Hello Friends! 2016 is almost over - but fear not! It was a really boring year for interior design - the most boring of the decade, in my humble opinion. (to be fair, nothing can top 2015′s Memphis-Milano revival but w/e)
I have scoured through this year’s HGTV, House Beautiful, and Elle Decor magazines to put together the most generic rooms ever a la 2k16.
Kitchens
Traditional White Kitchen™
Man, 2016 was a great year for nothing except for maybe white kitchens, which dominated the scene. Over 54% of all kitchens observed in popular magazines were white kitchens. Anyone who has ever dealt with small children understands their fatal flaw. Still, the white kitchen is timeless.
The Sleek Modern® Kitchen
We seemed to have exited the Mid-Century modern craze that dominated 2015, replacing it with a more pared-down modernism. Also the non-granite countertop saw a huge push through in 2016! This is positive, because we have had over 15 years of granite obsession.
Funky Eclectic Kitchen™
I never want to hear the word ‘eclectic’ again. It’s been a stand in for “add random clutter to your life” for an entire year. Also be sure to paint all of your wood surfaces even though it is irreversible and difficult to maintain!
Dining Rooms
The Fun and Eclectic Dinette
Guess what is in? NOT MATCHING. If you match anything ever, get BACK TO 2015!
SLEEK COOL AND METALLIC DINING ROOM
Every restaurant in North Carolina has these chairs.
Living Room
Remember: you have to have some sort of gray on your wall or you’re probably a fascist or something.
Bathrooms
Pared-Down 40s Revival Bathroom
Everything has to be white - except for the tile floor which has to be some variant of dark blue and also vaguely Moroccan/Arabic in aesthetic because it’s 2016.
ALL NATURAL WOOD BATHROOM
I saw this idea in so many magazines, probably because shiplap is so popular (apparently it’s the 30s) - gluing wood floor to your walls. It’s very very dark.
WEALTHY POTTERY-BARN TEEN GIRL ROOM
girls follow the trendz and this is no exception.
WEALTHY POTTERY BARN YOUNG GIRL ROOM
The metal-frame beds are back in style and in full force. Also chandeliers in bedrooms and MIRRORED FURNITURE.
Boy’s Room
People who appreciate Scandinavian-inspired design: - me (x) kids
That’s it for the trends! And yes, I did design all of these rooms in Roomstyler just for this post. It was very arduous. Say thank you.
Before I get any “but actually this is nice” emails, I’m an equal opportunity hater here, just for fairness. I like a lot of the trends myself (I won’t say which ones out of fairness). I did my best in these designs to streamline a whole year’s worth of magazines before I cut them apart into collages.
Stay tuned for Thursday’s McMansion of the Week in Arkansas, and for Sunday’s Best and Worst of McMansionHell retrospective!
Friends, I have seen some depressing houses in my short lifetime, but I have to say, this Howard County estate is seriously up there.
Built in 1999, this Certified Dank™ McMansion is a beaut, boasting 5 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms and is selling for just under $900,000. This house is especially unique in that it has to be the epitome of lazy and cheap construction techniques featuring various crimes against the field of architecture.
The Stunted Foyer
I have so many questions regarding this space. So, so many. Rarely do I find myself completely stumped by architecture not designed by Frank Gehry, but it seems that I have met my match. I have forgone commentary in order to simply ask questions:
The Sad Sitting Room
Perhaps a seasoned architect can explain to me what is going on with this window, because my books have nothing.
The Sad Dining Room
Beige is a noun, an adjective, and now an emotion expressing various degrees of nihilism!
Very, Very, Sad Kitchen
(insert joke about sad frog hate speech claims conforming to your political beliefs)
Sad Dining Nook
(Check out that wholesomeness in the bottom-right corner! :) :) ) Also being smack dab in the white southern middle class, I spent a lot of time with mom at Walmart in 1999, and I’ve seen some things (or maybe not - lots of it was camouflage patterned)
The Not-Great Room
why not put the clock further up?? also i can only be wholesome once per post. the bottom-right corner has returned to nihilism jokes.
