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[bellshazes]

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.

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[bellshazes]

this dripleaf challenge is making me absolutely cackle. bdubs expressly going well i think this is impossible but i'm going to get the three big redstone guys to try and solve my problem bc i don't think they will TODAY but maybe eventually later they'll still be thinking about it, and so giving problem-solvers a problem to solve classically obsesses them works. and now he's got new dripleaf techniques. stinking conniver

bdubs. talking about being proud of his kids AND also thinking his forest would be ordinary to people who weren't him. exploding him with my mind

[bellshazes]

everything is a mess i didn't clip the gif right i think i just deleted that anon so sorry im being beset by demons (bdubs members only release of his episode i bet it will be public shortly).

[bellshazes]

pov you've been invited to a small isolated cabin in the woods and this thang starts blinking wyd

[bellshazes]

bdubs. talking about being proud of his kids AND also thinking his forest would be ordinary to people who weren't him. exploding him with my mind

[bellshazes]

the rest of the block... it's not so bad in with the other buildings if i keep getting fun with the colors. I wish I'd been more thoughtful of framing when I started building but I'm chalking it up as a lesson learned. (this is spawn on my singleplayer world)

before/after.... i don't know that i love the second one but i do think it's better and stretching my texturing and shading skills a lot more. it's modeled after a real house in my neighborhood because i love riffing on richardsonian romanesques.

[bellshazes]

before/after.... i don't know that i love the second one but i do think it's better and stretching my texturing and shading skills a lot more. it's modeled after a real house in my neighborhood because i love riffing on richardsonian romanesques.

[bellshazes]

traffic report: he's the hiding lurker

[bellshazes]

traffic report: he's the hiding lurker

[bellshazes]

people have been saying this for 10 years

im about to join the war on rpf on the side of rpf. WHERE is the ethubs sex tape

[bellshazes]

why was etho obsessed with how broke bdubs was in mindcrack s3. of all the things to fake concern over (it is cover for him stealing all of the b team quartz shop stock when hoppers are first released) but it happens over and over. really funny for the guy with a current day shopping addiction bit

[bellshazes]

Sam called to let my know a) my dad is moving parishes (very juicy gossip) and b) he was playing minecraft the last time she called him. I want to make B and him play with me so bad

[bellshazes]

googling the source of a quote i heard at an educator's conference panel presented by radical youth work deleuzean psychotherapists last year and ending up on a master's thesis on the gender idelogoy of kpop rpf fanfiction in my attempt to explain why i think judith butler was mean about paris is burning and what that means for healthcare. where AM i

[bellshazes]

"haha the first two songs of I Have Made a Place talk about dreaming as a way to connect with others what's Devils Throat got for me"

devils throat:

[bellshazes]

the other day i drove past ollie's trolley omw to a different diner and i did think, as i often do, of the Memory Box bit.

[bellshazes]

Richard was a stout-hearted man, he’d been through the bulk of his life He no longer spoke to most of his folks and was abandoned by his wife Rolling down the road one night alone, he came upon a terrible sight An older woman lay bleeding in the road and her screams about filled the night

She said: Look backwards on your future and look forward to your past Everything upon which you base your faith is made of vapour and it won’t last It’s only everything in our shared reality that keeps our souls held fast So, look backwards on your future and look forward to your past

Richard woke the next morning and spoke, he said, there’s something I feel I must do He called up all of his natural born kids and all his money from the bank he withdrew He changed his mind about everything he’d ever felt about what’s bad and good He fixed a loud-speaker to the roof of his car and he sang to everyone he could

do you think that richard the stout-hearted man from 'look backwards on your future look forward to your past' is any type of nod to richard cory. because in my mind they are the same man

[bellshazes]

do you think that richard the stout-hearted man from 'look backwards on your future look forward to your past' is any type of nod to richard cory. because in my mind they are the same man