Category Archives: McMansions

McMansions don’t represent progressive home design

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Here is a suggestion that McMansions are not in the best tradition of modern American architecture:

McMansions

In the past American design was modern and the emerging architectural vernacular reflected that, from the Farnsworth to LA’s Case Study houses (such as the one pictured above) or to Eichler’s industrialisation of modernism, for the masses.

But now this has been replaced by a new version of the old, from McMansions to Pottery barn, Victorian design represents regression in the form of aspiration to a pre-industrial age, America’s current design prudery is a form of technological regression that is so pervasive, we should be very thankful for the brilliant exceptions such as Apple.

In this critique, the McMansion is simply recycled architecture, an example of our “design prudery.” I will grant that McMansions may borrow from older designs and may even do a poor job of combining multiple styles.

But, I think there could be a larger argument made here: Americans have been fairly resistant to modernist home designs. The functional and simple ranch may be the most modern home most Americans would consider. (Was there a historical point where home design really took a great leap forward or where it took a great leap back?) Thinking in Bourieu’s terms, are Americans more concerned with the functionality of homes rather than their aesthetic value?

This quick description of McMansions also leaves out another element: home design is also about status for homebuyers and residents. Older or established styles can confer a sense of permanency, history, and grandeur. Do Americans not like more modern home designs because it paints them in a negative light by suggesting they are elitist or too individualistic?

Dioramas of suburbs and McMansions

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The New York Times has a story about photographers who build model homes and suburban scenes in order to photograph them:

Yet “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them…

James Casebere, meanwhile, shows his photographs but not the architectural models of suburban housing developments on which they are based. By controlling the lighting and printing his images on a large scale, he makes sprawl seem even more aggressive and insidious. In “Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, N.Y.) #8” tightly spaced McMansions tower over a quaint white-clapboard farmhouse.

Mr. Casebere is something of an anomaly in this show because he is so focused on the present. Other examples of model architecture tend to indulge nostalgia, along the lines of Michael Paul Smith’s bland 1950s strip mall and Alan Wolfson’s gritty little slice of 1970s Canal Street in New York…

The trip through all of these microcosms can be tedious: too many shoeboxes, not enough ideas. One exception is a video by Junebum Park, who uses his hands and a rooftop camera to turn an ordinary parking lot into a kind of moving diorama. A simple trick of perspective is all it takes to make him the master of Matchbox cars and ant-size pedestrians.

The article ends by suggesting that too many of the dioramas are similar. What would happen if an artist presented suburban homes in a positive light rather than portraying sprawl as “aggressive and insidious” – would this be different enough or unacceptable?

I am intrigued by the idea that a “bland” 1950s strip mall induces nostalgia. What exactly does this look like?

California housing forecast includes fewer McMansions, depressed construction industry

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Several researchers from UCLA suggest California housing industry will experience some changes in the next few years including a construction industry that will need years to recover:

UCLA forecasters have seen the future of California’s housing market, and it looks like this: more apartments near the coast, fewer McMansions in the desert…

That’s bad news for the state economy, however, for two reasons. One is that construction of multifamily homes requires less labor than construction of single-family homes. Second, areas such as the Inland Empire and Central Valley that were hit hardest by the housing bust won’t get a construction boom to help pull them out of the economic doldrums.

This means “there is an even larger structural unemployment problem in California than we originally thought,” Nickelsburg wrote in the forecast. “Not only do we have excess construction, real estate and support skills, but some of those that will be demanded will be in the wrong geography.”

California won’t start adding a significant number of building permits until 2013, forecasters say, which is one of the reasons the state’s unemployment rate will stay above 10% until the middle of that year. Nonfarm employment in the state won’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014, and construction employment won’t reach those levels until at least 2021.

The demographic shifts and move away from McMansions have been predicted elsewhere but the longer-term impact of a troubled construction industry has sort of flown under the radar. I wonder how much of the current unemployment troubles in the US are the result of the lack of home construction, i.e., what percent of the unemployed are construction workers? Where do construction workers end up working in a prolonged housing industry slump?

