Our friends at PrairieMod have an excellent article on the community-butchering trend toward excessively large homes. Why do we want what we do not need?
A recent story on NPR
elicited a long and somber *sigh* from the PrairieMod team the other
day. The story, about the recent trend in excessive growth in American
"dream" home size, really highlighted exactly why we feel so passionate
to speak out against this cultural malignancy.Frank Lloyd Wright once said that a house should "spring from the
ground and into the light," a phrase that embodies his ideals behind organic architecture. Unfortunately, McMansions
don’t spring from the ground, they usurp it … blocking the view and
light from all others in its path. One underlying point of the story
was that Americans are building these brick and mortar abominations as
a way of living out the fantasy of "the American Dream" or a sense of
security after 9/11. This is a perverse fantasy of dreams overtaken by
greed. Any sense of security is an ironic one, since the high cost of
energy consumption of these behemoths compounds the problems of foreign
oil dependence that lie at the heart of the 9/11 tragedy.
Read the whole article at PrairieMod.