The McMansion as Harbinger of the American Apocalypse
In Houses without Names, Hubka breaks the working- and middle-class houses that predominated during the twentieth century into three domestic zones: the living room, kitchen, and bedroom(s). The rise of each of these zones is linked to immense changes in standards of living, such as the internalization of plumbing and the advent of electricity, the shift of work outside the home, and the moment in the middle of the last century when individual privacy became attainable in working-class homes. The McMansion adds a fourth zone for entertaining, reflective of the increasing social alienation and distance from urban centers caused by decades of sprawl. Such a profound shift in American life necessitated the internalization of communal spaces—bars, gyms, billiard halls, and the like—into the home itself.
Not that this development is entirely new. There has always been a connection between increasing wealth and intentional isolation, from the palace of Versailles to the petit bourgeois homes of the nineteenth century that were designed for live-in labor. However, between the streetcar Victorians of the 1890s and the McMansions of the 1980s, our entire social and economic order transmogrified. Industrialization and unionization meant the working class could suddenly afford better and bigger homes. Technological progress, standardization of construction, the invention of the automobile, exclusionary financial incentives—including those sponsored by the government—and a century of social unrest drove the almost uniformly white middle class out of the city and into the periphery. The interiors of their homes reflected these seismic transformations.
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The McMansion has also endured because, in the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation. It is a one-stop shop of wealth signifiers: modernist décor (rich people like modernism now), marble countertops (banks have marble), towering foyers (banks also have foyers), massive scale (everything I see is splendor). Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.
It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.
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