Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 93: Mcmansion Heck (w/ special guest Kate Wagner)

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Kate Wagner, the genius behind the website mcmansionhell.com, schools us in architecture, degrowth, the Notre Dame fire, and why we'll get to have nice things under communism. Support our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Trillbillies. Today we have a great guest for you. Kate Wagner of McMansion Hill fame. Maybe the most famous guest we've had on in at least a week.

In at least seven days. Kate's got a really great website called McMansionHell.com and she does some great writing. But before we get to her great stuff, we want to plug a little bit of our great stuff. Of our great stuff. Right.

For $5 a month, you can get our great stuff. Which is numerous. Really, almost infinite, but not quite. What's the greatest quantity right before infinite? One. There has to be a number so large that is like the end of all numbers, but it's not infinite. I've wondered about that for a long time.

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We would love your support. And I am about to take a short little trip vacation, so I would really, really love your support because I'm about to go in the hole for this fucking shit. Unemployed in a big cross-country wedding is a bad combination. That's exactly right. It would only be worse if it was one of those weddings

where they made you buy a tux. Right, yeah. If I ever, this is my solemn pledge to anybody that might end up in my wedding party. If I decide to tux it out, I will make sure I pay for your tux. Thanks, man. Thank you for that. Who said you're in the wedding party, pal?

Got a couple hurdles to jump out. I have to stay alive first. That's the biggest hurdle. Well, that's the biggest one. So, you know, would be a great help. This is my only salary at this point. This is my only source of income. Please.

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out of it too because you get fucking, you get episodes, you get content. Anyways, we've wasted enough of your time so go check that out

and in the meantime, enjoy this episode with Kate Wagner from McMansion Hill see you out there I was reading your curved piece from back in March and I felt seen a little bit when you're talking about

as rural kids we're coached the ways of the woods and how not to step over logs without looking for snakes first and whatnot. It's true. That's sort of how I grew up. Learning all the plants, what you could and couldn't eat, that kind of thing.

Totally. So, like, weird to me that people are all about lawns because it's like, I'm basically like you big fucking baby like go in the woods. Go see some real grass. Exactly. I lived with a guy one time, Kate, who refused to cut the lawn. And I was all for it. I hate lawns and I hate cutting them and keeping them or whatever but the neighborhood

like organized and confronted him and they confronted us they were like you have to cut this you know we you're making this look bad so he like paid the

I think it's like what's one of those big environmental non-profits? The World Wildlife... Federation. Federation. Yeah, he paid one of those non-profits to come out and designate our yard as a wildlife sanctuary.

Dude, that's so good. No, it was hilarious. And so he didn't have to mow it and it pissed off everybody. Yep. Pretty good. Well, thanks for joining us today, Kate. We are really glad this was able to work out.

Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me on the show absolutely yeah you're you're our favorite i've i've been wanting this to happen for a long time i just never could figure out a hook and it seems like we figured out a little bit of a hook well that's good thank you yeah um you know i like to read your blog when i'm feeling really depressed because it um You know, I like to read your blog when I'm feeling really depressed because it, I think I probably told you that, but it's just a really good mood lifter. Thank you. is a labor of love because you gotta look at all these fucking ugly houses

and you just gotta pick one and you're like okay which one of these is the fucking ugliest house and you're just like no it could go deeper it could get uglier you just have to like keep looking it just like it keeps getting harder and harder to find

the ugliest houses. There's not a lot of houses with interiors from like the 80s left, which is really quite devastating for the McManus economy. But now I think we're finally going to pivot to like houses with with boring HGTV interiors. I'm just waiting for that shit to go out of style so I can start roasting it. If you roast something that's in style, people get pissed at you. Oh, totally. They're judging your personal aesthetics. Really, I'm just waiting for something new to come along so we can just

start making fun of the last 10 years finally right are you like go ahead i'm sorry no no i'm done i was i was gonna say are you referring to like uh like what's what's really popping around here seems to be is like the magnolia. Oh, yeah, the farmhouse. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. The rustic wood kind of stuff. On that note, I posted something today on Twitter. I don't know if you saw this, Kate.

Like, what's that show? Fixer Upper with, I don't remember the two. Chip and Joanna. Chip and Joanna. Chip and Joanna Gaines, yeah. Yeah. That'saines, yeah. Yeah. That's the... That show is driving, you know,

this huge demand for what they're calling... What are they calling it? Reclaimed Wood? Reclaimed Wood? Yes. Oh, yeah, and people are stealing shit from barns. People are stealing shit. and people are stealing shit from barns people are stealing doing crimes just to get your chip and joanna look

that's amazing it's like the wine moms have now become new copper thieves i'm here for it frankly i want to see like you know like uh um duke's a hazard but it's wine moms. Well, that's what I was wondering. Like there has to be a sort of like black market, like, you know, place where like wealthy suburban dads like meet seedy thieves in the dark of night in alleyways. Like, hey, man, you got man, you got that 30 pounds, 30 tons of refurbished wood I need. You got that shipless? Yeah.

Dude, I just need my fix. I need to redo. That's right. That's right. You know, I don't know if these two things are related, but I was commenting on that tweet. A friend of mine is like a land property surveyor, and he said that like black walnut trees,

like mature black walnut trees, are going for like $3,000 or $4,000 a pop. And the new thing is people are going on people's property and cutting them down and selling them oh my god this is really like a bleak thing if you think about it like it's really quite sad like the four fucking trees what do they do exactly well it's this like i don't know if these people have heard of this thing called fucking wood stain, but... Yeah, you can... My sister built a furniture in a little workshop, and she's still in North Carolina.

His furniture building is a thing there. And she was saying that people want this stuff and she's gotten really good at making tables that look like they're um that look like they're old yeah she's found a way to sort of tool the wood in a way that distresses it and so like these wine moms like can't tell the difference so she's just buying fucking plywood at home depot and convincing like these dipshits that it's reclaimed wood and they buy it every time because she's good at what she does is it a scam no even if it was that'd be fine i mean i I'm not going to knock that hustle. That isn't a fine hustle. The famous gambler Canada Bill Jones said it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money.

That's exactly right. We all say as we have Patreons. That's right. That's right. So, yeah, welcome to the show. So, yeah, welcome to the show. This week we've got Kate Wagner with the very amazing McMansion Hill page, which you can find, I think it's just McMansionHill.com, right?

Yep. Where you basically, you know, go across the country to America's suburbs, but other places too, and just pick out just monstrosities. Houses that make no sense. 20 different kinds of windows. Basement bars. Just things that have absolutely zero functional value. And you basically comment on them, and I find it to be very hilarious, personally. Thank you.

Thank you. So, you know, Kate, before we really start getting into the weeds, maybe let's start with the basics. You write that the McMansion is like an obscenity. I think, who said that on the Supreme Court? You know it when you see it, right? It's not the Supreme Court definition of pornography. Exactly. A McMansion is an obscenity. You know it when you see it.

