Reblog, Click The Picture, And Prepare For Battle.

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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i find it so unfair that i cant do all the science. like what do you MEAN I can't study bio and chem and biochem and atrophysics and physics and geology and climate science. what do you MEAN i have a limited lifespan and need to get out of school at some point to get a job. i want to collect the science fields like pokemon, this isn't fair

someone explain the jewish holidays to me like i'm 5 years old

Anniversary Lunch 💕

SPOILER ALERT

So I started watching this Netflix show Q-Force, and it's really good. It's a bunch of gay spy agents going on missions, except one of them is just a normal straight 'toxic masculinity' guy who !spoilers! is secretly a sensitive guy with emotions !spoilers over!

Mary is gay, Deb is a lesbian married to a woman called Pam, and I think probably trans(?). Twink is, well, a Twink, and Stat is probably a Demisexual Lesbian.

Highly recommend!

Happy Blog Birthday then!

This blog recently turned 8 years old, and today it had 200 thousand followers, thank you all.

Almost Christmas means it wasn't Christmas dollar store version

That's nice. You're nice.

I have found your blog. There is no escape.

I'm not trapped with you, my friend.

You're trapped here with me. :)

Haha, *flashback to the time I went canoeing in a school trip and capsized so I had a mental breakdown* yeahhhhh

teaching paddling courses to kids is so much fun because without fail every class will have one or two children who are terrified to the point of tears about getting into the canoe, and every time I ask them what they’re most afraid of. I ask genuinely, “what do you think is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you today? If something horrible happens to you today, what will that thing be?”

And it’s always that the boat will capsize, that they’ll fall in, etc.

In summer courses, the answer is easy. I just walk into the water wearing my life jacket, start floating, and say “this is what it looks like when your boat capsizes and you fall in. I’m doing it right now. I fell in.”

If it’s chilly out and I don’t want to spend all day wet, I tell them, “want to know something funny? We’re going to capsize on purpose later. We have to learn how to capsize so that we know how to help ourselves when it happens on accident. Do you think we’d so something on purpose that’s dangerous? What will happen is that we will all fall in the water, and our life jackets will hold us up. I know that, because it’s my job to check your life jacket. Then we’ll all float around until we get back in our boats, and then we’ll go inside and change. The worst part of it all is that you’ll be soggy.”

This has never failed me. They always calm down, get in the boat, and end up having fun the entire time. Time and time again, the Unknown is the ultimate fear, and a little bit of patience at the start is all it takes to keep things running smoothly.

All that said, my favorite kids are the funny ones who clearly respond well to humor, so I get to tell them, “I can absolute guarantee that no one is going to drown today. I would never let that happen, because I don’t want to have to fill out the paperwork.”