Sunday, February 17, 2008

PLUM part 3 or more on McMansions

America's latest hare and hounds, Mansionization the campaign, square footage the quarry.

The space race, is it Jones'n, keeping up with the Jones', or subcortical sabotage? Or partly a response to increasing urban density, this hoarding of interior space?

Los Angeles, frequently billed as the swami of decentralization, continues to become more dense, now the 8th densest big city in America, leap-frogging Baltimore and Minneapolis. More pointedly, of the ten most populous U.S. cities, LA ranks fourth in persons per square mile, trailing only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Concomitantly, the creation of valuable green space, open space, grand public space fails to keep pace (ergo the popularity of bogus public spaces like the Grove). Interiors have swollen to compensate for lost exterior space, a residential DMZ.

McMansions are frequently the end yield of teardowns. They are homes assembled from mass produced parts, with stock plans often used to reduce costs, an artless assemblage of borrowed signifiers, cheesy Mediterranean revival elements paired with colonial kitsch.

They are actually very useful for illustrating the importance of proportion, because they almost always get it wrong. Tiny windows appear even more diminutive, shrunken against sheer stucco face. Party-sized balconies jut into perpetual space, porches are reduced to open air broom closets.

The free world's 21st century version of ruinous 1950's-60's era urban renewal, destroying cohesiveness in the name of progress, like the terrible fabric discarding re-muddles that transform L.A.'s great early housing stock into the next blight.

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