So what is the McMansion? Where did it come from? Where is it most commonly seen? And why does it look the way it does? That's a good question. I basically define a McMansion in sort of two parts. as a type of house, a typology, a housing typology that is related to other types of housing, like a vernacular architecture.

And the other part is as a cultural phenomenon. And these two parts come together to form this thing that we call the McMansion. So architecturally speaking, the McMansion is a large suburban house, and I just casually define large as being 1,000 square feet above the national average, which is already huge. I think the national average is something like 2,500 square feet, which is huge. I live in a closet. so uh and it is defined by a sort of a cannibalization of different architectural styles which is something that is called previously called neo-eclecticism which is a way

of saying we take all these different styles and then we apply them sort of like costumes and sometimes with mcmansions when you combine these costumes, you end up with some weird results. Like you'll have a Mediterranean house with like Gothic windows. You'll have a house that looks like an olive garden, but with like nautical theming. It just ends up being pretty much a convoluted mess. And they have a sort of secondary function, which is to signify the wealth of the owner, which is to say, I have a lot of money. And here's my house that says i have a lot of money so to speak uh so far as where they came from the mcmansion developed in the late 70s through

the 1980s from what was essentially larger split levels split levels a house with a central foyer and stairway uh that is sort of the main circulation of the whole house? And it was the larger it's kind of like the largest at the time was the larger type of suburban middle class single family housing. And so once people started to have an appetite for two story houses in the 80s, which happened as a response against the ranch house. Because at this point, the people who were born in ranches are now entering adulthood, and they are tired of long, low-ceilinged houses that are kind of the one sort of continuous space. They want higher ceilings. They want more space. The ranch is a really economical house. And kind of moving away from the one-story model into the two-story model. a much smaller scale and kind of blew it up it applied elements of post-modern architecture specifically post-modern classicism which was

the dominant style in the 1980s to uh like we're talking um basically disneyfied architecture uh post-modern classicism is what if we did columns but they're like pink and teal and blown up to look like cartoons i mean this is i mean i personally love postmodernism just aesthetically i mean politically i have my issues with it but aesthetically i mean this is the time period the 80s and 90s i'm born in 93 that i grew up with so i'm like kind i kind of into it but it took kind of like the, the postmodern elements, which in postmodernism, one of the kinds of architectural irony that was employed by architects was to

play with scale. So you would have like a house with like giant columns, but like, it's a tiny house, just like this kind of architectural humor. That was like very funny. Right. But at the same time, people didn't necessarily realize it was a joke which i think is uh to be expected from architecture because architecture as a field is like kind of like well let the normal people like do what they will we are very smart educated academic people and we will do what we will and so you ended up with like these these places like these giant foyers, blown up windows, cookie cutter kind of architectural detailing. And it got sort of – it sort of trickled down to use a Reaganism from high architecture like, for example, Philip Johnson's AT&T building in New York, which is kind of like a chandale cabinet down through to developer architecture which would be like you know your

average like marriott hotel or something like that down to sort of small scale commercial architecture like the like a mall for example uh down to residential architecture, like the McMansion. And I think that the combination of the evolution of vernacular housing that moved away from horizontality, from the ranch-style sort of mode of living to a more vertical one, combined with postmodern architecture and its sort of comical elements, the McMansion was sort of inevitable at that point. That's a kind of long-winded answer, but I hope that that... Are there any famous architects with these sort of monstrosities on their resume

that are kind of blemishes? I think... I don't think so. What's kind of sad about postmodern architecture is that there wasn't a lot of residential work. Yeah. Postmodern architects were really in the service of big corporations, especially Disney. I think Disney was the number one hiring – the number one company hiring postmodern architects. I think every major postmodern architect did a building for Disney at some point.

I mean, at least American ones. I think every major postmodern architect did a building for Disney at some point. I mean, at least American ones. So when you say Disneyfication, you mean literally? Oh, yeah. No, literally. Well, you know, there's that really great essay by Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism. I think it's the cultural logic of late capitalism. My daddy, yes.

Yeah, yeah. Daddy Jameson. But in that essay, he says, and I don't have it in front of me, I don't remember, but I think he says something along the lines of- I should pull it out of your shirt. Oh, I think he says something like, post-modern, has a lot of different expressions, but it's realized ultimately, it finds its most ultimate, like, sort of perfect expression in architecture. And I guess what he's saying is that, like, you know, you've got pastiche and you've got all these elements, basically what you're saying. You know, and one of the questions I had sort of posed to you is, you know, you write that

reality TV, like reality TV and video art installations, McMansions are inherently postmodern. I don't want to get like too deep into the weeds on what postmodernism is, because I want to do that at a later episode. But I just want to like, if you could, But I just want to, like, if you could, what do you mean by that? It's interesting. I think my argument is really framed around the Jameson argument, especially around pastiche, which he kind of compares to an addiction, which I think is really funny. It's like this sort uh cannibalization of all these different historic styles and this kind of weird nostalgia that drives it um uh and in mcmansions you see like nostalgia for all kinds of things nostalgia for things like separating services from public spaces

which was which is left over from the times of live-in servants, which has some white supremacist sort of undertones. We also see sort of like nostalgia for like Americana, like the colonial house, for example, or like Versailles, the desire for like a glamorous lifestyle of a sort of like, not totalitarian, but monarchist or like revanchist state um it's all about this kind of nostalgia for a type of power that one could not get anymore because i mean we do live in like some semblance of a democracy not a really good one but you can vote is what i'm saying

and and what it's funny what Jameson talks about. He talks about this idea of like the simulacra, the copy for which no original exists. Yeah. And he links this concept to nostalgia and he talks about it especially with film. Like he talks about it with things like Apocalypse Now and like those movies about the 50s that were made in the 90s uh right like happy days or whatever like all that shit um uh just like this kind of like perfect idealized vision of what the past is and this is something that he considers to be like inherently post-modernism and mcmantins are kind of like that they're like the 80s person from 1980s like view of like maybe like the of mansion from like

the roaring 20s or like versailles like it's a copy of a past that doesn't exist well in another thing that he points out in the in his essay is that um you know, aesthetically, postmodern presents itself as a kind of populism. It's basically, you know, it's basically, you know, I guess, in sort of demarcating postmodernism for modernism, he's basically saying, like, you know, in postmodernism, like, in architecture, there's not this idea of the master anymore. It's like, everything is more populist. And you kind of get this idea that you are living in a democratic society when that's not at all the case. And I do wonder if the reason why that is

is because you had so many people entering the middle class in the 70s and 80s, and they didn't want to, like, their tastes and culture. They were nouveau riche. They didn't want to be insulted by the fact that they had no highbrow, like, taste or anything like that it's kind of like a well a melding of high culture and mass culture it's interesting uh how foster in the book the art architecture complex has something really interesting to say about the sort of populism uh that was present at the time and what that sort of populism was.

