LowPolygon
Senior Member
charioteer: thank you for this excellent contribution--it was extremely informative!
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- Thread starter LowPolygon
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Tewder
Senior Member
Perhaps, but the McMansion phenomenon is specific to a time and culture: the crappy quality, superficial trophy homes of a pre-credit crunch, debt-leveraged era built by poseurs and the ersatz elite. The Rosedale mansion on the other hand truly stands for the rich and priviledged of the time. One was built on hollow image and the misbegotten conceipt that given enough credit we can all attain status while the other was built on the stability of harder-won achievements, financially or socially. A fine line I suppose but one worth noting.
TKTKTK
Senior Member
I'm not sure any of that's true though, really. You're making an awful lot of assumptions about awfully large groups of people
I kinda doubt the craftsmanship standards of the early 20th century were really on par with what had come 50 or a hundred years previous (so there's a parallel to the argument we're trying to make now). I'm not sure a building like, sayyy, Casa Loma is any less hollow an expression of newly achieved wealth and privilege as any recent Woodbridge pile. They're both making allusions to a history they're not part of.
McMansions aren't about cheap credit, or even necessarily shoddy construction (which happens and doesn't happen; there are some supurbly built, yet still entirely McMansiony, houses in Oakville and Mississauga). It's about an anachronistic fabrication of history; both time and place
LowPolygon
Senior Member
I'm not sure any of that's true though, really. You're making an awful lot of assumptions about awfully large groups of people
I kinda doubt the craftsmanship standards of the early 20th century were really on par with what had come 50 or a hundred years previous (so there's a parallel to the argument we're trying to make now). I'm not sure a building like, sayyy, Casa Loma is any less hollow an expression of newly achieved wealth and privilege as any recent Woodbridge pile. They're both making allusions to a history they're not part of.
McMansions aren't about cheap credit, or even necessarily shoddy construction (which happens and doesn't happen; there are some supurbly built, yet still entirely McMansiony, houses in Oakville and Mississauga). It's about an anachronistic fabrication of history; both time and place
Oh, please. Take an hour out of your day, and actually walk around Rosedale. Who is comparing these houses "with what had come 50 or a hundred years previous"? You mean all those fabulous mansions that were being built in Toronto in uh, 1795?
To compare these homes to the fatuous, tasteless, shoddily conceived design-build EIFS monsters littering the land is laughable, and extremely lazy intellectually. Also, Casa Loma is not in Rosedale. To cherry pick the most OTT example of historicist gargantua as your example just demonstrates how little thought you've given to the issue.
To assert that the term McMansions is not about "cheap construction" is an absurdity. That's precisely the point of the shorthand. What does McDonald's have to do with "an anachronistic fabrication of history; both time and place"? McMansions means crappy construction the same way McJobs means a crappy job. Why is that?: because McDonald's serves crappy food! Pretty simple. Maybe we should add McThinking to the list.
TKTKTK
Senior Member
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize we were only talking about architecture as it could have existed in Toronto. I was thinking London, Paris, Rome...
No, you're right, I'm not as worked up about this as you are. But even though I lack the frothing passion, I thought I'd join in on this, uhhh pubic discussion, right?
Anyway, I thought it was clear I was using Casa Loma as an extreme example, but I appreciate you drawing extra attention to it
I know you're on an EIFS kick lately, but not every McMansion is carved out of the stuff. I also don't understand the resistance to trying to retroactively apply the title. Well, you can define it however you want, but I think most people are willing to move beyond a super-strict definition of it. It's weird that you'd ask about McDonalds being anachronistic about time and place, since that's usually the criticism leveled against it; kind of a strange time/placelessness about them as they're the same everywhere - kinda like McMansions.
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LowPolygon
Senior Member
Oh, sorry. I didn't realize we were only talking about architecture as it could have existed in Toronto. I was thinking London, Paris, Rome...
No, you're right, I'm not as worked up about this as you are. But even though I lack the frothing passion, I thought I'd join in on this, uhhh pubic discussion, right?
Anyway, I thought it was clear I was using Casa Loma as an extreme example, but I appreciate you drawing extra attention to it
Well, you can define it however you want, but I think most people are willing to move beyond a super-strict definition of it. It's weird that you'd ask about McDonalds being anachronistic about place, since that's usually the criticism leveled against it; kind of a strange placelessness about them as they're the same everywhere - kinda like McMansions.
"I'm not as worked up about this as you are. But even though I lack the frothing passion, I thought I'd join in on this, uhhh pubic discussion, right?"
your contributions are welcome--sorry for the frothing! but please, lets not have a pubic discussion, shall we?
"I know you're on an EIFS kick lately, but not every McMansion is carved out of the stuff. I also don't understand the resistance to trying to retroactively apply the title."
its true i am a bit obsessed with EIFS these days. "I saw the best bricks of my generation destroyed by painted Styrofoam madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry contractor….†oh, sorry....must. stop. caring. so. much.
i don't know. i just can't shake it....cheap bad taste just really bums me out.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Isn't there a point in the design continuum where ostentatious "good taste" meets cheap bad taste, though?
LowPolygon
Senior Member
Conceptually, i think this is right. They meet because ‘cheap bad taste’ is an idiotic, slavish, corner-cutting and totally illiterate and incoherent render of ‘ostentatious good taste’. Todays McMansions are nothing more than simulacra, they are ‘based on architecture’ in the same way a fascinating historical event becomes a hackish mawkish Hollywood clunker that is 'based on a true story'.
In practical terms, though, the operative word in this whole thing is 'cheap'. I really, really, really believe that these large homes from the late 19th/early 20th century are fundamentally, and at the most material level, far far better built, (and far more coherently and intelligently designed) than their degenerate McMansion progeny.
The proof that this is true can be found in looking at them, and in the fact that they are there to be looked at--100 years after their construction. I doubt very much that the EIFS monsters will even be standing, let alone in this kind of pristine condition 100 years from now. I guarantee you: they will be landfill.
I am not making an argument that these houses are important, or 'historically significant'. I am not an architect or designer so my interest in them lies elsewhere, and it is no doubt idiosyncratic. The only thing i feel doctrinaire about is beauty, and I think these homes are beautiful. Totally subjective, yes, but one’s subjectivity is always worth defending.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
I think, as mentioned before, that your photographs have captured the range of architectural talent that worked on these various buildings very nicely, but I'm with TKTKTK concerning the nature of these Rosedale buildings, which perhaps anticipated the McMansions built on the fringes of the 905 a century later:
... but I'd call them hyperreal rather than anachronistic - built at a distance from the active city in an early suburb of curved streets that rejected the grid, in order to create a certain quasi-aristocratic illusion that everyone could play along with. As a collective statement - a sort of ghetto - they supported the fantasy scenarios of the nouveau riche and their servants who lived in them.
... but I'd call them hyperreal rather than anachronistic - built at a distance from the active city in an early suburb of curved streets that rejected the grid, in order to create a certain quasi-aristocratic illusion that everyone could play along with. As a collective statement - a sort of ghetto - they supported the fantasy scenarios of the nouveau riche and their servants who lived in them.
LowPolygon
Senior Member
I'm sorry I just don't buy it. At best, I think you're employing very profoundly revisionist and ahistorical logic. At worst, you're simply displaying your prejudices.
A district like Rosedale would have come about through a very complex community of interests, and to insist on reducing it to these vaguely perjorative characterizations like: "in order to create a certain quasi-aristocratic illusion that everyone could play along with. As a collective statement - a sort of ghetto - they supported the fantasy scenarios of the nouveau riche..." is just sloppy thinking, as well as being a sadly impoverished view of the time that these things were built.
As well, to deny or elide the fact that the present day McMansion phenomenon is deeply linked to the "pre-credit crunch, debt-leveraged era", as Tewder points out, is just uhm, obstinancy.
cdr108
Senior Member
wow, thanks charioteer for the walk through history.
almost all of those houses still exist i'm sure.
thank you also thedeeped ...
almost all of those houses still exist i'm sure.
thank you also thedeeped ...
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LowPolygon
Senior Member
you're welcome!
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flar
Active Member
Rosedale is intact, but I'm sure countless late-Victorian mansions were demolished in Toronto, as in every North American city. Many were regarded as ostentatious and impractical before they were even 50 years old.
That said, I like Victorian styles (in houses). They can be compared to McMansions in the sense that they were disposable (and sometimes of poor quality), but I think many houses of that era had enough individuality that the term doesn't really fit.
That said, I like Victorian styles (in houses). They can be compared to McMansions in the sense that they were disposable (and sometimes of poor quality), but I think many houses of that era had enough individuality that the term doesn't really fit.
thecharioteer
Senior Member
All too true. Every city had its versions of the houses in "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Meet Me in St. Louis". Cleveland's Euclid Avenue, known as "Millionaires' Row," fared even worse than Jarvis Street and lost most of its mansions (including even John D. Rockefeller's house).
thecharioteer
Senior Member
One additional point (speaking of "Meet Me in St. Louis"), the role of the streetcar (or trolley), can not be underestimated in creating housing opportunities on streets like Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, or Prairie Avenue in Chicago.
Dallas:
Dallas: