It all seemed so innocent when architecture grad student Kate Wagner started pushing her charming brand of millennial snark on us with her acerbic critiques of gaudy, poorly executed monster homes, but architecture is no laughing matter. Read the rest
Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike. Read the rest
Yesterday, federal authorities announced 50 indictments of college personnel, wealthy parents, and fixers who ran a multi-million-dollar bribery ring that ensured that the slow, plodding, undeserving fruit of wealthy grifters' loins could be admitted to the top universities in America. Read the rest
Last month, he amazing architecture-snark criticism site McMansion Hell (previously) announced gingerbread house contest to create "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" Read the rest
Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously) has put out a call for "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" (no styrofoam or support materials allowed) with prizes starting at $200 and a t-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store. Read the rest
Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner continues her unbroken streak of excellent and incisive architectural criticism with a new piece that riffs on Stewart Brand's classic "How Buildings Learn" to discuss how McMansions have gone awry: they represent a break from the tradition of designing stuff to fit in spaces, and instead, they are spaces designed for status-displaying stuff. Read the rest
Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner is carrying $42,000 in student debt; heiress Betsy "Marie Antoinette" DeVos is the anti-public-school advocate whom Donald Trump put in charge of the nation's public schools, and one of her first official acts was to end the rules limiting sleazy student debt-collection tactics, even as Trump was ending debt relief for students defrauded by diploma mills (like, say, Trump University). Read the rest
As far back as 2012, UCLA researchers were publishing studies that showed that Americans basically never used their "formal spaces" -- dining rooms, "great rooms" and parlours -- instead, they spend most of their time in the kitchen and the "informal" den. Read the rest
Update: Zillow has dropped all its absurd copyright claims after hearing from EFF and McMansion Hell is coming back!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published its letter to Zillow, explaining in eye-watering detail how wrong the company was to threaten the McMansion Hell blog over its use of realtors' glam-shots of shitty houses. Read the rest
