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What the Hell is Modern Architecture? Part Three: Late Modernism [The Conclusion]

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 15:35:48 -0500

Hello friends! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on Modern architecture as much as I have. It’s time for what is personally my favorite period of architecture, Late Modernism, which consists of the period from around 1960 to 1980.

Late Modernism was the ideological dam of modernism bursting, and the metaphorical river diverged into many tributaries of coexistent styles. The technological advances of the 60s, and particularly the 70s led to much speculation about the architecture of the future. It was during this time that the computer became more and more sophisticated. In the span of less than 20 years, the computer went from the size of a refrigerator to the size of a television set.

This post will focus on a few of the many movements of this time, and the philosophies behind them: Brutalism (in the UK & US), Metabolism (Japan), High Tech (Europe and some US), and finally US Corporate architecture (as a far extension of the International Style).

Brutalism

Late Corbu as Precedent

If Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel buildings were the prevailing stylistic foundation of Mid-Century Modernism, the same could be said of the late works of Le Corbusier and Late Modernism.

Three of Corbu’s works stand out as having huge influence on the entirety of the field: the Unite d’Habitation at Marseille (1952) (left), the Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1955) (top right), and the monastery Sainte Marie de La Tourette (1957) (bottom right).

Photo Credits (CC-BY-SA 2.0): Marseille by c1ssou, Ronchamp by Sem Vandekerckhove, and La Tourette by Alexandre Norman (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The Unite d’Habitation became the foundation of post-war mass housing theory, with its interior “streets” and grandiose social aspirations. Ronchamp and La Tourette established the use of the spiritual and sculptural monumentality that would come to fruition in the works of Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, as well as the stylistic foundation for the style known as Brutalism.

Brutalism: What is it?

Despite its unfortunate name, Brutalism does not refer to the so-called ‘brutal’ nature of the style itself. Rather, it comes from the French beton brut, meaning ‘raw concrete.’

In context, Brutalism was a reaction by a new generation of architects to the sleek, now over-used the International Style (and often its corporate practitioners as a subtext). Inspired by the monumental, sculptural work of late Corbu, the Brutalists sought to create dramatic structures evoking both the ancient (think caves and other natural forms) and the future (think science fiction).

Photo Credit: nicola j. patron, Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Photo Credit: Sengkang, Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Louis Kahn

Perhaps the most successful and enduring architects of this style is Louis Kahn, who, like Wright, did not belong to any particular school of architecture at the time.

Photo Credit: Gerhard Richter, Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Trained in Beaux-Arts classicism in Philadelphia, Kahn’s formation occurred before the institutional establishment of Modernism on the East Coast took place. His familiarity with classicism gave him a firm hold of formal expression - perhaps why his buildings have endured while those of his contemporaries have not. It’s also why Kahn developed a deep respect for the mysticism of ancient ruins, what he called the “spiritual roots” of architecture.

Perhaps Kahn’s most famous work, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1959-65) best congeals the architect’s mastery of materials and his (in a time of dry functionalism and stylistic mental gymnastics) emotional and sensitive design philosophy.

(Photo Credit: Flickr user dreamsjung, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

The Salk Institute integrates the nature studied within to the nature in which the building itself is enveloped. Kahn’s sensitivity to space, place, and time are explicitly unified every evening, when the light of the sun reflecting on the ocean merges with the light reflecting in the small rivulet of water running down the central court.

Kahn’s sense of the basics of architecture are best summed up by the architect himself:

“If I were to define architecture in a word, I would say that architecture is a thoughtful making of spaces. It is not filling prescriptions as clients want them filled. It is not fitting uses into dimensioned areas… It is a creating of spaces that evoke a feeling of use. Spaces which form the themselves into a harmony good for the use to which the building is to be put…”

(Photo Credit: flickr user tatler, CC-BY-SA-2.0)

Not all architects of the period were as sensitive to space, light, and time as Kahn, and their works have not faired well despite their remarkable sculptural qualities. This is especially true of the Brutalist architecture of the UK, where the Post-War welfare state intersected with inexpensive construction (and ill-informed social housing practices, which I will write about at length another week.)

Structural Expressionism

The other notable American Brutalist architect of the time, Paul Rudolph, sought to reject and react against the prevailing International Style of the time, which is somewhat ironic because he was trained at Harvard under Walter Gropius.

According to architectural historian William J.R. Curtis, Rudolph’s architecture was a unification of the concepts found in the late works of Le Corbusier, the spatial drama of the Italian Baroque, and the sectional complexity of Wright. (Modern Architecture Since 1900, p. 560)

Borroughs Wellcome Headquarters, 1969-71 (Photo found here, original source unknown)

Rudolph’s architecture sought to create complex internal volumes and then express those internal volumes via the building’s exterior. This technique came to be known as Structural Expressionism, and resulted in the most complex and bewildering works of Brutalist architecture.

He also produced some of the most complex, remarkable architectural plans, drawings, and models in the history of architecture. (Rudolph is probably one of my favorite architects, if not my favorite.)

The concept of expressing complex interior structures externally was not just an American phenomenon.

Metabolism in Japan

After World War II, the industrial expansion of Japan as a manufacturing superpower was deemed an economic miracle. The country’s development, as well as its population growth occurred at an astonishingly rapid rate. Combined with the small size of the country, issues of space became an urban planning crisis by the turn of the 1960s.

Enter the Metabolists, a group of young Japanese architects who sought to integrate technology, Utopian ideals, and the structural expressionism established by architect Kenzo Tange into a solution for this new crisis of growth.

Photo from @supermegalopolis, original source unknown

The Metabolists sought to use variable building elements ‘plugged in’ to a central system or infrastructure - a concept both rooted in technology and futuristic aesthetics as well as the organic structures such as beehives.

The extreme complexity of these ideas, however, made their execution almost impossible, and their only true fulfillments were in the World’s Fair Expo 70, hosted in Osaka and the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970-72) by Kisha Kurokawa.

Expo 70 (Photo Credit: Flickr user m-louis, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Nagakin Capsule Tower (Photo Credit: Flickr user yusonkwan, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Despite the short-livedness of the Metabolist movement, its idea of pods and clusters of human beings are very much of the 1970s, and their science-fiction aesthetic is still fascinating even today.

High Tech

The expression of the interior on the exterior took on another form in the High Tech architecture of the 70s. Another short-lived movement, High Tech turned buildings visually inside out with the mechanical innards and other structural components displayed on the exterior (however these were often not the actual mechanical innards but rather an artistic expression of them, just as Mies’ use of I-beams were not entirely structural but rather an expression of the structural.)

The High-Tech movement was spearheaded by the British architect Richard Rogers, whose collaborative work with Italian architect Renzo Piano, the 1971 Pompidou Center in Paris reached levels of structural complexity previously unheard of.

Pompidou Center (Photo Credit: Flickr user dalbera, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Pompidou Center, Detail (Photo Credit: Flickr user ainet, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Despite its sci-fi aesthetic, High Tech, like Metabolism, did not last very long as its projects were notoriously expensive. However, Rogers continued to build in the style, culminating in the Lloyd’s of London Building (1978-86) and the 2016 BBVA Bancomers Tower.

Corporate Architecture

The previously mentioned sub-factions of architecture were almost exclusively relegated to the public realm; that is, public housing, university buildings, museums, and other artistic institutions. The corporate architecture of the era was entirely separate from its experimental contemporaries.

Spearheaded by architects like Kevin Roche, Philip Johnson, the previously Brutalist I.M. Pei, and massive firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), the corporate architecture of the 60s and 70s took the aesthetics of the International Style glass tower set in place by Mies to the extremes of expression.

(Photo Credits: WTC by Wikimedia Commons user Jeffmock; John Hancock Center by Wikimedia Commons user Golbez, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

American corporations needed to express their power resulted in an era of ambitious skyscraper building, whose prominent examples included the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York (Above Left, Minoru Yamasaki, 1969, destroyed by 9/11) and the John Hancock Center in Chicago (Above Right, SOM, 1968-70).

The glass tower reached the limits of its formal expression in buildings such as Kevin Roche’s One United Nations Plaza (Left; New York, 1976) and Philip Johnson’s Pennzoil Place (Right; Houston, 1975).

(Photo Credits: One UN Plaza by Flickr user boscdanjou [CC-BY-SA 2.0]; Pennzoil Place by Wikimedia Commons user agsftw [CC-BY-SA 3.0])

One UN Plaza took the glass tower of Mies and removed from its exterior any context of the scale of the interior spaces. Miniature windows in an endless grid combined with an unconventional exterior shape, leave the viewer unsure of the floorplan or height of each story.

Pennzoil Place is similar in that its skin and shape conceals the interior layout, but excels in its technological fetishism: the space between the two conjoined towers is a sliver of only 10 feet.

Both are faceless and vaguely threatening corporate buildings, flaunting their power, looming over their constituents. Both are quintessentially 70s.

Conclusion

Though sweepingly innovative, the architecture of Late Modernity was quick to lose favor with the general public, who disliked the dogmatic forms and their association with failed housing projects and corporate giants.

By 1975, Postmodernism was already well underway via Robert Venturi (a student of Louis Kahn) in America and James Sterling and Charles Moore in the UK. When the 1980s rolled around, Late Modern architecture became best known as the aesthetic of evil in speculative film. (Shameless plug for my new job, by the way.)

Still, Late Modernism is amongst the most fascinating periods in the history of architecture - until recently, there has never been such rabid experimentation, idealism, or fear of the future, rooted in the belief that the built environment can, in fact, save the world.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series on Modernism as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it - especially this post, which covers my favorite period in architectural history. Stay tuned for Thursday’s Certified Dank McMansion, as well as next Sunday, where we return to our regular sprawl-related content, with a brief history of exurbia!

Also, if you haven’t checked out the Official McMansion Hell Store, I highly recommend it! 30% of the proceeds go to environmental, affordable housing, and architectural preservation charities. This month’s donation is going towards the North Carolina Botanical Garden and North Carolina Modernist Houses, two of my favorite organizations from my home state.

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Edit: my browser’s autoeditor corrected Kahn to Khan every damn time and I didn’t catch it until now.

McMansionHell

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 17:31:48 -0500

McMansionHell:

The official McMansionHell store is now up! New products every day. 30% of all sales go to architectural preservation/environmental/affordable housing charities! Just in time for the holidays!

Oakland County, MI

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 14:51:29 -0500

Hello friends! This week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion is well worth the wait. Every so often I come across a house that is so baselessly tacky, I wonder if the inhabitants have seen what rooms are supposed to look like on TV, like, ever.

Though it might be tame from the outside (by tame I mean clandestinely ugly but surrounded by pretty trees), this 5 bedroom 7 bathroom house, built in 1993, is definitely full of interesting…things. And they all can be yours for 3.3 million dollars!

Obligatory Foyer

Seriously, the weird wood-floor clad nook above the front door is a crime against logic - you can’t get to it without a 14 foot ladder, and it will perpetually tempt your stupid children to try without one.

Can I get that piano mural as a tattoo, because it’s just 2 real and 2 perfect.

The “Great” Room

I don’t have enough friends to fill like half of these seats.

Also that itty bitty step is a total trip hazard.

Dining Room 1

If Dolores Umbridge were a room, she would be this room.

Certified Awesome 90s Kitchen

I swear, I’m having flashbacks about being in Walmart as a young child and getting lost in the bra department and all the bras had the same patterns as these walls and seat cushions and I really just wanted to get back to my mom who was literally around the corner but kids don’t logic real good so I just sat there crying and

Dining Room 2

“Cute 90s Upcycled T-Shirt Custom Fabric Hand Made” ($56)

TV LAIR

Little would they know that their posh setup would be rendered obsolete with the widespread adoption of Picture In Picture circa 2001.

Sketchy Home Office

The wallpaper is especially sketchy.

It’s not like everyone who went to college in the last 5 years hasn’t been harassed by Vector Marketing at the beginning of every semester or anything.

Master Bedroom

So how come the night stands have granite countertops but not the kitchen cabinets??

Master Bathroom

Sadly, the only bathroom visible in the listing.

(Looks in Mirror)
(X-Files Theme Plays)

I wish America would adopt the bidet, bc they are a dream.

Bedroom 2

I think I stayed at this hotel once. 2.5/5 stars.

Bedroom 3

Special shoutout to my Patreon donors for enabling me to buy a drawing tablet, which I think is paying off handsomely.

Hella Scary Solitary Confinement Room

Should I call someone? Should I be concerned?

The DANKEST Basement Complex Ever

It’s probably actually dank in the not so good way, too.

I’m seriously impressed by this wine stash, which I doubt was decimated on Election Day, unlike mine. (POLITICAL JOKE)

On second thought, this is a really successful imitation of a 90s Golden Corral.

And finally, we’re at that special point where we take a look at the rear elevation:

Well, that’s it for Oakland County, which has a surprising amount of Late Modern houses, and speaking of Late Modernism - stay tuned for Sunday’s What the Hell is Modern Architecture THE CONCLUSION: Late Modernism.

If you like this post, and want to get access to cool features like the McMansionHell Bingo Cards I’m about to drop and the first round of collectable stickers (designs below), consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.

What the Hell is Modern Architecture? Part Two: Mid-Century Madness

Sun, 27 Nov 2016 16:18:31 -0500

Hello friends! It’s everybody’s favorite time of the 20th century, kudos to Mad Men.

For the purpose of this post, Mid-Century starts in the late 1930s and goes through about 1960. While the 60s were integral to the concept of “Mid-Century Modernism” to people who shop at Design Within Reach, it really belongs to the period known as Late Modernism, which will be the subject of next week’s post.

Where we left off with our beloved modernists two weeks ago, World War II was just starting. Coincidentally, it turns out dictators really like columns and stuff (who knew), and so Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius fled to the US where they responded to the hostile takeover of their countries by committing a benevolent takeover of the major American universities.

Though the architecture of fascism was overwhelmingly traditional, (with the exception of Italian Futurism) modernism has still been deemed “fascist” by the ill-informed for over fifty years. Go figure.

The Second World War had a major impact on the field of architecture. For one, it destroyed previous socioeconomic orders, and the horrific use of technology to commit so many heinous atrocities undermined its central position in the previous ideas of technocratic utopia. The machine for living in had a bad taste in its mouth, now.

In addition, in Europe, the destruction of so many urban communities during the war left a vacuum for housing projects, many of which failed and most of which were completely insensitive to people’s aesthetic needs post-tragedy.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. One of the pinnacle struggles of midcentury was the battle to continue old norms (the International Style of 1920s Europe) and to pave new frontiers. Meanwhile, in non-western countries, this prewar architecture spread like wildfire, partially as a reaction against the 19th century traditionalism they inherited from colonialism. In countries like Finland, Brazil, and Mexico, there was considerable effort to balance new modern aesthetics with national identities and climates.

But back to the Bauhaus babes: Gropius (and later Marcel Breuer) were both invited to teach at Harvard, effectively ending that school’s history of Beaux Arts classicism.

Gropius’ arrival did something else for American architecture: with the exception of Richard Neutra & Co. on the west coast and Wright in the Midwest, American architecture was relatively stale innovation-wise on the East Coast, and bringing Gropius in kickstarted architectural change in that region.

Gropius’ students, sick of the rather boring eclecticism of the time, flocked to hear the new European ideas, including future stars Paul Rudolph (my personal bae), IM Pei, and Philip Johnson, who would all go on to be icons of Late Modernism (and to some extents, its scapegoats.)

Enter the Saarinens

Meanwhile in the Midwest, where actual progress happened in lieu of lectures, the Finnish-born architect Eliel Saarinen and his son, Eero, effectively kickstarted the aesthetics of the mid-century. Eliel, a figure of the previous generation, shifted his attention to American design late in life, but Eero seemed to have been born into the American jet-set ideal.

Saarinen the Younger established his reputation when he won the competition to build the 1947 Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri aka:

The 1950s were a period of (highly idealized) prosperity and optimism (despite the constant threat of nuclear winter) with a focus on scientific progress and good ol’ American ingenuity.

It was said ingenuity that enabled new methods of construction, including the wall of glass. One of the pinnacle examples of this progress and optimism was the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan begun by Saarinen the Elder and finished by Saarinen the Younger in 1948.

It was in this building that the processes of American manufacturing, management, and industry were canonized in architectural form - the building, seemingly weightless, floats above a green, minimal lawn.

Meanwhile, Mies

Meanwhile, Mies van der Rohe, was spending 1939-1956 building the new campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies was very fond of the craftsmanship of American steel manufacturing, and used the steel beam as a way to articulate his functional ideals with a finesse like no other.

The glass box of the Institute’s Crown Hall was fervently egalitarian in that it was supposed to be good for anything and everything, and neutral to the concept of place and the specificity of internal function.

(The irony of Mies’ buildings and their honesty of expression, is that the fire code of the time required that steel be surrounded by fireproofing, and therefore the steel visual on buildings such as Crown Hall, is, in fact, a decorative effect, something not lost on later theorists such as Robert Venturi.)

Mies’ seminal work of the period was the famous Farnsworth House (1945-51), where he applied the cool sleekness of his academic and industrial buildings to residential design.

Perhaps Mies is most infamous in the long run for his tall skyscrapers, the most famous of which is the Seagram Building (New York City, 1954-8), which he designed with the help of Gropius acolyte Philip Johnson.

The building owes its debts to Sullivan, who over half a century before, used appearance to express the ideal of its structure, an idea Mies evolved into “lying in order to tell the truth” - his steel frame hid within it wind bracing and other engineering necessities; the mullions separating the windows are applied, rather than structural necessity.

While Mies’ aesthetic would be elevated to the epitome of American corporate style, it continued in the tradition of the Deutsches Werkbund of early modernity, which believed that industrial technique should be worn on the sleeve of architectural form.

Unfortunately, the Miesian ideal was taken up by countless (often garbage) imitators, which reduced his finesse to mere uniformity, resulting in the endlessly replicating “glass box downtowns” of the 60s and 70s. The criticisms of later theorists that Mies left out the messiness of life within the glass structure, weren’t entirely invalid, but much of the time the ad nauseum replication of glass boxes are the faults of Mies’ imitators rather than Mies himself.

Meanwhile, in Brazil and Finland

Brazil and Finland are perhaps the most notable of the nations to have adopted modernism after the pre-war German-French-American trichotomy, because their national architectural figures have contributed so much to the architecture of the time.

Brazil’s strongman, Oscar Niemeyer, was born in Rio de Janeiro, and studied architecture at the Escola Nacional des Belas Artes. His architecture was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier, and featured a heavy use of reinforced concrete. Niemeyer was a believer in constructing “monuments” - architecture that stood out from its surroundings, and the concept that architecture should be infused with social idealism.

Niemeyer’s most famous buildings were those built for the deal city of Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia. Built with Socialist ideas, such as the government owning apartments and leasing them to employees, and that the common worker and the top officials would share the same public spaces, the project, which was constructed hundreds of miles out in the middle of nowhere, aimed to bring a higher quality of life to a rural region.

Unfortunately, his leftist politics resulted in his exile from Brazil, when Castelo Branco usurped the previous president and made Brazil a dictatorship until 1985. Oh well.

Finland

In Finland, home of the Saarinens, the architect Alvar Aalto was quietly straight killing it at modern architecture. Unamused by the cold corporatism of the endlessly replicating glass box, Aalto and his contemporaries sought to infuse the vernacular traditions of their country, pre-industrial rusticism, and environmental consciousness with the sleekness of modernism.

(This was easier to achieve in the Nordic countries, where rabid industrialization had not yet ruined natural resources such as timber.)

Aalto’s remarkable sensitivity to his clients and their anticipated behavior within his dwellings combined with his keen sense of place made his architecture successful during a time dominated by the necessity of post-war building making (in place of lasting architecture.)

The sensitivity to the Earth, and the desire to embed his buildings fully into their environment (rather than make them objects on the lawn as was the modern tradition in Europe at the time), set Aalto apart from his contemporaries, and deeply inspired many young architects of midcentury, most notably Louis Kahn.

But that’s not why y’all came here. Y’all came here for this:

On the Pop Side of Things: What Most People Think of When They Hear “Mid Century Modern”

While Gropius lectured, Mies built his boxes, Wright got weird with the Guggenheim, Aalto and Niemeyer led their countries as pioneers, and Corbu hid in Europe (butthurt that he was used for his input on the design of the United Nations building but never received the official commission- basically, he got catfished by the UN) the endless sprawl of the suburbs inched across the US, and the Federal Highway Act paved the way for a new way of life: sitting in the car a lot.

What most people associate with mid-century modernism are the “retro” vibes of the 50s - the Eames rocker, the fanciful signs, and the space-age hotels. What they don’t realize is that much of this beloved imagery existed outside the architectural canon, in the realm of folk or commercial architecture.

Suddenly, the world of motels, supermarkets, diners, and more sprung up seemingly overnight. The architecture of this time was designed to get people’s attention, and not much more - which is perhaps why it is so endearing. Originating from Southern California, this style was known as “Googie,” “Space Age,” and “Atomic Age” architecture, inspired by the events that transpired as part of the Space Race, and the pop culture surrounding the events of the Cold War.

Also originating in California, the ideal of the Mid-Century Modern House was canonized in the Case Study Houses (built for Arts & Architecture Magazine, made famous by the photographs of Julius Schulman), the houses of Richard Neutra, and the affordable tract home plans put together by architects such as Joseph Eichler, and Palmer & Kilmer.

