Could summarize the design choices to malignancy, fakeness, and excess. Those are best avoided in programming BTW, its not just a house architecture problem. Also bad always crowds out good.
The design pattern of mcmansions is malignant. Oh you still have money, lets slap on an asymmetric ugly random whatever, any old place till you run out of money. The design scheme is tumor like. Ah the underlying tissue must have had a good blood supply in that direction as the tumor expanded in that direction. They're almost organically gross as opposed to simply random.
The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly. Also there's the fast food cookie cutter nature of McMansions where even if a single Big Mac isn't repulsive, an entire subdivision of identical ones is repellent, endless roads of ticky tacky. A semi-competent architect could make a nice looking Georgian pretty easily, but it doesn't flow to have dozens of CCR enforced utterly identical ones packed into a small area. Shotgun shack townhouse from Boston, yeah those look right when packed together like books on a shelf. If you must have lot spacing of 3 feet between houses, at least select matching appropriate styles, shotgun shack instead of southern plantation on LSD.
The excess is very much fast food like. Well, yeah, it sucks, and it sucks just like everyone elses, and you have no choice in some areas of the country, but the excess is very 128 oz big gulp or super size frys like. Oh you still got money, well, lets put more columns and weird dormers and rooflines until you run out of money. Sure it'll be ugly but the point is to show off how big of a subprime balloon payment adjustable rate mortgage you can take out, and ugly does get noticed...
The offensiveness of a mcmansion is bad always crowds out good. If you don't have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice looking row of boston style townhouses? If you do have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice plantation era with luxurious porches and stuff?
> The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly.
Class signalling. It's important to keep the new money in their place.
Insinuating that it's merely a tactic to silence debate of architectural principles strikes me as an effective way to curtail discussion of the use of architecture to signal class.
I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes?! :D
For my part, I've lived in a lot of houses where the exteriors looked like that those of the houses lauded in the OP, and a few whose design more closely mimicked the "awful" McMansion styles.
I absolutely detested the interior spaces of the "good" houses, and the placement of "voids" on the house's frontal exterior had primary blame for that. I STRONGLY preferred the interior spaces of the McMansion-type homes, looking at the exteriors on the blog there, I abhor the "good" ones and actually kind of like most of the McMansions.
I assert that while the criticisms appear to be valid at first glance, that virtually ALL of the derision for McMansions comes because of class differences and their reputation for shoddy workmanship, and almost NONE of it is due to actual, objective architectural issues. There's no accounting for taste, taste accounts for 99% of the derision towards McMansions, and this particular taste is associated by most with the upwardly mobile yuppies who tend to buy them, which marks it for nigh-universal hate - as strongly as I feel about the "good" house photos on the blog, exteriors of houses I great up in and around that were nearly unusable inside, people feel that way about McMansions, and this is just a (noble) attempt at explaining that subtle, almost unconscious derision for this type of home.
Insinuating that aesthetic architectural principles are anything other than class signalling is a good way to silence a debate on class signalling which makes you uncomfortable
The design pattern of mcmansions is malignant. Oh you still have money, lets slap on an asymmetric ugly random whatever, any old place till you run out of money. The design scheme is tumor like. Ah the underlying tissue must have had a good blood supply in that direction as the tumor expanded in that direction. They're almost organically gross as opposed to simply random.
The fakeness isn't properly explored in the blog. There is an uncanny valley effect where anyone who knows anything about Georgians, for example, can trivially identify a Georgian-inspired fake Georgian. I mean, you blew a million bucks and got all the hundred bucks parts wrong... how silly. Also there's the fast food cookie cutter nature of McMansions where even if a single Big Mac isn't repulsive, an entire subdivision of identical ones is repellent, endless roads of ticky tacky. A semi-competent architect could make a nice looking Georgian pretty easily, but it doesn't flow to have dozens of CCR enforced utterly identical ones packed into a small area. Shotgun shack townhouse from Boston, yeah those look right when packed together like books on a shelf. If you must have lot spacing of 3 feet between houses, at least select matching appropriate styles, shotgun shack instead of southern plantation on LSD.
The excess is very much fast food like. Well, yeah, it sucks, and it sucks just like everyone elses, and you have no choice in some areas of the country, but the excess is very 128 oz big gulp or super size frys like. Oh you still got money, well, lets put more columns and weird dormers and rooflines until you run out of money. Sure it'll be ugly but the point is to show off how big of a subprime balloon payment adjustable rate mortgage you can take out, and ugly does get noticed...
The offensiveness of a mcmansion is bad always crowds out good. If you don't have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice looking row of boston style townhouses? If you do have land, why "must" you have an ugly mcmansion instead of a nice plantation era with luxurious porches and stuff?