The first rule of good design is proportion and scale. A big McMansion looks just as obscene as the SUVs parked in the driveway. And actually, the house may be even more wasteful and polluting than the vehicles. So many beautiful vistas are spoiled by both the SUVs and the houses.
This is particularly unfortunate at the lower end of the market, she said, since it means that buyers often end up with homes that are quite large but otherwise poorly made. Such buyers are shortchanged by not having the option of smaller but better-made homes.
Even the high end houses look pretty substandard as they're being built. These modern houses are basically just a shell of rigid insulation tacked onto a lightweight wooden skeleton. Any "brick" or "shingle" siding is just stapled onto that. I guess they're alleged to be as strong as tradiionally built houses, but I find that hard to believe. The ironic thing is that they have replaced sustainable building materials (wood, cement and brick) with unsustainable materials manufactured from petrochemicals (like the rigid sheathing).