Howdy Folks! We’re continuing our out-of-order-for-dramatic-effect tour of the 50 States of McMansion Hell today with perhaps one of the most underrated McMansion counties in the country: Waukesha County, Wisconsin. These houses were so bizarre it was hard to choose just one to do a takedown of. So, without further ado…
#10: Doom McGloom
This 2002 estate, thanks to the clever machinations of whoever took these photographs, looks less like an enticing investment property and more like a prime candidate for the Chernobyl ripoff set in America that has 2 stars and is only available on Amazon Prime.
#9: Headquarters of Tree-Haters Anonymous
This 2004 manse is $1.4 million dollars and yet its creators couldn’t afford more than a single (invasive!) tree. I don’t know what kind of sociopath wakes up in the morning and actively hates everything taller than a malnourished shrub. Whoever they are, this is certainly the house for them.
#8: Roofer’s Paradise
A post-recession 2011 McMansion, this house clearly didn’t learn anything from the recent past. With many McMansions, I can conceive of ways to improve them to make them better. With this house, I simply do not know how to rectify its main problem: it’s, like, 90% roof. In my head I refer to houses like this as “turtle houses” but frankly this does a disservice to the noble turtle.
#7: Haunted Geometry
This house was built in 2014, a time when people should definitely have known better. Its inclusion in this list is solely due to the absolutely bizarre geometry of its roof, a kind of geometry formerly unknown to mathematics until this time. Bonus points for the continued animosity to trees found in the wealthy populous of this county.
#6: McEscher
Nothing about this house makes sense. I’m serious. I’ve looked at it from several different angles and have yet to perceive any coherent spatial logic to how it comes together. This is house is an SCP. It’s an X-Files case. House of Leaves was actually based on this house. It’s an Escherian nightmare. 0/10 would not go inside even if you paid me.
#5: Obligatory Beigehaus
You know when a bad stand up comedian tells a joke that just keeps going way too long? The audience is like, okay, we get it, you need therapy, but he (and it’s always a he) just keeps going on and on. Well, this is the house equivalent of that.
#4: House of Lumps
Whoever built this house was utterly incapable of picturing in their minds eye what a house should look like. The very conception of a house is foreign to them. They have never seen a children’s book with houses in it. They probably didn’t even have a childhood.
#3: Play-doh Playhouse
This house made it so far in the countdown because it is, frankly, weird. I don’t know why it is painted the color of jaundice, or why they have transformed every gable into a hollow cavity longing for death. Lots of things are happening here, though none of them could appropriately be called “architecture.”
#2: Farmhouse Freak
Let your eyes glaze over as you look at this “farmhouse” - the more you look at it the less sense it makes. What are they farming, you ask? Why, turf grass of course! Bonus points for this image in which the house appears through a haze of ozone or something.
And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for…
#1: Corinthian Catastrophe
It’s one thing to have oversized Corinthian columns on your absurd McManse, but it’s a whole new level of extra to spray paint the capitals gold. This house takes all the elements found in the other houses (treeless sociopathy, turret lust, garish mismatched windows, foam) and ramps it up to 11, which is why it earns the number one slot in the county. Also, as a bonus, I find it incredibly funny that they embossed the letter “C” everywhere. I guess whoever buys it either has to have a name starting with C or has their work cut out for them. The C represents the grade they got in home design class.
Anyways, that’s it for Wisconsin, folks! Stay tuned for a special essay on whether or not brutalism is good, as well as the next installment of the 50 States: Wyoming. Have a great weekend.
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No single-family home (besides, perhaps, the ranch or the McMansion) is as instantly recognizable as the American Foursquare. Named both for its boxy exterior as well as its neat, cubic interior plan, American Foursquares were trademarks of early suburban domesticity beginning around the 1890s, remaining relatively popular until the 1920s when they were overtaken in popularity by the smaller, more economical Minimal Traditional style.
The Foursquare is notable for being one of the first affordable, middle-class home types to feature both electricity and a standard sink-toilet-bath bathroom, amenities previously afforded only to the elite.
Early, Highly ornamental Foursquare home with many transitional Queen Anne-style details. From Lambert’s Book of Suburban Architecture, 1894. Public Domain.
Foursquares are found most commonly in first and second generation suburbs. The archetypal Foursquare features a full-width front porch, a low-pitched hipped roof, and one or more dormers (also usually hipped.)
Typical American Foursquare from a 1915 Montgomery Ward Homes catalog. 1915. Public Domain.