And how it was sort of, he called it, what he called it was double functioning, about this populism was double functioning in that, and I quote, there's an allusion to architectural tradition for the initiated inclusion of commercial iconography for everyone else.

And this served as a double coding of cultural cues that reaffirmed class lines, even as it seems to cross them. And this is a kind of what he calls deceptive populism, which is one, a populism that is like on the sort of lower class side or like the non-elite side is based on commercialism what is good and what is popular is based on what people consume and on the other side it's based on sort of taking the semiotic signifiers of things like home with things like the gable etc and uh that can also sort of like trickle down to um this uh you would take these these uh architectural illusions like for example you would have like some ironic version of like say the parthenon but it's like candy colored or something like that like people went to college would be like oh that's so funny he's like doing the parthenon or something yeah but someone who didn't go to college would be like

oh it reminds me of like the bank and but it's colorful and therefore friendly to me and therefore i will consume it uh so you you it's like kind of the best of both worlds so to speak in this weird sort of populism where it's a very like uh cynical populism any but so much of the populism of post-modern architecture is based on consumption that's why learning from us that's my qualm with learning from las vegas which was centered around las vegas which was centered around sort of like the iconography of advertising at the scale of the car and there's like we need to design for this world yeah which is a very kind of like peering down your nose super silliest way of looking at designing for everyone uh very much what would come out of yale uh yeah it was written

by this guy robert venturi is that correct and den Denise Scott Brown, his partner. Yeah, and Robert Venturi is my daddy, just for the record. Oh, really? Tom's the big Robert Venturi? I really, like, there's so much to love in that book, just as something that disrupted the architectural status quo in a way that was somewhat necessary, frankly, because you're talking about this the early 70s which is a time when architecture was have was going through this sort of split on the one hand you had the sort of last vestiges of modernism which were reinventing themselves in in different ways and the the

sort of the predominant way it was reinventing itself was through high tech which is basically like a super distilled like structural expressionism so you had like the santa pompadour which is a building that's basically its guts are on the outside and this including all the services and the circulation are all on the outside and the inside is just like a continuous volume which is like as high tech as you can get it's like oh we just we're we're expressing on the exterior all of the functions of the building right from its plumbing to the escalators to what have you and then on the other hand you had this group of architects that were starting to sort of move past um move past modernism and trying to sort of incorporate things like like sort of theoretical concepts like especially from philosophy like semiotics deconstruction post-structuralism they thinking how can we bring that to architecture and what happened was there's this this this kind of a split the split between

reinventing modernism and coming up with something else and learning from las vegas is really kind of a document that describes that split uh and declares one side of that split in a very manifesto way and so in some cases like this is why the 70s are my favorite time period architecturally speaking this is like the time period that my master's thesis covered um this is the time period where all my coffee table books deal with uh it's just like the weirdest shit imaginable was going on in the 70s uh you had like half half late modern half post-modern conglomerate buildings that make no sense like we're talking about just like a time of total experimentation and and uh moving past like what was considered sort of normalcy and i find that

to be very exciting and i don't think architecture has been as exciting since not to be like a big like poo poo like kind of a bitch but it's like after the 70s like everything got really fucking boring yeah i i like um i was guildhouse built in the 70s when did robert venturi when was that built yeah i think guildhouse was like i want to say like seven it was maybe the late 70s, late 60s, early 70s. Yeah. Because it's included in Learning from Las Vegas, which was written in 1972. So I think it's late 60s. I want to say 68 is when it was built.

Yeah. I love that building. And I think it's funny that, and this is kind of like, I guess, what you were saying, like the sort of postmodern thing. It's like they put a huge antenna on top, and it served no purpose. It was just them basically saying, like, the residents inside will be watching a lot of TV. The Guildhouse is, I love the early Venturi stuff so much

just because it is so fanciful it's like it's not cynical which is what i like i feel like once they got to the point where they were getting to like the additions on like to the onto the art museum once i started doing academic buildings like it was over like it started to get it got i think their stuff got more and more cynical but in that sort of late 60s early 70s period it's so innocent like the house that robert venturi built for his mother is just like okay what if we took the broken pediment which is a type of ornament that goes above a door or a window and we just made it like the roof line of the house right in in elevation and it's like's awesome. Like, that's so funny. Like, it's so charming.

It's so iconic. I would get that tattoo. I mean, and then they killed us. It's like, yeah, we watch TV. And it's like, yeah, we're owning it. Like, no architect really since has owned the fact that like, most of what we do as Americans has watched TV. Like there was a study done on like, which rooms were used most in the house. And it was like the kitchen and wherever the TV is are the two most used rooms in a house. All the other rooms in the house, except for maybe the bedrooms, are just like for show. Yeah. And so I think that was real. Like, I mean, they weren't being like the least bit funny about it.

They were just like, we're just designing for use. Wink, wink wink nudge nudge and it's like okay but it's funny like it's charming it's like fanciful and then it like but the thing about post-modernism is it started out so fun and like so silly and so unserious and then got progressively more serious more ironic more uh edgy right more it just like became something that was like it became first of all hegemonic stylistically i mean it dominated everything and it's dominates so many city skylines because at the time like you're this is a time of like great real estate investment on like a scale that is only rivaled by i I think today, as far as a skyscraper

building in major cities. So it's like dominates the city, the skyline of like Philadelphia dominates New York dominates Cleveland dominates. I mean, it, the post-modernism was intensely productive and it was almost entirely in the service of corporate wealth. That's why I said it's quite sad that there are not very many postmodern residences, and the ones that do exist are from the early periods of an architect's career. Because once they got those sweet corporate gigs, they were not going to go back to doing houses. Right, right. I was curious, Kate, and that kind of makes sense that when we were talking about Robert Venturi, and when I think about Robert Venturi, I think about Columbus, Indiana.

Oh, yeah. In particular, Fire Station No. 4, I think, is my favorite Venturi. I love that building. Yeah, I think it's fun. The typography is so good. Just like the aesthetic is just so choice. Oh, totally. Those super graphics.

That's what we need to bring back from the 70s, really, is super graphics. Just like print big shit on walls. Yeah. Yeah. Why do we paint our walls gray instead of having weird super graphics? Oh, yeah. I want like a giant number four in my bedroom. I don't know what the four means it doesn't mean anything like hell yeah like give me like a giant like painted target like or something just anything just like give me like

the word like high and giant letters doesn't even matter what it is. It can be totally asinine. All that matters is that it's huge and it's on the wall. Totally. Totally. Well, so, you know, in the sort of vein of Venturi, like, you know, and so, like, while we're talking about this sort of, like, grand historical scope, you know, you've written a lot about how, well,

in your article for The Nation about Philip Johnson, you had pointed out that architecture sort of used to be an upwardly mobile white-collar profession, whereas now it's like a deeply unequal and star-studded spectacle, is what you called it. Like, what accounts for this? Like, what changed, I guess, in the last sort of 50 years that caused that? I mean, it's the same thing you're seeing other in other white collar fields like you're talking about like the proletarianization of white collar work uh which happens and it's gonna start happening to tech workers if it's not happening already

uh it's it's happening to um things like tech support, which has mostly been exported to poorer countries now. Yeah. And basically people drive wages down because it's cheaper for them to do that. But architecture back in the day used to be a job that you could get if you were a man, by the way. Let's be clear here. Men's work. It was a job that you can get just like – it was like engineering. It was a job you can get that was like you were doing creative –

you were doing this sort of semi-creative but like productive work that you were making a building and it was a big serious deal and you were draftsman and you had a draft by hand and it was just all this like kind of reverence and uh the reverence and the sort of not that sort of like power of the individual creator on his built environment. That bullshit has stayed around. But the architecture being a job that you can make like a decent living in has gotten worse and worse and worse. And part of it is just a generally downwardly mobile trend of things like white-collar work. And you can see it in journalism and writing as well.

We're used to – like at my point in my life and in my career if i was alive like i don't know 30 years ago i would be working in a in a in a news room or in a in at a magazine with a unionized job with health insurance and a career that would be sort of upwardly mobile and as we can, we've just like decimated media, staff jobs are almost impossible to come by, and you get them by knowing somebody. And or you have a degree in journalism, which is, you know, you go 100 grand into debt for a job that pays like 40 grand a year. And so it's, it's kind of the same thing with architecture, you architectural education

is extremely expensive the undergrad is usually five years then not to mention a master's degree not to mention you have to pay to take all the exams to get accredited uh to uh get licensed uh you it's it's a huge capital sink to become an architect, to become a licensed architect, to become a member of the AIA, all of these things. And you don't have a union. And what's interesting about architecture offices is they're not just like cool swab. I'm ran protagonists at at their desks doing mighty cool creative work or whatever. There are a bunch of fucking unpaid interns at computers drawing screws in autocad right i mean talking about like the outsourcing of like like the guy at the top frank gary or like robert stern or any of these people like they just like draw some bullshit on

a napkin and then it's up to everybody else firms of hundreds if not thousands of people to make it into a building and so we're not really seeing like architecture is just an industry like anything else and it produces a commodity like any other industry but what's different about architectural work is that it's imbued with like this bullshit of not only like the individual and his creator and his contribution to the landscape of mankind or whatever, but also this idea of this workaholic, workaholism that starts in undergrad, where it's just like if you really want to be dedicated,

you have to work overtime, you have to take an unpaid internship. It's all about self-sacrifice for the art of the building. And this is just a huge thing in architectural culture it's a culture of overwork it's now becoming a culture of under or unpaid work uh and it's and when work becomes unpaid then the only people who can afford to do it are people who already have money and so you're starting to see the same sort of uh inequality and advantages that rich people have in architecture, which is about 20 years behind all of the other arts, where it's been like this since the 80s. It's like everything else after Reagan. It just turned to shit. It got neoliberal, so to speak.

We've all been neoliberal i guess um yeah does this basic i mean i don't know does this account for things like the vessel i mean you recently wrote about the vessel for the baffler there was a specific passage in there i thought was interesting you said that uh like and and if our audience doesn't know what the vessel is maybe we can make that the episode art but to me this is astounding i live in a place obviously me and tom live in a place where there's no development there aren't new buildings built like if anything buildings are being torn down or they just fall apart like there's no there's nothing like that no development and so like i was reading a you know your article is the first time i'd read about the vessel in New York. You wrote that it's a vessel for the depths of architectural cynicism, a form without

ideology and without substance. How can a building, I guess, what do you mean when you say an architectural object doesn't have ideology, that it lacks ideology? I think it lacks, it's an interesting question because it lacks it's completely cynical essentially uh it doesn't mean anything it it it's the the rhetoric of the vessel is like all buzzwords i mean like innovation and views and all these other things and the vessel is not even really a building it's like a set of stairs that goes to the top of the set of stairs. And you can like look out at things.

Yeah, you wrote that it almost seems that like, I think you wrote this, that it almost kind of seems like it was designed specifically. Like not shelter. Yeah, just to take selfies. Yeah, pretty much. It's like for selfies. Oh, God. Frankly, like like i'm not one of those people who's like perma mad at selfies because like but if you're like you're gonna hike your ass up the vessel which they won't let you take the elevator and you unless you're like visibly

disabled or a vip like if you're gonna haul your ass up the vessel you might as well take a fucking selfie it's 16 flights of stairs get your money's worth yeah totally exactly it's like well but the vessel is just like the most hollow image driven architecture it's architecture in the service of capital that aims to sell an image it aims to brand a space the vessel is a is a 3d brand uh it's an object that can be instagrammed over and over and over again and is in it's in in it's through instagram it's re-commodified you know by ads by uh by algorithms by all these other things and so it's like it's just it's a building that is endlessly consumed and produces nothing right like it means nothing it does nothing it just sits there and you walk up it doesn't even protect you from the elements it's just completely hollow there's no there is no i

there is no ideology and if there is an ideology it's unacknowledged it's the it's just the ideology of the status quo right ideology of architecture at the service of the wealthiest and dumbest people imaginable uh and that is an ideology but it's really like it says nothing it means nothing um well and unless you're a marxist like and you're like me and you're like this is what it means like if you're somebody else you're just like it's the stair thing that we walk up yeah you just take it for granted you're like yeah i want my selfie god damn it yeah right well and so if you've got like commercial buildings that are basically only meant to be they just brand space essentially just for consumption and then you've got

residential buildings that are basically just for consumption i mean what like what do we need to do to start looking beyond this i mean like me and tom were talking about this to like prepare for it and like one of the questions that we had come up with is, what does architecture look in a socialist society? Our only approximation is the Soviet Union. And I think the first thing that comes to mind is brutalism. And Tom had pointed out in the kitchen debates between Khrushchev and Nixon in the 50s. People should go read the whole thing because the whole thing is amazing but khrushchev has an amazing passage in there where he's like you know

we build things to last like you know and you know in in america you build things to last just a couple a couple of years like in russia people will be living in those homes for forever like and so it's just like like what is it like what would homes and architecture look like, I guess, in a more just society, in a socialist society? I think about this a lot, actually, being a socialist and all. I think that when we get to the root of it, the first thing that socialism should address is inequality. And that includes housing inequality. And so it means we have lots of people who need to be housed and we have to build spaces to do it

because when the landscape is dominated by basically single family homes owned by like bourgeois people, especially in cities, if you own like a house and you live in a city, like you're canceled. Sorry. I think about that scene in Dr. Zhivago where Yuri Zhivago comes back from war and like the communists have like taken over like his parents apartment. And I'm like, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Hell yeah. I'll help you. I think that for me, like in an ideal socialist society, which to me would be an eco socialist society. I think a lot about what work. I think a lot about what work, right?

