For the most part these students were legal adults by the time they started college. Still subject to parental pressure, sure. But it’s a stretch to say they were “forced” into taking places at elite Universities that should have gone to more-qualified-but-less-connected students.
At any rate, I’ve seen most of the criticism aimed at the parents rather than the students.
…a glimpse into the rarified existence of someone whose belief in meritocracy was so strong that he was willing to cheat to get the children of the wealthy the positions that poorer children had earned.
That may very well be so… but I’m going with unbridled greed as the “prime mover”.
I think you are confused as to what I was referencing. I meant about poking fun of these elitist pricks for having bad home design choices…most of which they most likely did not choose. Probably bought the house with those dumb ass columns and didn’t think anything of it.
Nothing to do with poking fun at the kids who went along with their parents breaking the rules. Those kids are just as much assholes as the parents for that shit.
Ah, it was the comparison to children being forced to pose in ugly outfits that threw me.
lol.
I mean fuck these assholes for plenty of other reasons…I’d just rather make fun of them for other stuff. Not the things most of us would also be “guilty” of. I personally doubt I’d ever notice most of the things that Karen points out as terrible about those houses until she pointed them out.
Roger that!
As the resident of a small, expensive, old silicon valley house: I would live in any of these in a second and love it. They looks awesome- comfy, big, insulated to modern standards or maybe even exceeding them, etc.
Getting things right is expensive. I dated a woman who was the interior designer of houses in the $2 million range many years ago. She described all the corners they had to cut and limits they faced even at that price.
You want to see a house where no corners were cut? Go to Biltmore House in Asheville, NC (or just rent Being There, it’s great). Everything, down to the smallest was designed and executed at the highest level. It cost a million dollars to build in ~1900 ($30 million today). Except it would cost $200 million to build now, or more. That’s why people buy McMansions- it’s what’s on offer that a normal successful person can afford.
I’m not sure what my point was, except it seems weird to me that people get so mad about these houses.
I don’t get mad at them, I just think they’re hilarious. The helpful captioned snark makes it all the easier to see in most of them the contrast between purposefully “impressive” facades and the ridiculous reality of their mashed-together, failure architectural gestures toward grandeur.
I can’t think of anything tackier than matched sets of never-read books.
Shelving the books so the spine is facing the back of the bookshelf?
AKA “Cowboy Tudor”. Giddyap, m’Lord?
I was referring to the shelving, but — to your point — “there’s no finer excuse for not reading a book than owning it.” - Anthony Burgess.
It’s also not just about things not looking right. It’s about actual real mistakes that are going to cost the owner. All those crazy rooflines add up to lots of places for leaks, more expense to re-roof and a need to re-roof earlier than a sane roofline ,etc., etc.
But at least they’re critter friendly!
Kate.
The pointing out is partly to make fun, but also to be educational. Part of her goal is to teach people more about architecture and other fields (like transit; it’s not for nothing that she lambasts 5-car garages) through humor and manifestly terrible examples, not just laugh at people’s fake book collections and questionable taste in lawn design.
I may have some more personal animus toward them, since an entire subdivision of stupid mini-McMansions went up across the street and up the hill from where I grew up as property values in my home town exploded (aided in this particular location by the great views across the river that every house competed to retain as they sprouted ever taller). They’re all a complete mess of stupid jumbled design from the front, and utter disasters of architecture from the back—nobody needs a quadruple-decker back deck that looks like an overgrown fire escape, and nobody else wants to have to look at it. I think most of them are vacant now, because they all went up just a few years before the recession hit in '08, and nobody could afford to live in them anymore.
They’re also all made all the stupider-looking by being within walking distance of an actual 19th century mansion.
Since you brought it up, may I ask why you purchased a house you don’t like? I’m genuinely looking for information here, not sniping.
(And to reciprocate, I live within about 50 miles of you in a small, old house that I adore. And bought in '09 when it was not terribly expensive. So there’s that.)
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