At that time were larger than lots of the previous generation of street car suburbs and so that widening of the lot size was really instrumental in the development of the McMansion through that initial open floor plan I've been to the time where people could afford to buy or to build larger houses starting with the ranch which was of course extremely long and had extremely wide lots and the split level which was of course building on on the ranch and then there was a sort of transitionary period between the split level and the sort of 1st generations of the mansions but those houses started to explore concepts like. Huge cathedral ceilings in different rooms and which was afforded to them by the shape the roof lines and really kind of got people associated with you know having larger interior spaces and so that style really led to a kind of transition between sort of more horizontal space and more vertical interior spaces and the 1st sort of generation of bonafide Nick mansions came about in around 198984 I guess I would say it's probably a year where he started to see them and passed wealthy areas outside of cities and more in rural areas most like mansions are found outside of cities and wealthier suburbs what makes a house a McMansion you've got a real definition it's not just some big 3 people have been kind of trying to quantify what makes a house in a mansion for a quite a bit actually there's a little bit of academic research on this right after the recession around 2009 or at the beginning of the recession Personally I think a McMansion is really simply to hide it that it's an oversized house my personal threshold can be above 3000 square feet which is well above the national average it's a house that is poorly constructed it's a house that has in concert. Stent or poorly thought out design the kind of composition of the house it's not really architecturally sound or there's lots of sort of anachronisms between stylistic movements there's a chaotic layout the Realize ation on the exteriors of the house is often a result of these kinds of convoluted plans that can only be realized that's why the roof lines are so bizarre because if you have cathedral ceilings in every room on the 2nd floor you're going to end up with some strange roof lines the House is essentially designed from the inside out it's a sign of a kind of bigger part of what a McMansion is which is really in my experience it's kind of the hyper commodification of one's living situation I mean these houses are designed to be bought and sold essentially at the height of the puzzle and even past the bubble they retain these important signifiers of wealth and when you are designing a house based off of what it's going to sell for it and it just becomes kind of an escalating game of of assets you have to have this this this and this or else your house is considered subpar to other houses and when you have to cumulate so many individuals items or so many in individual rooms or types of rooms or any kind of thing that will make that number go up up up up you're going to end up with a extremely convoluted House form especially if you're not dealing with an experienced architect who designs these things or are there architects involved or builders or what's the process some extensions are designed by architects that work for large building companies like you know the Toll Brothers say or Brian homes or whatever some of them are designed by our custom built by local builders probably a local builder or have a collection of plans what will happen usually is that the builder will sit down with the homeowner who will who will then add their own special touch and decide exactly what they want in the house and that kind of process and some marking what may start out as a relatively reasonable. And turning being executed in something that's completely unreasonable the resulting house that is Bill is often kind of strange looking especially the roofline and especially the way that the rooms are kind of splayed out in such a haphazard way it's really kind of to alleviate the structural burden of a queue of accommodating so much desired space then who lives in these houses what kinds of people is there some truth class or subclass that that is drawn to them most of the people who live in expansions are members of the energy real class mostly white collar workers in some kind of management positions or people like lawyers doctors but what's so funny is most of the houses that people suddenly saying I hate this outsider etc are houses that are like 11000 squares and like homes of the ultra wealthy let the ultra elites those houses that are are extremely tacky and I would say qualify for mention but I think that as big mansions but I think that they are kind of their own echelon of just their the kind of trump of the cation or suburban houses they go beyond just near like tastelessness into a like new realms of really kind of sick and degraded using gives a little conspicuous consumption Yeah it's funny you mention Trump is as Peter through your earlier. Then we think of the the aesthetics of Donald Trump says he does seem to emerge of the same culture that produces a McMansion I mean people said of Donald Trump that he is what a poor person's idea of what a rich person should be which I always I always kind of had a hard time with that statement I think that's a Personally I think a little classic but I would say that there are kind of material signifiers of wealth that are extremely simplified and basic one of them is like bronze gold any kind of like metals another such stone columns all these things that are used in extremely important buildings like government buildings school. Bills like colleges banks are really big ones that's where sort of the Floyd go to story for years is a is a trope borrowed from. Courthouses and banks it's not really necessarily comment on residential houses even affluent ones prior to probably I would say the 19th century. But even that but our current conception of the 2 story for your is based off of commercial thinks. They take very similar Florence especially with the centrally placed staircase and Chancellor and the materials which are usually marble floor and sometimes the only marble floor in the entire house. These are just basic and these are maybe subconscious I mean I don't. Necessarily you know people are intended in their players to look like Thankfully yours but there are these signifiers of wealth that people identify with as having made it that's why granite countertops are so are so popular it's not because you know granite is