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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

I also dislike McMansions but I disagree with his pseudo-scientific criteria of "voids" and "secondary mass" that he applied to the various houses.

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.

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>I disagree with his pseudo-scientific criteria of "voids" and "mass" that he applied to the various houses.

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?

To clarify, I wasn't criticizing the "names" he calls things. It was the criteria. For example, he has this rule:

  The secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass.

Whether he wrote it as "secondary outlines should never compete with primary outlines" or "secondary shapes should never compete with primary shapes" ... it doesn't matter what the labels are. I disagree with the rule as of the defining features of what makes a house a "McMansion". It's an inconsistent guideline.

Architecture has been using rule-based language since long before the advent of modern science. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius

I'm not against using a rule-based language. I disagree with his particular rules.

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."

>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.

This strikes me as a reasonable argument, but then the issue isn't the author's vocabulary; it's the contents of his analysis!

That's still not scientific, or pseudo-scientific. I'm starting to wonder if you know what "scientific" even means. What you quoted is a design principle, and just because you may not understand the reason for the principle (which is probably just "houses that violate this are ugly") doesn't make it invalid.

It reads like an appeal to authority. "This house has too many windows" is clearly an opinion. "This mass of this house has too many voids" sounds weighty and important, like a technical critique, a proven rule, a fact.

But architectural aesthetics aren't a quantitative field of study, so it's obvious from the get-go that we're not dealing with the same kinds of facts as in the natural sciences. From there, it's fairly obvious that these terms describe principles, not authoritative laws of nature.

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.

He leads off by essentially saying "If you don't share my tastes, don't worry, you're not stupid, just uneducated." It all comes off as quite certain that his taste in architecture is objectively, factually correct, not merely a matter of opinion. That's why people are getting rubbed the wrong way over it.

I read it as "if you can't verbalize why you don't like McMansions, it's because you're unaware of the architectural principles they violate.

> It's hard to talk about the specifics of a problem if you don't have names for things, don't you agree?

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.

I agree. This article echoes my sentiment with a class of articles that try to boil down whole crafts like painting, photography, cinematography[1] or here architecture to simple guidelines out of a beginners handbook aimed at amateurs to produce acceptable results with arbitrary, but accepted, rules.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948761

> I disagree with his pseudo-scientific criteria of "voids" and "secondary mass" that he applied to the various houses.

At least he didn't drag out the golden ratio.

This is no different to use of grids and rhythm in web design. These are not arbitrary pseudo-scientific rules imposed by snobbish architects and designers. They're rules of thumb that have been developed over centuries, because they work. It's helpful to have terms of art to describe them. You can certainly break them, but to do that you should know them, and know why you're breaking them. That's why he's said these same rules don't apply to modernist or post-modernist architecture. The examples here are trying to copy a style without understanding what makes the style. They're taking superficial "Georgian" (etc) details and randomly slapping them together. That's why they look so ugly.

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