Hello everyone. I am late, but I hope to make up with what may be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s so great it’s going to give me nightmares for the next three weeks. I had a dream once in the 5th grade that I went swimming with Lemony Snicket in a black pond that led to a furnace instead of a waterfall. That is perhaps the only scary dream I can remember verbatim, until now.
Before I show you this house, I need to introduce with what the Realtor®™ has to say:
When a Realtor™® writes a description with not a single word in all caps, you know something is very, very wrong.
I want to put a disclaimer here: of all the houses I’ve ever done, this is the only one that’s had less than 10 days on Zillow. Since I am more terrified of realtors than Aunt Josephine, I would like to take the time to articulate my copyright disclaimer before anyone dare pull the trigger on this bad-boy.
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Now back to business.
Our charmer is a 5 bed, 4 bath stunner built in 1988.
wait we need to go deeper
We are literally looking at a trash house. The front door is a sickly coo-coo clock articulated in dung. Several of the windows are crooked. I don’t know if that can properly described as a frieze along the roofline, as I’m not an expert in trash classicism.
The Lawyer Foyer
Do you know how hard it is to refrain from just talking about adult entertainment with this house? This house has its own obscenity laws.
The Living Thing
Pretty sure the floor is actually lava in that next room.
Dining Room?
Yeah, this is about the level of discomfort I felt going to my first college party. Probably stickier though.
The Kitchen
Okay, I have lived in some grody apartments over the years, but nothing has had as much grode as this house costing around half a million dollars. I’m having some crippling self-doubt about my upward mobility these days.
Bathroom 1
Maybe it was summer camp when they talked about Athlete’s foot. Puberty has permanently blocked out my memory.
Bedroom 1
Am I too old to use smh?
Bathroom 2
What’s unsettling about the toilet? I can’t tell what that stain is under the lid nor can I assume what kind of people would purchase such a device.
Bedroom 2
God, you know someone died in there. Also, is it just me or could this image replaced with some other text totally be the cover of a really bad shoegaze album c.1996?
Things men could put in those drawers: - half-used pomade tins - assorted toothbrushes - needlessly gendered jokes about men by women
Bar
***SCREEEE** “AGENT MILLER WE HAVE A ***SCREEEE*** 187 I REPEAT A 187 VICTIM IS 5′4″ AROUND 120 POUNDS NO SIGN OF STRUGGLE”
***SCREEEE*** “I HEAR YOU AGENT BRODEN I’M ON MY WAY WITH MY CONVENIENTLY MULTIRACIAL TEAM AND CANINE TEN-FOUR”
***gets to crime scene***
“INSTANT crime test is positive for roofies. Who would do such a thing to such a promising young girl?????stares at camera somberly” “I don’t know sensitive but strong female agent but we’ll get to the bottom of it.” PULLS OUT HYPER-IPAD. you know what? this joke is over, I’m done.
Finally, the rear elevation:
the poetic justice is oozing from the walls.
Well, that does it for California. I know I said I was going to do a double feature. I know I said it with my own keyboard. But here is the truth, friends: I got off the bus back from North Carolina at 5PM. I am exhausted, and honestly, a little :(. I’m excited to get to STRAYA tomorrow, despite the :(. I want to move there.
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Oh boy are y’all in for a treat this week. I hope y’all like words because there are quite a few in this post. You’ve probably seen me refer to Postmodernism at least once, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I pretty frequentlygarbage post about it.
Of all the styles in architectural history, none has become as ubiquitous in our suburban landscape as Postmodernism, later called PoMo, for short. But what is it? How did it get here? Most importantly, Why do I care?
BECAUSE POSTMODERNISM IS DANK AS HELL:
M2 Tokyo, Kengo Kuma, 1991 (Photo: flickr/wakiii)
But before we get to this dankness, we have to talk…
A wee bit about Modernism
For most of the 20th century, modernismdominated architecture. It’s focus on design efficiency and the lack or absence of ornamentation (ornament was for the Bourgeoisie) was eagerly adopted and practiced by architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius who were fascinated with the technological advancements of the early 20th century, specifically, the factory.
Le Corbusier, the French-Swiss architect who famously said that a house is, “a machine for living in,” and his contemporaries were entranced both by the forms of industrial structures and their streamlined efficiency, as well as by the new materials of the modern day: steel and reinforced concrete.
