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. — salon.com
15 Comments
i love the traditional detailing on that house.
These are assets, not homes. They are built to flip: human settlements organized around the premise of the Greater Fool Theory.
Exactly. Unless of course your only measure is money, in which this all makes perfect sense.
a house with chinese drywall that erodes copper is not an asset, or an investment. it depreciates faster than a car or computer. i would think if you were "investing" in a house, you would get one that doesn't start falling apart in the first year.
then again, i'm not much of a financial adviser. i guess people are making piles of money because big sells. doesn't make sense to me.
The number of spec houses in the $5-15m range here is staggering. The one thing they all have in common is disposability - built cheap and sold for top dollar, they all need massive repairs immediately upon completion due to basic design and construction flaws. Developers give two years free maintenance because they'd have to fix the problems anyway under law. Once the two years is up - adios, sucker.
The owners for the most part don't even try to fix them properly, they just patch and Band-Aid and figure the next owner will have to deal with it. Turnover is high.
The amount of money involved is beyond comprehension. A friend who takes care of a 3-year old $15m spec house that is fraught with problems (frozen pipes, electrical failures, flooding from bad drainage and insufficient dry wells, shoddy construction, equipment failures, etc. recently told me the owner said "I wish I had never bought this house". It's not a second home, it's a small part of a diversified investment portfolio.
"We have sprawl, wars over cheap gas, stagnant wages and longer hours because your boss wants this awful, ugly house "
No, we have sprawl, cheap gas, and stagnant wages becasue of good old greed and self interest. Privatize and sell as much as possible to maximum wealth for the top and let the beneficense of their over consumption trickle down to the hoi polloi, and if you don't eat cake, well, then God must have wanted it that way. Yada yada...
As for why this era's mansions, however badly built, are so butt ugly, another sentence in the story points to the reason.
"I took pictures of houses that seemed to have been designed by Stanford White after a debilitating brain injury"
Exactly. In the robber baron era we had similar excesses and concentrations of wealth that expressed themselves ostentatiously, but today, when most architects can't design with-in traditional styles, you get absolute crap. I hope we get Elizabeth Warren to tackle the first problem, but the uglyness of architecture is just willfull ignorance (and a matter of taste!)
soooooo, you're saying it's the 'style' that's the problem, and not the chinese drywall that rots copper? a good architect that studied vitruvious could make a much better house with chinese drywall that causes copper to erode?
big cheap pieces of junk are built, because that's what the public wants. if the public did not want big cheap pieces of junk, this house would not have been built. at least part of the problem that should be addressed is that the person who designed this house, and the person who paid for it, and everyone else involved, didn't care. if they did, be it 'modern' or 'traditional' or 'neo-eclectic,' or any other style, it wouldn't be nearly the problem it is.
i also hope elizabeth warren changes the world for the better. she should run for president.
most consumers of houses aren't aware of what's going on in their houses beyond the granite counters and walk in closets. my experience with boss clients is that they were very savvy wanted quality and had good if somewhat traditional tastes in what they wanted in a home. Now that can't be said for the average family who buy some snout house in a new subdivision. Here it is all about storage and mancaves with power reclining sectionals, big enough garages for both Suburbans and a pad for the boat. This is all builder driven bullshit and doesn't concern us. Move on find your niche and carve it out.
It's not the style, it's the vulgarity of the execution that people tend to dislike about McMansions. If your aesthetic is' less is more' minimalism, the only way you could show off your cash would be to slather expensive materials and engineered connections etc, which most people couldn't read if you hit them over the head with. You're conflating quality of construction with aesthetics, two different animals.
there are many architects who do work that I appreciate and admire who are working in a "traditional" vocabulary. These architects have the same disdain for the mcmansion as any "modern" architect. so, no it isn't about style it is about the essentials. proportion, scale, light. you know the architecty things that aren't considered in this product.
"it is about the essentials. proportion, scale, light. you know the architecty things that aren't considered in this product." and the architecty things that aren't taught in schools either.
The way in which RE is appraised is also a big part of the problem. The comp appraisal bs basically resorts to $/ft.2. Quality is not part of the appraisal process. Sure "features" are considered, but again its a quantitative measure.
If you build a 2000 ft.2 house that requires 200$ per ft.2 to make profit or a 4000 ft.2 house that requires 100$ per. ft.2... it still the same 400k. The developer will have an easier time building and selling the crappy big house. Money is what motivates developers. nothing more. They also see nothing wrong with crap architecture because in order to hate bad architecture you need to have a passion for good architecture. Hating something takes as much passion as loving it.
I blame the architecture profession also. We have failed to provide the public with any viable alternatives. We take the back seat with this service model expecting demand to materialize out of thin air. Demand is a fallacy. Demand is not bottom up. Demand requires the option to choose. No one demanded the I-phone until it was introduced. We live in a consumer based culture. With regard to housing, their options are limited to developer crap because the architects are working within a service model which is simply not accessible or desirable for most people. If we were to look at architecture as a product industry rather than a service industry we could possibly/probably out compete this garbage. (Architect as developer...)
Of course there will always be those who want this gaudy crap, but I know many many people who want more but are forced to settle because of the economic impossibility of hiring and architect and getting a construction loan...There are a bunch of mid-century modern homes in this area that are pretty nice and also small. They are probably 2x as expensive per/ft.2 than the other developer crap. They sell like hotcakes. You simply cant touch them because they are on the market and sold within days...
Suburbia is pretty much terrible, but this does not mean that sub-urban has to be. I would say that it is very possible to create great sub-urban habitats. With a higher/eco-balanced population density, more walkability and public space, more localized business and production, sub-urban habitats probably have a better chance at achieving true sustainability by balancing density with "resource space", by utilizing the open space/public space for permaculture, and by overall creating self sufficient decentralized "towns." With solar and wind technology and with a good public transportation infrastructure, we can potentially create a new urban form that is truly sustainable and sub-urban rather than suburban. I don't think that this is possible in cities because the population density far surpasses resource space (without super high tech production systems to supplement that are expensive like vertical aquaponics, etc...).. But with a sub-urban pattern, we could realistically create a very sustainable habitat with already available technology (green houses, solar, wind)
We could build houses out of durable materials like rammed earth and adobe.....etc.....and combine passive strategies with supplemental ones like solar....a solution is completely doable.
jla-x
I'm very much in your corner, on this thread as well as the other threads you've posted because your perspective on things acknowledges our chaotic reality and the opportunity it presents to come up with something better for the future. Though I'm not nearly as confident that wholesale change in suburbia can happen, nor do I think it always wise to endorse self-sufficiency at every instance, I do agree that our focus as architects should orient itself a bit more to where the majority of Americans live, outside the central core of cities. The suburbs need to be fixed, and there is acknowledgement among many suburbanites which I think it presents a chance to make a significant impact to these areas rather than fighting for crumbs at the limited number of traditional urban infill projects. In addition to my day job at the corporate firm, I also been able to design on my own time concepts for small suburban developers who are interested in reviving a number of old distressed suburban properties that they own to find new tenants. The solutions are cost-conscious and low-tech, but it doesn't take much to completely transform a tired strip center, low-rise office, or industrial warehouse to something pretty cool and likewise impact the surrounding context. It's a slow and incremental view on how to improve the suburbs, but I'm not convinced there's much of a native constituency (yet) for wholesale change.
homme_du_jura, I think suburban improvement is really interesting and long-term might be work a lot of architects could do. Maybe start with re-orientation to transit (the transit itself needs to come from community demand and political will), then focus on re-connectivity, some densification, some greening, some architectural/aesthetic improvement...it could be really cool.
homme-du-jura, that sounds interesting.
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