All of this is a reminder that the housing crisis which helped lead to the economic crisis is a longer-term issue. Lower housing prices don’t just influence homeowners who wish they could sell or get a return on their home or large lending institutions who lost a lot of money – millions of construction workers are under- or unemployed and communities can no longer rely on quick single-family home construction to help revive their economies.

Can’t we build greener McMansions?

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This is a story that comes up from time to time: people who live in larger homes, sometimes called “McMansions,” should pay some sort of penalty as they consume more. Here is this very suggestion from an Australian academic:

People who want to build energy-guzzling McMansion-style homes should pay more taxes, an academic says.

And taxes should also be used to make owning multiple plasma TVs prohibitive, says Melbourne University construction expert Dr Robert Crawford.

Rapidly increasing suburban house sizes, more reliance on cars and a rise in demand for consumer goods had wiped out many of the benefits of building energy-efficient homes, he said yesterday…

“Indirectly through the price of materials and things like that, if you make it more expensive in some way to build larger houses then that might encourage people not to do it,” he told the Herald Sun.

Such a move would be similar to other incentives that governments offer regarding certain activities.

But I have wondered in recent years why there aren’t more builders who are trying to make these large homes greener. They could benefit from this as one of the big knocks on McMansions is that they are symbols of excessive consumption. So why not earn some points back by making them more environmentally-friendly? I assume there are things that could be done that might cost some money but could also fight back against this image. In the long run, it may just be “greenwashing” but building homes that most people consider “McMansions” because they contribute to environmental problems is a losing cause. Additionally, this might expand their markets to people who are looking for greener homes. What reasonable American homebuyer with money today wouldn’t want a larger AND greener home? And for critics of McMansions, what if they were quite green – is the larger issue the presumed unnecessarily large size or the home or suburban sprawl or something else?

Of course, we could also have a larger national conversation about greener standards for buildings. But we would know how this conversation might play out…

Even Shakespeare doesn’t like McMansions

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As the debate over the value of certain college majors continues, William Shakespeare responds and defends the liberal arts and also knocks McMansions:

See, when I wrote all those plays back in the day, I had no intention of helping the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs. No, I was after something else altogether. (If you don’t understand this, please do not feel alone; this great stage of fools is plenty crowded.) To be sure, one should not attempt to mine A Midsummer Night’s Dream for literal fortune, unless, of course, you’re in the tights-and-tunics trade. But that’s another matter…

Students can do worse than to take literature courses, like ones devoted to my work, or to that of Toni Morrison, or even to depressing saps like Melville. To study literature is to practice critical thinking; to write about texts is to hone writing skills. The very things that the masters of industry demand in their employees, no?

Shakespeare seems to have heard the selling points for a liberal arts education.

The phrase that interests me: “the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs.” This seems to be a broad indictment of how students (and others?) view college: it is about making money and living comfortably as one pursues the American dream. In contrast, the liberal arts promotes thinking and wrestling with the big questions that humans have sought to answer throughout history. But do McMansions and critical thinking have to be mutually exclusive? McMansion seems to refer here more to the homeowners themselves who are only interested in making money, getting ahead, and enjoying life. Is the opposite implication that critical thinkers would never purchase or build a McMansion because they would see its faults? Do critical thinkers (and liberal arts majors) only live in homes with character and history in the city?

TED curator on moving away from McMansions to better-designed cities

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TED Curator Chris Anderson recently spoke at Harvard and envisioned a bright human future in cities rather than McMansions:

Designers have the answers to “the most important question we all face,” TED curator Chris Anderson told imminent Graduate School of Design graduates on Wednesday. “Can the coming world of 10 billion people survive and flourish without consuming itself in the process?” The key lies in finding “better ways to pattern our lives,” he added: “There is nothing written into our nature that says that the only path to a wonderful, rich, meaningful life is to own two cars and a McMansion in the suburbs.”…

Much of a successful future lies in “re-imaging what a city can be,” Anderson said. People will live closer together—“if only to give the rest of nature a chance,” and cities already offer “richer culture, a greater sense of community, a far lower carbon footprint per person—and the collision of ideas that nurtures innovation.” But architects have the means to incorporate “light, plant, trees, water, and beautiful forms into the city’s structures and landscapes” and imagine new ways for people to work and connect “without sacrificing your grandchildren.”

