Y'all, please don’t post my content on Imgur without any sort of mention source or AT LEAST LETTING ME KNOW. You’re going to force me to have to put big ugly watermarks on all of my McMansion of the Week pictures and do Imgur DMCA takedowns which I honestly loathe. There’s a copyright disclaimer at the bottom of the posts for a reason.
Thanks!
MMH
Earlier this week, Zillow sent an aggressive cease
McMansion Hell & EFF respond to Zillow!
Hello Friends! I just realized that this form is a great way to collect data on and track McMansions all over the world.
By submitting to the Official McMansion Database, you can both add a house you find particularly distasteful to the pool of potential McMansion Hell McMansion of the Week candidates, and help with research in tracking trends in homebuilding, design, and aesthetics across the world.
Your submissions are helping me with my research in understanding the McMansion phenomenon. Thank you for your input!
Note: From now on, emails regarding house requests/submissions will no longer be accepted. If you have a specific photograph you want to share and don’t feel comfortable uploading to an image host, you can still send it to kate@mcmansionhell.com.
Thank you to everyone who offered suggestions to the email problem!
Hello Friends! After some feedback, I’ve decided to go back to my roots and do some less esoteric content than architectural theory (which I will, of course, return to - I’m thinking about starting a not-regular blog or a podcast about it.) The purpose of this series is to give people the vocabulary they need to talk about houses and architecture in general!
I don’t know if y’all know this but there’s a lot of different parts and styles of architecture. Everything in architecture has a name, whether it’s ornament, architectural styles, or stuff like parts of a roof - either way, we should all be empowered to talk about architecture.
The good news is we all already know quite a bit about architecture.
Architecture speaks to us through personal experience. By looking at it long enough, you start to get a feel for it. Even amateurs can tell whether or not a house is new or old, even when the exterior has been significantly remodeled. Something just tells us - that’s an old house, or that’s a new house. The key to dating a house is to be able to pick out those codifiers - sometimes its a material (vinyl siding) or an architectural element such as window or dormer.
Most of us can identify a house that fits the labels “Victorian,” “Colonial,” or “Modern.” That’s not so far off from the truth - it’s a matter of narrowing it down, being able to say that Victorian usually codifies a type of ornate house from the 19th century, or a new house built in what is more specifically called the Queen Anne style. Colonial has been a type of house since, well, the colonies - but there’s a big difference between a 2005 colonial and a 1804 colonial. Not to mention the myriad differences between Spanish, Dutch, or English subtypes.
Because I don’t want to wait until next week to get this started, I’ll be posting the first article in this series on Friday - it’ll be about the Minimal Traditional style and how it has manifested itself in housing since the 1920s!
I hope you all enjoy this new series as much as I will!
