What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?
This conversation has gone in a very interesting direction. It&#x27;s true that on one level the perspective of this blog author corresponds to a sort of class-based tutting of the nouveau riche, but on another level I can&#x27;t shake the feeling that he is pointing to something that&#x27;s real.<p>I have much more experience doing web design (some) than I do evaluating architecture (none). The principles he is describing apply in a similar manner to web design, and they are similarly hard to articulate. When you see a block of text without enough space between paragraphs, you know it doesn&#x27;t have enough space, even though you would be hard-pressed to provide an objective reason why a paragraph needs 20 px vs. 5 px vs. 100px vs. 500px. Only one of those distances feels right, and it has almost nothing to do with how much vertical space is available on your screen or the relative ease of reading paragraphs with that precise distance between them.<p>Similarly, you can feel a wrongness when a similar visual element is repeated, but without consistency, like a second text box that has a grey that is just slightly bluer than the last text box, even though they contain text of the same type at the same level of semantic importance. That is the equivalent of including windows with wooden shutters, and a set of windows with blinds, and a set of bay windows on the same facade. (For a visual-design example of his masses and voids principle, see the BeOS UI window, but I think this is the weakest of his principles)<p>It is easy to be a contrarian and say &quot;this guy is wrong, all of this is subjective,&quot; but I think that contrariness is more wrong than right. The best functional (not purely artistic) designs, whether they are web designs or architectural designs, hold to a set of quasi-universal aesthetic standards, including balance (symmetry or balanced asymmetry), repetition (consistency in web development terms, repeated elements in musical terms), and appropriate blank space. I suspect that these core principles reflect aspects of human cognition that are not subject to pure subjectivity.<p>I think if you were designing from first aesthetic principles, you would probably retain balance and thematic cohesiveness (repetition). What you would lose is the trappings of particular eras, like roman columns or those shutter windows. Even if your house was based on a geodesic dome you&#x27;d want it to have a certain proportionality and space between visual elements. The problem with McMansions is that they take ONLY those trappings, and discard the principles, and that&#x27;s what this article should really be about. The reason for this is obvious: the uneducated consumer sees only the trappings, because they are concrete and obvious, thus easy to evaluate. They are associated in the minds of buyers with high class, and so they seem high class in this particular instance.