Hello Friends! Today is one of my special posts, from a very special state - the state I’m from! Originally, I was going to do one house, like I usually do, but as I scrolled through pages of incredible architectural mishaps, I realized I wouldn’t be doing my the capital county of my special state justice. Fortunately, for you, you get ten special eyesores - North Cackalacky Style!
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The best part of this house is that the side-house would be cute and normal, should one decide to trim the roof down to size.
9
Fun Fact: the French word “chateau” means “large French country house, or castle, usually with a winery attached.” It does not mean “Large American Suburban house with a basement wine cellar complete with signs that say ‘Wine Time’ just in case you didn’t get the memo.”
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Sometimes I forget that pinestraw is used as a landscaping material because there are no pine trees in Baltimore able to grace their immediate area with their prickly brown bounty. Also, I wonder why so many houses in NC had the copper-topped bay window, especially 2000-2006? If I did, there’d be a paper on it.
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Full Level Pringles Can: The Movie: (doom anime sound/visual effects, but it’s just this house sitting there, but anime)
(scoffing voice) I bet they changed the look to Tudor right after Kate Middleton got engaged.
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Me, yelling at contractor: I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DO IT BUT I NEED MY STAIRCASE TURRET
Also the best part is all the turret rooflines have varying degrees of smushedness.
Finally, the NUMBER ONE HOUSE IN WAKE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA:
My only dream is that this house was self-built by a pack of wolves, and they, in fact, are having a nice time living there, thank you very much.
Well folks, that does it for North Carolina! Join us this weekend for American Foursquares, and next Tuesday for our Certified Dank™ North Dakota McMansion.
Have a great week!
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!
Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store will go to help victims of the recent hurricanes.
If there is one truth about the second half of the 20th Century it is that, by all accounts, we started moving out rather than up; horizontal rather than vertical. Not only through the process of suburbanization, the building of massive highways, and the rapid capital flight from cities, but also in how we designed everything from our homes to our workplaces.
It could be said that, since the development of major highways, America has flattened – much in the same way that the invention of both the elevator and air conditioning brought skyscrapers to every major city in the first half of the 20th century.
I-55 Under Construction, 1972. Public Domain.
In his 1984 book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, John Brinckerhoff Jackson observes this transition:
“Who has not noticed…that in almost every American town the upper stories of the buildings flanking Main Street are being deserted?…Despite all the activity on the street floor, the second and third and fourth floors of the older brick buildings are no longer in demand. Not many years ago, they accomodated the offices of lawyers and dentists and doctors; dance studios and certified public accountants. Now the gold lettering has vanished from the windows, and even the street door leading to the stairs is blocked. Sooner or later, the buildings themselves will be torn down, to be replaced by one-story buildings or parking lots.” (68)
Jackson attributes this decline in vertical spaces to technological changes. Sprawling manufacturing plants with mile long assembly lines make more sense logistically than having workflow between stories. “An efficiently planned office,” he notes “is now seen as a system of information flow, most flexible, most effective when horizontal.” Even new skyscrapers are less like the ones from the recent past, described as “… a stack of large, uninterrupted horizontal spaces: vastly improved construction methods have made this spaciousness possible.” (69)
The technology of the car has created for us a new way of perceiving the environment around us. Jackson cites “increased mobility, and even more, an experience of uninterrupted speed…bring with them a sharpened awareness of horizontal space.” (70) Vertical space can’t be seen as easily from the car, the de facto way of getting around in America.
Residential Horizontalization
This transformation began with the Federal Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA originally provided home loans to qualifying (read: white) families during the Great Depression, as part of the New Deal, in an attempt to stabilize the mortgage market.
The FHA came to the forefront after WWII, when the Housing Act of 1949 began to systematically dismantle cities while simultaneously setting the guidelines of suburban sprawl. The Housing Act of 1949 worked in three parts:
1.) Federal financing for slum clearance (often coupled with highway building) 2.) Promised 800,000 units of public housing (the act actually destroyed more units of housing than it built) 3.) Increased financing for rural home loans and gave the FHA more authority to issue mortgages.
Poster from the 1940s.
This act had a devastating effect on cities. Not only did slum clearance destroy entire neighborhoods (often drawn along racial lines) and frequently replace them with highways (out to the suburbs!!), the process of Redlining (outlining areas deemed “high risk” and not worth issuing mortgages in, often in the inner city, almost always racially based) and the high preference for FHA-planned suburban communities over urban areas all but guaranteed a fully subsidized white flight from the cities.
