Word: mcmansion
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...McMansion design seems to me to have been originally conceived as an anesthetized imitation of the past, a sort of fairy-tale version of grandeur meant for mass consumption. As such, it is inevitably an artistic failure. The bizarre meld of faux-antique European design seems out of place 10 minutes away from Toledo (Ohio, that is, not Spain). Tradition cannot be created ex nihilo with only a vague sense of the past. It needs to be handed down from one generation to another or carefully rediscovered...
...found a subdivision that sounds like a WASPish Connecticut country club, you’ll be perfectly prepared to take in the grotesqueness of your surroundings. A guidebook, however, is entirely unnecessary. These subdivisions are filled with the easily identifiable domicile sometimes referred to as “the McMansion...
...refer to it as “the” McMansion because there is really only one version sold. Designed (roughly) as a one-fiftieth scale model of the palace of Versailles, with a few elements taken from Cinderella’s Castle, the same McMansion is found all the way from Detroit to Dubuque, and everywhere in between...
Perhaps the McMansion has even contributed to the current American renascence of triumphalist conservatism with its own fairy-tale romanticizing of the past. Our current McMansion conservatives, although often ignorant of history, would recreate the nation by returning it to some vague, Edenic period when everything was right in the country (usually, this means the 1950s, which is as far back as most remember). This sense of nostalgia is not only myopic but woefully artificial. Instead of appealing to an organic tradition, conservatives increasingly create one in their minds...
...others on lofty remoteness. Megalogenis is a data fiend and a diviner of patterns and types. Few know their way around a statistical time series like he does; no one can match his ingenuity in figuring out what to do with it. When Megalogenis describes the rise of the McMansion, for instance, you get acute social observation, street-cred cultural criticism, political nous, personal anecdote, ethnic punditry and a savvy dissection of changes in capital gains tax. There's a sense that Megalogenis-a former Canberra Press Gallery fixture who's never lost touch with the pulse of life...