The Foursquare is both a type of plan and a distinct building “style” (or form), which can lead to confusion if one wants to identify a Foursquare by exterior details alone. For this reason, front-gabled “foursquares”, while relatively common, are usually misidentified, even though their plans may be identical to their hipped-roofed counterparts.
A front-gabled home from the same Montgomery Ward 1915 catalog with a Foursquare interior plan. Public Domain.
Plan
The most common Foursquare plan features four main rooms on both floors. The front two rooms are usually an entryway (or hall), with a staircase leading to the upper floors, and a living room or parlor. Later examples often place the staircase between the entrance hall and the kitchen, as seen in the first Montgomery Ward example. The second story most commonly has a central hall, three or four bedrooms, and a bathroom.
1918 Sears Catalog showing a typical American Foursquare plan. Public Domain.
Architectural Style
The Foursquare was a versatile form, easily well-adapted to many different styles of architectural detail. Most Foursquares owned by working-class folks were plain, with little to no ornate detailing. More lush examples feature details from contemporary architectural movements, especially the Craftsman and Prairie styles.
A plain, relatively unadorned Foursquare from a 1916 Gordon Van Tine catalog. Public Domain.
The Langston: A Craftsman-styled Foursquare from the 1918 Sears Catalog. Note the low pitched roof, extended eaves with exposed rafters, and the ornate porch columns. Public Domain.
The Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries, such as Walter Burley Griffin, was very influential on Foursquare houses, particularly in the Midwest. (Wright himself drew up plans for affordable prefabricated houses, his American System-Built Homes.)
Prairie Style: Walter Burley Griffen, Gauler Twin Houses, prototypes for speculative houses built for developer John Gauler. Chicago, IL (1908.) Photo by IvoShandor (CC BY 3.0)
Many features of the common Foursquare borrow from the Prairie style, including their low-pitched hipped rooflines, relatively modern, economical form, and wide, boxed eaves.
Three heavily Prairie-influenced Foursquares from a 1916 Gordon van Tine catalog. Note the low-pitched rooflines, and extended boxed eaves.
From Left to Right: note the massive piers and material choice on House 1; on House 2, the playful upturned eaves (common in 1890s Prairie style houses, such as the Edward R. Hills House by Frank Lloyd Wright); House 3 exhibits an explicitly Prairie style side-porch and a more streamlined form with its absence of dormers.)
The End of Foursquares
The American Foursquare remained popular for almost four decades, providing an economical, thoughtfully designed home for America’s middle-class families. Its contemporary, the bungalow, would eventually overtake it in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s. The Foursquare was one of the last popular house types to feature a mostly closed floorplan.
The Great Depression halted homebuilding, and the homes that were built at the time were much smaller out of financial necessity, hence the dawn of the small Minimal Traditional houses of the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
While the Craftsman bungalow has seen a resurgence in popularity as an architectural form in the last decade, the Foursquare, despite its economical allocation of space suitable for larger families, has yet to see a revival.
Foursquares were popular in first and second generation suburbs because they enabled families to build more house on a smaller lot. Their square form was as much a stylistic choice as it was a result of economical construction and economical structural savviness. Lot size, which increased as people moved further and further away from the center, became (and remains) less of a constraint, which is perhaps why the Foursquare hasn’t had the same resurgence as the more-sprawling bungalow.
Still, existing Foursquares have proven to be enjoyable houses for those who live in them, and continue to maintain their position as one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable forms of the American home.
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Hello Friends! Sorry about the drama this week. Back to our regularly scheduled content!
Last week’s installment left us wondering: If architectural style isn’t going to help us identify common houses, what will?
In the world of vernacular architecture, floor plans are perhaps one of the single greatest ways to differentiate and identify certain types of houses for a number of reasons:
1) While the outside of some houses may look similar or exactly the same, their internal floor plans can be completely different, and vice versa!
2) There’s a clear historical progression of the number of rooms in a house and their various uses, which can be helpful in (roughly) determining the age of a house.
3) It’s possible to identify many floor plans from reading the exterior of a house - it just takes some practice!
The good news about floor plans is that a lot of our architectural vocabulary when talking about everyday houses already revolves around floor plans - we’re just not often aware of it. For example, a four-square house is called such because, well, it usually has four rooms per floor.
Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain
Alas, not all houses that look alike have the same floor plan! This is where homebuilding trends and regional differences come into play. For example, here is a four-square house that looks similar to the one above, but has a totally different floor plan!
Radford Homes 1909, via Archive.org. Public Domain.
In addition, houses that look relatively different from each other can have very similar floor plans. Taking the example of our first house, here is a house that looks different from it but has a very similar internal layout!
Sterling Homes, 1916. Via Archive.org. Public Domain.
