> I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously.
This is an interesting subject to me. There's value in preserving traditional styles. When I look at one of those bad-architecture blogs, certainly there are things that are obviously tasteless or mismatched to me. But there's also a lot of things where I can't see the problem until it's explained, and even then it just sounds like an arbitrary list of rules that you're supposed to follow because the cool people do it. The architectural equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day.
If it performs the functions of a home and makes the people who live in it happy, how much does architectural integrity really matter?
On McMansion Hell [1] one of the common criticisms is the mismatched windows. Aesthetic considerations aside, having mismatched windows can be a maintenance issue. One example might be hurricane shutters for homes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts---if all the windows are of the same style, it's cheaper (or easier) to obtain the proper shutters (you don't have to obtain six different sizes) and eases installation when required.
Complex roof lines (another symptom of McMansion Hell) leads to leaky roofs [2] and expensive repairs.
[2] Frank Lloyd Wright's houses notoriously leaked along the roofs. When called upon it, he is recorded as having remarked, "That's how you tell it's a roof!"
I just laughed out loud because I have never heard of the term McMansion before but every single house that I have been seeing go up in Dallas lately fits that description so elegantly. They do look like a mish mash of wierd things but when organized into clusters of hundreds its somewhat normalizing to see them all so wierd.
This is an interesting subject to me. There's value in preserving traditional styles. When I look at one of those bad-architecture blogs, certainly there are things that are obviously tasteless or mismatched to me. But there's also a lot of things where I can't see the problem until it's explained, and even then it just sounds like an arbitrary list of rules that you're supposed to follow because the cool people do it. The architectural equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day.
If it performs the functions of a home and makes the people who live in it happy, how much does architectural integrity really matter?