kyleknight

[kyleknight]

2024 total solar eclipse over the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (📸 Chris Owens)

#solar eclipse

[kyleknight]

meet cute: it's raining and I see your battered bleeding body lying in the mud and I kick it slightly to see if you're dead

#thorne and opal

[kyleknight]

[kyleknight]

Nice going man, you've become indistinguishable from that which you sought to destroy

#ivory

[kyleknight]

I wanted to make a backstory for the time I found this in pokemon Violet XD

#quality content

[kyleknight]

The discord opens in 3 days, and artist creation starts!! Do you have your art piece planned out?

#let me in!

[kyleknight]

"I think it's an exciting story for the sport and I'd love to see Sebastian race in F1. I tried to get Sebastian racing in World Endurance Championship and who knows, maybe that will happen as well so."

#jenson button #mmhm #distracted by the beautiful model on his shelf #bgp001 love of my life

[kyleknight]

purpose of this poll: basically im wondering if my gran having a pistol was a typical american experience

#yeah unfortunately people go to walmart with them #scares the life out of me

[kyleknight]

*smoke emiting from clenched fist*

woman: OOOOoOOH NoO!!!! It’s meelltIINNGG!!

*ring melts off woman’s hand*

woman: MY PRECIOUS POWERRrRR RING! GONE FOORRVVERrrr..

woman: *screams like a pterodactyl* 

#quality content

[kyleknight]

[kyleknight]

quitting mental health to watch this fuckass sport

#me with nascar this sunday

[kyleknight]

#opal and monica

[kyleknight]

from nebraska earlier today. this has got to be some of the craziest tornado footage i have ever seen. from @nickgormanwx

#science

[kyleknight]

This is the dream, tho?

#I hope he's living his best life

[kyleknight]

[kyleknight]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure bringing you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism while unable to let go of the cookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Yet all fits with what the interior design tries to hide, namely how unerringly peculiar the house is, yet it is not entirely able to do so because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

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#the window salesman theory is compelling #quality content

[kyleknight]