If there is a silver lining in this recession it’s the death of the McMansion. Not only from the perspective of environmental, economic and cultural sustainability but also from the standpoint of design.
I met a local home builder recently who was involved in the construction of these mega homes and was still promoting his experience using examples of these grotesque icons of a leveraged gilded age. It’s one thing to grasp the waste of resources tied up in one of these environmental and cultural disasters and another to be bludgeoned by its appearance. One can only hope that design professionals were co-opted in the process of delivering these products rather than aiding and abetting their creation.
All too often functional floor plans – reasonably sized rooms arranged in a fashion to compliment their use; and properly scaled exteriors – the placing of appropriate scaled windows and doors, the shape of walls and roofs, and the selection of materials – were totally absent, were out of out of balance with each other or historically misinterpreted by trying to match up some high-brow Renaissance motif with low-brow construction technology or mind-set.
I’m not trying to suggest that it would have been OK to develop McMansions if, in total, they were better designed. My commentary really is meant to illustrate that architecture is primarily a ‘following edge’ art form. Meaning that what gets built is a reflection of where a culture is, not where it’s going.
In the residential arena, architecture, like the culture that it comes from, has primarily focused on the formal aspect of design. The appearance, the surface, the skin and the shape of a building dominates the conversation, and in a ironic twist, influences more important components. In particular, and for the sake of appearance, the culture dismissed the relevance of a thoughtful development program – connecting with the stated, and unstated, needs of the buildings inhabitants – or the importance of a functional floor plan, where the arrangement of rooms enhance movement and efficiency, and at a subtle level just make sense – or the selection of materials, where it seems enough is never enough, or at least less isn’t more. A concept that, if not applied to materials, was certainly applied to size.
It seems that homes couldn’t be big enough to satisfy an egocentric demand for grandiosity, like a blow fish trying to scare away an aggressor, or at least impress the daylights out of him. Unfortunately the irresponsible desire to display a manufactured image of wealth coupled with an unscrupulous cadre of enablers in the form of shadow bankers and politicians pushed our economy off a cliff. Consequently the financial capacity to continue this show has pretty much ended. At the risk of sounding simple minded, or coming late to the party, it’s time to re-evaluate what’s important and re-balance the system. In an architectural sense this means focusing on well designed buildings based on the real needs of its users, not on over blown estimates of self worth. It also means building in concert with the real needs of our culture, in essence balancing the egocentric concept of ‘me’ with the community concept of ‘we’. And I think that’s a good thing.