It makes sense that such architecture originated in California, a state that adopted the automobile with a fervent efficiency and built its best-known city of Los Angeles around it.

The unique decor made by companies like furniture giants Knoll and Herman Miller, fit right at home in such adventurous houses. Herman Miller hired the famous duo Charles and Ray Eames to design many lines of chairs and other furniture which have become iconic in and of themselves.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

The Eames’ designs took the functionalism of modernism and infused it with fanciful coziness which became instantly appealing. The Eames’ chairs dared onlookers to sit in them, and were designed to excel at their purpose: to be sat in. These attributes, along with the slick futuristic design, have made Eames-design furniture timeless and highly desirable, even today.

While the Eameses were the most famous of the mid-century designers, the work of architects such as Eero Saarinen, and designers like George Nelson and Isamu Noguchi, should not be left out as well:

The fanciful nature of Mid-Century Modern design has seen a resurge in recent years, as younger generations delight in its charming simplicity and thoughtful execution for the first time.

Mid-century was the period during which American corporate zeitgeist, pop culture, and technological innovation reached its peak in the public eye. However, a new generation of architects were coming of age, whose sculptural monumentality would send a wave of dissent through the world of modernism, thrusting it into the period known as Late Modernism.

Which is what we’ll get to next week!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post on Mid-Century Modernism! I’m sorry I couldn’t post an ugly house this Thursday, as it was Thanksgiving and drama was high. Trust me, the upcoming Michigan Monstrosity is well worth the wait.

As a side note, for all of you who submitted a logo proposal to me, I am going through the entries (all 200 of them) and will select a winner soon, so stay tuned!

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get behind-the-scenes access to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Who the Hell Were Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier?

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 17:35:28 -0500

Howdy, howdy friends. For this installment of What the Hell Is..? we ask, instead, Who the Hell Was…? for two of the most influential architects of the 20th Century: Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.

Despite being somewhat contemporaries, (Wright lived from 1867 to 1959, and Corbu from 1887 to 1965, placing him a generation after Wright) the two were incredibly different from each other. However, each impacted the field of architecture deeply and permanently.

One was quintessentially American (Hint: It’s not the French guy), and the other quintessentially European. Both of them were total assholes personality-wise, but Frank wins out on still being the biggest asshole known to architecture.

This post isn’t so much a personal biography of these two architects, but more of an examination of their similarities and differences, especially in their formative development as artists. Before I start this comparison, I want to say a couple of things about FLW the man.

A Note On “The Greatest American Architect”

Let me start by saying this: Frank Lloyd Wright was a huge asshole. He was a terrible husband, an egotist and a notorious homewrecker, despite being America’s most famous and beloved architect. Wright’s architecture is worthy of great praise. Wright himself isn’t.

He treated his colleagues like garbage, and illegally worked under the table during his time at Louis Sullivan’s firm. He broke up the marriages of three women, treated his first wife horribly, abandoned his family to run off with a mistress who abandoned hers, and even though a crazed servant murdered his mistress and children with an axe and burned his house down, it still doesn’t excuse his reprehensible behavior.

The hero-worship of such a vile person is problematic in many ways, and many architects can’t stand Wright because of his personal ethics, which are rarely mentioned except for in fun anecdotes about his sassiness. I want to say here, that, though I love Wright’s work, the worst thing about it was the man himself.

Two Lives, Side by Side: Early Years

Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier didn’t take up his pseudonym, French for “the Raven”, until 1920) both grew up in rural towns, but beside that they couldn’t be more different: Wright’s childhood was agrarian America at its most cliched- he worked on a farm in Wisconsin throughout his younger years - perhaps why he developed such a profound love for nature.

Jeanneret, born in Switzerland, went to fancy art school, where he learned the art of watchmaking (which explains Corb’s love of machinery and efficiency) and is the perhaps the most stereotypically Swiss upbringing, like, ever.

Somehow, both men were lucky enough to escape their dull, rural lives to apprentice at two of the most super influential firms of the late 1800s.

Wright worked with Adler & Sullivan, the firm of Louis Sullivan, one of the fathers of modern architecture, whose steel skyscrapers rocked the landscape of a then-mostly burned down Chicago. Sullivan was probably one of the only people in the history of the world who ever earned the acknowledgement of Frank “I’m a freaking genius who had no help from anyone” Lloyd Wright, who, by the way, paid Sullivan back for his mentorship by blowing his money, arguing with his colleagues, working under the table illegally, and forever making Sullivan known to laypeople as “that guy who helped Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Jeanneret apprenticed with Auguste Perret, who was to reinforced concrete what Sullivan was to steel. Unlike Wright, Jeanneret was kind to his mentor, whom Wright also hated.

First Houses

Wright and Jeanneret’s early houses both followed the tradition of 19th century eclectic architecture, that is, combining influences from a variety of styles and integrating them in interesting ways.

Wright’s early houses were heavily influenced by architecture from England (such as the Colonial and Tudor styles - see: the Smith House and Moore House, in Oak Park IL) as well as the Italian Renaissance (as evidenced by the Winslow House in River Forest, IL, with its wall-driven rationality).

Moore House Photo Credit: J. Crocker. Others: Wikimedia Commons.

Jeanneret’s first houses, however, took more of a local approach, building in the Chalet style of his native Switzerland. Two of his most promising early houses were the house he designed for his family, the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, whose roof-driven structure and massing is reminiscent of some of Wrights early work, and the Villa Schwob, which predicts Jeanneret’s future use of flat roofs.

Also notable is both architects’ decisions to leave their parent firms (or, in Wright’s case, telling the most influential architect in Chicago, (Daniel Burnham) basically “up yours” when Burnham offered to send Wright to the Ecoles des Beaux Arts, the world’s most renowned architecture school) to start independent careers relatively early in life (e.g. in their thirties rather than fifties.)

Aesthetic Experimentation

It was during this period of the first years of the 20th century that Wright developed his Prairie Style, which took its name from the flat prairies of Illinois, where Wright almost exclusively worked at the time. Like its namesake, the Prairie Style emphasized the horizontal: the buildings were low, with shallow-pitched rooflines and long overhangs.

Wright at this point, had developed his ideas regarding the relationship of the house to its surroundings - the Prairie houses were designed to blend in with the landscape itself - as well as welcome it inside via long and low windows, which flooded the interiors with natural light.

Frank Lloyd Wright is also responsible a) the attached garage, and b) for the “open plan” or “open concept” (so if you want to blame someone for the insane proliferation of “open concept” all over HGTV, you can blame Frank.)

Jeanneret’s early career was put on hold because of WWI, during which he worked in a brick factory, further grooming his love of efficiency and technology. Already, Jeanneret was thinking about low-cost housing and how mass production could achieve it. During this time, he developed his idea of the Dom-Ino construction system, which used pillars and slabs of reinforced concrete to create efficient structures that could be quickly built. His most important house of this period, the Maison Citrohan (1920) was a prototype of these ideas.

Fame

By the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, Wright had immortalized his Prairie aesthetic in two of his most iconic houses: the Robie House (1906) (top) and the Coonley House (1907)(bottom), in Chicago, and River Forest respectively. Wright built each with the utmost care for every detail, from the furniture to the meticulous and delicate stained glass windows. At this point, he was already well known by the architectural press, and his work had already been overseas, where it attracted the attention of influential architects such as Peter Behrens.

Le Corbusier, as he now called himself, was now part of an established avant garde in Paris, which titled itself the “Purist” movement, influenced by both the Dutch de Stijl painters, and the Cubism. Corbu believed that a house was “a machine for living in,” and was designing on that principle.

He built his two most famous houses at this point in his career: Villa Stein at Garches (1927) and Villa Savoy at Poissy (1929). At this point, his machine aesthetic, with its minimal, clean lines and open interiors, was nearing perfection. During this time, he began writing books, one of the most famous being Vers Une Architecture, which was reviewed by Wright himself (who basically said “it’s whatever.”)

In the 1930s, Wright began thinking about low-cost housing, leading to the development of what would later be called his Usonian houses, which, perhaps as a response to the International Style promoted in Europe by the Germans and our friend Corbu, focused less on the factory/machine aesthetic, and more on the ability of normal Americans to put them together with little more than hand tools and a table saw.

The McBean House, one of two surviving Wright Prefab houses.

Still, the aesthetics of Wright’s architecture took influence from the Europeans: he began using exclusively flat roofs with strong cantilevers, larger windows, and less ornament. The epitome of this influence is, of course, the Kaufmann House, otherwise known as Fallingwater, which was built in 1935.

By this point, the two architects have designed their most iconic buildings, but as I said, this is not a biography, merely a comparison of how each evolved their artistic maturity.

Both of these architects were more similar than they were different, despite the fact that architecture writers have been pitting them against each others as nemeses, and dividing modernism into “Wright’s” modernism and “Corbu’s” modernism.

Yes, Wright was more rural, and Corbu more urban, as evidenced by their failed ideas of city planning: Wright’s unbuilt suburban utopia Broadacre City, vs Corbu’s unbuilt Radiant City, which involved razing entire swathes of Paris.

Yes, Wright emphasized the natural, and Corbu the machine, but both worked with the idea of prefabrication, and both believed in the importance of material selection to communicate ideas.

Both were Renaissance men: writers, designers, decorative artists, and visual artists in their own right, though Corbu’s artistic success extended beyond the scope of architecture - his furniture continues to be popular even today, and he was also a highly respected painter, notorious for making art in the nude.

We’ll come back to Corbu next week, because his late work is definitely within the realm of Mid-Century Modernism, and his city planning deserves an in-depth look because of its influence on planners such as Robert Moses.

I hope you enjoyed this little historical interlude - the scope of both of these architects goes far beyond what I’ve said here, but that’s what the future is for. Perhaps there will be a part two to this post, if it gains enough traction.

Still, Thursday, we look at a gem in Michigan, and next Sunday, it’s going to get hella mod in here, with What the Hell is Mid-Century Modernism? (I recommend watching Mad Men, because it is the only TV show I have successfully completed from start to finish - I’m not a TV person at all.)

If you liked this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! (Especially now, as my position at work got cut, effectively plunging me into the uncertain realm of full-time writer.)

Copyright Disclaimer: All images are from Wikimedia Commons and follow the guidelines set by Creative Commons 3.0, unless otherwise credited.

Naperville, IL

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 12:43:26 -0500

Hello Friends! Now that I’ve had my brief reprieve, I’m happy to be back in the saddle again. Thank you for your patience.

This week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion comes to us from Naperville, IL - one of my most requested locations.

This 5 bedroom, 6 bathroom beaut, built in 1999, is currently selling for almost $1 million. Not a bad deal for more than 5000 square feet of space.

The Lawyer Foyer

I’m very fond of this term, because it rhymes despite the fact that it looks like it doesn’t because English is a dumb language. Also, what the hell is going on in the top right hand corner there??