The Loneliest Wall in Existence: A Holiday Story by McMansion Hell “Once upon a time there was a sad, lonely beige wall. The wall was not actually lonely - instead, the loneliness of the author is being projected onto the wall as a literary device walls aren’t sentient the end”
Master Bedroom
Are y’all too young to know about Fried Green Tomatoes? Basically it’s one of the quintessential Southern Middle-Aged Mom films, along with Steel Magnolias and Gone With the Wind.
Also I just remembered - I need to clean out my tax fraud drawer.
Master Bathroom
I know Freud would have a field day with these people who build bathrooms inside their bathrooms just for their toilet.
Sad Bedroom One
Darryn now works at K-Mart, rides BMX bikes illegally on federal roads, and vapes.
Sad Bedroom Two
I was trying to decide between Confucius and Mark Twain, but Confucius had his own memes way back in the day.
“I know honey, let’s finish the basement so your mom can have a place to stay!” “Sounds great, honey!” (*rubs hands together menacingly*) “excellent”
Hands down the most depressing interior space I have ever seen in my life, and boy there have been some downers. I need to go take a walk. Speaking of outside…
The Rear Elevation
Fun fact: when I was a cringe-y high schooler, I wanted to write an opera about Robespierre after watching the classic anime The Rose of Versailles.
ANYWAYS, that’s all for this double special! I hope you enjoyed Howard County, MD! Stay tuned for Sunday’s post in which I will have created stereotypes of every over-done interior design trend of the past year as part one of the MMH Retrospective. Merry Holidays!
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.
Hello Friends! Yesterday was my last day of school before exams, a generally hectic time. This week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion (Friday Edition) comes to us from the home of some of America’s most beautiful architecture, and the city of Chicago: Cook County, IL.
Man, for all the incredible buildings in Cook County, y’all have some real doozies. It was a hard decision this week, especially because y’all have some of the most impressive vintage 80s interiors in history. But since I secretly like that stuff, I opted for something a little more…bland and ugh.
This 1991 treasure is a whopping 7,000 square feet and selling for close to 2 million USD. Without further ado:
The Cathedral of Wasted Space
My suspicion is that Martha Stewart’s grandmother decorated this house.
Sitting Room One
How much does vintage chintz go for on Etsy these days?
Sitting Room Two
That weird fake/whitewashed “bamboo” furniture is an interesting interior design phenomenon not looking to make a comeback anytime soon.
Sitting Room Three
The bonus of that maple/whitewashed furniture is that you can’t really tell when it’s been sunbleached.
Kitschy Kitchen
On another note, how many white countertops like this are even left in the world?
The Master Bedroom
Dream Job: vintage wallpaper designer. The goal is to make a room look as unsettled and busy as possible
The Master Bathroom
How much water do you think it takes to get that shower room sufficiently warm? Also the dedication to matching throughout this house is definitely to be admire. My socks don’t even match today.
Bedroom Two
((POLITICAL JOKE)) ((APOLOGIES))
Bathroom Two: Revenge of the Tub
Sorry mom about the kitchen comment - I’m actually nostalgic for those simpler times with more complex wallpaper. Also sorry bout that tub comment; I’m a little nihilistic these days, as is every college/grad student in the country right now.
Bedroom Three
Long since gone are the days where our wall art coordinated with our matching lamps and carpet. Simpler times, my friends.
Sad Upstairs Oddly-Shaped Dumping Ground
I think I have that Pottery Barn catalog somewhere.
Even Sadder Basement
Lonely Hearth just wants someone home for Christmas. :(
Finally, our favorite and final part of the tour:
Rear Exterior
I find the landscaping more pleasant than the house.
Well that does it for this week’s Certified Dank™ McMansion! Fair warning: Sunday’s post might be postponed due to the end of the year exams. Then, it’s winter break and boy do we have some goodies for you, including a McMansion Hell Hall of Shame.
Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs in this post are from real estate aggregate Redfin.com and are used in this post for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
Hello friends! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on Modern architecture as much as I have. It’s time for what is personally my favorite period of architecture, Late Modernism, which consists of the period from around 1960 to 1980.
