My Arts Editor and I like to walk neighborhoods, looking at homes new and old (so long as they’re not tract housing from the 60s-80s). This has led to the inadvertent substitution of the word ‘chickenshit’ for ‘gingerbread’ while admiring the fine work on Victorian, and the depressing observation that people must be sleeping in their garages since the garages on the new houses are bigger than the balance of the house.
Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com observes that the McMansion craze may have run its course:
There were many reasons for the McMansion boom. After the recession the banks tightened up lending so that only the rich with huge downpayments could get a mortgage; increases in income inequality meant that there were a lot fewer people able to by cheaper, smaller houses; there were millions of them on the market, left over from the crash.
Builders loved them because they were really profitable; the hard expensive stuff is the same whether the house is big or small (services, plumbing, kitchens) but they are selling a lot more air. They get a lot more profit per square foot.
They also sold for a lot more money; four years ago, the average McMansion cost 274 percent more than an average house in Fort Lauderdale. Today, the premium is down to 190 percent. In fact, the premium has dropped significantly in 85 of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In most places, the bottom has fallen out of the McMansion market.
The Worst of McMansions blog he references features some lovely snark, but also a tutelary section:
The mass is the largest portion of a building. Individual masses become interesting when they are combined together to form a façade. The arrangement of these shapes to create weight is called massing. As the pieces are combined, they are divided into categories: primary and secondary masses (1).
The primary mass is the largest shape in the building block. The secondary masses are the additional shapes that form the façade of a building.
Windows, doors, or other openings are called voids. Voids allow creation of negative space that allow for breaks within masses. Placing voids that allow for natural breaks in the mass create balance and rhythm across the building’s elevation.