Ok is there an ACLU for architecture, because I’d like to report a human rights violation.

The Sitting & Staring Room

I’m pretty sure everyone knows these rooms are just a big lie, because rooms with sofas are for watching TV and nothing more. Y’all aren’t fooling anyone; do you actually think that I sincerely believe y’all sit around and have meaningful conversations? It’s 2016!! /s

The Dining Room

For anyone salty about this year’s Thanksgiving, this one’s for you.

The “This Was Totally Always a Home Office, What Are You Talking About?”

Dang it, ain’t that just sad.

The “Great” Room

As someone who will probably never be able to afford a Noguchi coffee table, this image makes me a human salt mine.

The Kitchen

If you or a loved one knows of a kitchen in desperate need of renovation, the Kitchen Defense Fund can help: call 1-800-34-OVENS, that’s 1-800-34-OVENS. (before i get sued: this isn’t a real thing)

The Breakfast Nook?

Is anyone else laughing at the thought of the ceiling fan blowing people’s napkins off the table or is it just me?

The Master Bedroom

Dammit, Cheryl.

The Master Bathroom

Do not let the softness of the pink walls fool you: the neutral sink territory is still a heavily contested area.

The Spare Bedroom

I’m sorry I can’t make a comment on this room, because I’m overcome with both bitterness and nostalgia.

The Horrifyingly Gendered Bedroom

“Mom, I want to be a mechanical engineer.”
“That’s cute, princess.”

Bathroom of Said Gendered Room

Somehow they managed to pick a different colored pink from the pink in the attached bedroom…and this one’s worse.

Bedroom the Fourth

Cheryl always manages to find some way to circumvent Home Depot’s list of banned phone numbers.

MEDIA AND ALCOHOL LAIR

Disclaimer: I’m secretly into that bar.

And, now time for the obligatory…

Rear Exterior Shot!

Well, that does it for this week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion! I’m off to celebrate now, because today is my birthday!!! If anyone is interested in celebrating with me, please consider donating to my preferred charities:

The Nature Conservancy
Earth Justice
National Trust for Historic Preservation
Baltimore Architecture Foundation
Docomomo, US (a fund for the preservation of modernist architecture)
The Paul Rudolph Foundation (supporting the preservation of architecture by Paul Rudolph, who is my favorite.)

Or, if you really like these posts and me, consider supporting me on Patreon!

Be sure to tune in Sunday for Modernism Part II!

Dear Friends

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 12:53:28 -0500

There will be no post today despite my previous plans, and Sunday’s post for the very first time may be delayed. I have decided to take a day for myself to reflect on Tuesday’s shocking results and comfort my friends and colleagues who are deeply troubled by them. I will be going to the museums in DC and reminding myself of the power of art in these trying times.

This is not a political statement. I have no hidden agenda in this blog. My goal, like the goals of the rest of my colleagues in the field of urbanism, is to promote better, more livable, sustainable communities and to promote others to care about architecture, which I love so much.

I believe that above all art, music, architecture and design are for the betterment of humanity. In a time that is so divisive, I hope that we can come together to ultimately understand each other and what is best for the world. I will return next week to a normal schedule and continue my campaign to educate about our built environment to people of all beliefs, color, gender, sexual orientation and yes, political ideology.

Building a better world is for all of us.

What the Hell is Modern Architecture? (Part One)

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 15:40:40 -0500

I hope you guys like Modernism, because you’re about to get two more Sunday posts about it. Why? Because Modernism dominated the world of architecture for more than a century and it really wouldn’t be fair to stuff it all into one post.

Today’s post is going to focus on the movements leading up to Modernism and early Modernism, specifically the time period of the late 1800s to the beginning of WWII. All photos in this post are from Wikimedia Commons unless otherwise noted.

Before I start my post, I have a few things to say:

AMERICAN READERS- VOTE DAMMIT!
SAN FRANSISCO READERS: VOTE YES ON MEASURE RR DAMMIT!
BALTIMORE READERS: VOTE YES ON QUESTIONS A-D AND YES ON QUESTION J!!! McMansion Hell firmly believes that HOUSING IS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.

Ok, back to architecture.

Some of you may be wondering - how did all of those glassy boxy buildings even get here? Why did architecture go in this direction after centuries upon centuries of Classical tradition?

Good thing I’m here to answer your questions or else you’d be up late at night thinking about them in a spiral of anxiety.

Basically, Modernism in architecture can be tied to these three concepts:

1.) The concept of Modernity in general. See here.
2.) Cool new technology!
3.) Aesthetic opinions of some dudes about some other dudes.

Modernity

What is commonly referred to as Modernity in the fields of philosophy and sociology can basically be summed up as lots of new science coupled with angst. The science included ideas such as evolution and new fields such as psychology. The angst in the early 19th century manifested itself as Romanticism, which was best expressed by writers (especially poets like Byron), and composers like Beethoven (large-scale) and Chopin (small-scale - seriously this dude wrote his own funeral march.)

The new science and philosophy of modernity changed during the Industrial Revolution, resulting in a period of waxing poetic (culminating in ideas like Socialism and Existentialism) about how technology changed social order and how people lived and worked. Hence:

Technology

The 19th century saw the rise of the factory, which changed how the masses lived and worked. (Hint: it was mostly in filth and poverty.) It also saw the rise of two dope new building materials: reinforced concrete and steel.

Architects, being architects, went insane. Suddenly one could build things that were REALLY TALL and REALLY WIDE and totally not reflective of one’s ego at all.

Which leads us to…

Architectural Betchiness

Basically, throughout most of the 19th century (which will get its own post) architecture was really flowery.

The use of ornament in architecture got more and more, well, ornate. By the 1880s, architecture was producing many extremely complex styles such as Gothic Revival and Beaux Arts.

Besides looking pretty, architectural ornament played another, less flattering role: hiding the ugly structural bits of the building.

However, the new technology that was emerging made the structures of buildings a lot stronger and cleaner looking. For example the use of steel made the iron-age buildings, which relied on complex arch forms for their structural integrity, obsolete. Gone too were the limits regarding height that were imposed by the structural shortcomings of masonry.

This, of course, led to a stylistic *existential crisis* amongst architects, because none of the historical precedents of the past really applied to this new way of building. Trust me: if you think your ex dwells on the past a lot, the field of architecture has them beat 10000 fold.

Enter Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who declared in 1896:

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human, and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”

Sullivan’s main point was actually that this new way of building was unprecedented, and therefore deserved a new stylistic language to go with it, rather than relying on the tired vocabulary of Greco-Roman inspired Classicism.

Somewhat ironically, many of his contemporaries took the “form follows function” bit and ran off with it, decrying that in this new technological age, ornament was “nonessential” to the construction of buildings, and was thus frivolous. But we’ll get to that bit later.

Pre-Modernism: Exploring New Ornament

This idea of establishing a new language of architectural ornament wasn’t limited to Sullivan and his much more famous (and douchey) protege Frank Lloyd Wright. In Western Europe, it seemed like every country had its own new ornamental language:

As we can see here, late 19th century ornament was super cool and also, in the case of Gaudi’s vaguely skeletal buildings, super weird. Still, all this dopeness wasn’t enough for the dudes who saw all ornament as frivolous and also dumb.

To literally no one’s surprise, this line thinking began with the ever-so-practical Germans and Austrians. Like Marx, whose Communist Manifesto sparked massive political change, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos’ 1910 essay Ornament and Crime sparked a similar reaction in architecture.

The Rational Style: Modernism Canonized

In Loos’ essay, he makes a somewhat valid point that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. Therefore, ornamentation was wasted effort (a crime in this new factory-driven hyper-rational world). What was the point of adding ornament when it would make buildings “meh” in like 10 years?

Loos attached ornament to the concept of morality, (he literally called it “degenerate”) And, in a very manifesto-y way, declared its suppression was necessary for regulating modern society.

Basically:

MEANWHILE IN GERMANY a few years before (1899) the Austrian architect Joseph Maria Olbrich seceded from the Vienna Secession (something something Secession II: Electric Boogaloo) to form an artists colony in Darmstadt back when forming an artists colony meant that actual work got done.

This colony, named the Deutscher Werkbund, became the official national designers’ organization of Germany. Its goals focused on how to best utilize the sweet new tools of mass production (with the side effect of a ton of designers bickering about aesthetics.)

The most important product of the Werkbund was Peter Behrens’ 1907 turbine factory (built for the German electric company AEG). It blew everyone’s freaking mind.

Seriously, this one building kickstarted the hyper-efficient factory aesthetic of architectural modernity. Suddenly, like the new approach to warfare during WWI, architecture was all about efficiency, rationality, and functionality.

In 1919, the soon to be hella famous architect Walter Gropius, who worked under Behrens, seceded(!) to form his own design school based off of these new principles. This school, called the Bauhaus, (German for “construction house”) would ultimately become the most influential arts institution of the 20th century.

The Bauhaus (1919-1933), later headed by some guy named Hannes Meyer (who had such a huge stick up his ass that he forced one of the dankest Bauhaus members [Marcel Breuer] and others to resign) who was usurped by modern all-star Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, trained some of the most famous architects of the 20th Century. Its credo “Less is More” (coined by Mies - he’s so clever) would dominate the theory and practice of architecture for more than 60 years.

Sadly, the work of the Bauhaus was cut short by the Nazis, who were coincidentally really into ornament. Shortly after Hitler took power, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and company fled to America where they proceeded to dominate Harvard, other academic institutions, and architecture in general. But we’ll get to that.

Well, that sums it up for Modern Architecture Part O–

Oh yeah, you thought I forgot about these guys, didn’t you?

Don’t worry, I didn’t. They’re simply so important that they’re going to get their own special post next Sunday. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright impacted architecture, design, and urban planning in such significant ways that if I included them in this post, they’d make it twice as long and y’all are probs tired of reading at this point.

SO YES. That’s it for this week’s post on Modernism. Join us Thursday for the Certified Dank™ McMansion of the Week, and REMEMBER TO GO VOTE ON TUESDAY FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY IN THE WORLD.

P. S.: The deadline for submitting logo proposals is tomorrow (11/7/2016) at midnight! After all proposals have been submitted, the review process will begin!

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get exclusive content to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Fort Worth, TX

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:25:19 -0400

Howdy, y’all! It’s time for this week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion! Whichever one of my Patreon donors who suggested Fort Worth, TX gets a super pat on the back because that place is full of some serious fug.

Before I begin this post, I would like to make a note in regards to some recent emails that go something like “BUT WHY DO YOU MAKE FUN OF INTERIORS? WHAT WOULD YOU PUT IN A HOUSE????!!!!1″ The point of these weekly house post is to make fun of really tacky houses and really tacky staging by real estate agents. If you haven’t noticed, none of the houses I’ve posted look like they’ve ever been lived in by actual people. Actual people have real tastes and it’s (mostly) not fair to make fun of them. But tacky house staging by realtors? Totally up for grabs.

