Taj Murah: The McMansions of Southeast Asia

Note: This article forms a part of artist Izat Arif's exhibition "Aku Tahu Asal Kau Jadi" (S.E.A. Focus, January 2024) in Singapore. Izat created an assemblage that sustains his long-standing criticisms of the mores of the emerging Malay middle-class culture - the good, the bad and the ugly. At the centre of this assemblage is a fully academic reproduction of a Doric column in glulam timber, an ironic but messy allegory to McMansions. The exhibition can be viewed here: https://issuu.com/aplusart.asia/docs/a_sea-focus2024_izatarif_tanzihao

Before we proceed – let's be clear: McMansions are an obscenity. The spectrum of opinion on them varies from being offensive to the eyes to outright immorality. One is never indifferent to a McMansion, except if you’re a psychopath.

“You know it when you see it.”

“Pre-recession, post-taste.”

“McMansion. Latest iPhone. Entry-level foreign car. Soul-crushing debt.”

“The Successful Middle-Class Starter Pack.”

“Roman pillar. Batu botol.”

“We were inspired by the Halls of Mirror, Versailles!”

“Late Pretentious Period, Anthropocene.”

“Money-can’t-buy-taste Starter Pack.”

The memes go on – the entire world has converged on hating McMansions.

This McMansion owned by businessman Aliff Syukri purportedly cost RM30mil (USD6mil) and occupies four plots of bungalow land. (Source: https://malaysiazine.blogspot.com/2018/04/aliff-syukri-palace-grand-mansion.html)

For the uninitiated, McMansions are modern houses of disproportionate size, mainly found in suburbs and often designed in a kind of faux-classical or traditional architecture. The French may not take it as flattery, but often their architecture is the main source of inspiration for this global phenomenon of mega-mansions. In the United States, McMansions can be mass-produced houses that look identical to each other and spread across a suburban residential area. The agglomeration of such houses creates a vast landscape of a hyperreal fantasy land not too dissimilar from the themed residential centers in China, another global capital of McMansions.

McMansions are more than an architectural style; they are a cultural emergent. The societies that produce them tend to have the following symptoms: highly unequal wealth distribution, an uninhibited real estate industry, and a populace that inhabits an extremely globalized media culture. McMansions are a natural consequence in Jakarta, Klang Valley, provincial suburbs of China, India, Turkey... the list goes on.

The controversial Malaysian businessman and social media celebrity, Aliff Syukri, for example, openly admits that his opulent McMansion was based on houses of “Celine Dion, Shahrukh Khan, and the Sultan of Brunei,” and his furniture is all imported from Europe. That McMansions are part of the global consumption of media from Hollywood, and the United States in general, is naturally self-evident. What was initially pure fantasy on TV and cinema became imitated as reality itself. Simulacra-pura, or Simu-pore.

McMansions should be opposed. This voracious import of idiotic things from Western media culture has led to a massive waste of resources. So much of that wealth generated by our growth and national prosperity have been lost to these monstrosities. It could have been used for patronage of our architectural tradition and craftsmanship – whether it is modern, vernacular, or classical – to further our own cultural discourse free from the shadow of the former colonial powers.

Take the so-called “Roman Pillar”: the version of classical architecture applied by McMansions is a Hollywood version of the knowledge-world. It’s a pastiche of different styles intended to create a fantasy to be sold to an extremely aspirational population. Whereas, genuine Classical architecture is a rich tradition with a time-ennobled practice of studying precedents and literary texts. Its practitioners (now a rarity in today’s dominant Modernist dogma) often remark that classical design is analogous to the use of language. It has syntax and grammar. At the hand of a master, this language transforms into poetry. It is an exercise of subtlety. In the West, these grammatical rules are known as Orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and so on...). Southeast Asia’s classical traditions are no different - across the region, there are multiple dialects of classical and traditional architecture. In our region, the classical architectural tradition is a beautiful mosaic of interconnected histories, peoples, migration, colonial and pre-colonial heritage. Some have its roots in the earliest Austronesian migration, and some from ancient texts and traditions of later migrants and colonists from China, India, and Europe.

Almost half a century has passed since architecture schools across the world started abandoning classical and traditional design methods, producing several generations of architects solely adept in Modernist methods. In the absence of architects well-trained in classical architecture, the public demand for traditional and familiar buildings is met with ironic and willful responses from the Modernist design community. Classical buildings by Modernist architects are mostly “Learning from Las Vegas” and bogged down by the unending moral panic against ornamentation. Unaware of the discourses of Palladio, Schinkel, the Manasara, Yingzao Fashi or modern innovators such as Geoffrey Bawa. The elementary particles of McMansions are the Decorated Sheds and Ducks of Las Vegas, not the classical tradition.

Every McMansion is a pitiful version of architecture that has been vernacularized by the global media culture and an N-th missed opportunity for our prosperity to be used to advance our cultural discourse.

In the not-so-distant future, when all of humanity is burnt and buried, let’s hope future archaeologists will not have lost their sense of humor when they uncover the ruins of these McMansions. “Late Pretentious Period” - an apt name for this geological layer. This was a world born out of media, consumed by media and repoduced by media.

An abandoned estate in Turkey now made famous by Dezeen. (Source:https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/18/drone-abandoned-turkish-chateau-burj-al-babas/)