It is a disease that is spreading across America. It is infecting the landscape and polluting your neighborhood. And you can’t stop it…

A newly constructed 12,000 square foot house in my hometown with an asking price of $4,398,000 (http://imgsrv.homes.com/imgsrv/d6/93/157550936.jpg)

The MCMANSION is here.
            You can call it what you will--McMansion, Monster Mansion, Frankenhouse, Hummer House, Starter Castle, Plywood Palazzo, Parachute Home--it doesn’t matter. That which we call a McMansion by any other name would be as evil, ugly, and disgraceful to society. At first the disease infects one or two houses: a small, nice house is knocked down and obliterated. Next, the site is cleared of all trees and all life. A new foundation is extended out to cover 75 percent of the site. And then… it rises.
            Once one of these monsters is built the developers produce more. They see the potential. They taste the money. They don’t care how ugly it looks or how shoddily it’s made. The building is going to be knocked down and redeveloped by somebody else in a few years anyway. These homes are not built to last for hundreds of years, like some in my home town which date from the pre-revolutionary war era. They are built to last one generation of homeowners, at most two.
            They are built by cheap contractors/developers to provide the largest footprint allowable on the lot (they often have to get variances from the local board) and thus, the most square footage. They are built with pre-fabricated materials to speed up the construction time. McMansions can be built in a few months. They are usually built in a faux Neoclassical or Georgian or pseudo-Tudor style. The cheaper ones use stucco to save time (brickwork and siding can take days and days and need some skill). Sometimes large, prefab, fake stone is used (a layer ½ an inch or so thick) to cover/hide the sloppy underwork of the house. The houses are jam-packed with useless technology for the lazy American, like TV’s in bathrooms and room-size walk-in closets. Excessive numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms (sometimes 7 or 8, plus a guest suite) are standard. More “exquisite” homes have multiple (redundant) kitchens. Three-car garages are the norm, although garages for four or five are preferred. The following McMansion and the accompanying real estate company description provide an example of one such house.

	LOCATION: Alpine, New Jersey PRICE: $5,250,000 AREA: 13,000 square feet. 6 br, 7 full ba, 2 half ba
(http://imgsrv.homes.com/imgsrv/d9/62/162665629.jpg)

Description: “ULTIMATE GRANDEUR            
MAGNIFICENT 2 YEAR OLD BRICK MANOR CENTER HALL COLONIAL SET ON BEAUTIFULLY LANDSCAPED VERY PRIVATE 1 ACRE PROPERTY WITH CIRCULAR DRIVEWAY, ELECTRONIC GATES. GUNITE POOL, WATERFALL AND SPA. CUSTOM FINISHES THROUGHOUT INCL. BRAZILIAN CHERRY FLOORING AFRICAN MAHOGANY LIBRARY, DETAILED MOLDINGS, 3 STONE FIREPLACES, HIGH AND DOMED CEILINGS, BEAUTIFUL MARBLE FLOORS AND COUNTERTOPS, RADIANT HEAT, WALKOUT LOWER LEVEL BOASTS A GYM, REC. ROOM, SAUNA, SECOND FULLY EQUIPPED KITCHEN, BAR ROOM, BEDROOM AND 2 FULL BATHROOMS AND MUCH, MUCH MORE...”
(taken from http://www.homes.com)

            The horror, for me, at least, is that these houses are not designed by architects. In fact, some companies combine the developers, contractors, and builders into one. They buy a small set of plans (or a few sets) and then make house after house with minor revisions. These small revisions – fake balcony here, relocated window over there--can be done within the company or by a desperate 3rd party architect looking for some easy money (sign, seal, stamp = good to go). In the best-case scenario, the changes are small enough not to matter to the sometimes lazy and/or corrupt local review board.
            So if these houses are so tasteless and cheaply made and simply wrong why do they sell so well? And not just well--they sell for anywhere between 2 and 10 million dollars! ‘Cause the developers picked one hell of a target audience: the Nouveau riche! For them it’s all about showing off their (new) money. It’s about keeping up appearances and one-upping the neighbors: “Well… you may have a home theater and an indoor pool and a four-car garage... but your 6,000 square footer can’t compare with our 9,000 square foot mansion, complete with squash court, indoor polo field, rainforest greenhouse, six-car garage, and private jet airport.” McMansioners are the same type of people who buy Hummers and don’t give a damn about the environment or using the A/C when it’s 60o outside. I will enjoy watching the McMansioners go bankrupt when fuel and energy costs go up even more or when the housing bubble bursts.
            Another problem I have with McMansions are that they are built indiscriminately (hence the name “Parachute homes”). They are built without any regard to their context… both on the site itself and with the tasteful architecture that surrounds it. Thus, an innocent homeowner could be devastated with one of these beasts for a neighbor. Furthermore, the entire town has to walk, bike, rollerblade, and drive by these homes on a daily basis. The developers have no shame in putting up three or four or more similar looking houses into the same town, or, as the following pictures illustrate, even on the same street.

Disclaimer: Be warned… the following pictures illustrate the descent of a neighborhood into developer-heaven.

House 1 - The First Coming	House 2 - The Next Street Over
House 3 - The Final Insult?	House 4 - #3’s Neighbor aka Hit Me Baby One More Time
(http://www.antisleep.com/archives/2004-05-07_0247.php)

            The only difference between house 1 and house 2 is the number of windows on the right front wall (3 versus 2) and the small, fake, inner gable on house 1. House 2 and house 3 differ only by the presence of the garage. House 4 is not in the same style as the other houses because it is a renovation of an older, smaller, pre-existing home. Because these houses are located in the rural south, they only cost in the range of   $700,000 to $1,000,000. While this is quite cheap compared to the McMansions in New Jersey, relative to the other houses in the neighborhood they are exorbitantly expensive.
            McMansions are also built EVERYwhere. At first, I thought (and hoped) they were only in the dreaded tri-state area (NY, NJ, CT), but I’ve seen them elsewhere--Michigan, California, the South--as in the photos above. They even plague the wonderful, pristine nation of Canada.
            The ultimate in the McMansion culture is the subdivision of a huge plot of land (often one of great natural beauty) into a “private housing community” with some tacky name (the one in my hometown is called “Rio Vista”). However disgusting and unjustifiably elitist these communities are, at least all of those houses are grouped together into one ugly, concentrated evil. That is, these eyesores aren’t in my community, so I don’t have to see them on a daily basis. From an environmentalist perspective, however, the destruction of acres and acres of pretty trees, streams, and the like, a rarity in NO-JE (North Jersey) is unacceptable. And lest the reader be confused, I would be just as angry if an architect (famous or otherwise) built a huge house (architecturally attractive or not) on a lot made from the clearing of acres and acres of the environment. Overall, I’m not sure which is worse: communities of McMansions or just one McMansion in the middle of a neighborhood of beautiful homes.
            Wherever these houses are, they should be considered an insult to architects everywhere and to the American culture as a whole. I ask the developers to think of the children. They don’t have a choice of what home to live in. You are raising a generation of architecturally ignorant, tasteless, square-footage whores. More importantly, you are killing what little nature still exists in the suburban environment. Who knows how much damage has already been done. What I do know is that something has to change. And I for one don’t plan to stand by and watch the bastardization of America’s architecture. I propose that these stains should be Tide-with-Bleach-ed out of existence and be replaced with trees and the architecture of the future – environmentally friendly GREEN architecture. So, comrades raise your fists, pitchforks, and firearms, and let’s take back the neighborhood!