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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

Where does the author advocate banning terrible houses?

She's just explaining the features and design ideas that make this kind of architecture so distasteful - not telling anyone what to do...

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She also frequently points out that "McMansion" homes often have design problems that make them unpleasant to live in, like:

- Use of cheap materials, like vinyl siding and EIFS, which are likely to fail early and require expensive repairs.

- Poorly conceived interior spaces. Rooms that are awkwardly shaped or placed, which are impossible to furnish sensibly, or which simply have no purpose but to fill space. "Grand entrances" are a frequent offender here. These aren't just ugly; they make the house uncomfortable to live in.

Then why not directly complain about those?

The author does, and the person you replied to specifically mentioned that.

> Use of cheap materials, like vinyl siding and EIFS, which are likely to fail early and require expensive repairs.

I was under the impression that EIFS was a good system. Is that not true?

EIFS is great if it's done properly. It can be leaky if designed/installed improperly, though, and it's difficult to repair.

I've had good results with EIFS on commercial buildings. In fact if you look around you'll find most new commercial buildings in USA are EIFS, usually with one or two accent materials like CMUs or steel. I don't really like the look of EIFS on most houses, although it probably works for "southwestern"-style houses that mimic adobe construction, and I'd love to see a medieval half-timbered house using EIFS.

I don't agree with TFA's complaint about what it's calling EIFS "seams". First of all properly-installed EIFS doesn't have seams; in the picture those are simply decorative details. It would have been less work not to include them. If they hadn't been included, the tiny windows would have really menaced the neighborhood with their empty soulless stares. If TFA's favored flavors of "modernism" reject simple details like these, it has to come up with something to replace them, because giant blank walls just doesn't work.

EIFS is not alone in not dealing well with moisture when installed incorrectly. I have seen improperly installed vinyl siding, for instance, result in horrific water damage in a short period of time. If you're going to own the results for any amount of time, you must watch your contractors like a hawk. Reasonably-priced contractors will fuck you every time; the goal is to get fucked in relatively painless fashion. Having to replace entire walls is painful, even if insurance covers it.

>Use of cheap materials, like vinyl siding and EIFS, which are likely to fail early and require expensive repairs

Unlike wood shingles that have to be expensively repainted every few years.

She doesn't even get into the main thing (in my opinion) that makes them so distasteful--car dependency for everything. Having lived in that situation vs a situation where I was in a smaller house, but walking distance to town, I much preferred the walking distance house. Being in a subdivision a half mile into a windy 25 mph road is not such a fun experience.

She very often talks about how attached garages make houses much uglier, and ruin the aesthetics in a lot of cases. Check out the rest of her articles!

I like having a place to keep cars, tools, and sporting equipment. I suspect the people who buy these houses do as well.

She addresses that.

Here in the midwest we have a lot of houses that wound not qualify as McMansions at all, but that are just as car dependent as a huge McMansion: There is no town to go to, or if there is, the area around it is full of incredibly expensive houses.

At the same time, I could build something as architecturally catastrophic as those McMansions in SF, clashing with every house around it,but then you have no car dependency. So ultimately your argument is that entire swaths of the US are distasteful by default.

Car dependence today has more to do with city planning than anything else. The density that would make an area walkable isn't just hard to find, but downright illegal. The smallest allowed lot for a single family house around here would fit 4 houses in The Mission, San Francisco.

Here race politics came into play, and everyone made cars mandatory to stop black people, who were poorer and couldn't afford bigger houses or cars, to move into suburbs. When everyone had a car, the town center dies, as the small stores can't compete with driving a little bit farther to the bigger store. This means that even neighborhoods with small houses that are grandfathered in are not walkable, as the places you'd walk to are gone. A friend of mine lives in a 1 bedroom bungalow with no yard. He parks on the street. And yet, he has a single business in a 20 minute walking trip.

So don't look at just houses then, look at cities. The midwest is full of McCities.

I'm not saying distasteful--I just think it is overrated to have a huge house vs a better location. Generally a McMansion sacrifices the location for the huge house.

Where did I quote the author?

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