Late Modernism was the ideological dam of modernism bursting, and the metaphorical river diverged into many tributaries of coexistent styles. The technological advances of the 60s, and particularly the 70s led to much speculation about the architecture of the future. It was during this time that the computer became more and more sophisticated. In the span of less than 20 years, the computer went from the size of a refrigerator to the size of a television set.
This post will focus on a few of the many movements of this time, and the philosophies behind them: Brutalism (in the UK & US), Metabolism (Japan), High Tech (Europe and some US), and finally US Corporate architecture (as a far extension of the International Style).
Brutalism
Late Corbu as Precedent
If Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel buildings were the prevailing stylistic foundation of Mid-Century Modernism, the same could be said of the late works of Le Corbusier and Late Modernism.
Three of Corbu’s works stand out as having huge influence on the entirety of the field: the Unite d’Habitation at Marseille (1952) (left), the Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1955) (top right), and the monastery Sainte Marie de La Tourette (1957) (bottom right).
The Unite d’Habitation became the foundation of post-war mass housing theory, with its interior “streets” and grandiose social aspirations. Ronchamp and La Tourette established the use of the spiritual and sculptural monumentality that would come to fruition in the works of Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, as well as the stylistic foundation for the style known as Brutalism.
Brutalism: What is it?
Despite its unfortunate name, Brutalism does not refer to the so-called ‘brutal’ nature of the style itself. Rather, it comes from the French beton brut, meaning ‘raw concrete.’
In context, Brutalism was a reaction by a new generation of architects to the sleek, now over-used the International Style (and often its corporate practitioners as a subtext). Inspired by the monumental, sculptural work of late Corbu, the Brutalists sought to create dramatic structures evoking both the ancient (think caves and other natural forms) and the future (think science fiction).
Perhaps the most successful and enduring architects of this style is Louis Kahn, who, like Wright, did not belong to any particular school of architecture at the time.
Trained in Beaux-Arts classicism in Philadelphia, Kahn’s formation occurred before the institutional establishment of Modernism on the East Coast took place. His familiarity with classicism gave him a firm hold of formal expression - perhaps why his buildings have endured while those of his contemporaries have not. It’s also why Kahn developed a deep respect for the mysticism of ancient ruins, what he called the “spiritual roots” of architecture.
Perhaps Kahn’s most famous work, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1959-65) best congeals the architect’s mastery of materials and his (in a time of dry functionalism and stylistic mental gymnastics) emotional and sensitive design philosophy.
The Salk Institute integrates the nature studied within to the nature in which the building itself is enveloped. Kahn’s sensitivity to space, place, and time are explicitly unified every evening, when the light of the sun reflecting on the ocean merges with the light reflecting in the small rivulet of water running down the central court.
Kahn’s sense of the basics of architecture are best summed up by the architect himself:
“If I were to define architecture in a word, I would say that architecture is a thoughtful making of spaces. It is not filling prescriptions as clients want them filled. It is not fitting uses into dimensioned areas… It is a creating of spaces that evoke a feeling of use. Spaces which form the themselves into a harmony good for the use to which the building is to be put…”
Not all architects of the period were as sensitive to space, light, and time as Kahn, and their works have not faired well despite their remarkable sculptural qualities. This is especially true of the Brutalist architecture of the UK, where the Post-War welfare state intersected with inexpensive construction (and ill-informed social housing practices, which I will write about at length another week.)
Structural Expressionism
The other notable American Brutalist architect of the time, Paul Rudolph, sought to reject and react against the prevailing International Style of the time, which is somewhat ironic because he was trained at Harvard under Walter Gropius.
According to architectural historian William J.R. Curtis, Rudolph’s architecture was a unification of the concepts found in the late works of Le Corbusier, the spatial drama of the Italian Baroque, and the sectional complexity of Wright. (Modern Architecture Since 1900, p. 560)
Borroughs Wellcome Headquarters, 1969-71 (Photo found here, original source unknown)
Rudolph’s architecture sought to create complex internal volumes and then express those internal volumes via the building’s exterior. This technique came to be known as Structural Expressionism, and resulted in the most complex and bewildering works of Brutalist architecture.
The concept of expressing complex interior structures externally was not just an American phenomenon.
