The Residential Industry Complex is a vast marketing machine, and within it, architects and designers are either a sales tool or an unnecessary cost. In fashion, “hot” styles have a burst of popularity: Nehru jackets, shoulder pads, wide lapels and ties, large-plaid patterns, miniskirts, maxi skirts—all sold copiously and then faded away, essentially never to be seen again (except in nostalgic memes and at Halloween parties). 

But the housing marketing hype machine, and the billions of dollars at play, are blind to anything but sales. And yet sales are crowd-sourced, no matter how much is spent in promotion. As suburbia exploded and quarter-acre lots subdivided all the fields adjacent to cities across the country, the compact plans of Four Square, then Cape, then Ranch flooded the landscape, with occasional “Cabins” of rounded clapboards, stained brown, which simulated the settler’s mindset.

The oil crisis in the 1970s made some think of using less fossil fuel. So the sun was considered as an energy source. That meant solar shades, trombe walls, concrete floors over gravel beds for winter heat collection, two-story spaces for convection, and a hot-water heating set of solar panels on nearly every roof. Now, these are largely gone.

Then Baby Boomers bought the Greatest Generation homes, and the Ranches, Capes, and Four Squares developed cancerous growths of “great rooms” in an uncontrolled explosion of modest forms. They leaked, were blistering hot in the summer sun, freezing cold in the winter, and no one could hear above the TV. That idea also ended.

Bored with the blanding impact of stultifying, aesthetically correct Modernism, giggling architects playfully applied architectural “elements” as “commentary” on our culture, using the architectural xerox machine to glue on Palladian Windows, Dental Trim, Broken Pediment Entries, Extreme Trim, often plumb-cut at arbitrary ends with deep and contrasting colors. Perhaps keyed to an embrace of cocaine, Postmodernism spawned the most hideous bastard child in all of home design.

Boomers followed this gateway drug of over-building into a full-blown, ego-engorging “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins” aesthetic. Every conceivable piece and part of residential architectural cliche was thrown upon the walls of insane overblown plan obesity to create an instant self-mockery: The McMansion.

Big Real Estate lives off of brand recognition, and this means appropriating hot styles, whether it’s “Midcentury Modern,” “Shingle Style,” or, now, the “Modern Farmhouse.” The uber-blah boxes now being categorized as “modern” may be utterly styleless, because we’ve lived past the need to build our absurdities. We can just render, animate, and post them. 

But the Residential Industrial Complex still needs to sell product. Hypers need something to hype. Thoughtful designers in the late 20th century saw a rational application of rambling aesthetic in the centuries-long assemblage of farmhouses, evolving softly connected forms, detailing and materials, to make the larger home, well, “homey.”

“The Farmhouse” as a typology of new construction was found. Like huge plate glass in Great Rooms, aluminum clapboards on Ranches, and any/every material/detailing on McMansions, the color black became the highlighting outlines of windows, doors, anything, and the color of touches of standing metal roof spice on the familiar (as long as the house was white, and “traditional”). 

The time is at hand to start the death watch of a money-making aesthetic. It is now as predictable as the Ranch. Sometimes as overblown as the McMansion. Maybe as self-referential as the mindless boxes that seem to flood the multiple dwelling world.

But that watch is not based on aesthetics, it is based on sales. Developers build what sells and stop building those things that do not sell. Just think of the “death years” of styles: 

2008: McMansion (not dead in scale, but fully discredited)

2000: Great Room

1995: Palladian Window

1982: Solar (not to be confused the Net Zero designs still in flower) 

1978: Ranch

1975: Cabin

1970: Cape

1955: Four Square

Will there be one for the Farmhouse?