beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Okay, so, I have been looking at houses on zillow
(no I dont know why either)
and I have discovered that rich people houses in the USA are just... wrong.

Like, I'm not saying this for reasons of taste, make it look however, and I'm not saying British housing is superior, because... *big sigh, vague gesture at everything*
but looking at houses in the USA listings at the rich end just...
they're structurally incoherent. They seem to have no idea what space is *for*, or indeed that it can be for something. The heating and cooling bills must be stupendous, because they appear to have no necessary connection to the climate, and Really Big Glass Wall has been In for at least twenty years, like as a focus for what you might call the living room but I'm not sure they live in it.

... I'm not sure rich people live in these houses. Like they logically must stand, sit, or lie down in at least part of them, but they don't look like houses someone lives a life in.

And when trying to figure out why they give that impression, I have focused in on
Stairs.

Their stairs keep on being incoherent junky messes, and if the stairs are Like That, seems like the rest of the house is going to be too.

I have pondered what I mean by that:
( Read more... )
Once you stop measuring and shaping and placing architecture as a human space where human bodies will do human things, it gets pretty fricking uncanny really fast, imho.

Or just, like, vastly uncomfortable looking.



So the stairs are like a microcosm or symptom of what all else the architecture is likely to be doing, but I feel I have figured out my problem with the stairs first.

Other stuff can be much more nebulous.


... just, so many rooms, so awkwardly placed, no flow, no function, how many people are actually expecting to ever go in there?

What is any of it for?

*big sigh*




I tell you, I look at a lot of these, I miss great halls where the purpose is inviting all your friends and all your enemies and seating them far enough apart they'd have to take a step before they lunge.

Those at least make sense.