Like if you want to look like from a sort of a concrete utopia stance, like what are people doing right now that is utopian? I think about things like the passive house movement and like carbon neutral building, which not only is awesome because we're talking about like a zero waste carbon neutral building that is completely energy neutral, which we have achieved by the way but we're also talking about a carbon neutral energy efficient building that is fucking good looking like all the passive house apartment blocks are just like beautiful like there was like

five stories made with like all this beautiful timber and this this low emission glass i mean they are really good looking and that's the kind of thing that i think we would have in a socialist society which i think would be denser than uh sort of like we would have to if we're going to be an eco-socialist society we have to get rid of the car and sprawl and all this other stuff we have to rehabilitate sprawl and there's a cool book about this called degrowth in the suburbs um which kind of talks about like okay what do we do to facilitate this transition and some of the things that people have come up with are turning mcmansions into senior housing um and turning uh sort of like turning them into multi-family

residences uh one thing i think is interesting that i think points to the direction that this is going in is i don't know if you saw that article at bloomberg about the college kids who are living in empty mansions in vancouver no i saw that yeah they're like renting them for like a dollar a year and shit and it's just like yeah this is awesome the transition's already beginning because as more and more people don't want to buy these houses because they're fucking stupid like then the sort of what makes them so alluring which these houses because they're fucking stupid like then the sort of what makes them so alluring which is how much they're worth will eventually be kind of tanked so you're talking about something that is useless from a real estate speculation perspective but

useful from a use value perspective right and then when it's kind of like okay we're talking about like use and exchange value it's like the exchange value of the mcmansion like in vancouver that like has gone to like one dollar it becomes basically when you eliminate the exchange value becomes something that's only use value and so now college kids are living in them because they could use a house for one dollar a month right yeah uh and so it's uh it becomes one of those things like when you decommodify or rid architecture of exchange value, cities that eliminate or decommodify housing I think will be sort of like the future. Like housing is a human right, but that doesn't get to the fact of it that it is also a commodity and it cannot be both a human right and a commodity at the same time right like this it's one of those things like we in order for housing to actually be affordable and to be useful for most people we have to decommodify it yeah and so then you're talking into you're

you're getting into things like rent control or um like like land trusts or any of these other ways to socialization, any of these ways to sort of take housing out of the market, out of the market. And then also, I think. Energy wise, I think we're going to have like lots of cool solar houses. We're going to have like cool solar punk universes where like we have like trees growing in our houses and stuff like that that's the kind of like people like what kind what's like your aesthetic of like a socialist future and i'm like dude it's solar punk it's got to be solar punk our house from 70s like we're doing that like we're gonna build like solar paneled like backpacks and solar panelpaneled, like, transportation and solar. And it's going to be so awesome looking.

It's going to be so sick. Like, we're going to have passive houses that look awesome. We're going to have, like, solar buildings. We're going to have, like, zero-waste, zero-emission buildings. And the thing about, like, what's so funny about, like, people who are where it was like environmentalism has to be austerity well i went to finland which is like the closest thing we have to like social democracy at least i spent a week in finland last year and got to see a bunch of cool finnish shit uh everyone looks so young and happy there because they don't have to worry about you know like health care like if something happens to them like they're just taken care

of so they can just like look tall and beautiful and blonde and shit all the time. If I didn't have to worry about health insurance, I probably would not have wrinkles at 25. about planned economies and this idea of like what they call a circular economy which is kind of like the capitalist version of degrowth and a circular economy is basically like making goods resilient and usable so that they have like a really long lifespan and when that lifespan sort of comes to a close like it can be reused for something else like that basically the goal is to not have to throw anything away or to waste as little as possible you know like the first parts of like reduce reuse recycle it's like really emphasizing the first two parts of that reduce and reuse um and at the same time uh talking about sustainable materials like they

made this like imitation plywood out of of like plastic bottles and stuff like that it looks awesome it's like plywood but it's blue and white and stuff it's totally good looking like i was like i'd have a countertop they they found a way to make like stone like countertops out of plastic um or out of like recycled materials. And it looks just like stone, but it's recycled material. Like a hundred percent, like low waste load. And it's like, we can have nice things that are ecologically sound.

This idea in American culture that like we all nice things have to be environmentally wasteful is fucking stupid. And bourgeois, like that nice things. We can have nice things that are environmentally awesome. And I know because I saw it in Finland, which was not socialism, but it's much better than what the fuck we're doing over here. Well, there is this, like, idea on the left recently. I haven't really been keyed into these debates as much, but there has been this idea on the left that advocating for degrowth, basically a contraction of the global economy, if we're talking about reducing carbon emissions and making, you know, not, you know, completely destroying the global ecosystem,

that that amounts to austerity. I don't know. Like, it seems to me like a pretty big lack of imagination. But I don't know. That's kind of what you're saying, though. Am I correct? Like, it doesn't have to be austerity. It doesn't have to, like, there's nothing in that that says inherently that that spells austerity for us i

guess so can i give you an example of like d growth like basically what we were producing in like the 2000 like 2000 year 2000 i think there was a statistic that said if we kept producing at the rate that we were producing at 2000 like we wouldn't be like we would have like kind of staved off some of these like adverse climate effects so like just basically in the last like 20 years of neoliberalism like we've just been cranking out like carbon emissions like it's nobody's fucking business and if we had just stayed at like the level of like production 20 years ago which is by no means austerity frankly this is the year 2000 we're talking about um we could have like averted we it would have been it would be much easier for us to have avert to avert like climate catastrophe wow like i don't know if you guys know like i've

noticed i mean i've noticed this especially with shoes of all things but i feel like back when i was younger you would buy something it would last for fucking ever yeah and now like everything is just like as cheap as it's like the cheapest shit possible and it like you can get like three washes out of a shirt meanwhile i have clothes from like the 80s and they're doing just fine and it's like well the thing is is like we're just producing more and more and more shit it's about it's about the amount of shit that you produce not necessarily like the quality of those goods and so like what the thing there was like a interesting passage in andre gore's where he talks about uh this idea of like we basically created economies of waste like for example we invented things like plastic cutlery and stuff like that and yeah we produced more

things and by producing more things we increased the gross domestic product we had growth but the things that we produced were just things we were going to throw away so by producing junk we increased the growth like economic we we grew economically but at the same time this was all sort of an economy of waste of wastefulness like literally like stuff that you would use once and throw out right a plastic fork it's like we would just like kept inventing and producing this kind of crap when like back in the day people would just like use i don't know a metal fork like a normal fork and so it's like people are like degrowth is austerity and i'm like do you think that using a towel a hand towel instead of paper towels is austerity because like that is like the dumbest