As we can see, unlike architectural styles, floor plans offer a certain cohesion to different everyday houses from similar time periods.
We’re going to look at different floor plan typologies in-depth in other posts in this series, but in order to do so, an overview is needed.
Technology, Sociology, and the Layout of Houses
Before the Second Industrial Revolution, the layouts of most everyday houses were relatively simple, with a limited number of rooms and room functions. These pre-industrial houses are what most definitions of “vernacular” architecture refer to, emphasizing the heavily localized nature of their construction, entirely reliant on regional builders and their aesthetics, as well as material factors such as distribution of materials, types of financing, and land development/use. (Hubka 2013, 41; Gottfried and Jennings 2009, 9)
It’s important to note that regional differences and the design traditions of local builders are still extremely important today when examining common houses. However, it’s also important to understand that the industrialization of homebuilding and the housing market beginning in the late 19th century increasingly homogenized these design traditions and the role of local builders became developing nuanced regional traditions within a nationalized design fabric rather than the dominant determinants of housing forms. (Hubka 2013, 41)
There is a common misconception that houses got smaller as the 20th century moved forward. This is only true when talking about the houses of the elite, which indeed shrunk after certain sociological changes, such as the abolition of slavery and the reduction of live-in servants in the post-Victorian era.
The industrialization of national housing types ultimately brought down the costs of building homes with certain types of features. Several housing features that were previously accessible only to the upper classes such as modern bathroom and kitchen fixtures, dining rooms, closets, front porches, and larger, more private bedrooms became, through mass production, accessible to the middle and working class. For these classes, the average home sized actually increased in comparison to their previous dwellings. (Hubka 2013, 27)
Changing Patterns in Room Layouts and Uses
Pre-Railroad, Pre-Industrialization
Prior to industrialization (McAlester: pre-1850-1890), most working class houses were centered around the kitchen, with one or two other rooms for living, sleeping, and working.
1800s cottage in Custer Co., Nebraska. Image via Library of Congress. Public Domain.
One-room-deep (aka hall-and-parlor or “I” house plans) plans demonstrate the sparseness of these early work and kitchen-centric houses. At this time, many people often worked within their homes, or their homes were located on the premises of where they worked, such as sharecroppers’ cottages.
These early houses did not have the technological luxuries of today such as kitchen appliances or bathrooms. Each room had more than one purpose (Hubka 2013, 68).
Expansion of Industrialization
During the expansion of the railroads and the transition into industrialization (Hubka: 1860-1930; McAlester: 1850-1920), working and middle class houses developed three areas of domesticity: kitchen, living, and bedroom(s). The total number of rooms was increased from 1-3 to 3-5. The houses built for workers by the industries they worked for tended to be of this model. Below is a 1903 Radford prototype:
A more common subtype was the two-room-deep four-box (one-story four-square), as seen in this 1910 Aladdin catalog example:
At this time, the threshold between working and middle class houses was whether or not they had an internal bathroom or other utility spaces such as pantries or closets. At this time, thanks to the railroads and other technological developments, work began to be separated from the home; that is, many families began that familiar ritual known as the commute.
The Modern Era (post 1900)
Further improvements in homebuilding technology at the turn of the 20th century transformed the early industrial-era houses into our contemporary ideas of middle class domesticity that still exist today. House size increased from 3-5 to 5-8 rooms, with increasingly specified room types and modern utilities. By this time, thanks to the invention of the streetcar and later the automobile, almost all work was separated from the home as first and second generation suburbs flourished.
The bungalow was the first types of houses developed during this time, and its layout continues to be influential today:
At this time, specialized hobby rooms such as studies and sewing rooms began to appear in upper-middle class homes. This increasingly specific room use will soon devolve into contemporary tropes such as formal vs informal living rooms, game rooms, breakfast nooks, and laundry rooms.
(We know that this devolves into McMansion tropes as well - theatre rooms, anyone?)
That’s it for this week’s Looking Around! In our next installment, we’ll examine early industrialized home plans in more detail. Be sure to stay tuned for the Mississippi McMansion of the Week on Thursday!
If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!Also JUST A HEADS UP - I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content on Patreon!
Carter, Thomas, and Elizabeth C. Cromley. Invitation to vernacular architecture: a guide to the study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008.
Gottfried, Herbert, and Jan Jennings. American vernacular buildings and interiors 1870-1960. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.
Hubka, Thomas C. Houses without names: architectural nomenclature and the classification of Americas common houses. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.
McAlester, Virginia, and A. Lee McAlester. A field guide to American houses: the definitive guide to identifying and understanding Americas domestic architecture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
