Well, I hear your lament Tom, but you forget that this only represents
the demand of our housing market economy, and a national economy being
driven, in no small part, by housing and home improvement consumer
spending. No doubt, many local craftsmen make their living in your
area from this development. Now, perhaps some of your design animus
may be driven by the "architectual pollution" of your heretofor
semi-rural environs (e.g., in another context illustrated by the "last
man in theory" or perhaps the NIMBY point of view, neither of which I
suggest you subscribe to), and thus offends your sense of taste and
space, but as they said in Rome (or in pig latin) "de gustibus non est
disputandum" (for the monolingual, "there's no accounting for taste").

America, if nothing else, for better or worse historically has
celebrated personal property and the freedom to express one's view of
architecture on one's real property. For the life of me, I still
can't reconcile my own taste with those who slavishly recreate
victorian paint schemes of purple, pink, blue and other unknown
pastels on their rehabilated "historic" fix-er-uppers, and declare the
result tasteful and historically accurate. It may be historically
accurate, but if there were newsgroups in Queen Victoria's times,
there would have been, no doubt, postings which groaned about the lack
of taste of those victorian designers now widely celebrated (in
certain quarters) for their decorative ingenuity and sometimes
outright grotesque mixing of various revivals of styles.

I suggest the salve for your slightly offended psyche may indeed be
the green poultice of economic opportunity. I note with interest your
website, and the obvious quality of your craftsmanship (and your need
to jetison that old Stanley 55!) which cumulatively would bring some
much needed elegance and character to those wet-stick framed eyesores
about which you wax eloquently. I suggest that the number and
tract-like quality of these new homes represent nothing but a broad
opportunity for you to show these folks (perhaps unfairly
characterized by others - but not by you, as having more money than
sense, as they have a right to spend their money as they wish and if
they want to live in their real estate investment to fund their
retirement, who's to say they're wrong)the error of their plebian
tastelessness by redoubling your efforts at marketing and offering to
them the ability to customize their interiors in a manner befitting
the taste represented by the quality of your work.

It also strikes me that while the Levittowns of old were indeed cookie
cutter mediocrity in design and concept, take a drive through any
tract development say, maybe, 25 years later, and you will see the
transformation that renovation, addition and personalization by a
succession of owners has wrought. This, too, will happen to the
McMansions, because as much as things change, that's as much as they
remain the same.

Mutt

Tom Watson wrote in message . ..
Around these parts a proper McMansion is a jumped up tract home that
sits on a half to three quarter acre lot, sells for between $800,000
and two million dollars, weighs in at about four thousand to six
thousand square feet, and looks exactly like the other fifty to two
hundred houses in its development.

They are not built, so much as excreted - as though a great angry
animal has walked across the countryside, eating up land, labor and
materials - and ****ting out houses - one turd looking more or less
the same as all the others.

This part of Pennsyltucky is the center of the universe for Two Story
Center Hall Colonials. I can walk into just about any one of these,
built during the last twenty five years and know that the living room
is on the left, the dining room is on the right, the Great
Room/Kitchen is down the hall to the back.

It's like Levittown - without the panache of the three digit mortgage
payment.

There is invariably a Master Bedroom Suite, with the Master Bath
attached. There is, without exception, a Library/Media Room - as
though the two could cohabitate without giving birth to an oxymoron.

These are stick framed structures, two by sixes mostly, in a nod to
the intemperateness of this portion of the temperate zone.

They are sealed up tighter than a gnat's ass and air conditioned and
central heated to within an inch of their lives.

The boxes are thrown up within a single season of a year. Being
enclosed so quickly, the wet framing lumber that the developers favor
is encapsulated in layers of sheetrock, sheathing and veneer stucco,
veneer brick and veneer stone - before the moisture has properly left
the sticks.

So a number of these well off people have breathing problems - and
wonder why.

In the regard of exterior detail, they are festooned with false
replicants of an earlier and more worthy age of architecture - as a
young child will drape themselves in the finery of their elders -
thinking themselves beautiful and sophisticated.

Their roof lines are complex and dramatic, and covered with
Architectural Composite Shingles, made to be a simulacrum of the
baronial slate that was worn by their betters - but which is truly a
tarted up version of the same chapeau borne honestly by the working
class homes in the next zipcode.

They are not for all time but for an age - an age ruled by mediocrity,
of design and spirit.

"Little Boxes
Little Boxes
And all filled with ticky tacky..."




Regards,
Tom.

"People funny. Life a funny thing." Sonny Liston

Thomas J.Watson - Cabinetmaker (ret.)
tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)
http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1