mcmansion
well described. too well described.
via justin
selections :
Although the term "McMansion" is recent, criticism of American architecture based on the perception that it was oversized and artistically bankrupt reaches at least back to the beginning of the twentieth century. As the social critic H. L. Mencken wrote during the 1920s when examining the architecture of suburban Pittsburgh:
Here was wealth beyond imagination - and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgusted a race of alley cats...[Architects] have taken as their model a brick set in end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery.
(Mencken, The Libido for the Ugly, Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927).
In England similar concerns bothered every generation since at least the 18th century such as when Romanticist Dorothy Wordsworth in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803) lamented Drumlanrig Castle saying "This mansion is indeed very large; but to us it appeared like a gathering together of little things."
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well described. too well described.
via justin
- bill 4-05-2007 8:59 pm
selections :
Although the term "McMansion" is recent, criticism of American architecture based on the perception that it was oversized and artistically bankrupt reaches at least back to the beginning of the twentieth century. As the social critic H. L. Mencken wrote during the 1920s when examining the architecture of suburban Pittsburgh:
Here was wealth beyond imagination - and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgusted a race of alley cats...[Architects] have taken as their model a brick set in end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery.
(Mencken, The Libido for the Ugly, Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927).
In England similar concerns bothered every generation since at least the 18th century such as when Romanticist Dorothy Wordsworth in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland (1803) lamented Drumlanrig Castle saying "This mansion is indeed very large; but to us it appeared like a gathering together of little things."
- bill 4-05-2007 11:54 pm [add a comment]