Technological trends in computer-assisted programs and construction techniques and materials, he said, make design more adaptable and effective than ever in terms of large-scale projects that affect millions of lives. “Suddenly the fractals and curves of Mother Nature are a legitimate part of the architectural lexicon.” Moreover, cultural and intellectual notions around common human values are changing. “The toxic belief that human nature and aesthetic values are infinitely malleable, and determined purely by cultural norms” is dying, Anderson asserted. In its place, there is growing agreement that “we should think of humans differently, that far from living in separate cultural bubbles, we actually share millions of years of evolutionary biology.”

Anderson is right about the powerful cultural narrative of the American dream of a single-family home in the suburbs: it is a narrative that could change in the future. McMansions and suburbs seem to operate here as the antithesis of Anderson’s vision: sprawling, mass produced places that separate people into different “cultural bubbles.” This story suggests that Anderson thinks designers can offer an alternative that would change how Americans think about the city. Besides participating in TED, how exactly would designers make this pitch to the broader culture?

I wonder what exactly Anderson’s cities might look like and what cities (or city neighborhoods/areas) might serve as models.

Highlighting the isolation and independence of McMansions

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A feature of McMansions that sometimes draws criticism is the possible isolation they offer their inhabitants. Neighborhoods of these homes are sometimes envisioned as wastelands where neighbors don’t know each other and really don’t want to have any interaction. Here is an illustration of this idea within an article about the “peer-to-peer economy”:

The mentality peaked during the ’90s and first half of the last decade. Heaven was a safe job, a McMansion, a Target (TGT) in your city, a Starbucks (SBUX) down the road, a credit card with no limit, and a seven-figure bank account. No need to ever interact with strangers! The perfect bliss of isolation, err, “financial independence.”

The general idea here is that the goal of life during this time period was to have so much money that people don’t have to interact with others that they don’t want to interact with. While this may be in the name of being “financially independent,” it is really about becoming self-sufficient and not having to depend on anybody.

Several thoughts about this:

1. Even with this so-called “financial independence,” it is hard to escape the need for other people. I’m reminded of Durkheim’s idea of organic solidarity where people are more interdependent on others than ever due to the division of labor but also feel more independent. This seems related to American cultural ideas of individualism: the goal is to become a self-made man/woman who can do it all on their own. Can we then interpret advice from people like Dave Ramsey as promulgating American individualism more than fighting debt?

1a. This fear of strangers is an interesting idea. It is often invoked when talking about the formation of American suburbs (white flight out of cities) or gated communities (trying to keep certain people out). I wonder if there is survey data that would suggests Americans are more afraid of strangers than citizens of other countries.

2. Is a single-family house more of a place to avoid people or to build up the individual and the family unit?

3. I understand the idea of a McMansion and a large bank account fitting the theme of isolation but what do a safe job, Target, and Starbucks have to do with it? In all three of these settings, people interact with others, particularly on the job. With money, one can purchase a customizable experience at Target and Starbucks but this would be true in a lot of commercial settings.

Witold Rybczynski on McMansions, American housing, suburbs

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With the continued housing slump (and a story going around that the $8,000 homebuyer credit of recent years only masked the issues of the housing market), a number of commentators have shared their thoughts about the future of housing in America. Witold Rybczynski weighs in with his prediction for the near future in a piece with the headline of “McMansions dead at last?“:

Owning single-family houses represents a long-established tradition that the U.S. shares with many countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway), but 10 years is long enough for traditions and behavior to change. It is likely that in the future multifamily housing will represent a larger share of the American housing market than the one-in-five new dwellings that has been the historic norm.

What about single-family houses, which will still remain for many people the home of choice? There is some evidence that urban townhomes and infill housing are more popular, as rising gas prices increase the cost of commuting. Higher energy costs also affect heating and air conditioning, which may have the effect of discouraging homebuyers from purchasing large houses with soaring entryways and expansive family rooms. While the evidence is fragmentary—the current reduction in average new house sizes has more to do with the preponderance of first-time buyers than an overall shift in demand—it is clear that the long recessionary cold-shower will dampen the exuberance that characterized the boom years of 2000 to 2005. That will mean smaller houses closer together on smaller lots in inner suburbs, fewer McMansions, and fewer planned communities in the distant hinterland. An alternative scenario is that American optimism will prevail and it will be business as usual, as happened during the boom of the 1950s following the Great Depression, or during the period following the Energy Crisis of 1973, when car buyers, after a brief flirtation with Japanese compact cars, embraced minivans and SUVs. But I wouldn’t count on it.

It sounds like Rybczynski thinks the American housing market will be denser and smaller in the future as a reaction to the last few years. He also makes the point that one big issue plaguing the housing market is more demographic in nature: household formation has slowed down as more people are living with other people rather than starting their own households that require a separate home.

Two other things also seem noteworthy:

1. Rybczynski suggests the reduction in home size is more due to having more first-time buyers than anything else. What about downsizers, particularly Baby Boomers who are retiring or whose children have left the house, that others have talked about?

2. Rybczynski also suggests that we will have fewer planned communities. I assume he is referring to larger planned communities/suburbs that simply may not be possible with low housing demand. But what about a possible uptick in smaller planned developments done by New Urbanists and others who can offer a denser form of suburbia?

Perhaps the fun part about reading pieces like this now is that we likely have years before we can really assess whether something has changed. In the meantime, we can wonder how low home values might go.

Just how many McMansions have actually collapsed like Trump’s polling figures?

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One common critique of the McMansion is that they are poorly built. The story continues that because they are mass-produced, the materials are bottom of the line so builders don’t have to do anything more than necessary  in the search for big profits. This idea was found in a recent story about the decline of Donald Trump’s polling figures:

Public Policy Polling finds Donald Trump’s numbers collapsing like a poorly-built McMansion.

Might some people find this phrase redundant and ask whether McMansions are poorly-built by definition?

Perhaps I am being too literal here but this gets me thinking about how many McMansions have actually collapsed. I would guess that not too many have collapsed on their own so perhaps the more appropriate figures to search for would measure how many McMansions needed major renovations or fixes and then how this data compares to other kinds of homes. Would HGTV, the network always on the search for homes that need help, be a good source for figures? This is probably not the kind of data builders would want to keep and it would be difficult to collate the information from millions of individual homeowners.

And what would be a better metaphor for the collapse of Donald Trump’s polling numbers?

Zoning smaller lots in western Australia leads to fewer McMansions

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Here is a report from western Australia about a way to limit the construction of McMansions: approve smaller residential lots.

The McMansion is likely to become architectural history as small blocks take over as the more popular housing lot size in WA.

Research by the Urban Development Institute of Australia said 60 per cent of blocks approved in Perth and Mandurah this financial year were less than 500sqm.

In 2004-05, only 30 per cent of all approvals were for blocks of this size. The increase has become pronounced in recent months, with 2130 small blocks approved in the December quarter compared with 1462 in the three months to September.

UDIA chief executive Debra Goostrey said the change had been driven by land prices, and a greater acceptance of small properties amid changing demographics.

It sounds then like development is becoming denser and houses are becoming smaller in this part of Australia. And there is also information on the lot size and house size trends over time:

A typical 1940s home had 125sqm of floor space on a block that was 1150sqm, or a quarter acre.

In the 1950s, block sizes fell to about 750sqm and homes were typically 150sqm in size.

The extravagant 80s brought in the era of the McMansion, with the floor spaces of homes blowing out to 300sqm and this became more extreme in the 1990s, with homes typically covering 350sqm of floor space on a 650sqm block.

It is interesting that this story emphasizes the size of the lot. Of course, this would have some effect on the size of the home that can be built on the lot but not necessarily. One issue that frequently comes up in American communities with teardowns is that the new owners want to build a relatively large home compared to the relatively smaller size of the lot. This can lead to situations where the new home, often dubbed a McMansion dwarfs older single-family homes. In response, many communities have developed guidelines about the new home including height restrictions and how much of a lot the new home can cover.

The article suggests that lots are becoming smaller because of prices and “changing demographics.” Is any of it due to larger concerns about sprawl? Compared to the typical quarter-acre lot of the 1940s, many of the lots today are less than half of that size. There is also mention in this article of an interest in more infill development. It sounds like there could also be some zoning issues going on as governments pursue denser forms of residential development.