In my latest column for The Nation, I defend single stair buildings against their detractors - I think single stair is wonderful! - But I also don’t think it’s some kind of panacea for the housing crisis.
In my latest for The Nation I make the uncontroversial claim that bike lanes are good, actually.
a fine selection of bonker facades from the DC suburbs
Howdy folks! In honor of Halloween, here are some of the scariest houses currently for sale in the ever-cursed suburbs of Washington, DC. It’s been awhile since I checked in on this particular hotspot, and once more, it did not disappoint.
I’ll just get this one out of the way. Long-time McMansion Hell-heads are well aware of this monster estate in Potomac, MD, once allegedly owned by a particular professional athlete who will not be named, because the house should suck on its own merit. The only nice thing I can say about this house is that the designers kept the materials and colors consistent, which adds some unity to what is, in reality, five turrets in a trench coat.
Some things, the economists tell us, are too big to fail. This is not one of them. Let’s move on.
Many McMansions exist to mock the concept of architectural consistency and historical continuity. This is one of them. About every single type of expanded second-story window elaboration exists here: bay window, covered balcony, juliet balcony. None of them work. The house can’t decide if its 19th century eclecticism or tony DC Georgian/Federal cocktail. The random cupola merely adds insult to injury.
I don’t know where realtors learned how to do photoshop, but whoever taught them should have their Adobe licenses revoked. There’s a certain type of McMansion I call a “hat house” - which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a house with multiple bays or masses and each has its own special hat. This is one of the most egregious examples because all of the hats are different shapes and scales. Not even the most Disney Theme Park pink sky and fairy lighting can mitigate the controlling aesthetic influence of hät.
No compilation of Bad Facades would be complete without at least one Frankentudor™. Rich people in America really like to harken back to the days of feudalism, yet uglier, more drab, and using materials mostly derived from petrochemicals. The lighting is not helping this house, which is about as gloomy, hulking, and bloated as they come.
I have some fondness for houses that derive new, inventive forms of being ugly. The spread eagle McMansion is one of them, two oblique wings with no real core. A corner lot specimen. This one is especially weird, with the quadruple portholes, the windowless bays, the mall foyer, and the hipped roof that’s not quite clipped, complete with tacked on gables. Kind of neat, sad to say.
I know most of you won’t agree, but I actually believe this is the worst McMansion of the set. The absolute banality of it, the out-of-proportion everything, the compound-like demeanor, the nonsensical spacing of the mind-numbingly identical windows. The most infuriating part is that whoever designed this had some kind of order, continuity, proportion in mind and just failed utterly at it, like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. I hate it!!!!
When rich people try to make overly-inflated temples to their dumb piles of money, it’s deeply satisfying when they end up looking like this house, which is just a pile of roof and wall tacked on to the worst proportioned portico imaginable. Classic McMansion Hubris. Let us all laugh.
Now we’re getting into the more eldritch horror part of the list. Some houses make me wonder if I have the same set of eyeballs and conceptions of what “a house” looks like as other people. This one is playing dress up games with foam stickers. It looks like Steve’s shirt from Blues Clues. It abuses the prairie muntins, which is an insult to my chosen hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Bad house.
Not enough time is devoted on this blog to bad modernism, though it would be rather generous to call this house modern. It’s more like postmodernism trying to remember what modernism looked like and tripping down a flight of stairs collecting random masses and windows on the way down. Houses like this give modern architecture a bad name. It’s borderline libel. Also it looks like it was made out of cardboard.
This brings us to our final, and objectively worst house:
I don’t even know what to say about this freak of architecture. I don’t know how it came together or why. I don’t know what it wants or even pretends to do. It is a horrorshow. Gables protruding from random places, stealth roof fragments, windows too small for the walls they’re embedded in, a weird cathedral-like entrance, the mosquito-infested pond, the worst example of realtor sky I’ve ever seen, all of it is terrible. It’s haunted. Trick or Treat, but without the treat.