definition of austerity i've ever heard like like degrowth is like that there's only going to be like four types of oreos instead of 12 like i mean like it's like uh and we have to and it's got to be like an international movement like like we have to have sort of things like a green new deal like we have to have sort of things like a green new deal like you know it's all nice and good for example that like we're going to build these solar technologies but the some of the stuff that is used for that is like basically conflict minerals in the congo and stuff like that yeah and so we're scramping we have to make sure that like what we're doing is is is, is sort of like a kind, it's a development of technologies and a sort of investment in technologies, but we got to make sure like that this is an equal investment in that. There is this sort of like the colonial aspect to it that it's like, yeah,

we should not be exploiting children in the Congo for rare earth minerals to make solar panels. Like we can do this a better way. So it comes down to like throughout the supply and production chain like we will have to make things sort of like more ethical but i don't and i but i don't necessarily believe in like full luxury space communism either because like we are gonna have to make like a little bit of sacrifices and those sacrifices doing include things like not using paper towels or like plastic cutlery and instead using metal cutlery and and cloth towels uh like no more plastic bags bring a fucking tote bag it's like these are these are just simple like examples of actions that people can take right now but like

we're gonna have to find different ways to like i don't know heat and cool our houses that are more efficient until we can re we can decarbonize the building supply um well we're talking about things that are these structural changes that are necessary but the transitional period might be a little bit uncomfortable and these are just like basic sort of i'm taking a domestic sphere yeah yeah well expanding around that because like on a larger scale like yeah we're gonna cut fossil fuels there's gonna have to be like a significant transition away from the car which is going to hurt people i think and become politically unpopular the car the car will be difficult

um because well they're you know the the great you brought up andre gores earlier but he's got a great essay about cars that essay about the car is, if I could get one essay tattooed on my body. It's a hell of an essay. And like the best part about it is he's talking about like how, you know, the irony about cars is like you now can sit in traffic just emitting all these emissions into the atmosphere. And you can a bike or even a person walking can be going faster than you like they don't even serve a purpose anymore really like you just sit in them they burn gasoline anyways like but anyway yeah but the car thing it will be difficult but the whole notion about like people having to make a sacrifice and stuff is like a lot of us are

already making sacrifices and to just kind of like bring it back to where we were talking about at the beginning like most the carbon like most of carbon emissions come from really really wealthy people in mcmansions and shit like that who are just like i read this article once that said that a first-class ticket on an airplane has like a six times the carbon footprint of any other ticket. Wow. Well, and it makes sense because just luxury goods, luxury items, stuff like that, it just costs more in general in terms of externalities but also yeah like you know you had this essay about betsy devos's house and like you've just got like it's a massive house and it's got rooms in it that like have 80 foot ceilings it's just like you know and you can just imagine those houses just sit empty all fucking day with air conditioning on all goddamn day like just nobody there nobody fucking

benefiting also they would they would scare the hell out of me to be there alone in a house no i think that yeah you put i can't remember uh but you had it in your essay it's yeah it's just like it's like a massive house but it's only got like four bedrooms. And the rest of it is like kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms. Like, just space that is not even fucking used. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, oftentimes I find the pool houses of these places are like.

Oh, bigger than, yeah. And much more tasteful. Yeah, exactly. Like, Terrence's landlord lives in this, like, huge... I don't know what you would even call it. A mansion. No, it's a Spanish villa.

It's literally modeled... It's literally, like, architect... It's modeled after a Spanish villa. Yeah. But no, he's got a pool house. But his pool house is like, that is my dream house in this town is your landlord's pool house. You're gonna become a pool house. But his pool house is like that is my dream house in this town is your landlord's pool house.

You're gonna become a pool boy? Yeah. That might be my column. Well so okay before we wrap this conversation up let's dial back out to the big picture real quick. There is a very

big architectural story this week. Perhaps one of the biggest of the last few years, and that is that the Notre Dame Cathedral burned down. Now, this story in and of itself is interesting for all kinds of architectural reasons. However, the ante was upped today. What happened today, Tom? There was a bunch of billionaires, crowdfunded hundreds of millions of dollars to redo this,

but then Macron, I guess it's how you say it, Macron, whatever, he's like, I want to have a competition. Came up with the competition. Le competition. Oh, yeah, I saw that have a competition. Came up with the competition. Le competition. Oh, yeah, I saw that, and I was like, oh, no. This is possibly, like, the worst case scenario. When, like, the president's like, we're going to have an architecture competition.

Historically, this has never really gone well. It's kind of the most neoliberal bullshit you can imagine. The lifeblood of architecture, but also extremely tiresome. I think it's so funny. It's like something you'd see out of a movie. It's like, all right, everybody. Yeah, you've got a problem. We're going to have a competition.

Who can build the chapel back to earth? It's regional glory. Yeah, glory, but even better. Like, that's... He's good at that. You nailed my crumb. Oh, man. We're gonna end up with, like,

Thomas Heatherwick of vessel fame doing, like, just a bunch of vessels, but it's, like, the new spire. Yeah. Just, like, stacking little vessels on top of each other. We're going to get Santiago Calatrava like doing something that looks like a chicken bone wing, like a chicken wing bone.

Yes. Yeah. And then like rubber bands and shit. That's what Jacob Bacharach said. He was like, we're going to get Calatrava and put an upside-down well skeleton that looks like it was made out of styrofoam on top of the cathedral.

One of the worst architects, and you've got to realize I'm a newbie at this, is Zaha Hadid, in my opinion. She's dead, thank God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but like some of her, the Hadar Aliyev Center, I think it's in Azerbaijan, is one of the ugliest fucking buildings I've ever seen. But could you imagine if they redid the Notre Dame Cathedral with that kind of stuff? They just put that on top. Basically, Zaha Hadji died like a couple years ago.

And she died suddenly. She's like only, only 54. Right. And she's, like, the peak. She's, like, peak. Like, she's, like, the Hillary Clinton of architecture. Like, she's got, like, pantsuit power, but she's, like, a woke war criminal, essentially. Right.

Because she, like, basically, like, all of her buildings in the Middle East were, like, built with, like, slave labor. Like, she works with, like, the bloodiest, like, most authoritarian government. Yeah, and just shrugs it off a bad egg yeah but also so she died the guy in charge of her practice now is patrick schumacher who is like an ayn rand accolade and uh like basically like said that like advertisements are art and that uh cities should be privatized and then they will be better great well we're talking about like the biggest bag in like architecture right at this moment cities should be privatized and then they will be better. Great.

