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Kate Wagner goes from McMansion Hell to critic at The Nation

2023-07-03T12:41:00-04:00

The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture, today named Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell) to its masthead as architecture correspondent. Best known as the brains behind the brilliant and satirical architecture blog, “”McMansion Hell,” and following a wildly successful stint as a Nation guest columnist earlier this year, Wagner will contribute monthly commentary on architecture and the built environment—but not as always conventionally understood.

Wagner succeeds Michael Sorkin, who died in 2020. The new correspondent said the post is “an ideal perch for me to explain how everything we see and everything we build is political.” She is now one of a select coterie of dedicated critics writing for American publications, including Michael Kimmelman, Lee Bey, Carolina A. Miranda, Ingra Safron, and Robert Campbell. Wagner's personal account of her ascent from the widely-acclaimed blog, which she founded in 2016, can also be found here via The Baffler.

Previously on Archinect: Bro, Do You Even Quoin? A conversation with McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner

Kate Wagner says McMansions have become a permanent staple of the American scene

2023-05-17T19:50:00-04:00

I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. [...] I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments [...] the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boom time fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.

Wagner says that, without noticing, the media’s focus on gentrification and the affordability of cities has meant that the rise of “modern farmhouses” and other forms of McMansions following the end of the great recession has gone largely unscrutinized. She claims these and other designs occupy a place between high design and vernacular architecture before finally predicting their continued dominance over the residential market owing to our penchant for consumerist displays.

"One day the McMansion, once a token of financial tomfoolery, will instead epitomize our nihilistic, environmental death drive," she writes in The Baffler. "More than half a century of urban planning prioritizing sprawl has gotten us to where we are now: choked by endless freeways, benumbed by carbon-copy strip malls, secluded in catchpenny houses with no sense of human scale."

How to hack McMansions

2020-03-13T14:25:00-04:00

Members of the architecture community know too well the infamously gaudy and ugly reputation of the "McMansion" housing type.

Despite the fact that esteemed architecture critics like Kate Wagner have been roasting these buildings (and their owners) for years, more and more of these gargantuan homes continue to be built each year.

However, with the growing push to draw down carbon emissions and promote sustainable design initiatives, efforts have sprung up to shrink the McMansion's super-sized carbon footprint.

Previously on Archinect: "California eliminates single-family zoning." Image courtesy of Archinect.

A piece by Adele Peters from Fast Company illustrates the possibilities of how society can shift the McMansion housing paradigm into a system that doesn't focus on the "bigger is better" ideology. Peters writes, "Over the last seven decades, the average American house has nearly tripled in size at the same time as the number of people living in each household has dropped."

C...

Megamansions might be making their occupants unhappy

2019-06-12T14:31:00-04:00

American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973[...] the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015. But according to a recent paper, Americans aren’t getting any happier with their ever bigger homes. “Despite a major upscaling of single-family houses since 1980,” writes Clément Bellet,[...], “house satisfaction has remained steady in American suburbs.”

For many homeowners in America, happiness is often incorrectly measured by how flatteringly the scale of one's home can be compared to those around them. Since the construction of Levittown and other post-war suburban developments, American homes have, on average, been built with incrementally larger footprints in a tireless search for the largest house on the block.

Interior of Versailles House under construction.

"To be clear," Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic writes, "having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby."

And not only can happiness not be achieved through square footage, but these increasingly large homes also breed unhappiness through a variety of means. They contribute, for instance, to the increasing isolation of the families that occupy them - if a family can afford a large home with separate rooms, appliances and products for all its ...

Kate Wagner challenges the myth: "We don’t build houses like we used to"

2019-01-21T17:17:00-05:00

“We just don’t build houses like we used to.” Whether we’re criticizing an individual home or a wave of boxy buildings, it’s a common lament... It’s a statement that contains some truth, but it also misses crucial context about the material conditions, functionality, and style trends of the past.

Kate Wagner, the writer and critic behind McMansion Hell, has turned their sights towards an often-uttered statement about the current state of architectural craftsmanship: "We just don't build houses like we used to."

Listen to our conversation with Kate on Archinect Sessions:

Wagner methodically debunks this myth, starting with the false belief that there was once a great and more well-treated supply of craftsman in the past. "Many of the beloved houses of the 19th century and early 20th century, such as pattern book houses, kit houses, foursquares, and bungalows," Wagner reminds us, "were built by local carpenters, contractors, and builders who had small teams of employees or hired local day laborers. Often these houses were even built by the completely unskilled person who bought the house."

A typical California Bungalow.

Second, Wager points to the myth that older buildings are 'better' because they were built using fewer codes, claiming that those same codes make more recen...

