One of my favorite bloggers has given a caustic interview:

In which I am interviewed by @InterviewMag: https://t.co/bQonsVRsM2

— kate wagner, A-frame dreamer 🏳️‍🌈 (@mcmansionhell) March 13, 2019

From the interview:

SARAH NECHAMKIN: Did you grow up in McMansionville?

KATE WAGNER: I grew up in a small town in North Carolina. There were McMansions around in the wealthy parts of the county, […]

NECHAMKIN: And the socio-political implications of them.

WAGNER: The architecture of conspicuous consumption and the isolation. The houses are so far away from pretty much anything. You have to drive fifteen minutes to get a gallon of milk at Walmart. They’re just completely car-dependent most of the time. I always found them to be fascinating portraits of American culture. They kind of embody the isolationist American idea of This is my plot of land, and the power that comes with that. It’s about taking the architecture of the normal suburban house to new expanses: Look at how much suburban house I have, and you don’t. So you have these monumental elements to the architecture. Huge foyers, with huge chandeliers and huge staircases, giant emerald-like kitchens, like they’re on the cooking channel or whatever. You have these spaces for entertaining that just completely isolate different parts of the house from one another that are rarely used, statistically-speaking. It’s aspirational. It’s the dream house built for the parties that you’ll never have. You see all those HGTV shows where it’s all about how to paint your walls so you can sell your house for a thousand more dollars. It’s the consuming of the home as a commodity itself. I think that is a very backwards way of thinking about what architectural space does for us. The act of conspicuous consumption is so divorced from the act of actual dwelling. If people actually designed their homes for living, they would be a lot smaller and cozier. There wouldn’t be farmhouse sinks and gray walls everywhere.

[…]

NECHAMKIN: Do you think there’s a parallel phenomenon happening in cities?

WAGNER: Those big empty apartments in Hudson Yards that cost billions of dollars for millionaires to own are McMansions in the sky. Honestly, I hate Hudson Yards. It’s just stupid looking. It’s like a bunch of dildos in the sky. The architecture may change and the urbanism may be different, but the idea of projecting wealth is the same. It’s all about the value of the property or how much it’s worth. Everything in New York now is a Chase bank or a Starbucks.

NECHAMKIN: It was hard to find a place to meet for this interview around Union Square that wasn’t a chain.

WAGNER: Now there’s a Nutella store. What the fuck are you going to sell in there besides Nutella? You’ve spent all that money on Manhattan real-estate to sell hazelnut spread?

[…]