What little public housing was built quickly fell into decline, as maintenance costs were tied to tenant rents - this, coupled with resistance to forced integration after Brown v Board of Education (1954) from whites led to their rapid depopulation of public housing. As a result, the remaining tenants could not offset the costs of empty units. This, coupled with a high youth density (unsupervised youths were often the cause of many maintenance problems - even benign ones, like breaking the elevators playing games of ‘elevator tag’), meant that existing public housing was quickly deteriorating. It was this combination of socioeconomic circumstances that led to the decline, and ultimately, the failure of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri.
The FHA’s guidelines for issuing mortgages after the 1949 Housing Act centered around wide lots with driveways on streets organized to deter traffic, which had become a huge problem now that everyone had a car.
These wandering neighborhoods were often attached to arterial roads, but built with few entrances to these busy thoroughfares. Zoning was a huge part of why the curvilinear streets and island-like neighborhoods developed: the FHA was more likely to sponsor home loans to those looking to purchase a home in single-family residential zoned areas as part of its goal to protect lots from “adjacent non-conforming uses.”
However, it wasn’t always this way. In the earlier post-war suburbs, the FHA suggested subdivisions that were close to school, churches, the occasional commercial unit, and parks. What changed this was the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, better known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which subsidized the construction of over a million miles of local and interstate highways. After these roads expanded exponentially, planning for less traffic meant sprawling deep into the countryside and the beginning of entirely new horizontal landscapes.
Garlinghouse Home Catalog insert from c. 1950
These policies imitated themselves in the architecture of common houses. The little post-war (white) working and middle-class Minimal Traditional house extended itself into the Ranch and Split-Level forms as lots grew larger and neighborhoods less dense. It was at this point that attached garages became ubiquitous, as car use had become increasingly necessary, cushioned by the increased lot size of the late 50s and beyond.
Northern Homes Catalog, c. Mid 60s. Public Domain.
For those who are curious, the origin of the McMansion lies in the Styled Ranches first popular in the 1930s in Hollywood and in more wealthier areas in the 1950s-1970s - these houses began the process of taking a basic built form (a Ranch) and applying various cladding materials and stylistic details to make it seem more elegant. For one-story McMansions, these houses are their predecessors.
Styled Ranch (note the pitch of the roof) from the 1970s
The Split-Level ensured that two-story homes became hot commodities amongst middle class homeowners. By the early 1980s, (after the end of the Energy Crisis) homeowners rejected the low ceiling height of the ranches and split-levels, and, coupled with less expensive building materials and riskier mortgages, the McMansion had arrived. Their massiveness of scale was, perhaps, the only verticalization that occurred during this time.
Commercial Horizontalization
The depletion of urban density was not just a matter of people moving to little boxes on winding streets. Business moved as well. Factories, once located in dense urban settings, moved to the suburbs, where massive horizontal plants were created to streamline the work process. After all, the assembly line works horizontally.
If you’ve ever traveled outside of Chicago, you pass through the exurb of Naperville. While also being a verifiable McMansion Hell (perhaps no group of people own more McMansions than the managerial class), the I-88 corridor from Naperville to Aurora offers one of the most spectacular arrays of office parks in existence. Uncommonly more than five floors and rarely more than ten, these monoliths languidly straddle the flat prairie landscape, neatly bundled up by ribbons of highway.
Helmut Jahn’s interesting “N” Building off of I-88, Naperville, Illinois.
After WWII, corporations began a new way of organizing their businesses in order to adapt to new means of national and later international expansion. The new system was called “managerial capitalism” described by Louise A. Mozingo as “a transparent, rationalized administrative hierarchy… Rather than conferring positions
based on ownership or nepotism, corporations awarded management authority
to a meritocracy of salaried, professional managers.” (3)
The bosses and managers needed a new space along the same highway as the new factory (perhaps deliberately away from the workers themselves) and more amenable to expansion and technological development. It was for them that the modern office park was born.
It wasn’t just the office park - the highway also brought upon the world one of the most ubiquitous forms of building: the strip mall.