We're talking about the biggest bag in architecture at this moment. Maybe he'll enter in the competition. I think he's blocked me on Twitter. That's how you know you're doing it right. Well, okay. So maybe... If Zaha Hadid gets the commission for Notre Dame,

I'm just going to self-immolate in the Paris Square. You'll be missed. Yeah. Well, like, what... Okay, so there's that aspect of it, like the global arms race to see who gets to rebuild the thing. But what kind of loss was this building to the architectural legacy of mankind

humanity so i think like as far as my understanding only the spire got destroyed and the spire was built in like the 19th century right okay by this guy named le duc and uh he uh basically he also put a statue of himself as like one of the saints on the spire wow so we're talking about like big egos here but this wasn't an original part of the church so the spire and like the roof are done but everything else kind of remained intact so like the sweet shit that's like from the medieval era is mostly safe that shit would have been really sad if it and like all the art is safe uh the cross and all the other stuff is safe so most of the stuff that is like really really really odd not that like the the villa duke stuff is is is like it's sad that it's been demolished it's sad that it burns like it's definitely sad like i definitely cried a little bit when i saw that happening because the time we didn't know

exactly how much is going to be lost but it seems like things the things that were the most most priceless seem to have survived um but i think that uh so i think it's it's not a good situation in that it's fucking sad to see something so locked into the imaginations of so many people burn. I mean, I don't think it means anything but the death of Western civilization or some bullshit. It's literally just an accident. Yeah. Accidents happen with buildings. Accidents happen, but when they happen with buildings, it's never it's never good i have a conspiracy tom has a conspiracy theory someone burned it down to okay what's your conspiracy do we know where emmanuel macron himself was when all this was

going down you know he's taking some heat from the gilet jaune maybe this was like his like we're all frenchmen yeah no like the the Reichstag fire or something. I'm subscribing to this conspiracy theory. It was an inside job to blame the yellow vest. Yeah. That was Macron's 9-11. No, speaking of 9-11, dude. Blair Cayman, who was the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune,

wrote his column about this. And Blair Cayman is my least favorite architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, wrote his column about this. And Blair Cayman is my least favorite person probably living on this earth. Like, I hate him so much. He's like peak boomer, essentially. Yeah. Like, they should give me his job and fire him. I will go on the record to say that but like he wrote he wrote when it was happening that like that it was that like notre dame's fire burning down was worse than 9-11 because notre dame was good architecture and

the world trade centers was not good architecture and fortunately the editors at the chicago tribune managed to like nerf that part of the essay before too many people saw of course i have i have screenshots receipts because uh fuck blair uh he's a huge misogynist he's never said anything good about a female architect he like refuses to even like acknowledge the existence of any other women who write about architecture not only myself but like everybody else that i know uh so he sucks he's a piece of shit and i hate him and he never has anything interesting to say which is the worst crime one can commit when they are a serial a serial serialized critic yeah that's incredible critic with like nothing fucking to say well he had something to say here but uh people didn't like it too much

and i was like someone tell blair that people died on 9-11 that's so insane what's his reasoning because it's mean to the world trade centers which was not a bad building thing it was like not the greatest building but it wasn't a bad building but also like thousands of people died in 9-11 like not to be like sanctimony not to be the other kind of boomer which is like 9-11 sanctimonious, but it's just a fact that 9-11 was worse than the spire of Notre Dame burning down. Yeah, zero people died. People died. We now have a police state. We have a bigger police state because of 9-11.

It gave us all brain poisoning. I really want to get to the bottom of the problem. It's that the upkeep of our cultural heritage is basically sold to the lowest bidder. And we essentially, like, because so many of, like, the maintenance, no one wants to do maintenance on anything. Like, what's so sad about Notre Dame is that this fire happened because they were doing maintenance like because they were making repairs right granted those repairs were outsourced to the lowest bidder but they were making repairs nonetheless right and but the other the other aside from like syria which is like you know war crimes uh like the other fires like the national

museum in brazil and the glasgow school of art are just negligence and that is is and that negligence is some is somehow like that is really profoundly sad um that negligence cost so many things to be destroyed yeah uh and i think that for me like this is all sort of part of the same problem which is like first of all like we don't really fucking value in our neoliberal society arts and culture everyone just tells you why don't you get a job that pays uh it's like the people who like would restore like notre dame or like take care of the museum and stuff like that or guess what fucking humanities majors right like a straw man or anything like that but like we don't give people like the jobs that are meaningful and people don't take those jobs

because they don't pay anything right the upkeep of our cultural institutions don't it doesn't pay like we've just let everything atrophy in a way that is like really really upsetting i think and whenever we're confronted with this we just kind of like move on after a week it's like oh this is so sad but like when you're when you're you know attached to architecture like people who are into architecture like like dipshits like me are it's like this is fucking upsetting and it's just gonna keep happening like how can we stop this from happening? Right. Like, we should not be having all these massive fires in the year of our Lord 2019. I'm trying to remember.

I think you had written an article. I'd read it a while back about sort of about this. also about the people who um like document meticulously the changes in k-marts across oh yeah this is my greatest article and my greatest contribution to uh that was nuts historic preservation i didn't yeah i didn't know anything about that but basically yeah you're basically saying what you're saying just now it's just like you know we you know in this sort of world where we just sort of turn all over our cultural preservation and historical preservation to like the lowest bidder like you've got these people out there who are basically you know sort of doing the the work um you know like i think it's really really cool it's like people are just like documenting this sort of cultural phenomenon um and they're doing it all in their

own time do what because no one else is really gonna do it exactly right yeah it becomes like it's one of those things like there is a division and this is sort of the point of that article is like there is a division between what like institutions find to be historically valuable for example like notre dame versus like the places in everyday life that everyday people find to be like memorable and important like the ramada inn that they got married at yeah um it's like and that divide comes through in like internet labor essentially where you have all these people documenting all of these places on facebook and flickr groups and stuff like that and because they're they're doing the work of preservation on their own because

institutions have failed most of architecture um the vast majority of our architecture is failed by architectural institutions like the buildings that we all live in every day house are like our houses our apartments and it's like those are not important to architecture they're important to us like deeply existentially important to us but they're not important to the field of architecture as a whole architecture doesn't give a shit about them because they don't have an author right they aren't about being something they're about serving a purpose which is providing shelter and also a secondary purpose which is as a commodity and you know just to sort of put a bow on it um i guess in a socialist world you know in a more just

eco-socialist world architecture would uh do what what purpose would it serve well first of all we'd beat the ego out of architecture i know that sounds like extremely like totalitarian but like architecture would be a good place to work as well as beneficial to workers and being beneficial to workers meaning the architectural workers like architects drafts people construction workers etc but also housing the working class and be having buildings for the working class i think a lot about um uh concert halls because that's what my that is what my master's thesis was about and i think a lot about the berlin philharmony which is a concert hall which is by this architect honcharoon who's a little kooky, but let it slide.

