Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

If you drive around the wealthy areas of Dallas, Texas, you will soon discover a special breed of extremely large, new houses located on relatively small sites. These houses are the phenomenon known locally as ‘McMansions’. Most of these houses are variations on seventeenth century French architect Louis Le Vau’s most famous chateau, ‘Vaux-le-Vicomte’. If you can pleasantly imagine this massive French mansion on a two acre parcel surrounded by traditional Texas ranch houses (soon, undoubtedly, to be razed themselves and rebuilt as yet more McMansions) you would probably feel at home in Dallas. Interestingly, McMansions are much in demand in Dallas and elsewhere throughout the country. Of course the particular pilfered architectural style varies from region to region; newly constructed residential variations on palaces, manors, villas, etc. can be found throughout the country, including the Berkshires. Regardless of location or assumed pedigree, they all share in common unabashed and largely unadulterated European ancestry, high construction cost, and an ‘in-your-face’ opulence. In general each of these houses, like their European progenitor, provide spectacularly more than needed in terms of room and size; vast amounts of the house exist only to demonstrate that the house is vast.

More often than not these houses are clustered together, sometimes in private, even walled communities. This creates a fascinating menagerie of styles verging often on the surreal. These communities have names like ‘Brentwood’; locally we have not yet seen the arrival of ‘gated communities’ so common in Miami, Florida, and Greenwich, Connecticut, but we do have districts like ‘Prospect Hill’ in Stockbridge; Lenox, Great Barrington, and other Berkshire towns have their equivalent or will soon. The largely egalitarian residential landscape of my childhood is breaking down quickly. Recently the New York Times ran an article noting that the quiet enjoyment of wealth in affluent towns like Greenwich, Connecticut is a thing of the past. The sentiment there today is, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. The beautiful and the adorned have replaced the useful and this represents a seismic shift in the American psyche. I use ‘beautiful’ cautiously in the context of the McMansions because I personally find them pretentious with ridiculous a close second, but “Isn’t that house beautiful!” was the unsolicited opinion of people walking by me as I studied the previously mentioned variation of ‘Vaux-le-Vicomte’ under construction in Dallas. In my opinion something big is going on here and, were he alive today, Alexis de Tocqueville – the French aristocrat and societal observer who visited the newly formed United States in the early nineteenth century -- would certainly be interested.

“Democratic nations … cultivate the arts which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful.” De Tocqueville wrote these words in his seminal study of life in the United States, Democracy in America. He was struck by the, “general equality of condition among the people. He continued, “I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of a society…”

I do not believe I am romanticizing my childhood in the nineteen-sixties by noting that there was far greater “equality of condition”, at least within the context of upstate New York where I lived. The difference between the people we thought of as ‘rich’ and those we described as ‘poor’ was largely confined to the age of the automobile parked in front on the house. The houses were all remarkably similar – ‘ranch’ variations - and even the one family that really was much more affluent than the rest of us and who still maintains controlling interest in a major American corporation – comparable with Bill Gates today -- did not demonstrate this with much vigor. None of this is to suggest that there was not real poverty in America then; a trip through the Appalachian Mountains revealed pockets of grinding poverty, and Black Americans were even more marginalized economically than is the case today. Still, at that time a house like Bill Gate’s current mansion would have been seen by virtually everyone, including our own local wealthy family as a grotesque violation of some unwritten societal compact, a brazen affront to de Tocqueville’s, “general condition of equality.”

Today, however, it is likely that this same local family does have a home to rival Mr. Gate’s residential palace. Like the other McMansions, Mr. Gate’s new house is, in my opinion, a symptom of a disease that threatens our concept of democracy itself. Democracy is a far more fragile structure than we care to imagine. But, as has always been the case, it is not so much the sudden and massive assault – we have, after all, survived and even thrived through several wars -- but rather the slow, inexorable depletion of our sense of ‘fairness’, de Tocqueville’s “general condition of equality” – that most threaten democracy’s vitality, its very existence.

The suburban architecture of the post-war era was decried by the architectural academy and sociologists alike as dangerously conformist and stylistically lacking. In hindsight, however, the first houses of Levitown or my own Big Flats might have been viewed by de Tocqueville as a healthy sign for a democracy like ours.

However, I believe he would have seen the emergence of McMansions as a clear sign of trouble.