Anyway, back to our scheduled content.

This week’s house, a Mansard built in 1993 (but is totes 1987) is pushing 5,000 square feet, and is currently on the market for $1.3 million USD.

Now, Mansard houses are weird. The style only lasted around 20 years, and is pretty much quintessential 70s weird. Named after the mansard roof, which was popular in a French-influenced Victorian style known as the Second Empire, the Mansard style was popular from around 1965 to 1985. If you’re interested in these strange beasts, be sure to check this link from Washington State University.

However, our house was built in 1993 meaning it’s almost 10 years behind. Whoops.

The Entryway Thing

While there is a brass n glass chandelier in this home, I couldn’t seem to find any views of it, mostly because this REALLY weird staircase/catwalk kinda gets in the way of everything, even itself. The columns really obstruct the path from the front door to anything remotely near the stairs. Whooops.

The Living Room

As you can see in this picture, the staircase/catwalk thing is really weird. Not only is it low to the ground, but it basically shuts the rest of the house out from any sort of light coming from those 2-story fanlight windows. The placing and spacing of the columns would make Borromini cry.

Dining Room 1 of 3

Notes: I feel like there are way too many chairs for this one table and also can anyone else hear the SCREEEEEEEEECH sound of wood on tile in their heads?

Powder Room

Putting a cherub in a bathroom is unsettling to me for some reason. Also special lol @ that spray-painted side table.

Dining Room 2 of 3

I am seriously amazed by this wallpaper. It takes serious balls to put metallic flower-motif wallpaper on your ceiling. I could have done without the leopard print chairs, but to each their own.

Dining Room 3 of 3

I’m starting to think that there are so many dining rooms in these houses because these open, empty spaces aren’t conducive to much else. There’s no privacy and/or way to prevent noise from activities like watching TV from getting into adjacent rooms. This is the key fallacy of the open floor plan.

THIS AMAZING KITCHEN

Ok, if you want to put botanical stickers on your shabby chic cabinets, more power to you. I am really impressed by the two refrigerators. If I had two refrigerators one would be exclusively for booze.

The Dark & Dreary Office/Study

And the award for poorest quality cabinetry goes to….

Master Bedroom

One of my Twitter followers informed me recently that many people who do home staging for a living do in fact buy a lot of their furniture from hotel liquidation sales. This explains a great deal about this bedroom.

The Master Bath

I’m incredibly sad that this was the only view of the master bath, which is honestly incredible.

Bedroom No. 2

Ok don’t get too excited - I’ve only seen like 2 episodes of Doctor Who. This bedroom is almost scarier than that one episode with the weird Medusa angel statues.

And Finally (there was no backyard shots, sadly)

Bathroom No. 2

There are too many metaphors for death in this bathroom.

Well, that wraps it up for this week’s Certified Dank McMansion! Stay tuned for Sunday’s What the Hell Is… post!

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get exclusive content to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

McMansions 101: Landscaping

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 13:55:54 -0400

Hey guys! I was really wowed by how successful the post on PoMo ended up being. My thoughts are that I’m going to be doing more posts like that in the future - a bit of history of architecture as told through its misappropriation by the suburbs. As for now, enjoy this brief McMansions 101 on Landscaping!

In my meticulous study of our suburban landscape, I’ve taxonomized McMansion landscaping into three categories:

- No yard / soul patch
- Sea of turf grass + single tree
- meticulously manicured lawn most likely cared for by immigrants.

This post is less “THIS IS WRONG!” and more “here are some interesting observations.” In reality, the only objectively “correct” landscaping is that which is sustainable- e.g. uses native plants and avoids pesticides. Gardening for many is a wonderful and therapeutic hobby, hence the lack of ridicule in this post.

Without further ado…

Yard Trope No. 1: The Soul Patch

This is classic McMansionHell: You have a 3 car garage, and your yard is a driveway. But, at the same time, you want the visual cues that say “hey this is a yard” right?? Whatever are you going to do?????

The answer: The Soul Patch™

Now for those of us who are newer to MMH, you may not remember the early-on Houston McMansion of the Week, aka the origin of the Soul Patch. Not all Soul Patches are as dramatic as the OG Soul Patch pictured above. Basically, any house that has more driveway than lawn falls under the No Yard/Soul Patch dichotomy.

The Soul Patch doesn’t always have to be relegated to the land of landscaping amateurs - there are plenty of overdone Soul Patches as well:

But a lot of the time, they look something like this:

Who needs trees n crap if you have 3 cars tho??????

Yard Trope No. 2: A Sea of Green with a Stick in it

I feel like 90% of suburban yards fall into this category: 99% turf grass with some bushes and a single tree (sometimes multiple dinky trees like crape myrtles)

Now there are reasons why suburban houses rarely have full-sized trees in the front yard - a) it is usually cheaper to tear down the trees than to work around them and b) trees near a house are a liability and frequently get torn down for insurance reasons.

A lot of the times, homeowners who are building new have to fight to keep the trees in their yard, for the sole reason that developers are lazy.

Also P.S. Maples are an understory tree. They’re supposed to be planted in shadier conditions in order to thrive. People plant them in full sunlight in parking lots because they know this will stunt their growth and prevent any future issues with roots and pavement. To me, this is incredibly sad.

Usually people go the turf-grass with one or no trees route because it’s the easiest kind of yard to ignore. Because you really don’t have time to worry about yardwork when you work a 9-to-5 to pay off your massive house and your marriage is falling apart and I heard that gas prices are going up again….

Yard Trope No. 3: Meticulously Manicured Yard Most Likely Maintained by Immigrants

You know these yards - they’re the kind that make their neighbors jealous and make the cover of all of those random magazines lining the shelves between the checkout kiosks at Home Depot.

No working person has enough time to sit around and maintain their massive garden-yard, hence they hire a landscaping crew made up of either immigrants from the south or blue-collar teenagers on summer vacation.

At the same time, these lawns use up tons of natural resources. The fact that there was a massive drought in California and people still watered their damn lawns is astounding. In water-scarce localities, lawn care like this is an enormous waste. Like seriously, haven’t any of y’all read Dune???

Jokes aside (I seriously love Dune if you guys didn’t know already) suburban landscaping is responsible for a ton of environmental screw ups, most importantly:

FREAKING INVASIVE PLANTS

Oh yeah, that English Ivy we all like to see crawling up our houses?

BAM! INVASIVE!

Oh yeah, and what about your Green Privacy Fence aka Japanese/Chinese Privet???

Oh it gets worse? You know your pretty white Callery/Bradford Pear Trees???

And your FREAKIN’ NANDINA:

Yeah, pretty bad. But there’s good news:

If you want to stop or prevent the destruction of our forests/beaches/plains with invasive landscape plants: check out your local state Invasive Plant Council (in the US - it’s different for other countries) and view their lists of invasives that are a problem in your area. If you have used invasive plants in your yard, look for information about proper plant disposal and removal.

(I personally volunteer with my local invasive plant council and have spent quite some time removing invasive plants from public spaces and reporting new invasions to government databases.)

That’s it for this brief primer on landscaping! Stay tuned for Thursday’s Dank McMansion of the Week and a cool new What the Hell is…? next Sunday!

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get exclusive content to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.

Invasive Plant Photo Credits: EDDMAPS.org/Bugwood Wiki

Cobb County, GA

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 13:08:37 -0400

I’ve been bugged for a while to do a house in Marietta, Georgia, which is a goldmine of dank McMansions. It was indeed difficult to select merely one example to share with you all this week.

The house I’m about to show you is a time capsule back to 1990s interior design and it is amazing. I can’t’ even hate it it’s so amazing.

(Note the pre-2000s lack of double-height entryway.)

This house, built in 1987, and a little under 4,000 square feet, is certainly not the dankest house in and around Marietta, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it because it’s rare to see a house with an interior that has remained unchanged for so long.

The Foyer

I swear to gawd that I went to this house at some point during my childhood, even though I was no where near Marietta, Georgia. Like, I can see myself excitedly running up those stairs, careful to not knock the random trinkets from their precarious resting place.

The Sitting Room

Has no one lived in this house in the last 26 years? It’s got every 90s design trope in the book: gigham couch, white leather chairs, white walls with teal accents, and brass and glass fan dangling from a precipitously high ceiling.

The Kitchen

OMG y’all think kitchens are white now? White was SO HUGE in the 90s. Everything was white: appliances, counters, floors, chairs, walls, ceilings, you name it, it was white. The gigham wallpaper is especially dated, but luckily for them this style is coming back again, even if white appliances never do.

The Dining Room

Ah yes, the table covered with very heavy fabric, conveniently omitting the idea that people, you know, eat at tables.

The Living Room

Those wall shelves with the chunky brackets are so of their time. And the TV!! They haven’t even bought a new TV since 1996!!!!!

The Master Bedroom

The pale blue and vaguely French-Country theme were both huge in the 90s. Note in particular the coordinated fabrics and the table that has been totally robbed of its function by what seems to be a misplaced drape.

Bathroom #1

Oh man, I used to go to my friends’ houses going up and was always SUPER JEALOUS if they had celestial wallpaper. I simply couldn’t convince my mom that having a bunch of stars and clouds and stuff on the walls was a good idea. I hate to say mom was right on this one.

Study

Fun fact: My parents painted their living room walls this color when I was a kid. Funner fact: they were sponge-textured as well.

Bedroom #2

This style is totally coming back, and it’s fascinating.

Bedroom #3

Does the paint not going up to the ceiling bother anyone else? All they need to do, fortunately, is get rid of the wallpaper border, paint the walls, and change the bedspread and ELLE Decor will LOVE. IT. (They need to chill with the frills over there, seriously.)

Bathroom #2

Damn, the bathroom from my childhood looked a bit like this, especially that sink. Feels, man.

And, finally,

I mean, you’d be a fool to believe that those super weird ceiling shapes weren’t going to lead to some super weird roof shapes.

If this post has made y’all nostalgic, you’re in luck! While wallpaper borders won’t be coming back any time soon, the rest of this aesthetic definitely is.

Note: McMansionHell volunteers for the NC Invasive Plant Council. Please consider doing the same for your local Invasive species organization! You’ll get fit and save the earth pulling weeds! Anyways: That’s it for Marietta, Georgia, folks! If you like plants (or hate them) get hyped for Sunday’s Post: McMansions 101: Landscaping.

Like this post? Want to see more like it, and get exclusive content to all things McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

What the Hell is Postmodernism?

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 16:48:33 -0400

Oh boy are y’all in for a treat this week. I hope y’all like words because there are quite a few in this post. You’ve probably seen me refer to Postmodernism at least once, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I pretty frequently garbage post about it.

Of all the styles in architectural history, none has become as ubiquitous in our suburban landscape as Postmodernism, later called PoMo, for short. But what is it? How did it get here? Most importantly, Why do I care?