particularly well suited to a countertop surface any more so than linoleum any more so than Formica or any more so than any other kind of stone the reason why granite is so highly coveted is because it takes greater amounts of labor to extract it from the Earth and therefore there is some kind of you know Birky and sublime quality to it because that Labor is in even and that's really the big thing with chandelier stoop because back in the day these things of course they signify the signifying chain of these individual you know signifiers of well as been completely eradicated I mean the changes there's a great example back in the day the chandelier was extremely decadent because it took an army of observance to get up on a ladder precariously holding playing to light each and every one each and every candle that was just a display of labor for the amusement of everybody else in the house to watch and for what to light this giant thing that springs from the ceiling in a very treacherous way so there are kind of indications of previously laborious elements to these kinds of architectures and for me what's so interesting about the Mansions is that these elements are completely devoid of their original context now when you want to turn the chandelier on it's just like flipping a switch but we still find that to be some kind of supine because you knew that back in the day with extreme luxury these are not necessarily you know conscious decisions that people make in their head but these are kind of cultural bodies that guy these principles of designing around some general idea well keeping the mattress of course racially did often quite. Really isolated removed from cities what about the social configuration of the mantra does that compare with your classic or better to prepare well make mansions or are part of a larger effort amongst wealthy suburbanites to become more and more isolated from other people essentially the reason part of the reason is because you know what you can build a larger house of plants cheaper because you have more money left over to actually get the building and part of it is so that was an expensive in and of itself to move if you move farther away you got the bigger house that's not necessarily always the case because there's other elements of like building infrastructure for sewage and or waste disposal extras any etc that were expensive but for for a lot of people it's actually just cheaper to buy to build a bigger house the further away you are that kind of isolation is really interesting to me though but it's part of a larger 20th century I still a sion of the suburbs and which was of course evilly racial I know the kind of setting of the suburbs especially the ex-urbs was was based off of the sort of federal housing authorities plan for great streets. Federal Housing Administration there are plenty. They chase plant very good streets which had to be curvy and off of the not sure he'll and you just didn't deter traffic but it also deterred walkability and that was not necessarily unintentional you didn't want riffraff from the city coming into your perfect suburb so you had to buffer you have a buffer of an arterial road and constantly winding streets that it's pretty disorienting basically to deter outsiders from somehow getting into this insular neighborhood of course this is a racialized issue the other thing is so when that the McMansion of that kind of isolation is taken to new heights and it's very much evident in the social structure of the house itself in mc mansions often people get not only their own rooms but rooms in front of those rooms some lifts for example the master suite will often have kind of an area where like there's chairs and books or a fireplace or something like that and it's to add to and even another blocker of isolation between one person and the rest of the house but it's so funny about Nick mansions is that because they're so isolated they try in and of themselves to be small towns that's what you see in basements you see rec room with pool tables and a full bar it's like yes I would love to go downstairs and participate in a full bar which I what do you call your life can be like a any to play bartender I'm lonely or something like that I mean there's really no reason to have a full bar in one's house with a full bar counter and a wall of liquor and whatnot it's just I feel like it's almost a psychological. Compensation for the extreme isolation that being a nice ex-urban areas. Provokes I think that be the specially ornate That yards all of these the settings in the house for a med for entertaining but how many times do these people really entertain because it's such a burden to get to and from their house that's really the kind of irony of it there are these houses are designed with the maximum possible social interaction in mind which for some people it's like oh yeah we're going to have Thanksgiving here one day and all my kids are going to be grown and then their kids are going to be grown and then there are other kids like to families or something I mean she's an absurdly. Large amount of actual house is devoted to entertaining which happens in most households not very often and in the households and the time in one's life where one entertains a vote which if I experience as big college people are pretty much Ok with just sitting in the kitchen and drinking beer in my in my experience they don't necessarily need their own rooms for entertaining with 6 tv's in like 10 pools or whatever when people come to see you they're happy to see you not your stuff that's always been my understanding and that's what my parents always told me. And so these are just designed to impress more than anything it's not so much about accommodating the social fabric of the outside but it's about dominating it and it's about showing anyone who happens to stop by look at how much stuff I have that's really what it's about when you think about it that is extremely antisocial and also extremely American. The mishmash of styles materials that characterize a McMansion which you spend a lot of time detailing on on your blog what does that say Is it like they don't really know what they're doing or are they actually trying to say something by putting all these different styles of materials together I think it's just kind of accident I think that it's not intentional I don't think that they're being sly or ironic or in the kind of post-modern sense of these juxtaposition or exaggerations of these details I really think that they just pick them out of a catalog they know is that this looks big little