#bad architecture
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we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.
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from twitter
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2023.07.17 | dus medienhafen
#fotografie#photography#art photography#original photographer#original photography#architecture#bad architecture
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You can’t get there from here.
via recovering problem child
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What's worse then gendered bathrooms?
Gendered bathrooms on different floors :/
This building was built last year too AND an older building on campus has non-gendered bathrooms so imo there's no excuse!
#trans#transgender#nonbinary#non binary#non-binary#nb#enby#transphobia#bad architecture#architecture
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Okay hear me out an entire house made of the chia pet material, and the grass is continually growing out of it. Like walls, floor, ceiling. heck even furniture. and you would have to continually mow it. forever.
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youtube
Throw the whole house away.
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#wtf#bad architecture#oddcore#roomhole#random rooms#roomcore#rooms#weird aesthetic#weird core#empty room#craigslist#interiors#june 2023
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01.08.2022
"But if I can cheat my heart with the old comfort, that love can be forgotten, is it not better?
Adah Isaacs Menken - Myself
#213of365
#igerspoznan#visitpoznan#viewfrommyoffice#windowview#colorcolourlovers#postcardfrompoland#pocztowkazpolski#instapoznan#poznan360#pathport#poznaninpixels#remonty#bad architecture#works
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Dublin
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You could obviously see where I tried covering up my imperfections. The DOD (Demon of Duluth) is fighting Silicone Sam, an ancient demon that takes the form of a heavily-advanced robot that has gone rogue. The woman that just got out of the shower lives in a paranormal-infested apartment and is unfazed due to dealing with Silicone Sam’s bs many times before. Anyways, although I may suck at art (specifically backgrounds), I suck more at digital art. Perhaps I’ll create comics about the DOD in the future.
#demon oc#superhero#my shit#my oc art#watercolourpainting#superheores#demon art#bad art#bad architecture#oc artwork#superhero oc
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mojo dojo casa house
Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I'm back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I'm sure you've all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.
Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It's just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.
Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.
Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.
It is undeniable that they put the "great" in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.
The island bit is so funny. It's literally so far away it's hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.
Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.
The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.
Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.
Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.
You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it's planned but:
Not really.
Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I'll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today's bonus posts.
Also P.S. - I'm the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.
#architecture#design#mcmansion#mcmansions#ugly houses#interior design#bad architecture#2010s#2019#Illinois
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from cursed architecture
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Architectural atrocity exhibition:
Handsome and dignified mid-century modernist building gets converted to something that looks like post-modern fake melted cake frosting. LOL
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it’s still funny to me that that cuck of Trump’s who’s a reactionary aka the opposite of a change agent would be such a fan of Richard Morris Hunt’s work without even having a goddamn clue like an adult would who the name of the architect was and what he has done.
this baby has never seen the Biltmore with his own eyes, or the statue of liberty’s pedestal, or any of the well-established works he could see by this architect who’s works he so adored and pined for.
this is always a problem with conservative babies… they pine for the past even when there’s a dozen ripe fruits in the present for them to pluck.
it’s a Trumpism-induced social sickness with many Ill effects.
anyhow, I’m only thinking of it because I was reading a Book — Babycuck rarely does that — and this ghastly design for the Vanderbilt family was Richard Morris Hunt
Hey kid if you’re a fan of Hunt’s work in 1893 Chicago
get off your buns, look up his name, look up his surviving architecture and go see it or
at least appreciate it online.
i like some of Hunt, like the Tribune Tower — even tho damn were they fuckin awful conservo // I don’t feel like getting into it all right now as a babysitter
But I don’t like this, which was a ridiculous thing to build in America. Louis Sullivan mocked it as a ‘chateau du Blois’:
Kid it’s clear your idea of good architecture is the same as like the Biltmore estate or the Vanderbilts just some wealth culture American shit maybe you should get away from Wonderbread money or something go leave your parents’ easy cashshelter supply to you behind so you can start to appreciate things for what they actually are and start to be less materialistic and Nazi-friendly
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So I went to an anime convention recently and it was a completely horrible experience from all angles. Too crowded, the tickets were too expensive so I couldn't afford any merch once I was inside, I couldn't find any actual ANIME anywhere, I reserved a spot at a ttrpg only for them to fill the seat and start without me when I was less than 10 minutes late because I was stuck on the bottom floor, the panel schedules weren't posted in one spot but on the doors of each panel room, the parking cost 20 dollars, there was a line for everything, nobody wanted to socialize, my face was always ass-level on the escalators, too loud... Lots of bullshit. However the WORST part of it all was the physical, actual building itself.
FUCK whoever designed this. See those stairs on the left? The bottom 1/3rd of that staircase features steps that are so WIDE that it took 2 footsteps per step. Then it suddenly turns into steps that are stupid crazy narrow and steep for the other 2/3rds.
Look at how wide those steps are towards the bottom! There was a poor lady trying to climb up them in heels, she gave up and took them off halfway. My hip ached after I went down because I didn't have the sense to just crabwalk down. Each step down I landed on my right leg instead of alternating, which isn't a thing you think is important until you're traversing the fucking hell stairs.
Why do the stairs swing out so far? Why is there no wheelchair ramp leading up to that balcony? Inside there was only one set of elevators that I could see, the rest was escalators. This building was designed like a snail trap.
#rant#me complaining#architecture#building#bad architecture#FUCK those stairs#i wasn't warned about the stairs bro
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