BECAUSE POSTMODERNISM IS DANK AS HELL:

M2 Tokyo, Kengo Kuma, 1991 (Photo: flickr/wakiii)

But before we get to this dankness, we have to talk…

A wee bit about Modernism

For most of the 20th century, modernism dominated architecture. It’s focus on design efficiency and the lack or absence of ornamentation (ornament was for the Bourgeoisie) was eagerly adopted and practiced by architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius who were fascinated with the technological advancements of the early 20th century, specifically, the factory.

Le Corbusier, the French-Swiss architect who famously said that a house is, “a machine for living in,” and his contemporaries were entranced both by the forms of industrial structures and their streamlined efficiency, as well as by the new materials of the modern day: steel and reinforced concrete.

Don’t worry, I’ll be doing a post all about Modernism (which is my soapbox bae) so I don’t want to spend too much time here, but it’s the starting point of Postmodernism, so it’s, y’know, worth a mention.

Here’s the thing about Modernism: it dominated architecture practiced by architects for almost a century, but made up only a small (well-documented and beloved) part of residential architecture built during its reign.

The thing is, the people who toiled their lives away in the factories absolutely DID NOT want to go home to a house that looked like the factory.

However, traditional architecture quickly (by the mid-forties) became a huge faux-pas in the practice of architects and was omitted from architectural education. In addition an exploding population that now needed housing (the Modernists thought it was a great idea to put them in high rises and we all know how well that turned out) emerged that wanted said housing to look like the centuries-old conception of home (aka a box with a door, windows, and topped with a triangle hat).

The combination of these factors led to developers sweeping in (as architects chilled in the Modernism echo chamber), and, lo and behold, we ended up with places like this:

While the modernists were practicing modernism, the rest of us were voraciously exploding out into the wilderness with our cars and highways and motels and suburbs and shopping centers and other ‘vulgar’ pursuits. And nothing communicated said vulgar pursuits better than the booming city of Las Vegas.

Over the first half of the 20th century, the field of architecture was more than a little disconnected from the general public, and without their guidance, the suburban and commercial world developed an aesthetic language all their own.

In the late 1960s, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, took a group of students from Venturi’s studio at the Yale School of Architecture on a long trip to Las Vegas.

What happened to Venturi & co. in Vegas definitely didn’t stay in Vegas, and architecture would never be the same.

Learning from Las Vegas: The Stirrings of Postmodern Architecture

Venturi & co. set out to document the landscape of the largest and gaudiest strip in the country and came out with, yes, a study of a city and its forms, but more importantly a manifesto in two parts: first, that modern architecture is ignorant of what most people want, and what most people want is worth studying, and secondly, that the past has a place in present architecture, and that ornament in architecture has meaning, is intrinsically symbolic, and can be used communicate ideas.

The underlying foundation of Learning from Las Vegas is that architecture is both a space and a symbol, and that modern architects abandoned the symbol in favor of the space, and in doing such made the space itself a symbol, AKA:

Venturi called this type of architecture –where the space itself (and by extension, the structure, and function of a building) was the symbol – a duck after the famous NY roadside stand that takes the actual shape of a duck.

He contrasts this to the concept of the decorated shed where the space and structure are at the service of the program (the intended use or function of a building), and the ornament is applied independently of those things.

TL;DR: The duck is a building that is a symbol, the decorated shed is the building that applies symbols. Venturi argues that the history of architecture is the history of ornament, and after this brief deviation of modernism, ornament and its symbolism is something to which we should return.

The Expression of an Idea: Postmodernism in Action

Needless to say, Venturi & Co. telling the whole world of architecture “up yours” went about as well as you’d expect. But after a bit of fighting, a school of architects emerged and began working in this new style, a style that combined the symbolism of the past with the forms of the present.

The Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi (1964) [Photo: Wikipedia] takes the traditional symbolism or idea of the house as a box with a gabled roof and a front door flanked by windows, and executes it in a new context - with new materials, minimal lines (hence the integration of the modern) and a bit of architectural irony and humor (e.g. the roofline above the front door is imitating a broken pediment, like one that is often found above a front door)

Postmodernism started out as the pursuit of a few outsiders in architecture working independently of each other in an innovative and interesting way,

It quickly gained public popularity in the 80s and 90s and, thus, transformed into PoMo. (For the curious, this dichotomy between artistic Postmodernism and corporate/neoliberal PoMo is explained at length by Charles Jencks, the intensely detailed taxonomist of the movement, in his 2011 book The Story of Postmodernism.)

From Postmodernism to PoMo

In 1984, this ~~broken pediment architectural pun~~ skyscraper by Philip Johnson went up in New York and became the most public symbol (and triumph/downfall) of Postmodernism:

Let’s just say developers loved it. Through developers looking for a big ROI, the great, elegant glass box of modernism, was transformed through said developers into cheap, soulless office boxes, forgettable skyscrapers, and loathed public housing. Their shoddy modernist jobs were, by the 80s, becoming rather passé and unpopular. Thank gawd the Sony Building came along, the developers thought.

AND SO, the original spirit of Postmodernism, lovable, colorful, nostalgic for most of my readers and myself:

WAS NOW, through developers seeking a quick ROI, transformed into:

So, let me get this straight:

This is the crux of the failure of PoMo: Postmodernism was about using architectural ornament within a modern context because we have emotional connections and connotations to architectural ornament. These buildings were about saying through ornament “I AM A HOUSE” or “I AM A BANK” mixed, of course, with a bit of clever architectural humor.

However, this was also the 80s & 90s and the global corporation ruled all, and rather than using the clever language of Postmodernism, PoMo was global corporations saying architecturally: “WORK IS YOUR HOME” or “THE MALL IS YOUR HOME” or “DOLLAR GENERAL IS YOUR HOME.”

That dull and mundane office block? Now it’s an insulting, dull, and mundane office block with a gable and Palladian windows.

Remember those people at the beginning of this post who didn’t want to live in modernist houses that looked like the factories they toiled away at?

We have no choice but to live in houses that look like our office blocks, because our office blocks took the architectural symbols of our houses. And, in response, our houses took the vomited up architectural symbols from their corporate remixes, because residential architecture almost always imitates the public architecture of the time.

Now, I’m not saying McMansions are a product of Postmodernism, or that they are themselves Postmodern architecture, because neither is true. It’s more of a coincidence than anything else that they borrowed certain tropes from the PoMo office tower and integrated them into features like the two-story entryway with the huge transom window.

So what did we learn from this endeavor?

Not much. And, much to Venturi’s chagrin, after this brief period of badly decorated sheds, architecture went right back to making, big, expensive ducks.

BONUS: here’s a pic of me speaking at TEDxMidAtlantic about how much I love buildings and want to encourage others to love buildings as much as I do:

That’s it for PoMo, friends! I’ll see you Thursday with a Dank Southern Special, so stay tuned.

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Looking for a New Logo!

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 10:32:50 -0400

Dear beloved Tumblr followers: I am currently looking for a new logo for McMansionHell.

As this blog gets more and more attention, having ol’ Ronnie as the figurehead is becoming a bit burdensome and to be fair the whole housing crisis isn’t entirely his fault (Bill Clinton following up with his well-intentioned-though-ill-fated housing solutions and the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the fiscal policy at Greenspan’s Federal Reserve were also a huge part of it) ergo the Reagan inside joke has g2g.

I am a writer and am lucky enough to be compensated for my writing. As a young person, I am entirely against the “gig economy”/“working for exposure” crap and will fully compensate the creator for their work. (However, keep in mind that I am also, y'know, a writer and don’t make lavish amounts of money either.)

Here’s what I am looking for in a logo:
- Vector/Scalable
- Simple (can be understood and recognized as a Tumblr or Twitter icon on mobile)
- Preferably no text (too hard to read at a small size
- Communicates the message of the blog with, of course, a tinge of humor.

Of course I can pick a picture of any ol’ McMansion and have it as a logo but I want to have something a bit more profesh/enduring. I plan on taking proposals until the end of the first week of November and will respond to each email after that deadline.

Anyone who is interested in this endeavor please feel free to send a proposal or a link to your portfolio to mcmansionhell@gmail.com with the subject header: Logo Design Proposal

Thank you all once more for your support!

Great Falls, VA

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 09:16:23 -0400

Hello friends! Today is the day of my TEDxMidAtlantic rehearsal, and I am in a Starbucks writing this post dressed in full PoMo regalia. (I’m talking 1000% clothed in David Bowie’s Furniture just so I can make one joke about not being the gatekeeper of good taste.)

Speaking of Postmodernism, it’s gonna be Postmodernism Week on McMansionHell! As you will see on Sunday, Postmodernism has a lot to do with McMansions and other tenants of our sprawl-based built environment. I don’t want to jump the gun on that yet, but let’s just say this wonderful estate is a teaser of things to come. Got questions? Don’t worry. All will be explained.

This amazing testament to the fact that maybe architects actually had some impact on the design of our suburban houses after a, like, 50 year hiatus during which they were prancing around in glass-box-land was built in 2000, is on the market for over $2,000,000 and has no fewer than 7 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms

And all of them are amazing. Let’s begin.

The Front Entry

Judging by the numerous attempts to cover up the seemingly endless white tile floor, the homeowners realized that it was probably a bad decision. Seriously nothing is colder on your feetsies than stone tile.

The Sitting Room

I hesitate to call this a living room because it looks too much like my last dentist’s waiting room. (I wish I had dental insurance again, oh god)

The OTHER Sitting Room

The Other OTHER Sitting Room

There better be butts in at least half of these chairs at any given time or the engineer in me is going to be peeved at the lack of efficiency.

The Dining Room!

Phew! At least it isn’t another…

…Sitting Room

One has to admire their dedication to total grandmotherliness.

The Kitchen!

Something something joke about that song about that lighting fixture

The…oh for ****’s sake

RIP Best Western (1986-2000) it is maybe a Crackle Barrel or something now who knows. Also, the splayed geometry of this room is probs very good for it’s acoustics! Yay!

The Master Bedroom

I am p peeved when real estate listings only have one or two bedrooms out of y’know 7.

And, of course…

The Master Bathroom

I think that weird light thing is from whatever the 80s equivalent to Pinterest is.

The Reject Bedroom

is v sad

I want that party bed please and thank

The Designated Alcohol Space™

Normalizing addiction since circa 1980.

That painting is really messing me up. Like, I know y’all trying to look like your lives were spent collecting priceless european replicas from the Frontgate catalog or whatever but of all the paintings to hang in your bar…

Finally, we conclude our tour with a marvelous rear photo.

Thanks for sticking around for this post even though it was late n stuff. Stay tuned for Sunday’s bit about Postmodernism, and wish me luck for my TEDx talk tomorrow!

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.

The 10 Circles of McMansionHell: The McMansion Scale, Explained!

