Archinect - News

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."

McMansions are making LA’s housing crisis a lot worse

2022-12-19T12:05:00-05:00

There is another cause of overcrowding and homelessness. It is mansionization, the demolition of older, smaller, less expensive houses by real estate speculators who quickly replace them with spec McMansions: boxy, shoddily built houses that max out the permitted building envelope.

The disincentive to build multifamily and affordable housing is made worse by the popularity of these easily repeatable home designs, which also cost more to construct while taking up more space and using more water and electricity. Certain communities around L.A. County have developed effective anti-McMansion ordinances that work by limiting the size of structures, although loopholes abound.

A possible solution can be taken from LA's 35 existing community plans, which contain some version of language to “protect existing stable single-family and low-density residential neighborhoods from encroachment by higher density residential uses and other uses that are incompatible as to scale, character, or would otherwise diminish quality of life.”

Revenge of the Suburbs?

2020-06-22T12:46:00-04:00

American homes are extravagant, having swelled from about 1,500 square feet on average in 1973 to more than 2,400 in 2018. After the pandemic, memory of the novel utility of all that space could justify even more of it. Some companies have already declared their intention to let workers telecommute forever, and real-estate analysts anticipate more companies eliminating or curtailing expensive commercial leases to save money.

The new article from The Atlantic expands on the premise, "Suburbia was never as bad as anyone said it was. Now it’s looking even better."
The incoming changes to built environment due to COVID-19 pandemic, might well be viewed as going back to suburban communities and escape from the density of packed urban environments, the author argues.

As many companies want to keep "working from home" policies extended, city folks might benefit from lesser traffic and lower property values and rents, as this reporter observes.

There's a glut of McMansions on the market

2019-06-17T15:06:00-04:00

Many baby boomers poured millions into these spacious homes, planning to live out their golden years in houses with all the bells and whistles. Now, many boomers are discovering that these large, high-maintenance houses no longer fit their needs as they grow older, but younger people aren’t buying them.

The Wall Street Journal reports that wealthy baby boomers in America's far-flung retirement suburbs are having trouble selling their McMansions. The problem? The homes are too big, too expensive, and too far away from everything else.

Another issue: Too many multi-million dollar homes are hitting the market all at once. As the TV generation begins to age out of homeownership and sky-high student debt keeps city-loving millennials locked out of the housing market, giant suburban homes are sitting for longer than in previous years. As a result, owners are increasingly accepting below-asking price offers.

The problem, the report warns, could get worse in the coming decade as demographic transformations reshape America and some 32 million baby-boomer-owned homes go for sale.

Rick Palacios, Jr. of John Burns Real Estate Consulting told The Wall Street Journal, “You had this wave of homes built that now just don’t make sense for a lot of the people who bought them."

Maybe it's time to ...

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 ...

Alex Maclean's aerial photography is devastating

2019-04-22T12:39:00-04:00

It is often said that whenever one needs to assess a task at hand, the proper step is to look as far back as one can see.

Airport Runways. Photo by Alex Maclean

This is the philosophy among certain aerial photographers, whose task has been making sense of the build environment after the Industrial Revolution. Alex Maclean is one such photographer, who has, for the last 30 years, made it his task to capture the evolution of the American landscape and the complex relationship between its natural and constructed environments that contribute to climate change.

Yard Space. Photo by Alex Maclean

His photography book, Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point, is a culmination of his aerial photography that seeks to document the ravages of the human influence on vast landscapes.

You can get a copy of Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point from our online store or at Archinect Outpost.

Untitled. Photo by Alex Maclean

How has Hollywood shaped the idea of an American house?

2018-12-22T13:28:00-05:00

The decorated Christmas houses, bedecked in wreaths and lights and the mythology of Christmas, and the haunted houses of Halloween, draped in fake spiders’ webs and punctuated by plastic pumpkins, are two sides of the fantasy. The suburban house represents freedom and independence just as it can come to represent a trap.

What is the aspirational American house and why is the general public obsessed with this version of residential living? Hollywood has painted a picturesque image of what an ideal American house looks like, especially during the holiday season. These ideal homes can be broken into three specific groups: the Christmas home, the Haunted House, and the infamous McMansion.

Image © homesoftherich.net

All three homes consist of staple vernacular styles like large fireplaces, staircases, multiple garages, and windows of varying styles. However, why have these designs won the hearts of the public and have become the "design goals" of many builders across the nation? Some may say these homes embody varying forms of the American dream, each expressing a combination of fantasy and longing within contemporary American culture.

House in The Addams Family (1991) © Allstar/Paramount

Image © homesoftherich.net

When people think of the contemporary American life, "families relocate thousands of miles...

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

Listen to "Bro, Do You Even Quoin?":

iTunes: Click here to listen, and click the "Subscribe" button below the logo to automatically download new episodes.
Apple Podcast App (iOS): click here to subscribe
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://archinect.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

...

Having bazillions of dollars helps

2016-12-01T20:21:00-05:00

Even if the townhouses look alike and they’re next to each other, they don’t always have the same floor levels. So we’ll have to find a way to eliminate the party wall between them. It’s really taking apart both houses and rebuilding them as one. If the client wants these big open spaces, we have to dismantle the interior of these buildings and then rebuild them together as a 40-foot-wide building

S. Jhoanna Robledo reviews the latest trend in urban living for the wealthy, the Frankenmansion.

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:

Let them eat McMansions! The 1 percent, income inequality, and new-fashioned American excess

2014-04-16T13:35:00-04:00

Today we call those changes “inequality,” and inequality is, obviously, the point of the McMansion. The suburban ideal of the 1950s, according to “The Organization Man,” was supposed to be “classlessness,” but the opposite ideal is the brick-to-the-head message of the dominant suburban form of today.

Los Angeles’s Endangered Modernist Homes

2013-08-19T09:02:00-04:00

“An economic downturn is always a good thing for preservation,” says Regina O’Brien, chairperson of the Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “A lot fewer developers are making a lot less money, and therefore they have a lot less motivation to pursue these profit-oriented flips. But the problem is that the opposite is true when the market picks back up.”

Lloyd Wright's Palos Verdes Moore House Demolished Today

2012-04-26T00:13:00-04:00

After a short day of demolition, the Lloyd Wright-designed Moore House in Palos Verdes Estates is gone. The city council denied an LA Conservancy appeal of the demo last night and the Conservancy's Director of Communications Cindy Olnick tells us she's just heard from the city that the deed is now completely done.. the current owner bought it in 2004 and says he never even knew who Wright was. For years now the owner has been trying to tear the house down and build a Mediterranean-style house...

Homework and Jacuzzis as Dorms Move to McMansions in California

2011-11-13T19:04:15-05:00

Here in Merced, a city in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and one of the country’s hardest hit by home foreclosures, the downturn in the real estate market has presented an unusual housing opportunity for thousands of college students. Facing a shortage of dorm space, they are moving into hundreds of luxurious homes in overbuilt planned communities.