#90s architecture

[kleinefreiheiten]

11.2017 Hamburg

[thegikitiki]

1994, where the kitchen wasn't just a place to boil pasta; it was an altar to the Gods of Patina. This copper vent hood isn’t just an appliance, it’s a mood ring for your stove, radiating "burnt sunset" energy while it valiantly attempts to suck up the steam from your Sun-Dried Tomato Fettuccine. Between the dark, brooding ceiling and the army of tiny figurines watching you chop onions from the shelves, this kitchen feels less like a place for meal prep and more like the set of a prestige drama about a quirky architect having a mid-life crisis. It's bold, it's glossy, and it's 100% prepared to be the most expensive thing you've ever had to polish.

Sourced from the 1994 "Sunset Kitchen Planning" guide.

[mcmansionhell]

a fine selection of bonker facades from the DC suburbs

Howdy folks! In honor of Halloween, here are some of the scariest houses currently for sale in the ever-cursed suburbs of Washington, DC. It's been awhile since I checked in on this particular hotspot, and once more, it did not disappoint.

I'll just get this one out of the way. Long-time McMansion Hell-heads are well aware of this monster estate in Potomac, MD, once allegedly owned by a particular professional athlete who will not be named, because the house should suck on its own merit. The only nice thing I can say about this house is that the designers kept the materials and colors consistent, which adds some unity to what is, in reality, five turrets in a trench coat.

Some things, the economists tell us, are too big to fail. This is not one of them. Let's move on.

Many McMansions exist to mock the concept of architectural consistency and historical continuity. This is one of them. About every single type of expanded second-story window elaboration exists here: bay window, covered balcony, juliet balcony. None of them work. The house can't decide if its 19th century eclecticism or tony DC Georgian/Federal cocktail. The random cupola merely adds insult to injury.

I don't know where realtors learned how to do photoshop, but whoever taught them should have their Adobe licenses revoked. There's a certain type of McMansion I call a "hat house" - which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a house with multiple bays or masses and each has its own special hat. This is one of the most egregious examples because all of the hats are different shapes and scales. Not even the most Disney Theme Park pink sky and fairy lighting can mitigate the controlling aesthetic influence of hät.

No compilation of Bad Facades would be complete without at least one Frankentudor™. Rich people in America really like to harken back to the days of feudalism, yet uglier, more drab, and using materials mostly derived from petrochemicals. The lighting is not helping this house, which is about as gloomy, hulking, and bloated as they come.

I have some fondness for houses that derive new, inventive forms of being ugly. The spread eagle McMansion is one of them, two oblique wings with no real core. A corner lot specimen. This one is especially weird, with the quadruple portholes, the windowless bays, the mall foyer, and the hipped roof that's not quite clipped, complete with tacked on gables. Kind of neat, sad to say.

I know most of you won't agree, but I actually believe this is the worst McMansion of the set. The absolute banality of it, the out-of-proportion everything, the compound-like demeanor, the nonsensical spacing of the mind-numbingly identical windows. The most infuriating part is that whoever designed this had some kind of order, continuity, proportion in mind and just failed utterly at it, like Sideshow Bob stepping on all those rakes. I hate it!!!!

When rich people try to make overly-inflated temples to their dumb piles of money, it's deeply satisfying when they end up looking like this house, which is just a pile of roof and wall tacked on to the worst proportioned portico imaginable. Classic McMansion Hubris. Let us all laugh.

Now we're getting into the more eldritch horror part of the list. Some houses make me wonder if I have the same set of eyeballs and conceptions of what "a house" looks like as other people. This one is playing dress up games with foam stickers. It looks like Steve's shirt from Blues Clues. It abuses the prairie muntins, which is an insult to my chosen hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Bad house.

Not enough time is devoted on this blog to bad modernism, though it would be rather generous to call this house modern. It's more like postmodernism trying to remember what modernism looked like and tripping down a flight of stairs collecting random masses and windows on the way down. Houses like this give modern architecture a bad name. It's borderline libel. Also it looks like it was made out of cardboard.

This brings us to our final, and objectively worst house:

I don't even know what to say about this freak of architecture. I don't know how it came together or why. I don't know what it wants or even pretends to do. It is a horrorshow. Gables protruding from random places, stealth roof fragments, windows too small for the walls they're embedded in, a weird cathedral-like entrance, the mosquito-infested pond, the worst example of realtor sky I've ever seen, all of it is terrible. It's haunted. Trick or Treat, but without the treat.

Anyway, that does it for this installment. If you're curious about more McModern badness, this month's Patreon bonus post will be to your liking!

Happy Halloween and Día de Los Muertos!

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[amaranth-aether]

credit: rayoutthere on instagram

[aparchitecture]

From Firm's Website:

Celebrated French fashion house Hermès commissioned Renzo Piano to design a building for their Japanese headquarters in 1998. Its location at the heart of Tokyo’s densely built, neon-lit Ginza shopping district, and the stringent building regulations regarding earthquakes and fire, have influenced a compact and unique building with a distinctive glass façade. The building contains a shop, offices, an exhibition space and access to the underground station below Harumi Avenue.

The slim building, only 10m wide on its Harumi Avenue frontage, runs back 56m along a quiet side street, and rises 10 storeys high. It has a unique glass façade made of 13,000 bespoke, 450mm-square glass blocks (with special smaller, curved glass bricks at the building’s corners). Much larger than standard glass blocks, these were especially made by Vetroarredo in Florence, Italy and had to meet stringent fire and earthquake regulations. Their stamped textured glass finish means they are translucent rather than transparent, the overall effect of the facade being somewhat like a contemporary version of the traditional Japanese screen.

Hung from the structure on steel arms, the glass block facade is designed to act like a curtain in the event of an earthquake, allowing it to move via the flexible seals between the blocks by as much as 4mm, absorbing rather than resisting seismic shock.

This translucent membrane is unchanging as it screens the office floors and upper levels of the shop, wrapping the building all the way down to the ground. Only at ground floor level, along the longer side-street elevation do you find the occasional clear glass brick framing a precious display of Hermès products. The tiny Harumi Avenue frontage is the sole place on the building for more conventional, full-height shop display windows.

Inside, the shop extends over four floors from ground floor to 3rd floor, with ateliers and offices above, and a double-height exhibition space on the 7th floor. A planted courtyard garden open to the sky tops the building but remains screened from the street by the glass block facade.

Services and circulation are housed at the back edge of the building in an opaque strip along the party wall. The glass facade stops short of this with a curved edge, revealing the escape stair and helping to define the edge of the building.

By day, the facade is silvered and sparkling; by night it glows warm like a lantern, a distinctive presence in the crowded shopping district.

[artisy2k1]

"Water / Glass" house, 1995, Kengo Kuma, Shizuoka (Japan)

[marvelobsessed134]

I can’t explain how much I love this architectural style

[radicallyretro]

Creative Artists Agency (CAA) Building - Beverly Hills, CA (1990)