Nobody likes a Critic: McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner on Her Fondness of Modernism, the Evolution of Her Writing, and Following in the Footsteps of Architecture’s First Critic

Kate by Tomaž Černej

By Patrick Dimond

Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist. She is the creator of the blog McMansion Hell and has held posts as a columnist at The New Republic, Curbed, and the Baffler. She lives in Chicago. In her interview with Pat Dimond, Kate talks about the evolution of her writing and the realities of criticism, advising those just starting their careers to be critical and brave.

PD: Kate, it's nice to meet you. I have been a fan of McMansion Hell for a long time. Tell me about your foundational years.

KW: I grew up near Southern Pines, North Carolina, in a town called Carthage, a small rural town in Southeastern North Carolina, about an hour south of Raleigh. Southern Pines became a resort town in the 19th century and eventually became a defacto excerpt of Fort Bragg following 9/11. As a result of that, there was an increase in military spending, and the towns around Carthage grew.

My parents had normal jobs; I'm not from a wealthy family, despite what people on Twitter say. My dad was a civil servant and worked for things like the VA, and my mother was a preschool teacher. I was interested in the outdoors, and I was interested in botany and the weather, and I started playing violin at the age of four, and I was always reading books. I was really into Lemony Snicket, like most people born in 1993. And yeah, those were the things I kind of governed my life. I got into architecture a little later when I was in my mid-teens.

What did you learn about yourself while studying and critiquing design — and, to my understanding, your interest in modernism?

I first became interested in architecture in the eighth or ninth grade when I went on a family trip to Goshen, New York. I saw Paul Rudolph's government center, which I thought was the coolest building I had ever seen in my life, and became obsessed with it and with late modernism in general.

I initially ended up going to school for music, which is why an 18-year-old should never pick what they are going to do with their lives. I studied composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, worked in a recording studio, and studied spatial audio as a composer.

As a result, I became interested in spatialization, which I specialized in for my graduate degree at Johns Hopkins. Specifically, I studied concert hall typologies designed and built between the 1960s and 1970s. This building period was a time of great architectural experimentation thanks to improvements in the science of acoustics. So, my thesis was a history of science mixed with architectural theory, and during that time, I started McMansion.

How has your writing evolved?

When I started, I was only working on McMansion Hell, but shortly after, I started freelancing for various publications, most notably Curbed, where I had a column for several years that was later sold to New York magazine.

I've been broadening my scope to cultural criticism, and I wrote a lot. For a couple of years, I was a columnist at The Baffler, a left-wing literary magazine. And then my editor from The Baffler went to The New Republic. So, I went to The New Republic and was a print columnist, and when that editor was deposed, let's say, I also left. At that time, I was disillusioned because the media landscape was worsening during the pandemic.

“I always wanted to encourage everybody who reads McMansion Hell to feel they have the authority to be critics themselves and broaden the scope of criticism into the political. Anyone who protests police brutality or gentrification, the commodification of the city — that’s criticism in practice...”

— Kate Wagner

How has your writing evolved throughout the pandemic especially?

In 2020 I started moonlighting as a sportswriter and covered two Tour de France races. I have lived in Slovenia for several months and have become more interested in narrative writing. I'm getting back into the swing of being a critic after a hiatus because I just needed to do something else for a little bit. So now I've started to work more on architecture again and refocus my energies there.

The past few years have changed how I think and write, and doing journalism, especially investigative journalism, has reshaped my conception of ethics in the field of criticism. You could say I'm an ethical purist, [laughs] about it.

It's hard not to have conflicts of interest, I'm fortunate enough to be an independent critic thanks to McMansion Hell, and I have strong beliefs about that.

I apologize; this is a digression that goes back to modernism. I went to architecture school in Columbus, Indiana. Have you ever been?

I have not been, but I'm planning a trip for the spring. It's belated because we moved to Chicago during the pandemic, and there wasn't much traveling happening. The traveling I did do, I was in Europe for basically two summers. I'm trying to organize a trip with some people soon because it's fantastic. I've seen documentaries about it, and I'm familiar with those works from reading analysis. So that's very cool.

It is such a unique place, and it's so multifaceted. I attended architecture school at IU Bloomington, and their architecture program is based in Columbus. Our academic building was the town's old newspaper, which Myron Goldsmith of SOM designed.

One of our courses was to study the town and learn how each structure responded to other buildings or spaces, be it physical, perceptual, directional, or interwoven. It made me think differently about the built environment and be more critical of what takes up space.

Where are you in your career today, and what's on your mind?

