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The Slogan for Our Age

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When I hear buzzwords like sprawl and McMansion and hyperconsumption and unsustainability and so forth, they are universally used as pretexts to allow the author to hate his fellow citizens without seeming snobby. No one needs what I don't want is the slogan of the age.

That works as an excellent summary of our cultural attitudes, useful well beyond its original context as preamble to a rant against “snout houses”. And there’s more pith:

There has been a concerted effort to dismantle all standards of right and wrong and beauty and truth. If ever truthiness was put into sticks and bricks, this house is it. When you rebel against standard things, sooner or later you run out of ways to be original, and all that is left is to do the exact opposite of good. It's the only permutation of new that's left to you after a while.

It’s Sturgeon’s Law applied to architecture.