Every next picture feels like slipping further into a fever dream of an alternate dimension where architecture is just different than it is in our reality.
That's right! We've got it! All here!
Look at all these chairs! Look at `em, they're great, they're office chairs. Who wants to sit on them? Not me!
Looking for ugly architecture? Then you've come to the right place! Just ugly, ugly architecture.
(also I'm trying to get my writing chops back so forgive me for placing this abomination upon thine timestline)
The first time I saw this post I had an immediate anxiety reaction and could not express why. Subsequent exposure has not lessened the anxiety, but I have been able to refine my position and figure out just what
the fuck
it is about this "house" that sends my senses into paranoid anxious overdrive from relatively innocent photography. I think I've actually got it. Come with me on this journey.
I shall not be sharing further pictures.
You're welcome.
0: THE EXTERIOR
Immediately setting expectations, this does not look like a house to me. From a distance it resembles either a warehouse or garage, or possibly the building which housed the game store I used to work in, a long white block of a thing which was obviously supposed to grow into some sort of shopping-zone anchor but that never materialized around the building, leading to this game store with empty fields on 3 sides, bordering a highway and across a parkinglot and retaining pond, a weirdly empty housing subdivision. This does not signal to me "people live here". If I'm being gracious, mayhaps it could resemble an motel, but there again - people sleep there, often people fuck there, people plot secret operations there, people hide out there, but people do not live there. People do not make a home there. And so here we are, and the initial approach is at best a place for people to do living-adjacent things, but not a house.
1: THE BAIT
Scrolling through the interior pictures, though, most of them are "fine".
Now before you riot at me, hear me out: I didn't say they were GOOD, I said they were "fine", let me elaborate.
Each individual room picture in the post above (WITH ONE NOTABLE EXCEPTION and one less-notable exception) has a very specific vibe to it, one which is not, in fact, a BAD vibe: the vibe of the "casually finished basement" in some cases or the vibe of the "aftermarket-added enclosed porch" in others. That first picture with the office chairs and many tables? That's someone's basement that was inexpensively carpeted and table'd for teens to congregate in for game night. The laundry room, the textiles/sewing room? Those feel like they ran out a new foundation and enclosed a porch, just backed up on the siding of the exterior. So on down the line - the lotsa shelves room? That's someone's basement tchotchkes room, the box-fans-in-wall picture, that's an enclosed porch with an ad-hoc ventilation feature. IN ISOLATION, all of these things are... well, perhaps they're not good, but they're eminently reasonable. I would not turn down a house with one or even more of these things.
The exceptions, for the record, are that boiler-room-ass bare-insulation fire-hazard utility room (WHAT THE SHIT) and the weird split-level-ish porch approach (not necessarily mind-boggling but still a little wtf why is it like that, to me). Everything else, I could fairly easily wrap my mind around "oh, ok, here's why this is in a house".
2: THE SWITCH
...but that's the thing, isn't it? We're not dealing with one or two of these rooms in a house. We're not dealing with a couple finished-basement rooms or exterior add-on rooms. We're not even dealing with "there was a core to this house and it sort of metastasized out from that in a nautiloid-growth pattern of DIY additions and extra rooms" situation. There is no "rest of house". There is no "interior of house".
This is it.
This is the whole house, everything designed - quite possibly unintentionally, I might add - to scream "this is outside, this is exterior, this is a pass-through space" even when you're inside. Some of it looks weirdly airy for enclosed space and it is because of the visual semiotics of the interior architecture and geometry, the collection of symbols screaming "outside" and "cheap" and "low-effort" even when there are expensive items there (like the sewing equipment, or the office chairs)
And when I said unintentional, I meant it: the most likely scenario I can think of is the homeowner saying to themselves "Well, we have this amount of space, we have all this space, we need to use it, but siding is cheaper than finished walls, and we won't have to put up wallpaper, and this carpet is cheaper than what they're asking for "good" carpet, and we can accommodate airflow without needing a whole big fancy HVAC system" and not MEANING to trigger Suburban And Rural Symbolic Panic in the visceral manner that the contradiction DOES, through one of the most glaring examples of an architectural Kuleshov effect I have ever seen, of relatively innocuous elements given hideous context just by being placed next to each other...
...honestly, this is an unintentional masterpiece in horror writing, that's what this is.