But how did this sudden transformation come about? In her book about corporate campuses, Pastoral Capitalism, Mozingo details exactly how the entire commercial world was scattered across the formal countryside:
“At the city’s edge, an effective alliance of well-financed real estate
investors, large property owners, local governments, federal loan guarantors, and
utopian planners opened property for speedy development. Building along federal-
and state-funded road systems that brought these large tracts of land into
the economy of metropolitan regions, this alliance conceived of low-density,
auto-accessed landscapes of highly specified uses with plenty of parking, and
wrote these forms into stringent zoning and building regulations.” (8)
The car-oriented technocracy of mid-century urban planning, emerging global capitalism, and government policies, completely terraformed the American landscape and made it, well, a landscape - horizontal in shape and in scope. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of these new developments is the appropriation of what they replaced. The banal, pastoral names of greenfield housing developments, malls, and strip malls, is but a memory of the eradicated landscape: Rolling Acres, Greenmeadow Heights, Slate Hills at Elysian Farms.
In the cities, one by one, the lights of the old upper stories began to flicker out, entire avenues permanently for lease. The popularity of so-called “ruin porn” attests to the kind of nostalgic longing these old spaces engender in people young and old.
But curiously enough, the edge is becoming the center once more. Old derelict factories become spacious lofts, skyscrapers repopulate, uses become mixed, the lights begin again to flicker in the upper stories. For those with the financial mobility, the city is becoming vertical once more. As for the rest of us?
There is an ongoing and heady discussion about the repopulation of the cities. This essay is not the place for this discussion. As the infrastructure of the suburbs begins to wither and fray; as the malls close and the For Lease signs begin to shift from the city block to the office park, it is an interesting time to witness the shift of the American landscape back into some semblance of verticality.
The 20th Century saw the simultaneous birth of skyscrapers in the first half, and the mass flattening of the landscape in the second half. This massive transformation occurred at such a blistering pace, it became the new normal within twenty years, the flattening process seen only in hindsight. We’re running out of folks who remember the world before the hegemony of the car.
Abandoned Packard Auto Plant in Detroit. Photo by John Duce (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A few years ago, I woke up one day and read that the malls were dying. This news was shocking to me, despite the fact that I hadn’t been to a mall myself in years. Their sudden appearance and proliferation in the late 50s must have been seen as an equally surprising shock.
The purpose of Looking Around is to encourage people to take a critical look at the world they live in – to appreciate its nuances, and take note of its changes. For those of us who pass by life at 45-80 miles per hour (often not by choice but rather necessity), it’s easy for these changes to blur into the fabric of endlessly horizontal scenery. For those of us in the cities, the news of the vacating office park surprises us, because we tend to believe that the edges - the burbs - are forever. Without taking a second to notice the day-to-day changes, one day we’ll wake up, flip on the news, and the whole world will suddenly be vertical again.
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!
Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store ! 100% of the proceeds from the McMansion Hell store will go to help victims of Hurricanes Harvey & Irma
HELLO FRIENDS, I AM BACK! Thank you all so, so, much for your patience during my leave of absence - I haven’t had any sort of extended break from school, research, or work for almost a year, so this was desperately needed for my mental health. Now I’m back and feeling better than ever!
Today’s house is one of those special vintage time capsule houses, and I’m very eager to share it with you.
This 1994 house, boasts 5 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms totaling a whopping 8,000 square feet. It can be all yours for the low, low price of $1,200,000!
Little Lawyer Foyer on the Prairie (could not resist)
Patriotic or not, those flowers def clash with the red white and blue, what were they thinking???
Dining Room
I’ll concede: despite the exterior chaos, a lot of interior details of this house are very well-constructed. I’m not a fan of the mirrored bottom of the built-in, but the cabinetry is well-built compared to 99% of McMansions.
Still, those curtains are ridic.
Great Room
(whispers) “the dead dreams are of paying off the mortgage”
Office
Confession: my parents had a subscription to the leatherbound book club in the 90s, but my dad and I read the books for real. Nice books, shame they’re mostly used decoratively.
*twinkling piano accompanied by litany of life-threatening side-effects*
Den
Seriously that sculpture looks like a prop from MST3k.
