99% Invisible - 232- McMansion Hell

Episode Date: October 18, 2016

Few forms of contemporary architecture draw as much criticism as the McMansion, a particular type of oversized house that people love to hate. McMansions usually feature 3,000 or more square feet of space and fail to embody a cohesive style … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It is the most reviled form of contemporary architecture. There is. A McMansion is an oversized house, usually over 3000 square feet, that doesn't really interact with its environment, whether that's the houses around it, or if it's built in the middle of nowhere, that environment as well. This is Kate Wagner, creator of the blog of McMansion Hell, where she helps readers like me understand what is and isn't a McMansion, and why we hate them.

The main signs of a McMansion are that they're built cheaply with very cheap materials, new materials rarely ever traditional materials. As you can tell by the name of the blog and by her general demeanor, Kate Wagner hates the Magmánchen. They're built without any sort of consideration for the grammar of design. Since the creation of this show, I've used the word architecture in the most tenuous and metaphorical of ways, but according to Kate, the Mag McMansion may not even qualify as architecture at all. There's no real architecture in the McMansion, and it's two ostentations to be considered folk architecture.

They have no architectural commentary. All they do is represent sort of an ideal of wealth. But it's more an image of wealth rather than wealth itself. It's very much meant to convey that one message that I have a lot of money and a lot of space. And I am putting it in this house that is so tall and so massive that you feel intimidated by it just as you should feel intimidated by my apparent wealth. That single purpose, to convey wealth, That single purpose to convey wealth, steam roles, every other potential design principle, like symmetry, or logic, history, or beauty. Yeah, who cares if you have a big house?

If it's like so ugly, I don't want to look at it. Kate believes the source of this ugliness stems from the combination of mass production and customization. During the 90s and 2000s, thanks to easy access to a lot of money through bad mortgages pushed on the American people, the tastes of the new home buyer ran to the extreme. The standard models of these mass produced homes reflected that, but of grand entrances and granite countertops and stainless steel appliance was weren't nice enough. Many new home manufacturers allowed for customizations that brought the opulence to the next level. So they'll combine the two

an already designed prototype with sort of a custom home, which can end up in some pretty wild looking results. So they're designed and customized from the inside out and it makes the outside big and weird and lumpy. Because somebody wanted cathedral ceilings in their bathroom, which is obviously a necessity. The first victim in the design from the inside out process is the roof. Make-manchin roofs are a mess. The roof is sort of the number one way to tell a make-manchin from a mansion

and that the roof kind of makes no sense. It's got various pitches, which is how it's sort of steep. The roof is, and it's got many different shapes, many different heights, many different angles. Like a gable roof, with a hip to roof, the pyramidal roof, you don't really need to know what these look like, but just no, they're not usually all together. They're really just there to put a hat on a ridiculously crafted house. But the kuda grass of the McManshin roof is a feature that Kate has dubbed the McManshin nub. The McManshin nub is where you'll see like a roof line that is relatively organized and

then you'll just have like this bump at the top because somebody had to have some feature and they just like couldn't fit it in linearly. Usually it's like either stored space or like someone wanted some ridiculous ceilings or ceiling feature. So they just have this like nub at the top. So it's like a hat to a hat if you will. According to Kate another hallmark of the McMansion is the two story entrance. You walk into a house brokers and marketers and hosts of house flipping TV shows. So to have a big entryway, you should probably have a pretty big door. And then on top of that really big door, there's a really big window. Sometimes there's like three foot of useless space and then the really big door. And then on top of that really big door, there's a really big window. Sometimes there's like three foot of useless space and then the really big window. The window usually

has a square bottom to match the top of the door and an arched top. That kind of window shape didn't even exist really before the McMansion. The McMansion invented that window. It's not only the window on top of the door that makes Kate and the avid readers of McManchine Hell cringe, it's all the windows. And I do mean all of the windows. There's usually more than three different shapes of windows. Of course, there are always thoughtful and interesting violations of any design guidelines, but generally Kate thinks the house should limit the front facade to two or fewer window shapes, while keeping a single window style across the entirety of a single story.

I get ridiculous houses in my inbox all the time, where there's like six different types of windows from six different architectural styles. It's sort of a garbled communication of sorts. You can't filter the signal from the noise, design-wise. And last but not least, you can't have a big, ostentatious house without columns. So the columns usually are either oversized or undersized. Or sometimes the columns are not columns at all. They're just column-shaped protrusions from the exterior wall. Basically a a column is created to sort of balance whatever it is that it's holding up. That's the point of columns is that they hold things up.

