
The purely aesthetic perspective should embarass contemporary architects by its shallowness.
The word 'energy' doesn't appear anywhere in the original article, and only a couple of times, en passant, on the HN discussion. However the wanton misuse of materials (including energy) and on-going misuse of same, is the thing I find least attractive about these structures. Sure, it's not a purely aesthetic response, but it's hard to look at one of those things going up in the neighbourhood and not think about these aspects.
They all face the street, too. (Thoughtfully designed structures would be aligned, as appropriate for the region, with north / south.) It's a weak line, but the owners aren't the ones who have to look at the outside all the time, so they aren't as impacted.
So nothing like most software at all.
It is very useful to know these sorts of principles because without them you notice stuff looks wrong but you don't know why and you don't quite know how to fix it.
Having said that, it's often better to fail by actively trying to avoid following the norm than to try to follow it and not quite succeed.
Here's a ~$9million house being built that suffers from almost all of the claims put forth in the post even though they're supposed to be hallmarks of McMansions and not real mansions https://www.redfin.com/MD/Potomac/10501-Chapel-Rd-20854/home...
After spending some time thinking about the problem, I've come to the following hypothesis: architecture schools aren't producing architects trained to produce quality designs that match the desires of the vast majority of the marketplace.
Consider the following: we've been though decades of massive architectural development in practical housing, the result of which appears to be variations on boxes-with-mixed-materials https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=modern+house+design&hl...
Most consumers don't want these kinds of buildings and the ones who do buy them because they're custom architected and that acts as a status symbol. Consumers want classic "house" shapes on various degrees of "fanciness".
Most consumers also don't know good from bad architecture. But it's okay, because it appears most architects don't know good from bad either or else we wouldn't be getting endless variants of boxes-with-mixed-materials. The last time the kind of design this blog is looking for was actively used was during the American colonial period. And that wasn't always a successful meme -- America is littered with old homes with huge pillared entrances on otherwise modest homes. http://www.house-design-coffee.com/porch-columns-disaster.ht...
It could be worse, America could be littered with craptastic hyper-modernism and weird vestigial bits of unintersting history http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/ But Europe isn't immune to this nonsense either, McMansions have started infecting everywhere from Ireland to Germany.
Asia has it's own entirely unique series of architectural sins.
I think there's a number of forces at play here that have all led up to where we are.
- A growing desire in industry to find ways to minimize materials usage in new construction (older homes are sometimes hilariously overbuilt)
- A rising and increasingly affluent middle class
- A lack of good examples to educate people on -- most buildings are crap...even the ones that are well considered often fall apart quickly http://failures.wikispaces.com/Fallingwater
- A lack of architects who can produce something other than boxes-with-mixed-materials
- Continued cost cutting as plans go to market
- Consumers who are fine settling with "nice enough" if it saves them $100k-$200k on a similarly specc'd home
- Most people don't give a crap about gardening or yard maintenance. Who cares what your house looks like or how small the property is if you're spending all day inside your climate controlled 5000 sq ft personal facility with movie theater, gym, gourmet kitchen and jacuzzi?
It also turns out most McMansions are actually pretty nice places to spend time: well lit, nice materials on the surfaces you interact with, tons of space so you don't have to make too many compromises, open floor plans and so on.
They are worlds better than the 60's, 70's and 80's era homes I grew up in and later owned. The 70s and 80s were particularly abysmal for material quality and energy use. Holy crap the heating/cooling bills on those homes.
I feel like it's a rather toxic cultural thing to care at all about other people's houses. Likewise with cars. It's also something that's not nearly as prevalent in mainstream culture outside the US (snobbery is the domain of the upper classes exclusively).