And the Berlin Philharmonic, the concept was that the orchestra would be in the middle and the audience would be seated around the orchestra. This would in effect eliminate the embedded social hierarchical, social hierarchies of concert hall seating that had been kind of like an ascribed function of concert hall seating and concert hall attendance since jesus christ like since concert halls were right right uh and so by eliminating sort of like the hierarchy of seating uh and you you you weren't able to give everybody like this kind of like equivalent experience that uh han sharon called it like being an individual in a

democracy and i think that that concept of being the individual in the democracy is something that i think is important for the architectural experience like we would like to have like architecture especially cultural architecture should provide us with some sort of like solipsistic moment of like you know refuge like the art museum should be a place where we can be by ourselves and sort of like thinking about things or the concert should be a place where we have an individual unique experience that is a social experience as well. This balancing of the individual and the social,

I think is deeply important to architecture, especially to housing. And I think that this is sort of like why Stalinism was so stupid, like Stalinist architecture, because it was like, okay, we're going to ascribe like this idea of what good architecture is onto everybody and that it's all but it's all going to be like the same and it's all going to be

like top-down very sort of dogmatic architecture uh and in reality i think that there's this concept by henry lefebvre who wrote he was the guy who coined the turn the right to the city, which is abused by liberal nonprofits everywhere. But this idea that of appropriation, which is to take the spaces that we are given and ascribe our personal meanings onto them. Like it's how we sort of make our own space in, in space, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Like it's, it's things like i always think of appropriation when i look at a at a uh an apartment building and see all the different types of curtains that everyone has in an apartment building and like their own sort of like or like every how every window is kind of different because everyone has different stuff yeah i really i think about that like appropriation when i look at that because like here's this thing that we've been given and this is how we make meaning of it like this is how we ascribe our everyday experience on our own built environment and that's going to happen no matter what and we don't like when we talk about like

socialist architecture especially historically we don't talk about that kind of appropriation that happened we don't show pictures of like actual people living in soviet housing and stuff like that and how they decorated and the kind of like kitschy shit they had laying around it's all about like demonizing the imposing exterior and whatnot but i think that like to me like an architecture is like a vessel not to use like the fucking word vessel after the vessel but uh it's kind of a vessel for our lives as people uh and we should be able to do with it what we will uh and that means like when we have like our beautiful eco-socialist, solar punk architect designed housing for everybody, decommodified housing, what have you. We should be able to put whatever fucking pots we want on our balcony.

We should be able to have the ugliest curtains in our windows. Yeah. We should not. I think the goal is to kind of liberate aesthetics and personal choice from like sort of bourgeois propriety yeah like like if we live in a modernist house no we don't all have to have modernist furniture like we can have lazy boy sofas in our modernist house it's fine like there are no rules to follow uh there's no right or wrong way to do architecture besides like mcmansions but mcmansions are insidious because of what they mean today if they were reappropriated to means to be something else and to mean something else

and i think that would eliminate most of the things that are bad for them like who can poop who a mcmansion when it becomes like low-income housing for seniors yeah like what is so insidious about them is that they're like single family houses for the richest and dumbest people imaginable. When they stop being that, when they stop using those signifiers and using that program, then I think that like we'll kind of like take the vinegar out of it, so to speak. And so I think that like there's two kinds of architecture of like what it is and what it does for us. And we should always sort of be thinking of both. Well, I think that's well said one one last thing okay before we cut you loose what would you say are the two or three must read texts uh for the leftist in architecture oh that's a good question uh i think uh by like specifically like by marxists i think uh

architecture and utopia by manfredo teferi he was a italian architecture critic and architecture theorist uh toward an architecture of enjoyment by henryfebvre which is I don't know why someone from Brings Them Aflana is calling me and I think it's the student loan people they're calling you on Skype wow so cancelled anyways sorry anyways

and then I think wait I don't think you got cut off when you were talking about i think lefebvre yeah toward an architecture of enjoyment is like a short bit about like what architecture would look like it was like built for joy and shit okay um like kind of divorcing architecture from urban theory for a second urbanism to like just talk about architecture itself which i think is useful because urbanism kind of poisons the well of all discussions of architecture in one way or another um and then i think honestly like it's really always worth reading the chapter on architecture from post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism because really describes a lot of sort

of the background of what's been happening in architecture in the last 40 years. And a lot of the stuff that is written in that book is still relevant, especially the underlying structural critiques. Yeah, and I suggest reading anything by Frederick Jameson. I think he's always fun to read. He's one of the few theorists that is like you can just read him and you don't have to get a dictionary out exactly yeah he's very plain spoken and um and i you know i think it's it's always fun to sort of like you know it's kind of like smoking

weed man and like thinking about society that's totally true though because like sometimes i'll read like jameson and be like dude this is just like just like punching me in the face with how good it is like yeah yeah just like god damn like he's so good yeah i just like kind of want to be him at some point in my life uh like it would be cool though i don't care enough about film no offense to film oh yeah he does love uh film well i just like don't know that much about film like my partner like he's the one who knows about film and so he'll be like have you seen this felini movie and i'm like is that a type of noodle like yes actually and sophisticated as i can be on like literature and art and architecture when it comes to movies like i don't know jack shit you only have so much brain space you know so i know it's like someone else can care about movies that's why that's why i think

jameson is a genius because he can just talk about everything yeah and he knows it all yeah and you're just like damn i wish i didn't fill my fucking brain up with like the dumbest tweets by the dumbest people it's like i know like about like neera a tandem's mom now but like i had to like delete a memory of something that was useful to me in order to like put that in my brain yeah we all honestly you know the fact that we have near a tandem like that should be enough like mandate to break out the guillotines and everything like that's the fact that we're subjected to this person the epitome of like someone i don't like like if someone just like drummed up like someone i don't like it would just be near a tandem like i was like let's

create the perfect antithesis to kate wagner um well okay we'll let you go. Thank you. This has been really fun. This is really fun, Kate. Great conversation. Yeah, it's a great conversation. Thank you, guys.

Yeah, good questions. Good to do some dunks. Yeah. That's always the point. You're a quintessential podcasting experience. Of course. You guys cut out. We cut out?

Can you still hear us? No, no, no. You didn't cut out. Oh, we didn't cut out. You're right. You're right. That's amazing. An hour and a half is a new record,

a new personal best for us. And before we go, do you have anything you want to plug? Visit my website at mcmansionhall.com and my at on twitter is mcmansionhall if you want to view my garbage tweets um i uh yeah okay my website my personal website is katewagner.org where you can read all of my stories that I've written. I like your personal website. I put on my website just for funsies. Yeah. So if you like weird stuff,

you can check it out. Uh, I guess that's it. Yeah. I like the old, um, the old sort of nineties block, you know,

your, your website is a nice little throwback to thank you because that's about the level I can code at. Yeah. It's literally, like, a website from 1999, but I just, like, am leaning into it, because I think that that's when the web was good, actually, and everything since then has been, like, downhill. I agree.

Except we mentioned hell, but everything besides that. Yeah. Well, thank you again, Kate, and we'll see you on the internet where that that sucks sure thanks guys see you guys we'll see you later kate bye Thank you.