A status update on Twitter:
Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
261–270 of 388 posts
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, McMansions are often not very functional. As much as I would appreciate more space, I've been in enough McMansions to appreciate how important a well-built and well-designed house is. Completely ignoring scale doesn't just make McMansions aesthetically unpleasant, it them uncomfortable or completely unsuitable for most of the things we use a house for as well. If you spend any time in a McMansion, you w…
> The fridge will be placed on the complete opposite side of the room from the island with the stove in it. This is actually proper kitchen design (the island being in the way would be a problem, though). It's called a "kitchen triangle" and the proper shape and size of it determines how efficient a kitchen is (the third vertex is the sink). A properly sized and shaped kitchen triangle can help turn cooking into a ve…
Kitchens are undeniably more important today than in the past. Their increased and expanded uses have driven larger sizes. As you suggest, too larger of a triangle is inefficient. To deal with this, the concept of Kitchen Zones has been taking root as an alternative. A zone for preparation, cooking, cleanup, entertaining, etc. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16934736/list/kitchen-evolut...
[2] http://lifehacker.com/optimize-your-kitchen-layout-with-work...
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of time on that blog was spent mocking purely aesthetic features of the homes and I feel like if you like the aesthetic then there is not much else to consider.
But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger o…
Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, McMansions are often not very functional. As much as I would appreciate more space, I've been in enough McMansions to appreciate how important a well-built and well-designed house is. Completely ignoring scale doesn't just make McMansions aesthetically unpleasant, it them uncomfortable or completely unsuitable for most of the things we use a house for as well. If you spend any time in a McMansion, you w…
This is where I fall on the spectrum. I can understand someone wanting their house to evoke some notion of grandeur but really if it isn't functional the effort feels wasted to me. That said, I have always felt ridiculing other people's taste to be fairly mean. And while there are/were some solid points in the blog about design and things that 'look right' and things that 'look wrong' it could often come across fairl…
Are you affiliated with that site? Only reason I ask is because of the McM in your name?
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#265I totally understand the whole "McMansions are bad architecture" thing... However, something about it really bothers me. There was an episode of 99% Invisible where the guest was talking about their McMansions blog and how it makes fun of these Horrid dwellings. The whole thing stank of classist elitism. The Wrong Type of people were getting the chance to design and build large houses, and of course they're applying…
Exactly, there's nothing wrong with Geocities style websites either, just snobbishness. /s
I mean, to be fair, there isn't anything wrong with Geocities-style websites. Some of us have fond memories of the mid-90s web, and dislike the trend of shoving 20MB of JavaScript down the reader's throat before they can get to the 20KB of text they're actually looking for.
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger o…
Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
This is a pretty good architectural round-up: https://www.homestratosphere.com/home-architecture-styles/
If you look at these, you'll notice something: they're by and large consistent within themselves and the author of that piece is often (and I say "often" because it's a pop piece) able to tell you what aspects the architects of that style are focusing on. Any given style of architecture might not be your thing, but I bet that you can see commonalities of design within a given design family. In particular it's worth looking at horizontal lines (stories of a house); it's sometimes fashionable for different stories of a house to differ stylistically, but do different parts of the house, including the roof, differ notably on that horizontal line?
One of the deadest giveaways as to whether you can reasonably call it a "McMansion": look at the windows. Some of the houses on McMansion Hell have six different styles of window on the same story of the house. Sometimes they just look plastered on, like the house was built and somebody said "let's add a window there". It's not just bad taste, which has a lot of variance--it's also incoherence, and while there is some taste in evaluating whether various elements that a design adopts cohere together, there's a reasonable-person test there that doesn't really exist for like-it/don't-like-it. McMansions like the ones under discussion are incoherent because they're not designed for coherence, they're designed to tick off boxes in a "How To Increase The Value Of The Thing You're Flipping" checklist. (Few McMansions are built by the owners.) They're zits on a good neighborhood.
Ever heard the adage, learn the rules in order to break them? An analogy that I like is with regard to painting: a cubist Picasso and realist Courbet are both technically masterful and appealing works, but if you mash them together the point becomes that they don't work together at all. And that can be fine--maybe the point of what you're doing is to highlight that discordance--but if you do it without understanding how and why they work, you're just creating a trainwreck.
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're claiming ToS violation.
Which seems fishy to me… IANAL but without signing or hitting "I accept" to the terms, I haven't accepted the terms… I assume anyway. I could be wrong.
