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McMansions And Such
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 |