Rec Room / Bar
“TONIGHT ON BIG BROTHER: tonights CHALLENGE - FOUR PEOPLE attempt to use 8,000 SQUARE FEET OF SPACE in any kind of MEANINGFUL WAY who will SURVIVE THE NEXT ROUND”
(cut to teenage daughter)
“honestly, like, I just don’t know why Jimmy can’t play video games in more than one room of the house - he’s just, he’s (tears) just, like, really ruining our alliance here”
Finally, our tour comes to a close with our favorite part of the house:
Rear Exterior
I, extremely online, just remembered that the Patrick meme is, in fact, old. I’m sorry to have let you down like this, comrades. (sniffles)
Anyways, that does it for Nebraska! Stay tuned this week for our second Looking Around guest post: How to Identify Rowhouses! Have a great weekend, friends!
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!
In the world of vernacular (aka “everyday”) architecture, oftentimes architectural styles do not provide enough information when studying most of the houses built in any given neighborhood at any given time.
A good exercise in proving this point is the number of Real Estate listings that label a given house as being simply “Colonial.”
This is by no means the fault of misinformed realtors - it’s a result of a strange truth of talking about everyday houses: there really isn’t an commonly established or well-known stylistic vocabulary used to describe them. How can realtors or anyone else describe everyday houses when, for most new single family housing under a certain square-footage, architectural coinage exists as not much more than “Traditional,” “Contemporary,” or “Modern.”
We know that there are stylistic tendencies within these categories, but why don’t we meticulously articulate or analyze these tendencies like we did in the past?
The answers are not clear, though the elitist distaste for “mass housing” may play a part in it. What we now call “mass housing” (read: single family working class housing) was a mere blip on the academic (non-vernacular) architecture radar, studied in passing before moving on to other things.
That blip was still a blip, however, and it was called Minimal Traditional
Minimal Traditional
Ultimately, the architectural styling of a large chunk of everyday houses can be described as Minimal Traditional. This term was originally devised to describe the small, sparse houses built from around the end of the Great Depression to after WWII (roughly between 1935 and 1950.)
(the houses in color and the one in the bottom left all borrow from the Tudor Revival style that was popular with the elites from the 1890s-1940s)
The original Minimal Traditional homes were small enough to be built during times of economic hardship and wartime scarcity; but after the war, the Federal Housing Administration quickly adopted the style in its Principles for Planning Small Houses, aka houses that were eligible for FHA and GI Bill home loans.
Minimal Traditional houses were kept sparse in order for them to be built inexpensively and rapidly. Between 1946 and 1949, 5.1 million of these homes were built. They were exercises in efficiency and utility, not far from the factory housing built by Sears, Aladdin and other mail order home companies in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Minimal Traditional FHA-Insured Home, 1941. Library of Congress
As many prospered in the 1950s, the Minimal Traditional style was gradually overtaken by the more spacious Split-Level and the rambling Ranch, though these are two terms that denote floor plan layout rather than explicit architectural style.
Here we reach the crux of the problem: for most common houses after 1940, architectural identification ends at Minimal Traditional. Certain terms, such as ranch and split-level, are employed to denote floor plan layout for a significant number of houses, but even the best field guides have not risen to the challenge of style and everyday housing after 1940.
We’re All Minimal Traditional Now
Minimal Traditional denotes a certain type of historic house, but, other than its small size, its other characteristics (including borrowing architectural details from other popular styles) are easily be transferred up to this current day:
This is why, when talking about everyday houses style is so problematic. Most styles are borrowed from both history and the current “high” architectural trends. The high-profile architectural trends of the last 30 years aren’t exactly transferrable to the average homebuyer (looking at you, Frank Gehry) - so, in their place, we’ve been borrowing more and more from the 19th and early 20th century.
But here’s the sitch:
Building a house with features belonging to a style from the past does not make it that style. A new house with Craftsman details does not make it a Craftsman house or part of a Craftsman Revival (a serious academic and professional undertaking in reviving authentic Craftsman architecture). A house that borrows details from the Craftsman style but none of the other aspects (period materials, interior organization, proportions, massing, etc.) can only be called Craftsman-influenced.
Our houses are not mere imitations of the past. Our borrowings of historical elements are executed in a way that reflects our current housing needs (e.g. attached garages) and scientific advancement (such as using new materials e.g. fiber cement siding or low-E windows).
How then, do we describe our common houses if they drift so nebulously within the realm of architectural style and influence?
Fortunately there are answers to this question – answers that will come next Saturday in the next installment of Looking Around! (Also be sure to stay tuned for next week’s Mississippi McMansion of the Week!)
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!