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 15:38:04 -0400

Hello friends! I’ve received over one hundred (1-0-0) emails regarding the McMansion Scale from last Thursday. My goal with this post is to clarify the scale, which I believe can be really useful in helping my readers tell whether or not they’re in McMansion Hell!

BUT FIRST: I want to apologize for missing Thursday’s post. EXCUSE TIME: I ended up being stranded in NC for three extra days because of the hurricane (my grad assistantship work got behind because of it, and I really like my semi-free schooling - hence, priorities), and also ya girl’s givin a TEDx Talk next Saturday in DC and so prepping for that is of course v important.

WARNING: This post has a “READ MORE” page break, so now is the time to open in a new tab!

So about the McMansion Scale: (Click here for Hi-Res Zoomable version)

It’s a lot to look at. But I’m here to help, with photographs, of course.
Friendly reminder that the scale is really for single-family houses built after 1980, and does not include historical houses, vernacular (folk) architecture, or multifamily housing.

Without Further Ado:

1-4: The Chill Zone

The 1s:

The 1s are reserved for:

tiny houses
houses built under historic preservation guidelines
most modernist houses built by architectural firms (e.g. not builders or construction companies)
houses built by architects working in the New Traditional style

The 2s:

The 2s are for:

classic suburban house styles, built using high-quality materials (e.g. Wood or Hardie Plank vs Vinyl Siding, Stucco vs EIFS)
This includes houses of various styles designed by local architects and well-informed builders.
Typical 2 aesthestics include the Classic Cape Cod/Colonial and Bungalow styles.
The houses in architect-designed/planned Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) communities (such as Seaside, FL) often fall under this number.

The 3s:

The 3s are for two things:

traditional style houses built from modern materials with large attached garages; the standard suburban home, if you will.
The extremely trendy but otherwise well-executed house

Probably the most trendy housing style trend in recent history is the crossing over of modern and traditional forms. These houses have simple shapes, and sleek, minimalistic windows and rooflines. While I personally like the style, I’m curious to see how long it lasts.

The 4s:

99% of houses I believe fall into the 4 category:

If a house has either cascading gables OR a concealed multistory front entry, but follows the rest of the rules, it is a 4.
These are the houses that begin to have noticeable design flaws, such as inconsistent window choices.
This is the realm of the houses that are high quality, but a little off (sometimes this is the handiwork of an architect)

5-7: The Meh-to-Slightly-Ugh Zone

The 5s

Return to the Scale: if a house a few of the yellows, but at least one of the greens, it is a 5. This is the land of Meh. It is a safe place to be.

Some typical 5s:

The 6s:

On the scale, If a house has a few yellows, but one or two of the light pinks, it is a 6.

For example, if a house was a generally decent house, with a strong design, but had out of scale columns and a huge garage it would be a six.

Note: The above house would be a 5 if it weren’t for the dumb addition/garage.

The 7s

This is the zone of pushing it.

On the scale, if a house has 3 or more of the light pinks, or 1-2 of the dark pinks you’re in the 7 zone.

This is the realm of the incredibly cheap, but decently composed in design. (This is also the realm of the tacky, but reasonably sized tract-modern house.)

A classic 7 is a house that attempts to imitate a traditional (usually manor-like) architectural style and botches it, but the intent is clear.

No real modernist house would have visible EIFS seams.

8-10: The McMansion Hell Zone

The 8s:

On the scale, if a house has 3 or more of the dark pinks, and/or one of the reds, it is an eight. A nub automatically places a house in the 8 range, no exceptions.

8s are usually like 7s but worse.

The 9s:

If a house has two of the dark reds it is a 9. Usually 9s still have some kind of vague cohesion to them. It’s the only things keeping them from being 10s.

The above house is like an 8 but with a special kind of ugliness that puts it one category higher.

The 10s:

A 10 is literally the worst. If you have 3+ of the dark reds, you’re a 10. Sorry. These are the worst of the worst. These are canonically nonsense houses, as seen from the examples below:

Well, I hope this post has helped anyone who still had questions about the McMansion Scale! Stay tuned for next week’s Dank McMansion from Great Falls, VA and a surprise post for Sunday!

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.

McMansionHell from A to Z: Part Three (Q-Z)

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 12:02:01 -0400

Greetings from North Carolina, where Hurricane Matthew has successfully prevented any fun activities from happening until further notice! I, however, have made up for this total bummer by writing this post and reading Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Alas, it’s time to conclude our A-Z Tour of McMansionHell. No worries, though - there will still be fun times ahead on Sundays - namely, my research into “modernist” McMansions and other delights. Onward!

Note: This post contains a “Keep Reading” break, if you want to open it in a new tab.

Q is for Quoins

Quoins, like keystones, originated as structural components and were later adopted as ornament when structural technology improved. Technically, quoins are masonry blocks at the corner of two walls. When houses were made out of stone, they held lots of the stone bits together.

Because of this history, it is a good idea use quoins made of brick or other heavy materials. However, the McMansion has taken the quoin completely out of context.

McMansion quoins are often found on all-EIFS (fake stucco) decorations as mere stick-on architecture:

or worse - EIFS quoins are tacked on to houses whose exteriors are actually made from masonry.

The worst by far is when they even remove the context of the corners themselves:

R is for Roofline Soup

For those of you who haven’t seen the McMansion Scale, a house with Roofline Soup is automatically a 9 or a 10. What is roofline soup? When the roofline of the house is so chaotic and illogical, one is immediately sent into a spiraling descent of cringe. Here are some examples:

Not all houses with Roofline Soup have to be insultingly large, either:

S is for Secondary Masses

Of which there are many. If a house has so many secondary masses that the primary mass becomes hopelessly obscured, you are most likely dealing with a McMansion. Examples:

T is for Turret

Aww yiss Turret Time. Previously in architecture, turrets were found only on houses whose architectural styles were influenced by the Medieval: Queen Anne, Tudor, Chateauesque, Richardsonian Romanesque, Gothic Revival, and French Eclectic (Norman Subtype.)

Sometime in the late 90s, somebody began equating turrets with the illusion of wealth, and thus the Turret Age was upon us.

And boy did we come up with some really dumb turret schemes, including but not limited to:

U is for Ugly

Above all else, McMansions are ugly. It is this ugliness that myself and many others find so intriguing about them. Here is some uggo eye candy:

V is for Voids

Specifically, the soulless variety. Nothing is worse than gaping, muntinless windows where they don’t belong. It makes a house look cheap, sad, and empty. See below:

W is for Wallpaper Exteriors

Hah! You thought I was gonna say windows! Nope. I’m referring to the tendency of McMansions to have a million different materials on their facades, like each mass was a wall covered with a different wallpaper. See below:

Clearly someone was told that the more patterns you have on the front of your house, the more wealthy your neighbors will think you are.

X is for Xenophobia

I’m going to go into a lot more detail later on about this, but the fact is that most McMansions are in communities that have strict guidelines, usually income-based, in order to keep certain populations out.

The whole point of gated communities was to prevent “undesirables” from coming in and lowering the property value. This is, of course, thinly veiled racism and classism.

Y is for Yards

There are primarily three types of McMansion Yard:

1.) No yard.

2.) Plot O’ Grass with No (large) Trees (most common)

3.) Meticulously Lanscaped and Maintained by Immigrant Laborers:

Finally,

Z is for Zoning

Zoning is the governmental designation of certain areas for certain uses. Most McMansions are under areas which are zoned for Residential (low-density) housing.

Because of this, there are no commercial businesses in sight, making those who live in these communities extremely dependent on the automobile and the consumption of fossil fuels.

I will talk about zoning at length in its own post, but it explains why we have places that look like this: (Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

I hope you all enjoyed McMansion Hell from A to Z! Next week will be a bit tricky, as I am currently swamped with tons of projects. But there will be something, mark my words!

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

McMansionHell Surprise Special: The McMansion ScaleY’all thought...

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 13:38:44 -0400

McMansionHell Surprise Special: The McMansion Scale

Y’all thought you were getting an ugly house post. Instead, here’s something better; something truly useful.

How much of a McMansion is the house you’re looking at? Now there is a quantitative way to determine the level of McMansion in any design: The McMansion Scale.

This is a broad scale and doesn’t include things such as historic (old) houses, multi family housing, and folk or vernacular architecture. It can be separated into “Not a McMansion;” “Kind of a McMansion” and “Thar she blows!”

To view the scale at full resolution, click on it, or open it in a new tab in your browser window!

How to read this scale:

1-4: The Chill Zone

This is a chill zone to be in. The 1s are reserved for tiny houses and houses built in historically protected areas, and those built by architects working in the New Traditional style. The 2s are for small sized, classic house styles, and those designed by architects (they are usually obvious.) The 3s are for really traditional style houses with attached garages; the standard suburban home, if you will. If a house has either cascading gables OR a concealed multistory front entry, but follows the rest of the rules, it is a 4.

5-7: The Meh to Slightly Ugh Zone

5: if a house a few of the yellows, but at least one of the greens, it is a 5. This is the land of Meh. It is a safe place to be.

6: If a house has a few yellows, but one or two of the light pinks, it is a 6. For example, if a house was a generally good house, with a strong design, but had out of scale columns and a huge garage it would be a six. This is the category for houses with big garages, or one huge glaring error that kinda ruins it, like improperly sized dormers.

7: This is the zone of pushing it. 3 or more of the light pinks, or 1-2 of the dark pinks and you’re in the 7 zone. A classic 7 is a house that is symmetrical in design, but has stick on architecture, with an oversized pediment. The house attempts to imitate an architectural style and kinda botches it, but the intent is clear.

8-10: The McMansion Hell Zone

8: if a house has 3 or more of the dark pinks, and one of the reds, it is an eight. A nub automatically places a house in the 8 range, no exceptions.

9: If a house has two of the dark reds it is a 9. Usually 9s still have some kind of cohesion to them, even if it’s only color.

10: A 10 is literally the worst. If you have 3+ of the dark reds, you’re a 10. Sorry. These are the worst of the worst.

I hope you enjoy this special report! We will return to our regularly scheduled programming this Sunday as we finish up our A-Z of McMansionHell.

P.S. If you haven’t read this article I wrote for Atlas Obscura about why WE WERE OBSESSED WITH BEIGE, I highly recommend it!

McMansion Hell from A to Z (Part Two: I-P)

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 16:30:56 -0400

Greetings! Even though I’m currently suffering from a nasty cold, I have yet to miss a Sunday post, and this week is no exception. Last week, we covered McMansion Hell from letters A-H , and this week furthers our journey through letters I through P in the alphabet of ugly. Picking up where we left off…

I is for Injection Molding

I hate to break it to you folks, but those columns aren’t made out of marble. If you haven’t seen this video, you may not be aware that most columns, moldings, pediments, and other details are actually made out of foam.