I don't know, a lot of people seem to have not understood that in the last 30 years. But they actually are supposed to hold things up. And so if you have these really big columns and they're holding up the tiniest little pediment or portico, then it looks like pretty ridiculous. But the point is that you have the really big columns, so everyone knows that you're rich like a bank that also has really big columns. All right, so this kind of snarky criticism is fun at all.

It's really fun for me, but there's a larger point to be made about the design of the McMansion. According to Kate, the age of the McMansion saw the shift of the house from a place that we live in, potentially for the rest of our lives, to an asset that we are decidedly not supposed to live in forever. People started designing their houses with the notion of selling them in mine. Real letters would advise, oh, I wouldn't buy or do this because the house isn't going to sell very well. So we sort of devised this culture where we thought about selling our houses before we even spent one night in them. Kate lays the blame for this mindset at the feet of HGTV and

similar channels. The excess and conformity of the McMansion was reinforced over and over again on home improvement and the house flipping TV shows because the House as object could always be improved. Not necessarily to make it better, but to make it sell. Home improvement channels would paint a house beige, and then you would see this ticker in the corner that says, oh, we just added $800 to the value of this house or something like that. They would come up with these crazy ways to quantify these sort of improvements that sort of caused people to go into these frenzies and that's why so many houses look the same is because

This is what was told would make our house worth more Rather than what actually does make a house worth more which is structural changes Improving energy efficiency green upgrades things like, not like adding a certain color of paint. It's totally subjective. Older MacManchons built in the early 2000s are not proving to be a very good investment. Smaller houses are appreciating at a much faster rate than larger houses. But after a lull in the market following the housing crisis, builders are finding buyers for huge brand new homes again. According to CBS News, quote,

homes 4,000 square feet or larger saw a sharp jump in sales last year, rising 30% from the year earlier, end quote. It's safe to assume that all the bad design choices in the first round of McMatchans will continue on in this new generation, which is not good news if you enjoy the vibrancy of variability in the built world. A houses of differing styles sets another thing that gives us a sense of place. You can tell that you're somewhere else because all the houses are different, but the sort of sprawl aesthetic is that it's the same everywhere.

And houses and styles didn't evolve through a planning committee. They evolved through a combination of popular taste and place. Like that's why you'll see like poebo style architecture in the west, but you're not going to see it in Kerry North Carolina. It's just one of those things that gives you a context of where you are and that the built environment has everything to do with place as the natural environment does. Embedded in the pages of McMaster and Hell are lessons in consumerism and materialism, but fundamentally Kate Wagner picks apart these crimes against architecture in hilarious

and excruciating detail to teach us the fundamentals of architecture in a new way. Using humor to educate people about the world around them is sort of a great way to get people involved in the sort of greater design, community. Most people, what they learned about architecture in school is they learn like the Greek orders and it's like, oh, this is the ionic column. Yes, this is the flying buttress, everyone's knickers, and it's really dry. People really don't care. I firmly believe that people do care. Even if we don't know why, even if we don't know how to articulate it,

we feel the effects of bad design, whether we consciously notice it or not. So now people can say, now I know why I hate that house. Thank you. Now it's like, wow, actually none of these windows match. I hate that. And it's empowering people to have opinions

about the built environment, which they have mostly been served through like a marketing or materialistic lens, rather than from a design standpoint. And as I've learned with pointing out the bad design of city flags, once you get people to notice bad design, your annoyance spreads like a virus. I get a lot of emails, like a lot of messages that say like, before I read this blog, I didn't give two crafts about architecture. And now I start to notice these

things on all of the buildings I passed by. And that makes me so happy because now other people have to suffer through what I have suffered for years and years and years. And we will all suffer together, with our bad houses, and our ugly flags, and doors that you don't know whether to push or pull. And our light switches, you never remember which light they go to even though you've lived in the house for 20 freaking years. And our terrible currency, and our ugly passports, and our comic sands, and our public bench armrests, and our bogus expiration dates, and our confusing ballots.

That one we really need to fix, like soon. 99% invisible is Katie Mingle, Kurt Coles that, to refuse stuff, Sam Greenspan, Avery Troll from the Emmett Fitzgerald, Teraren Mazza, Delaney Hall, and me Roman Mars. All the music this week was composed by Sean Rial. We are a project of 91.7 KLW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. So last week I presented at the Frontiers Conference organized by the White House. President Obama was there and it was a very cool event.

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