Don’t worry, I’ll be doing a post all about Modernism (which is my soapbox bae) so I don’t want to spend too much time here, but it’s the starting point of Postmodernism, so it’s, y’know, worth a mention.
Here’s the thing about Modernism: it dominated architecture practiced by architects for almost a century, but made up only a small (well-documented and beloved) part of residential architecture built during its reign.
The thing is, the people who toiled their lives away in the factories absolutely DID NOT want to go home to a house that looked like the factory.
However, traditional architecture quickly (by the mid-forties) became a huge faux-pas in the practice of architects and was omitted from architectural education. In addition an exploding population that now needed housing (the Modernists thought it was a great idea to put them in high rises and we all know how well that turned out) emerged that wanted said housing to look like the centuries-old conception of home (aka a box with a door, windows, and topped with a triangle hat).
The combination of these factors led to developers sweeping in (as architects chilled in the Modernism echo chamber), and, lo and behold, we ended up with places like this:
While the modernists were practicing modernism, the rest of us were voraciously exploding out into the wilderness with our cars and highways and motels and suburbs and shopping centers and other ‘vulgar’ pursuits. And nothing communicated said vulgar pursuits better than the booming city of Las Vegas.
Over the first half of the 20th century, the field of architecture was more than a little disconnected from the general public, and without their guidance, the suburban and commercial world developed an aesthetic language all their own.
In the late 1960s, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, took a group of students from Venturi’s studio at the Yale School of Architecture on a long trip to Las Vegas.
What happened to Venturi & co. in Vegas definitely didn’t stay in Vegas, and architecture would never be the same.
Learning from Las Vegas: The Stirrings of Postmodern Architecture
Venturi & co. set out to document the landscape of the largest and gaudiest strip in the country and came out with, yes, a study of a city and its forms, but more importantly a manifesto in two parts: first, that modern architecture is ignorant of what most people want, and what most people want is worth studying, and secondly, that the past has a place in present architecture, and that ornament in architecture has meaning, is intrinsically symbolic, and can be used communicate ideas.
The underlying foundation of Learning from Las Vegas is that architecture isboth a space and a symbol, and that modern architects abandoned the symbol in favor of the space, and in doing such made the space itself a symbol, AKA:
He contrasts this to the concept of the decorated shed where the space and structure are at the service of the program (the intended use or function of a building), and the ornament is applied independently of those things.
TL;DR: The duck is a building that is a symbol, the decorated shed is the building that applies symbols. Venturi argues that the history of architecture is the history of ornament, and after this brief deviation of modernism, ornament and its symbolism is something to which we should return.
The Expression of an Idea: Postmodernism in Action
Needless to say, Venturi & Co. telling the whole world of architecture “up yours” went about as well as you’d expect. But after a bit of fighting, a school of architects emerged and began working in this new style, a style that combined the symbolism of the past with the forms of the present.
The Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi (1964) [Photo: Wikipedia] takes the traditional symbolism or idea of the house as a box with a gabled roof and a front door flanked by windows, and executes it in a new context - with new materials, minimal lines (hence the integration of the modern) and a bit of architectural irony and humor (e.g. the roofline above the front door is imitating a broken pediment, like one that is often found above a front door)
It quickly gained public popularity in the 80s and 90s and, thus, transformed into PoMo. (For the curious, this dichotomy between artistic Postmodernism and corporate/neoliberal PoMo is explained at length by Charles Jencks, the intensely detailed taxonomist of the movement, in his 2011 book The Story of Postmodernism.)
From Postmodernism to PoMo
In 1984, this broken pediment architectural pun skyscraper by Philip Johnson went up in New York and became the most public symbol (and triumph/downfall) of Postmodernism:
Let’s just say developers loved it. Through developers looking for a big ROI, the great, elegant glass box of modernism, was transformed through said developers into cheap, soulless office boxes, forgettable skyscrapers, and loathed public housing. Their shoddy modernist jobs were, by the 80s, becoming rather passé and unpopular. Thank gawd the Sony Building came along, the developers thought.
AND SO, the original spirit of Postmodernism, lovable, colorful, nostalgic for most of my readers and myself:
WAS NOW, through developers seeking a quick ROI, transformed into:
So, let me get this straight:
This is the crux of the failure of PoMo: Postmodernism was about using architectural ornament within a modern contextbecause we have emotional connections and connotations to architectural ornament. These buildings were about saying through ornament “I AM A HOUSE” or “I AM A BANK” mixed, of course, with a bit of clever architectural humor.
However, this was also the 80s & 90s and the global corporation ruled all, and rather than using the clever language of Postmodernism, PoMo was global corporations saying architecturally: “WORK IS YOUR HOME” or “THE MALL IS YOUR HOME” or “DOLLAR GENERAL IS YOUR HOME.”
That dull and mundane office block? Now it’s an insulting, dull, and mundane office block with a gable and Palladian windows.
Remember those people at the beginning of this post who didn’t want to live in modernist houses that looked like the factories they toiled away at?
We have no choice but to live in houses that look like our office blocks, because our office blocks took the architectural symbols of our houses. And, in response, our houses took the vomited up architectural symbols from their corporate remixes, because residential architecture almost always imitates the public architecture of the time.
Now, I’m not saying McMansions are a product of Postmodernism, or that they are themselves Postmodern architecture, because neither is true. It’s more of a coincidence than anything else that they borrowed certain tropes from the PoMo office tower and integrated them into features like the two-story entryway with the huge transom window.
So what did we learn from this endeavor?
Not much. And, much to Venturi’s chagrin, after this brief period of badly decorated sheds, architecture went right back to making, big, expensiveducks.
BONUS: here’s a pic of me speaking at TEDxMidAtlantic about how much I love buildings and want to encourage others to love buildings as much as I do:
That’s it for PoMo, friends! I’ll see you Thursday with a Dank Southern Special, so stay tuned.
Every once in a while, I discover an extraordinarily special place. And by special I mean hideous. Bergen County, New Jersey is that place. This will not be the first, nor the last time this county will show up on this blog, as its houses and I have a long working relationship ahead of us.
So where to start? I used this house as an example in another post before (can’t remember which one) but I knew from the first time I saw it, that I needed to dive deeper.
Man, where to start. First of all, the exterior of this house appears to be screaming in two different ways: either the two dormers, or the two “sidelight” windows are the eyes, with the door being the agape mouth. With the absurd windows on the front facade, the silly fake quoins, and the pseudo-Palladian elements scattered all over the place, I have a feeling this place is going to go down in McMansionHell history as a Certified Dank™ Legend.
This house (built in 1988 as we will all soon see) has seven bedrooms and six bathrooms, and is currently retailing for almost 3.5 million dollars.
By far, my favorite McMansions are the ones that are like time capsules. You open the obnoxiously large front door and step into the obnoxiously large entryway and are instantly transported into another era.
In this case, that era is 1988.
Front Entryway
My favorite part about the 80s was how they axed all of the environmental reforms made in the 70s while simultaneously obsessing over having as many house plants as possible.
Living Room (1 of 2)
At least piano makers are thankful that their art is being funded by those who buy large instruments as symbols of wealth.
Study
Fake book subjects commonly include: - Business - Law - Classic Literature
Dining Room (1 of 2)
Seriously I don’t think you guys are prepared for what you’re about to see.
This has to be one of the best worst vintage 80s rooms I’ve ever seen.
Dining Room (2 of 2)
Those poor plants, working like slaves for the man.
The Kitchen!
Who thought that orange was a remotely good idea?? Spoilers: it was probs HGTV.
Living Room (2 of 2)
Luckily for the homeowner, many elements from this room (the furniture and wall color) are coming back in style again, as dark green is all the rage this year apparently.
Master Suite (Part 1)
Shocked that the drapes don’t have the same pattern as the wallpaper.
Master Suite (Part 2)
P sure the hyper-femininity of the 80s and early 90s were what led to the creation of the ManCave during the dawn of the 21st century.
Master Bathroom
This bathroom almost looks like it came out of a Robert A.M. Stern coffee table book from the late 80s. Whoever did this interior was a licensed interior designer. I’m pretty sure those vanities are custom.
On to the last room of our tour! (Somehow there weren’t pictures of the other 6 bedrooms or the other 5 baths…)
The Basement
Seriously the mirrored door is hella choice.
Fortunately, our tour ends on a positive note this week, as the rear of this house actually makes some architectural sense:
Rear Exterior
Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that tour as much as I did. I love these time capsule houses - you can learn a lot from studying the design trends of the past; most notably, when they’re coming back.
Stay tuned for this Sunday’s special post, McMansionHell from A to Z (Part Two) and, of course, next week’s dank McMansion!
Like this post? Want to see more like it and get behind the scenes access to everything McMansionHell? Consider supporting me on Patreon!
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Zillow.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