Metabolism in Japan
After World War II, the industrial expansion of Japan as a manufacturing superpower was deemed an economic miracle. The country’s development, as well as its population growth occurred at an astonishingly rapid rate. Combined with the small size of the country, issues of space became an urban planning crisis by the turn of the 1960s.
Enter the Metabolists, a group of young Japanese architects who sought to integrate technology, Utopian ideals, and the structural expressionism established by architect Kenzo Tange into a solution for this new crisis of growth.
The Metabolists sought to use variable building elements ‘plugged in’ to a central system or infrastructure - a concept both rooted in technology and futuristic aesthetics as well as the organic structures such as beehives.
The extreme complexity of these ideas, however, made their execution almost impossible, and their only true fulfillments were in the World’s Fair Expo 70, hosted in Osaka and the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970-72) by Kisha Kurokawa.
Despite the short-livedness of the Metabolist movement, its idea of pods and clusters of human beings are very much of the 1970s, and their science-fiction aesthetic is still fascinating even today.
High Tech
The expression of the interior on the exterior took on another form in the High Tech architecture of the 70s. Another short-lived movement, High Tech turned buildings visually inside out with the mechanical innards and other structural components displayed on the exterior (however these were often not the actual mechanical innards but rather an artistic expression of them, just as Mies’ use of I-beams were not entirely structural but rather an expression of the structural.)
The High-Tech movement was spearheaded by the British architect Richard Rogers, whose collaborative work with Italian architect Renzo Piano, the 1971 Pompidou Center in Paris reached levels of structural complexity previously unheard of.
Despite its sci-fi aesthetic, High Tech, like Metabolism, did not last very long as its projects were notoriously expensive. However, Rogers continued to build in the style, culminating in the Lloyd’s of London Building (1978-86) and the 2016 BBVA Bancomers Tower.
Corporate Architecture
The previously mentioned sub-factions of architecture were almost exclusively relegated to the public realm; that is, public housing, university buildings, museums, and other artistic institutions. The corporate architecture of the era was entirely separate from its experimental contemporaries.
Spearheaded by architects like Kevin Roche, Philip Johnson, the previously Brutalist I.M. Pei, and massive firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), the corporate architecture of the 60s and 70s took the aesthetics of the International Style glass tower set in place by Mies to the extremes of expression.
American corporations needed to express their power resulted in an era of ambitious skyscraper building, whose prominent examples included the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York (Above Left, Minoru Yamasaki, 1969, destroyed by 9/11) and the John Hancock Center in Chicago (Above Right, SOM, 1968-70).
The glass tower reached the limits of its formal expression in buildings such as Kevin Roche’s One United Nations Plaza (Left; New York, 1976) and Philip Johnson’s Pennzoil Place (Right; Houston, 1975).
One UN Plaza took the glass tower of Mies and removed from its exterior any context of the scale of the interior spaces. Miniature windows in an endless grid combined with an unconventional exterior shape, leave the viewer unsure of the floorplan or height of each story.
Pennzoil Place is similar in that its skin and shape conceals the interior layout, but excels in its technological fetishism: the space between the two conjoined towers is a sliver of only 10 feet.
Both are faceless and vaguely threatening corporate buildings, flaunting their power, looming over their constituents. Both are quintessentially 70s.
Conclusion
Though sweepingly innovative, the architecture of Late Modernity was quick to lose favor with the general public, who disliked the dogmatic forms and their association with failed housing projects and corporate giants.
Still, Late Modernism is amongst the most fascinating periods in the history of architecture - until recently, there has never been such rabid experimentation, idealism, or fear of the future, rooted in the belief that the built environment can, in fact, save the world.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series on Modernism as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it - especially this post, which covers my favorite period in architectural history. Stay tuned for Thursday’s Certified Dank McMansion, as well as next Sunday, where we return to our regular sprawl-related content, with a brief history of exurbia!
Also, if you haven’t checked out the Official McMansion Hell Store, I highly recommend it! 30% of the proceeds go to environmental, affordable housing, and architectural preservation charities. This month’s donation is going towards the North Carolina Botanical Garden and North Carolina Modernist Houses, two of my favorite organizations from my home state.
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