People with obscene amounts of money can afford real columns made from real materials. The people who build McMansions don’t have obscene amounts of money, but insist on pretending they do anyway, and so we end up with houses where every detail is another unfortunate example of peel n’ stick architecture:

I can’t even believe this house is still standing. ^

J is for Jerkinhead

Ah yes, the Jerkinhead roof. A classic of Tudors, Queen Anne/Stick/Shingle Styles and Bungalows everywhere. And McMansions. Unfortunately. A Jerkinhead roof used out of place is a pretty good indicator you’re looking at a McMansion, because architects should know better.

Quick review:

Is your house imitating a Tudor/any of the 19th c. Eclectic styles/Craftsman or Bungalow?
If yes, go ahead. Use that roof.
If no, don’t, dear lord.

I commonly refer to incorrectly used jerkinhead roofs as snouts. See below:

A gable would’ve been more appropriate here.
When a snout is used on a McMansion, it is often used inconsistently or on only one of the roof masses, indicative of a general tendency amongst McMansion designers to cherry pick architectural details arbitrarily.

K is for Keystone

Ah yes, inappropriate keystone use. Where the keystone is not embedded in the very thing it is supposed to tie together - whether it’s a moulding, arch, lintel, it doesn’t matter - keystone abuse is rampant in McMansion Hell.

Keystones should be embedded in the surface, not tacked on to it. The original purpose of a keystone was to hold an arch together, but they have been used decoratively for hundreds of years. Yes, a keystone can be used in a flat arch, often called a jack arch. (This was particularly popular in Italian Renaissance Revival Architecture.)

I mean, the keystones and the window mouldings are also usually made of foam as well, so you can’t blame developers for not embedding them in the surface, as they wouldn’t do a very good job holding things up anyway.

L is for Lot

Ok so McMansions are all about getting as much big ugly house on a lot as possible. While a house designed by an architect will attempt to connect and integrate with its site, a McMansion is just plopped down rather carelessly (after removing all of the existent trees of course.)

As we can see from the above examples, the McMansion is a direct corollary to those who refuse to think about anyone other than themselves.

M is for Muntins

McMansions never get their muntins right! Either they use too many different types of muntins, or they use the wrong style of muntins (looking at you, prairie muntins). This is seriously a huge pet peeve of mine, and now it will be a pet peeve of yours too:

Also this house looks mildly peeved. ^

N is for Nub

Ah yes, the incorrigible McMansion Nub - one of the classic indicators of a McMansion, alongside the 2-story entryway. It’s that awkward bit of roof that doesn’t seem to quite smooth out, much to your infuriation.

O is for Oriel

What is an oriel? Basically it’s a second-story protruding window, like a bay window. These windows were commonly found on Tudor and Queen Anne style houses, and have, of course, been appropriated by the McMansion.

In which case they are too damn big.

An oriel is almost never the same size as a full-sized bay window - it is supposed to be smaller. Oversized is just how the McMansion tends to do things, unfortunately.

P is for Patchwork

Yeah, so that fake brick patchwork that was tacky literally instantaneously. Like someone did it, and then the next person who walked by was like “that’s tacky, yo.” Only McMansions have that. No respecting architect or builder would willingly do this to a house:

Seriously? Were we somehow supposed to believe that this is actually somehow worn away stone, weathered by years of erosion?? What is this, a metaphor for the mortgages going around during the time this house was built? Congrats on actually having the worst taste. Instawrong.

Well that’s all for this week, folks. Next week, stay tuned for the Certified Dank McMansion, this time in Atlanta, GA, and next Sunday, we round up our McMansionHell from A to Z!

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Bergen County, New Jersey

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 13:02:34 -0400

Every once in a while, I discover an extraordinarily special place. And by special I mean hideous. Bergen County, New Jersey is that place. This will not be the first, nor the last time this county will show up on this blog, as its houses and I have a long working relationship ahead of us.

So where to start? I used this house as an example in another post before (can’t remember which one) but I knew from the first time I saw it, that I needed to dive deeper.

Man, where to start. First of all, the exterior of this house appears to be screaming in two different ways: either the two dormers, or the two “sidelight” windows are the eyes, with the door being the agape mouth. With the absurd windows on the front facade, the silly fake quoins, and the pseudo-Palladian elements scattered all over the place, I have a feeling this place is going to go down in McMansionHell history as a Certified Dank™ Legend.

This house (built in 1988 as we will all soon see) has seven bedrooms and six bathrooms, and is currently retailing for almost 3.5 million dollars.

By far, my favorite McMansions are the ones that are like time capsules. You open the obnoxiously large front door and step into the obnoxiously large entryway and are instantly transported into another era.

In this case, that era is 1988.

Front Entryway

My favorite part about the 80s was how they axed all of the environmental reforms made in the 70s while simultaneously obsessing over having as many house plants as possible.

Living Room (1 of 2)

At least piano makers are thankful that their art is being funded by those who buy large instruments as symbols of wealth.

Study

Fake book subjects commonly include:
- Business
- Law
- Classic Literature

Dining Room (1 of 2)

Seriously I don’t think you guys are prepared for what you’re about to see.

This has to be one of the best worst vintage 80s rooms I’ve ever seen.

Dining Room (2 of 2)

Those poor plants, working like slaves for the man.

The Kitchen!

Who thought that orange was a remotely good idea?? Spoilers: it was probs HGTV.

Living Room (2 of 2)

Luckily for the homeowner, many elements from this room (the furniture and wall color) are coming back in style again, as dark green is all the rage this year apparently.

Master Suite (Part 1)

Shocked that the drapes don’t have the same pattern as the wallpaper.

Master Suite (Part 2)

P sure the hyper-femininity of the 80s and early 90s were what led to the creation of the ManCave during the dawn of the 21st century.

Master Bathroom

This bathroom almost looks like it came out of a Robert A.M. Stern coffee table book from the late 80s. Whoever did this interior was a licensed interior designer. I’m pretty sure those vanities are custom.

On to the last room of our tour! (Somehow there weren’t pictures of the other 6 bedrooms or the other 5 baths…)

The Basement

Seriously the mirrored door is hella choice.

Fortunately, our tour ends on a positive note this week, as the rear of this house actually makes some architectural sense:

Rear Exterior

Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that tour as much as I did. I love these time capsule houses - you can learn a lot from studying the design trends of the past; most notably, when they’re coming back.

Stay tuned for this Sunday’s special post, McMansionHell from A to Z (Part Two) and, of course, next week’s dank McMansion!

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.

McMansion Hell from A to Z: Part One (A-H)

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 16:08:13 -0400

Hello, Hello! As you may have read from last week’s post, this week’s post is a sort of field guide to the McMansion. As the internet’s self-appointed expert on big ugly houses, I have collected over the years a huge amount of materials, data, and resources on everything “luxury.”

As I sat down to plan this post, I came to the realization, that, taking into account such things as geographical variation (e.g. Texas vs New England), fitting the McMansion into one post would be pretty impossible. So, after a week of dwelling on it, I decided to break it up into three posts, using the letters of the alphabet as a guide. Part One is A-H; Part Two will be I-P; Part Three will be Q-Z.

By the end of this three-part series, my hope is that even the least architecturally inclined (e.g. my relatives) will be able to identify a McMansion from a mile away, and the world will be a better place for it.

So without further ado, let’s begin.

A is for Architectural Anarchy

As you might recall from the post on eclecticism, McMansions can’t just pick one architectural style. They have to have all of them and nine out of ten times, they aren’t integrated together whatsoever.

It’s not just mixing styles that’s the problem, it’s mixing shapes, rooflines, details, sizes, and pretty much everything else into Architecture Mystery Meat.

Here are some examples of Architectural Anarchy. If the house you are looking at looks anything like these houses, it is almost certainly a McMansion:

B is for Beige

It’s no secret that McMansions love beige - and the further west you go, the beiger it gets. Now, not all beige houses are McMansions, but often the BeigeHaus, as it is known around this blog, is almost always cladded with EIFS (fake stucco), and the architectural features almost always have a tacked-on appearance.

Here are a few examples of classic BeigeHauses:

West Coast BeigeHauses:

East Coast BeigeHauses:

C is for Columns

Columns, of course, have their own post. But it’s worth reviewing here. Not all McMansions have columns, but all McMansions with columns use them totally incorrectly.

If the columns look like the ones below, the house you’re looking at might be worth tweeting to me.

D is for Dormers

Yeah, there was that whole post about dormers too, but out of scale dormers are a classic McMansion woe.

If the dormers on the house you’re looking at look anything like these, you’re probably in McMansion Hell:

E is for Entryway

Luckily for everyone here, the McMansion has its own textbook entryway, universally recognizable by all. This entryway consists of three parts:

1.) Arched two-story entry “porch”, may or may not have columns
2.) Large front door, usually double door. (May have sidelights)
3.) Enormous transom window, often with square bottom and arched top
The arch in part one is not as important as the other two parts - often the entry is flush against the surface of the building.

Here are some examples of this textbook McMansion Feature:

In the above example, the transom is visually separated from the door by a portico. On the inside, however, they are all the same space.

Note the pilasters, rather than columns, above.

Any variation of this entryway is one of the most important signifiers that you are looking at a McMansion. It is a textbook feature, and one of the easiest to identify.

F is for Fake

McMansions are faker than your friends were in middle school. What do I mean by fake? I mean using low-cost reproductions of quality materials or features in order to portray the illusion of wealth. I’m talking about the knockoff handbags of architecture.

Examples of fakery:

Here’s a secret about architectural details, especially those around windows and doors: with a few exceptions (e.g. pedimented windows/doors) architectural details are supposed to be embedded in the surface of the facade, rather than stuck on top of it like a 3D sticker.

A simple portico would have sufficed.

The key to talking about fakery is to ask oneself whether or not the fake is using cheap materials to imitate more expensive ones. Fake stucco is aesthetically problematic in many of the instances it’s been used because it forms a material/color/texture monotony and the visible seams ruin the authenticity of what it was trying to portray in the first place.

G is for Garage

McMansions love garages. After all, they’re part of a lifestyle that’s entirely dependent on the car, and are themselves testimonies to consumption itself.

Garages are not defining aspects of the McMansion, as most American houses have attached garages, but the presence of a three or more car garage is a pretty good sign that you’re looking at a McMansion rather than a run-of-the-mill suburban tract house.

H is for Huge

Oh yeah. The thing about McMansions is that they are enormous. Hence the Mansion part. They are not built to the human scale, and can seem overpowering, massive, and intimidating to the outside viewer. The tendency to remove all foliage around the house during development only reinforces the excessive size of these houses.

Does the house look like it could also function as a commune? Does your neck hurt when you try to look at the roofline? If yes, it’s probably a McMansion.

That’s all for this week’s installment! I hope you enjoyed this potentially useful collage of ugly! Stay tuned for next week’s Dank McMansion, and next Sunday’s continuation of the A-Zs of McMansion Hell.

Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.