281–290 of 388 posts
I 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…
So I don't get it. This girl sounds really, really petty, and the 99pi episode is probably their worst. So what if someone wants to build a huge house? How is that harming anyone else? If I were wealthy I would totally build a McMansion because I want it, I like it, and I would love to live in it. Who cares?
> So what if someone wants to build a huge house? They are literally building semi-permanent garbage on the face of our only inhabitable planet.
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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?
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I don't see any pretence, I really don't.
You don't see any pretentiousness in driving around judging a bunch of people on their houses and just ragging on how terrible they are? Really? You might want to look harder.
Remembering that is YOUR responsibility, and if a bunch of people seem to prefer the critic's point of view and it clashes with yours… perhaps you have things to learn, even from the arrogant. :)
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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 multipl…
Isn't that practically one of the defining characteristics of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses?
I 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…
I grew up in Northern Virginia among these McMansions, and frankly I don't buy the elitism angle. These folks have a lot of money (top 5% at least, if not even top 1%) and are among the best educated in the country. And these aren't dwellings driven by the need for functionality. It's not like people here have big families they need to house (empty nesters can afford them more readily than people with families!). The…
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"If you can't ridicule them for lacking taste you're basically saying that taste doesn't exist and everything is always subjective." Or perhaps you're against ridicule in general. Why is it your problem what sort of houses other people live in?
If they're living on the other side of the country, I don't care. If they're knocking down perfectly fine, correctly-scaled houses in my neighborhood in order to build huge monstrosities that parasitize the aesthetic niceness of the neighborhood that is due in large part to correctly-sized and shaped houses then I get upset. Example happening in my town: builder buys a normal-sized house on a large lot for $800K. Kno…
What else did you think anyone meant by NIMBY?
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The guest on that article and the blog author are the same person. How can you "understand that mcmansions are bad architecture" and also say "the whole thing stank of classist elitism"? The blog points fun at clearly bad buildings. Fake columns, unnecessary rooms, poor placement of re-used furniture, etc. Sarcasm is funny. The blog is sarcastic in nature. What's wrong with that?
> The blog is sarcastic in nature. What's wrong with that? It's punching down: the builders/purchasers didn't know/care how to make architecturally sophisticated dwellings, which is no reason to make fun of someone. The commentary applies equally-well to pre-fab apartments, shotgun shacks, suburban housing developments, etc. It's poorly-targeted. It's also elitist a.f. "Look at these gauche bungalows, drawn up no dou…
That's a false equivalence. Shotgun shacks and suburban housing developments aren't trying to be something they're not. And that is why you don't find ironic commentary like this directed at them.
When you put on airs, you get cut down. Is that mean? Probably. Sometimes it's also appropriate.
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> 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://life…
If you have a lot of different things being cooked, you want the brigade system with individuals' prep, holding, and cooking areas distinct and the flow across their space minimized. That includes little things like having squeeze bottles of water at their station so they don't have to access a sink to add liquid to something and all the dishes they need to plate what they're working on. If you have labor intensive assembly of a few things, you want assembly line, and then it's more important to have lots of contiguous, double deep counter space so you can stage materials for each step and slide things along. For a brigade system, you usually have an aisle wide enough for someone to carry a hot pan past you while you're working without having to worry about bumping into you if you don't suddenly lurch backwards. Oh, and somewhere to step out of the zone where you have to be on alert for things like that. I've seen that both with one sided prep areas with eight feet or so to the other wall so you can physically back out of the line, or a four foot aisle and walking down the line to the storage freezers (which people aren't going into constantly once everything is prepped) to step away.
In either case, finished materials need to be staged to be removed from the kitchen, and a parallel path needs to bring dishes back without getting in path of the cooks.
But back to the primary topic, most of the kitchens I've seen in houses simply are not functional. When we were house hunting a few years ago I would say half the kitchens were laid out where, due to other constraints of the house, they could not be remodeled into something that wasn't a pain to work in. It's fine to have to cook in some place that's a pain once in a while, but in your own home? Yeesh.
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I don't see any pretence, I really don't.
You don't see any pretentiousness in driving around judging a bunch of people on their houses and just ragging on how terrible they are? Really? You might want to look harder.
I mean, she even designed a shirt that says: "Judge Houses Not People." https://www.zazzle.com/judge_houses_not_people_shirt-2351054...