they plea old to they want some sense of history a city her some sort of 30 or heritage that they can cite with these. Vulgar structures I always think about which Amos and said about the pastiche so Boger history a city is what he says it's it's even it's not even history a city it's the complete breakdown of history a city it's completely detaching these materials from their original context and he goes to talk about the Platonic idea of the simulacrum the perfect copy for which no original exists and this is a great example of that these houses are basically traditional There are even called in house plants traditional style houses with no tradition to speak of these houses didn't houses didn't look like this before this is a copy for which no original exists and the family a risk to produce the least things were they did they burn out with the Bible you know we're still producing them we're not going to stop producing them until they stop being so culturally desirable and we're not going to stop producing them until . It's no longer sustainable to live a car centric lifestyle. Kate Wagner keeper of the blog McMansion hell which you can find of the pension held out by those Doug Dillard in the program is behind the news back after a musical break. To Though some of Newtown by the slits next the far right in late July American renaissance of white supremacist organization hold its annual conference and run is led by Jared Taylor a yearly a preppy demeanor who aspires to be the respectable face of the American reaction it's one of the few called vacations of such ghouls that's open to the. Public including press and document which went and wrote it up for the Political Research Associates magazine public eye you can find it on the web at Political Research dot org Jared Taylor was born in Japan to Christian missionary parents and spent the 1st 16 years of his life there he founded the journal American renaissance in 1990 in the organization of the same name several years later you know the only believes that black people are genetically dumber than whites but that people of African descent are actually grateful to hear that slander he's also fiendishly at the immigrant who believes that white people deserve their own homeland he has oddly enough not in that he Some might but that doesn't stop at least some eyes from going to his conferences here's the American Renaissance sounds like a fancier version of make America great again doesn't it describes its mission quote race is an important aspect of individual and group identity of all the fault lies that divide society language religion class ideology is the most prominent and divisive race in racial conflict are at the heart of some of the most serious challenges the Western world faces in the 21st century the problems of race cannot be solved without adequate understanding attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse progress requires a study of all aspects of race whether historical cultural or biological this approach is known as race religion close quote Dunham eco it's a Brooklyn based writer whose work has appeared in Slate Salon the nation the New York Times book review in The Village Voice spent several days at the conference here she is the report my 1st question Donna what's it like for a pin code Jewish lesbian from New York to travel among a bunch of Nazis I was really scared I did a lot of things to help make myself safer I'm not sure I can talk about them but I'll say I was really really scared and I was happy once I got inside and I realized they were taking me as friendly they were taking me. I as just another white person who they thought was favorably disposed towards them did they know anything about your proclivities or did you keep it under wraps I kept it under wraps although the the actual staffers from American renaissance a couple of them had read my work they want Progressive's of all kinds including queer ones to come write about them they really. They really do want to do outreach to anybody who is white which is something we really have to watch for and whether Jews are white is a controversial position in this group yes absolutely yeah I was really afraid going there as a Jew and my name was on my bad you know so it said Donna Mankowitz press so probably a lot of people got that I was a Jew but some people may not have but at this conference on live all the other white nationalist conferences Jews are officially welcome is the head of this conference Jared Taylor has decided to make this this event and his organization look forward thinking by saying it's Ok Jews Jews are white so they can be part of our white greatness so someone came up to me and asked if I was Jewish and I said yeah and he was a he was a fellow Jew So you know great he was a Jewish white supremacist and you know was happy that I a fellow Jew was there I want to get back to the it is so much as I'm quoting absolutely these guys were very good behavior right they wanted to be seductive absolutely and really not like flaming like Neo Nazis they were doing so they were looking like flaming neo nazis like 2 weeks later which is when Charlottesville happened many of them were going and looking like flaming neo nazis and chanting Jews will not replace us. And on Twitter I mean I I followed the people who were tweeting from the conference on Twitter many of them were saying anti-Semitic things and Nazi supporting failings but at this conference they were on their best behavior famously David Duke who has attended in the past made an anti-Semitic remark from the audience back in I think 2006 and a Jewish attendee yelled You know you Nazi and he was he was heckled roundly the Jew Jewish guy was heckled roundly but after that they kind of made a tacit policy that you weren't supposed to say anything anti-Semitic while you were in the halls of the conference Ok this group Jared Taylor the leader or you only from I. Can Run officials tell us about him and them Jared Taylor for a long time has been part of the Council of concerned citizens which is the reincarnation of the old White Citizens Council in the south which actually lots of mainstream public politicians have been involved in in the past like Haley Barbour and other Republicans a couple of Democrats just very involved with mainstream politicians to influence policy in a racist direction Jared went to Yale as as I did too and he advertises that all the time he likes to make white supremacy seem gentlemanly and patrician so he uses his e l alumni address for his you know his main American Renaissance which might be rath