(2023-05-11) The Mcmansion As Harbinger Of The American Apocalypse

The McMansion as Harbinger of the American Apocalypse. ...gargantuan homes with equally oversized trucks parked in the driveway. They tower over their older neighbors at a tragicomical scale difficult to convey, each identically crafted for maximum cheapness and interchangeability. Behold the McMansion in all its readymade, disposable grandeur.

Unlike the McMansions that predominated prior to the financial crisis (credit crisis 2008) - over-inflated, fake-stuccoed colonials festooned with some tacky approximation of European finery - the new iterations are whitewashed and modern, their windows undifferentiated voids.

Moore County, meanwhile, is a prototypical American sprawl scenario: boundless, monotonous growth laying waste to what was once a network of stolid retirement communities orbiting the quiet resort town of Pinehurst

The street I grew up on in Moore County, North Carolina, is unrecognizable now

Once thought vanquished by the recession, the McMansion really hasn’t gone anywhere. From 2010 to 2021, the rate of construction of McMansions (loosely defined as homes at or over 3,000 square feet) was on par with the more classical McMansion period between 1999 and 2004.

Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight

Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life

McShitshow

McMansions began proliferating even before the term first appeared in the 1980s

The McMansion did not cause the financial crisis; its role was negligible at best. But it became indelibly associated with debauched, prerecession excess

The object of furor in the realm of architectural criticism shifted from the McMansion to the boxy 5-over-1 apartment building—so named for its five stories of residential units over one story of retail—that began blanketing every American city

McMansions were a misunderstood architectural phenomenon long before they passed out of public consciousness. The most common misconception is that they are an architectural style and that, like most styles, they have their time and place—in this case, from the Reagan eighties to the ignoble 2008 collapse—and then are replaced by some ensuing vogue.

The McMansion straddles the divide between high and what’s called vernacular architecture, i.e. the trailer parks and worker’s cottages and dormitories occupied by the working and middle classes. The vernacular is the mass-produced architecture of the everyday.

disdain for the vernacular is not universal: Thomas Hubka’s 2013 book Houses without Names: Architectural Nomenclature and the Classification of America’s Common Houses lays out how to identify and classify ordinary houses

Even so, Hubka is of the mind that the McMansion falls outside the purview of vernacular study

I think there are some things about the McMansion that can only be understood through a more vernacular framework, such as their ubiquity and the means by which they are built. McMansions are not usually designed by architects but by builders, most of them massive corporations.

Not that this development is entirely new. There has always been a connection between increasing wealth and intentional isolation

However, between the streetcar Victorians of the 1890s and the McMansions of the 1980s, our entire social and economic order transmogrified. Industrialization and unionization meant the working class could suddenly afford better and bigger homes. Technological progress, standardization of construction, the invention of the automobile, exclusionary financial incentives—including those sponsored by the government—and a century of social unrest drove the almost uniformly white middle class out of the city and into the periphery.

The McMansion is sold in catalogs, not unlike the vernacular homes that could once be ordered from Sears.

the McMansion is always fundamentally the same house. The signifiers change, but the house remains. There are millions of McMansions. There will be millions of McMansions.

The real question now is, Who is still building, buying, and living in these houses? It is stubbornly difficult to nail down.

In essence, the only certainty is that when Americans get richer—through generational wealth transfer or through industry—they tend to seek out McMansions. When boomers die and bequeath their wealth to their children, those children will probably also build a bunch of McMansions.

Why? Some of the correlating factors are cultural, others architectural or material. For starters, you get more house for your money in the suburbs than in the city, where the price of land is astronomical. Buyers with children, but without the means to send them to private school, want to live in good school districts, which necessitates moving to wealthier neighborhoods

the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size

Contrary to almost four decades of urbanistic thought highlighting the need for walkability, density, and transit-oriented development, companies like Pulte Homes continue to construct McMansion neighborhoods near highway off-ramps and high-traffic arterial roads. They do this because people buy these houses and drive to work, and because building single-family homes doesn’t require suffering through rezoning battles or complying with extensive building code requirements, to name just two pesky bureaucratic hurdles of the plethora associated with multifamily residential development.

The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory.

The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.

Perhaps the McMansion will only come to an end when the ethos it represents becomes impossible, logistically or financially.

More than half a century of urban planning prioritizing sprawl has gotten us to where we are now: choked by endless freeways, benumbed by carbon-copy strip malls, secluded in catchpenny houses with no sense of human scale.

The solutions to these problems are equally obvious: more population density; preserving existing green space to allow for stormwater runoff; better public transportation to decrease reliance on cars; the decommissioning of urban highways; comprehensively transforming the energy sector in pursuit of a post-oil world; and, most of all, building affordable, livable, and—dare I say it—rent-controlled or even government-funded housing.

One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up

We need, quite literally, a revolution. And every revolution, lest we forget, is an architectural revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about the dawn of modernism; the Russian Revolution initially saw the demise of bourgeois opulence in favor of Constructivism. The French revolutionaries looked upon the palace of Versailles with disgust, for it represented everything loathsome about monarchist French society: inequality, waste, and excessive filigree

The present crisis surrounding the depleted Colorado River, owing to overconsumption and a world-historic megadrought plaguing the Southwest since the 2000s, will be the first real test of the McMansion way of life

When the resources of the commons no longer subsidize the whimsies of the rich, when there is truly nothing left to drink or burn in the tank, then, and only then, will we be able to look at the McMansion in retrospect.