I thought I should find out how a standard McMansion style house is put together - having been an architect and noticing that they seemed to be really badly built. I did some reading up.

The standard construction materials are essentially: timber of the same grade used for temporary hoardings (structure); expensive garbage bags (DPMs); bubble pack grade plastic (siding, soffits, sills); staples; Tyvec envelopes and fly paper (weather proofing).

The principal American domestic architecture of the last 20 years consists of a building type based on ascetic Protestant architecture designed to minimize flamboyance or display of wealth, which is then blown up to a large scale to do just that, complete with neo-baroque trimmings (ironically from catholic architecture) which are made out of plastic.

This same building form spans an entire sub-continent with a climate that ranges from tundra to tropical and culture that varies from Appalachian to Amerindian. It is constructed using materials that are of lower quality that the packaging in most consumer goods. It is an architectural tragedy, whose only saving grace is that, unlike concrete brutalism, it is bio-degradable.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.