McMansions: The Threat

As my previous posts clearly states, McMansions are hideous and a complete affront to people with even a moderate sense of aesthetics. In this post, I will elaborate on why, aesthetically, McMansions are so horrid and discuss their effect on the social behavior of their residents.

To again reference my previous post, it's obvious that McMansions are pretty similar. The floor plans may change from house to house and the color of the kitchen tile may be different, but they're all, essentially, variations on a theme, and a bland theme at that. As far as I can tell, what the below photo shows is a lot of white houses with fake Spanish tile roofs. Even if you like the style of the house, which can be alluring, does the house still retain that allure when there are thousands like it just down the street?




While McMansions are being built all around the country, I feel that Los Angeles is the most tragic/ironic victim of the trend. Los Angeles has long been considered one of the most architecturally inventive cities in the country. The trend can be traced back to at least the early 1900's with the Arts and Crafts style homes built by Greene & Greene. In the 1920's Austrian architect, Rudolph Schindler, expiremented with poured concrete and tilt wall construction while building his King's Road House. Los Angeles is also home to Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block experiments including the Freeman House, the Ennis-Brown House, and the Alice Millard House. Famed architect, Richard Neutra, also built many homes in the Silver Lake and Griffith Park area, including the Lovell House. The building trend continued into the 50's and 60's with the advent of Googie architecture and the Case Study Program, not to mention John Lautner and his beloved Chemosphere and the Sheats-Goldstein House(perhaps you've seen them in movies...Charlie's Angels, The Big Lebowski, Fiona Apple's music video for the song, "Criminal."). Now, Frank Gehry calls Santa Monica home and builds giant binoculars along the beach. And this is only a partial list.

The point of all this is to say that Los Angeles is an architecturally diverse city that is losing its heritage and identity by succumbing to prefab housing. Fullerton, a city south of Los Angeles, in Orange County, has a great architectural heritage site, highlighting all the styles that have flourished in Fullerton, as well as Los Angeles. These homes are the very kind that are being replaced by the McMansion and their "boxy is better" aesthetic. Even if you don't like the styles showcased on the site, you have to admit they're different. Each one has its own set of characteristics and details. There is a uniqueness to each style that is lacking in McMansion designs. If nothing else, one can at least argue against the McMansion because of its uniformity.

The ironic part of the Los Angeles McMansion construction boom is that many of the homes are built by KB Home, who as of 2001, was the no. 2 home builder in the country. What's so ironic about this? The "B" in KB home stands for Broad, as in Eli Broad, the Los Angeles based philanthropist who, most recently, gave Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art a $30-million bailout. He is also the namesake and chief financial contributor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new, Broad Contemporary Art Museum. I find it odd that a man who makes his money building pre-fabricated homes would also collect Jeff Koons sculptures and Andy Warhol paintings. It's like being a cardiologist who smokes. He has given millions to fund the arts in Los Angeles, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

The building of tract homes is, of course, not just limited to L.A. and neither are the problems associated with them. As stated before, one of the major problems with McMansions is how aesthetically displeasing they are. A 2006 Slate article reviews some of the major design flaws associated with McMansions. Another article, this one in Newsweek, tells of how ill designed McMansions are and how home buyers are beginning to recognize this fact.

"I think there's a return to an interest in modernism," says New York architect Deborah Berke, "and I would call it warm modernism, not sleek minimalism." She argues that a younger generation, steeped in a love of cool design and loft living and ready for a first house, isn't going to buy a mini-McMansion.

And it's not on the style conscious that are against these big homes. "The eco-conscious hate big houses, too, with the energy cost of heating and cooling all those big empty rooms."

The last issue I have with McMansions, although it is a problem with suburban sprawl in general, is the high level of obesity in the suburbs. With miles and miles of homes, and no urban center in sight, people are more reliant on cars. More driving means less walking and less walking means bigger waistlines. Housing divisions rarely include any sort of civic center. The formerly ubiquitous Main Street U.S.A. is slowly disappearing and being replaced by malls. This trend began in the 1960's with the advent of the shopping center.

McMansion communities don't have a main street containing local stores. Instead, the local shopping center, located outside the subdivision, has everything a person could need. The problem with this model is that the shopping center is its own entity, distanced from the surrounding neighborhood by a giant parking lot and generally deserted when not open. If the stores were on a city's main street they would be integrated into the community and would have local foot traffic. People would recognize each other on the street, perhaps converse. Larger shopping centers, because they serve a larger area, lack the personal intimacy of a local main street. While all this may seem like nostalgia for some 1950's suburban ideal, there is truth to the idea that architecture and urban planning affect how people behave/socialize and how that behavior, in turn, affects the fate of the community.

A site hosted by Cornell has a list critical essays outlining the history of urban planning from 1794, all the way up to World War I.

A post on ZNet argues that there is a correlation between urban sprawl and the growing obesity epidemic in the United States.

An article in the Atlantic talks about the rise in popularity of urban living and what this means for the once popular suburbs.


Bad design, potential health problems, and social interaction all play a role in the rise and fall of the McMansion. Now that the initial wow-factor of cheaply built homes is beginning to wear off, people are fighting against the McMansion. As always, Los Angeles is leading the trend with a series of laws prohibiting the huge houses to be built. This, along with other anti-McMansion trends, will be covered in the third and final post in this series.