I split my time between architecture and sports journalism. I started being a sports journalist because I lost a lot of work in the pandemic and began moonlighting and filling in those income gaps.

During the pandemic, the media landscape shifted dramatically, and editorial changes meant I couldn't write for publications that I had previously written for because my values and the values of the publication or my political values and those publications no longer aligned. McMansion Hell started as a way to supply my income, but becoming a journalist, especially a beat journalist or a hard journalist, has changed how I think about criticism.

When I wrote columns, I thought that criticism was a form of journalism, and I learned that I didn't have to seek comments from the people I was referencing. I had this instinct to seek an interview whenever possible, so I was less confident in my writing. I learned that you don't need to talk to these people. It's not a journal. It's not investigative journalism. It's not beat journalism. Just, write [laughs]. Navigating that has been an adjustment.

What is your biggest challenge, and how did you manage through a disappointment or perceived setback?

The biggest challenge I felt in my career was definitely when Zillow threatened to sue me in 2017, and then it was an extra terrible time because I also had bed bugs.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation came in, defended me, and Zillow didn't end up going through with the lawsuit, which is good because it was bullshit. It was an obvious textbook case of fair use, but if I can brave the harassment of a multimillion-dollar corporation, I can kind of brave anything at this point.

“We must remember that Ada Louise Huxtable was the first ever columnist at a newspaper who was an architecture critic. This field was invented in its contemporary form by women, and we have every right to be here and take up space.”

— Kate Wagner

What are you most excited about right now?

I just got back from living in Slovenia for two months. When I was there, I had some public poetry published in Versopolis, an emerging European writer's journal. I'm also excited to get back into architecture after taking a hiatus. I have reinvested more time in McMansion Hell, so I'm just getting back into the swing of things after covering the Tour de France. Along with the Tour de France, I covered the tours in Spain last year and spent lots of time focusing on cycling. I'm finally evening out the balance between my two lives, both very male-dominated fields.

[Laughs] which leads me to my next question: who are you admiring right now and why?

It's interesting because I had just written a retrospective on Michael Sorkin, who passed away in 2020. I admired him for being political, never backing down on being a critic, and never capitulating to the kind of New York social scene of high-flying institutions and powerful firms.

He remained critically distanced from all of that, and that's a stance that I have the privilege of taking as someone who is primarily independently funded. I constantly think about him when I ask about the ethics of my practice.

What's the impact you'd like to have on the world? What's your core mission, and what does success look like to you?

That's an interesting question. I always wanted to encourage everybody who reads McMansion Hell to feel they have the authority to be critics themselves and broaden the scope of criticism into the political. Anyone who protests police brutality or gentrification, the commodification of the city — that's criticism in practice, even if it may not end up in the New York Times pages.

I'm also consoling myself by the fact that Michael Sorkin never won a Pulitzer, and I don't think I probably will, either — they don't give Pulitzers to socialists. It's sad but true. So, I guess what success looks like to me; is living comfortably and doing what I like to do. I get to travel and have personal autonomy in my life. That's afforded to me by my career. I think that's all you can ask for in these times.

I also always really wanted to have a staff writing job. Still, I don't think it's ever really going to happen because I don't live in New York, and I don't want to live in New York. The media landscape is so terrible in terms of economics that you can't define success; by the way, your parents' generation defines success in media.

I think about it often, and I'm probably a little self-conscious about it, but I'm here, I'm working, people like my work, and I'm surviving. So that's, [laughs] yeah, that's a success.

There are so many paradigm shifts happening at the moment, and it makes me think about McMansion Hell and how it reflects a time in the U.S. when consumption was at an all-time high — and it still is insanely too high. And as a result, so many of the things and values our parents prized feel obsolete. You do a great job of speaking to that excess and silliness in your tongue-in-cheek writing.

My final question for you: what advice do you have for those starting in their careers, and would your advice be any different for women?

My advice would be to be brave. I mean, all you can do as a critic is to be brave [laugh]. That's important. Say your piece. Nobody likes a critic, that's the truth, and we live in times where criticism is vitally necessary. But, unfortunately, sometimes, the only way to be a critic is to strike out on your own and reach out to known publications.

For example, I'm an editor at Failed Architecture, a fundamental publication in my development as an architectural thinker. I started reading it in 2011 when I was still in high school.

Also, criticism has become more gender friendly than it was before. We must remember that Ada Louise Huxtable was the first ever columnist at a newspaper who was an architecture critic. This field was invented in its contemporary form by women, and we have every right to be here and take up space.