McMANSION SATIRE
Giant tract homes meet Old Masters in Keith Krumwiede’s satirical Freedomland mashup.
My desk at The Times, like the one in my home office, is shadowed by an ever-growing pile of new architecture books. Many if not most are monographs that follow the essentially self-promotional formula of that genre: Here are some lavish photographs of one firm’s work! Here are some essays praising that work!
Every once in a while, an entirely different kind of book sneaks through. One recent outlier of note is “Atlas of Another America” by Keith Krumwiede, an architect who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It is that rarest of things in architecture: a book of satire. (Its subtitle is “An Architectural Fiction.”) It lays out the history of a place called Freedomland, an imaginary new town that brings together Thomas Jefferson, gardencity planner Ebenezer Howard and the back-to-the-land collectivism of 1970s Northern California. Krumwiede cribs the basic designs of the houses in Freedomland from the big U.S. home-builders: KB Home, Toll Brothers, Meritage Homes and the like. But he then reconstitutes them, stringing or mashing them together to form a strikingly odd sort of communal housing.
All of this is accompanied by a series of Old Master and landscape paintings — by artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Winslow Homer — to which Krumwiede has added renderings of the Freedomland housing tracts, slipped in usually along the top of the frame or in one corner. These digital collages are like the book as a whole: somehow familiar and strange at the same time, separate fragments of Western cultural history pushed together for scrutiny.
Krumwiede and I conducted the following Q&A, which has been condensed and edited, by email. Because your book never really lets its guard down as a piece of satire, inter viewing you sort of feels like inter viewing Stephen Colbert — I’m not sure if you’re going to be in character. When you do readings and lectures promoting the book, do you do it as Keith Krumwiede the architect and academic or as the impresario of Freedomland?
Actually, there is only Keith Krumwiede the impresario. Seriously, though, that’s been something that I’ve struggled with as I prepare for some lectures this spring. Right now, I’m leaning toward doing a full Colbert, putting on my seersucker suit with a straw fedora. What prompted you to turn your work in the direction of satire — and in particular this kind of satire, with its 18th century flourishes?
I wanted to make clear, in a humorous way, that even as the single-family house represents the foundation myth of rugged individualism, it also masks the inconvenient (to many) truth of our mutual interdependence. It was also, frankly, an attempt to make something beautiful out of these houses that the discipline disdains.
What I found exhilarating about the process was that I was able to hold opposing views and philosophies in the space of the one project. I could use exaggeration, a classic tool of humor and satire, to inflate these already large houses into even larger, grander and consequently even more absurd domestic piles, while at that same time suggesting that these palaces could be a model — tied as they are to lost strands of thought in the history of American housing — for new forms of shared living. Why do you think satire is such an unusual register in architecture?
Architecture, it could be argued, is about putting things in order, cleaning things up, making them right. Satire, as a kind of fiction, often does just the opposite. There’s a quote that I use in the book from [New Yorker staff writer] Larissa MacFarquhar that I really love where she says, “Fiction is about creating foolishness and practical difficulties and allowing them to tangle and fester until they are beyond repair.” If forced to choose, would you say the book is the product more of your disillusionment with residential architecture and patterns of living in the U.S. or with the way we (architects, critics, academics) think or write about that architecture and those patterns?
It’s certainly both, but more the latter. And actually, I wouldn’t say it’s disillusionment; it’s more about frustration in both cases. I’m a bit of a misanthrope, so I have no illusions any longer about how people, citizens or architect-citizens, will behave. But I am continually frustrated by architecture’s general inability to get past its own implicit prejudices regarding the suburbs. While there are some architects and critics that are engaged in some serious and important work, the tendency is to be simply disdainful of the place and the culture. “Atlas” argues for turning the McMansion from an expression of private status to a communal building type. To what extent do you think the American home buyer or home builder is ready (or has ever been ready) for that kind of transformation?
There’s a history of communal dwelling experiments in the U.S., most dating back to the 19th century. During that time, when the house had not yet completely captured the popular [imagination], different groups — often influenced by people like Charles Fourier in France — set up collective communities all over the country, including in places like Red Bank, N.J., with the North American Phalanx. Dolores Hayden has written extensively about these experiments, most notably for me in her book “Seven American Utopias.”
So there’s a history to build on there, full of useful and cautionary evidence. Interestingly, there are already new experiments happening as well. Some of these are more bottom-up proposals, like cohousing developments, while others are more market-driven, like WeLive, which is extending the office-sharing ideas of WeWork into the domestic realm. At what point did you decide to include the paintings?
The paintings actually came somewhat late in the process. It began with just the plans. And after exhibiting those a few times and lecturing on the project, I kept getting the same question: “What does it look like?” At first, I found the question frustrating. After all, these were generally architects asking the questions, and they’re supposed to know how to read plans and imagine their formal consequences. But I realized that the work was too ambiguous and I did need to add some other imagery to drive the message home. The book strikes me as connected in certain ways to a nascent but growing interest in history among young and midcareer architects. But when you began the project, I’m guessing many of your colleagues and students were entirely immersed (and maybe still are) in a futuristic digital realm. What was attractive to you about spending time with the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson, Ebenezer Howard, et al.?
These houses already encode a vision of history that in many ways is absent of any actual historical reality. In working on them, it became obvious to me that I had to address that schism; I had to actually contextualize them in relation to the ideas and myths that drive their production and, more important, their consumption. And the ghosts, as you call them, provided me with voices that I could adopt in the performance of the story, as well as giving the story a sense of legitimacy, whether real or imagined. This holds true for the design of the book as well. It’s why I formatted the book like a historical treatise.
There’s also an aspect of taking an intentionally contrarian tone with the work. I knew that it would aggravate, or at the very least confuse, some people, that they wouldn’t know what to make of it. I wanted to exploit that inherent risk of using satire, the fact that some people will take you seriously. Is Freedomland a utopia?
Yes, absolutely. Aren’t all great architectural proposals? This one just happens to be more self-aware than your standard, run-of-themill utopia. The discontent of its fictional inhabitants is baked in from the start. But so is their happiness. Just like real life.