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October 30, 2007
Too Weird Architecture
It's Halloween week, so I thought I'd get your take on scary houses. You know the kind -- the ones that, when you drive by them, you think, "Who on earth thought that would look good?" I used to live in one, sort of. It was a perfectly acceptable Colonial from the front, but sometime in the late '60s, the then-owners decided they needed a family room. So they apparently hired somebody whose sole purpose was to give them the extra square footage they wanted -- with no regard to how the addition looked from the outside: like a giant white shoebox with a few windows cut into it and a flat (and leaky) roof stuck onto the back of an all-brick house. (Flat roofs in snow country are such a bad idea.)
A while back, I got a really interesting book titled What Not to Build: The Do's and Don'ts of Exterior Home Design, written by Sandra Edelman, Judy Gaman and Robby Reid. The cover photo says it all: a house with (among other things) Doric columns; brick (two kinds), stone and stucco;at least four different styles of windows, ranging from double-hung to casement to octangonal fixed to something that looks like it's out of 1955 Miami -- well, you get the idea. I sure hope the photo is the result of computer art; I'd hate to think anyone actually lives in a house like that!
What's the scariest addition (or new construction, for that matter) that you've seen? In non-residential, I'd have to pick the expansion of Soldier Field in Chicago. (As many locals say, it looks like a spaceship landed on top of the venerable old stadium.) Other nominees for my personal hall of shame includes porches and decks slapped onto houses with no regard to its style and garages that cover 1/2 (or more) of a front elevation. Share your own pet architectural peeves with the rest of us. I'm sure we can all relate!
Posted by Marjie O'Connor, HGTVPro.com Staff at October 30, 2007 12:43 PM