Betsy DeVos’s summer home resides in McMansion Hell

2018-08-09T14:16:00-04:00

Two weeks ago, somebody untied Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht from its mooring. It got me thinking about another opulent display of wealth owned by DeVos: her 22,000-square-foot nautical-themed summer mansion, located in Holland, Michigan. Just a few more years of climate change and it’ll be floating too.

Kate Wagner critiques Betsy DeVos’s Michigan summer mansion on her humor blog McMansion Hell. Wagner unpacks not only the architectural design but also the greater social implications of why the education secretary's McMansion is so horrendous. The essay is dedicated to "all of the public school teachers who taught [Wagner] how to write".

Betsy DeVos's summer home on McMansion Hell. Image: Kate Wagner/Advance Media/Barcroft Images.

Betsy DeVos's summer home on McMansion Hell. Image: Kate Wagner/Pricey Pads.

Kate Wagner's case against formal residential spaces

2018-07-17T18:12:00-04:00

Nobody is actually using their formal living and dining rooms. Families actually spend most of their time in the kitchen and the informal living room or den. Yet we continue to build these wastes of space because many Americans still want that extra square footage, and for a long time, that want has been miscategorized as a need.

McMansion Hell creator, Kate Wagner, makes a passionate case against wasting precious square footage (and associated resources) on formal living and dining rooms in our homes.

Her plea is backed by data from a recent UCLA study which suggests that entertaining rooms, instead of bringing families together, actually divide us: "There’s a reason why the UCLA study showed that the most-used common areas are the kitchen and the informal living room: People like to spend time together eating and watching TV, without the glare from those two-story great-room windows. Large, unused spaces designed for social functions foster isolation instead."

A Texas McMansion Hell bracket approaches, check out the 8 contenders

2018-07-03T17:38:00-04:00

I’ve been poisoning my brain the last couple of weeks narrowing down 2000 prospective McMansions to 16. Please give me a round of applause for this immense personal sacrifice. Instead of ranking them myself like I usually do, I will be doing a bracket at the end of the next post where you can vote for the Most Terrible in Texas! (After all, everything’s bigger in Texas!)

McMansion Hell, a bi-weekly blog delighting in architectural education through ridicule, now brings us a Texas bracket. The top 8 worst McMansions of Texas suburbia have been chosen and properly mocked. Now it's your turn to choose which belongs at the innermost circle of hell.

Here are a few of the contenders:

Montgomery County (House 3) (AKA Cascading Nope)

Denton County (House 5) (AKA Mt Nub)

Collin County (House 7) (AKA The Triple Can)

Check out the full lineup at McMansion Hell and get ready to cast your vote!

Want to learn more about McMansion Hell? Check our our conversation with McMansion Hell's author Kate Wagner, from a previous episode of Archinect Sessions...

Bro, Do You Even Quoin? A conversation with McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner

2017-07-13T16:41:00-04:00

On this week's episode we’re joined with Kate Wagner, the author of McMansion Hell, a blog that balances serious essays on architecture and urbanism, with brilliantly funny analysis of the absurd trends in American suburban architecture. Kate has recently emerged, triumphantly, from a widely publicized threat from Zillow to stop using their imagery. As reported on Archinect recently, Zillow withdrew their legal threats after the Electronic Frontier Foundation responded on behalf of Kate, and McMansion Hell is back in business, with a larger following than ever.

A taste of what McMansion Hell offers

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Zillow backs off McMansion Hell

2017-06-30T12:46:00-04:00

McMansion Hell, which besides satire, also regularly features educational posts on the history and significance of vernacular architecture in the US, was threatened with a lawsuit this week for using photos obtained from Zillow for parody.

Image courtesy of McMansionHell.com

After Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Wagner against Zillow, released its letter asserting that the company "cannot leverage its agreements with third parties to assert some kind of 'super copyright' that overrides fair use" Zillow announced that they will not pursue legal action against Wagner. The blogger agreed to stop using photos sourced from the website but will not delete any of the already posted images, as originally requested.

Dissecting McMansion ugliness

2016-08-16T15:56:00-04:00

The aptly named "McMansionhell" tumblr has taken the time to carefully note just what makes a McMansion an ugly, terrible, no good architectural atrocity. Skipping over frothy diatribe and going straight into meticulous point by point dissection, the tumblr notes that McMansions fail in four key areas: Masses & Voids, Balance, Proportion, and crucially, Rhythm. "McMansions lack architectural rhythm," the tumblr states, using slidetool graphics to help you wince and blanch in an informed way (as opposed to just experiencing an overpowering visceral dislike each time you pass one on the street).

Other ugly building news: