FULL VIDEO (1h05m27s): McMansion Hell, Fandoms, Retinol and Modern Opera | Middlebrow Podcast (May 13, 2026)
Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at The Nation and the creator of the internet's favorite architecture criticism blog, McMansion Hell. We dive into finding beauty in all buildings, criticism as a practice, modern opera, retinol, fandoms and more.
Interviewer to Kate:
You've actually gone on the record on other podcasts and have said that being an architect sucks ass.
Kate:
Yeah, this is a really important point.
Essentially what's happened to architecture since the development of autoCAD, especially is that architecture has been largely deskilled in a lot of ways, so drawing, for example, is not commonly taught in schools. Everything becomes abstracted, essentially. The computer systems are so complex now that basically, you know, those five over one [cookie cutter buildings], the reason they look like that is that they're essentially the built version of a spreadsheet.
So all of the materials, the aluminum panels, you can just plug and play, whereas like, if you wanted to add a curve to a building, then that takes like a huge amount of labor because you have to think about the flashing for like the rain. There's a possibility you could get sued if like something leaks. You know, then you have to add like additional construction drawings because it's more complex than just like slapping that stuff on there.
And so everyone's like, why are all these buildings the same? And the answer is because one, you have to minimize liability at all costs for the firm, which means like, if you just play it by the rules and you just play it into these sort of systems, you're not going to get sued. Second of all, like it's the developer's bottom line.
And third of all is that architecture itself is an abstraction. Back in the Middle Ages, when people were building the cathedrals, they were hand building and hand cutting the stone. There weren't plans.
These were developments of the Renaissance. When you take a building plan that is already an abstraction from the actual act of building the building, you're coordinating the labor instead of doing the labor. And so essentially the computer is another layer on top of that because you are so disconnected from the material, you don't touch the material, you're just in revit, you're just in autoCAD, you're dragging and dropping.
Interviewer:
It sounds like you're playing a video game.
Kate:
Exactly. You don't have any sense of, you know, the materiality of the building.
Interviewer:
Or the sense of place.
Kate:
Or the sense of place. It just you just plot that building down on a.
Interviewer:
Looks exactly the same in, you know, North Carolina, in Texas, in Atlanta.
Kate:
Exactly. And so getting an architecture degree now in a lot of the state schools, for example, it's just a technical program to learn these programs.
And a lot of architects are very upset because, you know, they went to school because they wanted to make a better world. A lot of the time.
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