IANAL either but I've researched this issue some. Still, nothing I say should be construed as reliable legal information.
Automatic acceptance of ToS is described as "clickwrap" or "browsewrap", depending on whether the ToS is expected to be accepted by going to any page deeper than the home page (browsewrap) or whether it's accepted by, say, clicking a button. This is determined by the text on the site. For example, clickwrap would say "By clicking 'Search', you accept our terms of use." Browsewrap would be some text that reads "By using this site, you accept our terms of use."
At present, it's mostly case-by-case, and it generally hinges on whether or not the consumer had sufficient notice that taking an action resulted in acceptance of the contract. If that claim were to go to court, the argument would be about the location of the notice and whether or not a reasonable person would've realized they were agreeing to the terms (assuming that the accused's knowledge of the terms cannot be directly established, e.g., the author states that she was not aware she was bound by the Terms of Use).
People have a bad habit of assuming that technology law is somewhat reasonable. That's not the case. Because technology is foreign and magical to most people, and also because technology is very fast-paced and law is very slow-paced, and thirdly because most people don't have to be aware of these legal technicalities and can violate them without ever running into trouble or even realizing they've broken the law, ensuring that these things remain obscure political issues, tech law is in a pretty sorry state.
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I don't think even people who acquire or live in those homes like the esthetic. Remember,mcmansions wind up the way they are because they're ticking off a list of 'things that algorithmically increase the home value'. That's what creates a sense of Inbalance and forces the house to contort into strange forms. Most denizens, I suspect, probably feel that something is not quite right but couldn't put their finger o…
Maybe so. I dunno. I don't feel like I have a clear sense of what distinguishes a "McMansion" from "recently-built house in a more or less modern style."
While there may not be One True Definition, and there's room to agree and disagree, there are attributes people probably could agree are tasteless and help qualify a house as a McMansion:
* No clear architectural style, or a haphazard/incoherent mix of styles
* Brick or stone facades in front, and cheap siding on the (less visible) sides
* Non-structural arches and columns
* Oddly placed/sized windows
* Multiple roof lines, chimneys and dormers
To the extent that a "Recently built house in a more or less modern style" incorporates these elements, it can be considered more or less a McMansion.
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#269I totally understand the whole "McMansions are bad architecture" thing... However, something about it really bothers me. There was an episode of 99% Invisible where the guest was talking about their McMansions blog and how it makes fun of these Horrid dwellings. The whole thing stank of classist elitism. The Wrong Type of people were getting the chance to design and build large houses, and of course they're applying…
The only relevant question is: do the people living in these houses enjoy them? Because if they do, then who cares? I look at some of the houses on the blog and think they're really pretty. Sorry I don't have the correct sort of taste in windows or whatever. Maybe it's because I'm one of those dumb idiots that grew up in a flyover state (Iowa). This house: http://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/10/12-hate-pe.…
Trying to answer with the author of the mcmansion hell's viewpoint, the digrams on this post are helpful: http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/post/148605513816/mcmansions...
In the one you pointed out, the question arises: "Which part is the actual house?" It has a feeling of "someone stuck on this extra part here, this stairwell here, ..." particularly with the mix of the stone and stucco'd/painted exterior, the multiple incoherent roof angles, and the inconsistent Z-depth of the front of the house.
With some architecture, the more you look at it, the more it grows on you. With the picture you posted, at first glance, I had the same reaction you did -- but after I really looked at it for a while, it started to bug the heck out of me. Kind of the same thing that happens after listening to too much auto-tuned music. The effect is cool the first time you hear it, but after a while, ...
Re: Zillow forces McMansion Hell to delete posts
#270IANAL but we can do some harmless armchair lawyering... The 4 Factors of "fair use"[1]: >1. the purpose and character of your use. Criticism, critique. >2. the nature of the copyrighted work. Published photos used in website blog without ads. Also, the photos were not put into a compilation book to be sold at Amazon. However, Kate Wagner does say in twitter that "this blog is my entire livelihood" so it seems that so…
They're claiming ToS violation.
> They're claiming ToS violation.
They did say that. But the true nature of their actions are intimidating an under-funded adversary who actually does have fair use rights to criticize their work.
Think of the slippery slope- TOS of car, can't complain about defects, TOS of prescription drug, can't say grandpa died while using it as noted in the side effects of the drug. And that's why the courts have shot down these "TOS trumps the First Amendment" cases every time.