Anyway, that does it for this installment. If you’re curious about more McModern badness, this month’s Patreon bonus post will be to your liking!
Happy Halloween and Día de Los Muertos!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including extra posts and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.
New Blog Updates and Patreon Rewards for 2020!
Howdy folks!
Now is a great time to join McMansion Hell on Patreon, and I’ll tell you why!
Patreon has really evolved over the years and the landscape of how creators can interact with their patrons has changed dramatically - expanding to such areas as merch, exclusive servers, instagram-like story features, and newsletters. That’s why I’ve taken the opportunity to expand my Patreon to be more interactive with all of the patrons who make this project possible. More on that later!
First off, we’re going to start with what’s coming on the blog in the year 2020:
McMansion Hell enters bi-monthly status
As many of you are aware, this blog has been, well, flaky, as I try to balance my career as a freelancer, speaker, and educator with my career as a blogger. Instead of random updates, this blog will be set to publish twice a month, the first post being a house roast and the second post being a series post, such as the series on Brutalism. This allows time for freelancing, devoting more time to Patreon, and creates a more consistent expectation of what bang you’ll get for your buck.
New House Roasts, Year By Year
Do you ever wonder how McMansions got the way they did? We’ll we’re about to find out. Now that we’ve completed the 50 States of McMansion Hell, I’m going to be selecting one house for every year from 1970 to 2018 that is emblematic of the design trends of its time - in house-roast form, of course.
New and Continuing Series
The Brutalism Post will see three more installments this year. It will be followed by The Postmodern Project a new, five-post series on Postmodernism and its trials, tribulations, and legacy.
Results from the 2019 Gingerbread Contest will be announced next week!
New Patreon Rewards and Tiers
In order to take advantage of all the different goodies Patreon now has to offer, the tiers have been totally revamped:
$1 - League of Architectural Wokeness
- Access to Patron-only feed
- Access to the Good House of the Month - the antidote to the month’s house roast.
- NEW: Access to the Discord server. Many people I know who are also on patreon have had great success with having a Discord server, “McMansion Hell Chat” just for patrons. This will have channels for sharing McMansions, architecture news, urbanism/housing hot takes and more in order for all of us to get together and share cool stuff as a community.
$3 - League of Architectural Sassiness
- All previous rewards
- NEW: Access to a new weekly newsletter: “McMansion Hell’s This Week in Design” - I’m super excited about this project, which is taking place via Goodbits. Every week, subscribers will get a curated list of the goings on in the world of architecture, design, urbanism, housing and more, with commentary by yours truly. It’s going to be really fun. The first installment rolls out on Sunday!
$5 - League of Architectural Savviness
- All Previous Rewards
- Access to a monthly live house roasting session and Q&A on Crowdcast, which this year will feature several guest appearances by content creators, cultural critics, architecture journalists and more.
$10 - League of Architectural Solidarity
- All Previous Rewards
- NEW: Welcome to Discourse Club, a special Discord chat and monthly discussion session that’ll function as a book club - I send out articles, essays, or other tidbits and we will discuss them together as a group. If that sounds boring, trust me it won’t be - it’s called Discourse Club for a reason. Plus, I get to use the skills I learned teaching this past year.
- ALSO NEW: Get posts from the Lens app on Patreon, where I’ll send Instagram-like updates about the goings on of architecture, design, and McMansion Hell. (Let’s be honest, a lot of them will be buildings I like)
$20 - Guardians of Architecture
- All Previous Rewards
- NEW: a free An Art sticker!
$30 - NEW TIER: League of Discourse Warriors
- All Previous Rewards
- NEW: free An Art Mug and Sticker!
$50 - League of Suburban Warriors
- All Previous Rewards
- Free An Art T-shirt, Mug, and Sticker
I hope that you enjoy this year of house roasts, articles, and fun new patron goodies. See you next week with the Gingerbread Contest results!
xoxo
Kate