Dear Student, I suspect you’ve already encountered most of the conventional advice—the familiar platitudes repeated endlessly in classrooms, critiques, and career talks. Work hard. Stay disciplined. Develop your craft. Each phrase is earnest, and each contains some truth, but none of them alone can fully illuminate what it actually means to become a professional. That word carries with it a whole slew of expectations—some external, some internal, some inherited without question. Rather than offer prescriptive wisdom, I prefer to share some reflections from my own often uncertain path—observations that didn’t arrive all at once, but over time, and usually the hard way.

You may know John Green as a Youtuber, a podcaster, or the mega best-selling author of Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. His latest book is called Everything Is Tuberculosis. It’s a deep-dive into one of the oldest and deadliest threats to humankind. “If

FYI, this post is a little more NSFW than usual with the language. Usually I think McMansions are kind of funny. Sometimes, I even like them. If I didn’t like them at least a little bit, I don’t think I’d be running this blog for a solid eight years and counting. Some McMansions are so strange and so fascinating in their architectural languages (it’s never just one language) that they test the boundaries of what residential architecture can do on an individual and often ad hoc level. Others so cogently and often whimsically express various cultural fascinations and deeply entrenched American ideas of what prosperity looks like (read: neuroticisms), that, as a sociological text they remain unrivaled. But some (many!) McMansions are, to put it bluntly, evil. And it is these McMansions that reveal the ugly truth beneath the ugly architecture: that the McMansion is a manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible, and that it does so in a country besieged by brutal and inescapable income inequality. In our present political moment characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is pro-social in nature (and nature itself), I figured it was my duty to show my readers a house that embodies these sentiments, one we can all use to assuage some of our perceived powerlessness by way of mocking the shit out of it. There are a lot of fake White Houses in the US. Most of them can be found in or around the area of McLean, Virginia, the ground zero of DC blob sickos whose job it is to mete out the ratio of lethality and economy for weapons manufacturers. This one, however, is in Indiana, outside of Evansville. It was built at the apex of theme park mindset in architecture (1997) and is on the market for $4.9 million dollars. However, don’t be fooled by this opening exterior shot. It takes literal drone footage to show how unhinged this house actually is. In reality, the White House facade is akin to the light dangling from an anglerfish, luring the unsuspecting victim in… Completely NORMAL amount of money at play here! There are some images historians (if there are any left) will look back upon and say, such a phenomenon truly would not be possible without an abundance of cheap oil and derivative products. Fortunately, in the immanent post-neoliberal chobani yogurt solarpunk utopia, this house will be converted into a half ruin garden (though this will take some time with all the plastic) half public spa complex. A better world is possible, but only if we imagine it. Pro tip: there’s a way of saying “wow it’s so big” that can land as the most devastating insult in the rhetorical lexicon. I’ll be real, the armchair thing is a new one for me, too. (Rise and grindset voice): Inside you are two lions. Both of them are hungry for prosperity and success. Let’s get this bread, king. Not to do gender here, but compared to the rest of the house, this is a “my wife got her way” room if there ever was one. Fixer Upper was basically 9/11 for “architectural foam trappings” and “color.” Look what they took from you… Honestly, what a great juxtaposition. This is what that book The Machine in the Garden was all about. (No it’s not.) Half of this post tbh: Well, that’s it for this extremely upbeat and positive McMansion Hell post in this extremely positive and upbeat time we are living in. Join us soon for the concluding part 2 of the Neuschwanstein Castle series, especially if you like beautiful, psychosexually crippled swan boys (real and fictional) and kitsch theory. 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. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! McMansion Hell stocks, much like mortgage-backed securities only ever go up!!

Built in waves across centuries, it tells a story on every street.

Architecture Firm Imaginary Objects, has shared photos of a small child-friendly cabin they completed in Chonburi, Thailand, that's inspired by the spirit of a treehouse.