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In the Midst of the Grind
I don't have much time these days, for the same reason I've been
mentioning here for the last year--too busy working and schooling to
spend much time writing stuff here. I have somehow managed to
find a little free time to update a few things. First, there's
this page. It's not much, but there are a few things that I've
been able to write about here and there.
The major update is still Vista Drive, which gets updates to nearly
every gallery. Specifically Color page 37, B&W page 36,
Collage page 6, as well as Sampler page 3. The amount of pictures
in this update is small but I'm happy with that for now.
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Editorial : McMansions
I live in a quiet neighborhood in Encino. A neighborhood of
modest houses peppered among middle class, and upper middle class,
homes. Over the last couple of years my neighborhood, like a lot
of neighborhoods in Los Angeles, has been invaded by McMansions.
What are McMansions , you ask? The term is used to describe
over-sized houses that fill much of the property they stand on.
The following editorial cartoon is a good example of what I'm talking
about.
On my street alone there are twelve new homes built, or being built, on
what used to be the sites of four homes. The density of those
three lots has tripled. The new homes aren't just on smaller
lots, they're easily bigger than the homes that used to sit on those
properties. One on property there used to sit one house, but now
it has five houses on that same area. Each one of those homes has
upwards of 2,800 square feet footprints that engulf the property they
sit on. A couple of weekends ago one of these homes had an open
house, so I decided to check the house out. This thing was a
monstrous two-story five-bedroom home with a three car garage.
There were four small bedrooms, each modest and not too big, and one
not so big master bedroom, with huge bath. The master bathroom
was easily twice the size of my room since it included a walk-in closet
that was easily as large as my room at home. The style of the
home was faux Spanish with a backdrop of bland. Architecturally
the house was boring, unimaginative, and wasteful in its use of
space. This giant house had three fireplaces, one of which was
located in the wall between the master bedroom and master bath.
That placement of which felt more like a salesman's gimmick than
inspirational.
And that's my main problem with these McMansions, they're
eyesores. Badly designed, unimaginative eyesores that multiply
the density of neighborhoods while adding nothing to the aesthetics of
a neighborhood. I fear that developers will continue to see the
economic windfall of this kind of construction and flood this city with
horrible homes that subtract, rather than add to the beauty of any
given neighborhood.
For the longest time I've noticed the construction of buildings with
little public worth. Architecture is very much about changing our
enlightening us. Homes are where we spend the majority of our
lives. We live in these places, instilling something of ourselves
into them as we live in them. They aren't just boxes divided into
smaller boxes inside, their where we dream and wish and live. To
cheapen this by just building bigger and bigger boxes that come off as
cartoon versions of actual homes is only going to make us lose a part
of our humanity. Because the current trend that states bigger
(bigger homes, bigger cars) is necessarily better is only going to a
lost hope. Bigger isn't better, better is better. Sadly
these McMansions are not better, they're just bigger. And their
invasion can only lead to the continuance of bigger is better myth.
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