The Architecture of the "Oh"s

We will look back on the Architecture of the "Oh"s and shake our heads. McMansions are over (we hope).

First thing, let me explain what I mean by the "Oh"s:

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet conclusively named our past decade. Everybody comes up blank when I ask: "What will we call the past ten years?" There have been ideas floated: a revival of the archaic "Aught"s of the earliest decade of the 1900s, or the "Naught"s, a feeble attempt at the modernization of that term. But what is a "Naught"?

I propose that the past decade be known as the "Oh"s. Why not call it what we called it? Remember the year that the housing bubble peaked? Was that Oh-seven or Oh-eight? It was fast on the slide in Oh-nine.

The name of the "Oh"s, to me, carries so much of the past decade: one that started with a war and ended with a depression (and still a war). It is like a fantastic groan: oooohhhhhghh...The groan of a whole culture crushed under its own weight.

Looking back at Architecture of the Ohs, we will certainly groan, for sure...

I house-sat recently in a relic of the Ohs, circa 2005. All the hallmarks: gables galore, proportion run amok, 18-foot foyer into a 14-foot cavern of a "living" room attached to an equally cavernous kitchen. Thankfully they skimped short of the traditional, senseless granite countertops (drop a glass and its dead, buddy). But the construction of the house was showing its shoddiness: drywall joints popped, hastily-installed wood flooring that shrank to leave large gaps, and carpenters' sloppy pencil marks left on the balusters. And so much space to fill up with purchased items out of a catalog, and to fill with heat in our northern winters. Such a sacrifice of quality, traded for quantity: more square feet!

The Age of the McMansions is over. The illusion of opulence crumbled, along with the disintegrating housing market. One already sees the cheaply built houses falling down as well. I have seen many a house unfinished, never lived in, already moldering into a heap: transient memorial to a transient buck, a fast buck that was made and lost, leaving us with a lasting impression of the Ohs.

By building small, I don't propose to claim that everybody should live in a house under 100 square feet, but rather that it is quite possible and plausible. Look around the world, and you would see it all over. Our 6000 square foot caves built for 4 could house a village. I don't propose that everybody should live tiny, but I DO know that many of us could afford to live with a lot less. In my travels around the world, I have seen many different living situations, most of them involving LESS: less space, less money, less stuff…

I believe that when we look back upon the Architecture of the Ohs, we will see it clearly for what it is: a false opulence, created by imaginary financing schemes: palaces built out of air. The senseless false gables & towering foyers that made us say "Ooooo...." with our eyes widened, will in retrospect make us say "Ohhhhh...." with our eyes cast downward, shaking our heads.