This post wades into an area normally met with knee-jerk comments and defensive house owners, but I think there's some really subtle points being made here -- I don't agree with some of them, but I think the author is really trying to figure out what exactly is going on with some of the really terrible McMansions shown. However, these problems extend up through real mansions as well.

Here's a ~$9million house being built that suffers from almost all of the claims put forth in the post even though they're supposed to be hallmarks of McMansions and not real mansions https://www.redfin.com/MD/Potomac/10501-Chapel-Rd-20854/home...

After spending some time thinking about the problem, I've come to the following hypothesis: architecture schools aren't producing architects trained to produce quality designs that match the desires of the vast majority of the marketplace.

Consider the following: we've been though decades of massive architectural development in practical housing, the result of which appears to be variations on boxes-with-mixed-materials https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=modern+house+design&hl...

Most consumers don't want these kinds of buildings and the ones who do buy them because they're custom architected and that acts as a status symbol. Consumers want classic "house" shapes on various degrees of "fanciness".

Most consumers also don't know good from bad architecture. But it's okay, because it appears most architects don't know good from bad either or else we wouldn't be getting endless variants of boxes-with-mixed-materials. The last time the kind of design this blog is looking for was actively used was during the American colonial period. And that wasn't always a successful meme -- America is littered with old homes with huge pillared entrances on otherwise modest homes. http://www.house-design-coffee.com/porch-columns-disaster.ht...

It could be worse, America could be littered with craptastic hyper-modernism and weird vestigial bits of unintersting history http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/ But Europe isn't immune to this nonsense either, McMansions have started infecting everywhere from Ireland to Germany.

Asia has it's own entirely unique series of architectural sins.

I think there's a number of forces at play here that have all led up to where we are.

- A growing desire in industry to find ways to minimize materials usage in new construction (older homes are sometimes hilariously overbuilt)

- A rising and increasingly affluent middle class

- A lack of good examples to educate people on -- most buildings are crap...even the ones that are well considered often fall apart quickly http://failures.wikispaces.com/Fallingwater

- A lack of architects who can produce something other than boxes-with-mixed-materials

- Continued cost cutting as plans go to market

- Consumers who are fine settling with "nice enough" if it saves them $100k-$200k on a similarly specc'd home

- Most people don't give a crap about gardening or yard maintenance. Who cares what your house looks like or how small the property is if you're spending all day inside your climate controlled 5000 sq ft personal facility with movie theater, gym, gourmet kitchen and jacuzzi?

It also turns out most McMansions are actually pretty nice places to spend time: well lit, nice materials on the surfaces you interact with, tons of space so you don't have to make too many compromises, open floor plans and so on.

They are worlds better than the 60's, 70's and 80's era homes I grew up in and later owned. The 70s and 80s were particularly abysmal for material quality and energy use. Holy crap the heating/cooling bills on those homes.