king midas in the lawyer foyer

Howdy everyone! I wrote this short piece for a magazine in Austria, and since it's not going to be featured anywhere in English, I thought I'd post it here for your enjoyment.

In American domestic architecture, the language of power is often a joke. Something that endlessly amuses me about a country that loves to bellow about their constitutional freedoms and (ersatz) democracy, is that its wealthiest participants often feel compelled to invoke the very opposite in their houses. While the Gilded Age mansions of the late 19th century have always adopted the languages of feudalism (specifically Tudor and Gothic Revival), their Reagan-era successors, the McMansions, speak more honestly to the nature of our specifically American ruling classes, namely that they have awful taste.

An estate such as the robber-baron Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Biltmore is best seen as a kind of nostalgic feudal wish fulfilment. The days of Versailles and the like are over, but one can recreate them solely through the machinations of unadulterated commerce. The McMansion is both more and less subtle because it is put up not only by unfathomably rich people but by top 10-percenters (think doctors and lawyers), as well as developers catering to the aspirational. What these groups see as emblematic of architectural power is more aesthetically diverse.

Furthermore, the development throughout the entire twentieth century, of ever-cheaper mass produced building materials has both deskilled architecture and has also opened up, in catalog form, reams of different stylistic trimmings, ornamentation, and fixtures, all rendered cheaply in Styrofoam and plastic. The end result is pastiche. One no longer needs to copy wholesale designs borrowed from the distant past, but rather can pick and choose to their heart’s delight. Corinthian columns hold up pathetic, triangular pediments; Palladian windows are used in sequence rather than as a singular feature to draw the eye; Colonial Revival can meet Neoclassical any day of the week. Some houses are so customized, their rooflines bulging, each window a different shape, their two-story entryways a dark void of transom window and chandelier that they fail to have a style other than what one describes, with acerbic politeness, “neo-eclectic.”

However, the purpose is the same: to demonstrate, through architecture, wealth. And in America, wealth is power. Theoretically speaking, a McMansion is best understood as an everyday extension of the Postmodern movement in architecture, which focused on understanding architecture as a system of signs and symbols. High Postmodern architecture, such as that of Robert Venturi or Michael Graves, assembled these symbols in ways that were sometimes kitschy, clever and ironic, and other times rich in references to regional characteristics and specific buildings. Almost always Postmodern buildings are reinventions of the old via the language of new technologies and materials.

While McMansion builders weren’t citing the works of Saussure when coming up with their designs, they, and the clients who commissioned them, had a similar innate conception of architecture as a system of communication. The McMansion is always borrowing symbols. Usually these are symbols of power – if not outright oppression – but sometimes they are more benign symbols of status. The McMansion borrows the Greek Revival pillars and wraparound verandas from the slave plantations of the Confederacy. It borrows the entire front façade of the White House. It borrows the towering glass arcade from the 80s shopping mall. It borrows gilded, ornamented columns as much from Scamozzi as from Las Vegas.

In order for the McMansion to better convey its status, these symbols are often comically distorted in terms of scale. The house is built not to the human scale but to the scale of the automobile, that ever-present extension of the American corpus. They are meant to be driven by. They are meant to make anyone getting out of a car feel very small. Another way McMansions communicate power is by accumulation: four bay houses, three-car garages, two-story foyers. Their insides are filled with great rooms, rec rooms, bedrooms, bars, gyms, walk-in closets, sybaritic bathrooms, you name it, and all those amenities have to, spatially, go somewhere. Thus, the houses, much like their urban environs, sprawl out to communicate simply that they can.

There is a cultural logic behind this accumulative practice. When the Federal Housing Administration set minimum standards for housing in the 1930s, developers realized that they could upsell any house that featured more amenities than the bare minimum. Thanks to abundant, government-funded mortgages, a post-war economic boom, sprawl-driven development, and general improvements to the standard of living, people began to view houses as commodities. One bought a “starter home” and then upgraded or renovated their way into a “dream home.” The end logic of this mentality is that of bigger and bigger houses. That this coincided with the financialization of mortgages and the arms race that ultimately led to the Great Recession has left an indelible mark on the McMansion. It is simultaneously emblematic of having made it while also being a prime example of American gluttony and hubris. However, despite the Recession, the houses very much persist today, albeit dressed in the more pared-down languages of pseudo-rural rustication or even total minimalism.

Finally, the urbanistic qualities of where McMansions are built create an additional layer of context and meaning. When a little house in an older neighborhood is torn down for a behemoth, the result is both one of triumph and warning. When dozens of McMansions line the meandering streets and cul-de-sacs of a gated community, the desired target of their intent is their similarly status-chasing neighbors. When a McMansion is built on a vast swath of land in the middle of nowhere, it regains its feudal undertones, betrays a kind of siege mentality, a fantasy of lordship. Always, the preferred interpreter of the house is one’s less fortunate guests and family members. A McMansion’s gussied up sociality is, in fact, profoundly antisocial. Miles away from anything of note, all of urban life has to be internalized within the house itself. This is it’s supreme irony. One sits alone in one’s two-story foyer like King Midas. But hey, at least it’s gilded.