Translating "Blah" Into Architecture - My Grandparents Suburban Home

From my Xanga blog:

Translating "Blah" Into Architecture - My Grandparents Suburban Home

I've posted before about how I dislike city life, but suburbs depress me just as much as urban blight, although the former is more subtle and insidious. I had an experience recently which reminded me why.

My grandparents moved into a new house in what I'd call a REAL suburb -- one of those places where you can't get more than three or four sheets of paper between the identical homes. One line of them made me think of a row of pointed teeth against the sky. My security-paranoid grandmother showed us that she had both backyard gates tightly locked; I asked if she would hire a security guard to sit in a watchtower brandishing a rifle perhaps?

The sizzling, sun-bleached gray driveways winding to monotonous pastel houses were almost blinding as we pulled in, and as we got out the unearthly quiet was the first thing to hit me. It's hot for a lack of trees of course, because they're all mowed down, and any hills seem to be leveled as well -- a slope or hill might resemble something in the real world. Any semblance of nature was carefully planned with the customary band-aids; short, scraggly trees rounded by pine-needles, grass that looks like carpet, and perfectly trimmed shrubs. Chaos theory doesn't apply in this place -- life doesn't "find a way."

Inside the banality was worse; there was a high-ceiling main room loosely divided into a kitchen, dining and living room, and four other smaller rooms branching off of its four corners. Essentially, like a shoebox, you could see most of the place from any corner. All the rooms displayed more flat, pale pastels, and everything was so neat it felt about as lived in as a new casket. One room was a very light, sickly shade of blue with all of the furniture stark white. Very "early morning," or "creamy" comes to mind, but without any of the sugar that word might entail.

My mother tells me that my grandfather is depressed for the first time in his life. My grandmother has been having some health issues, but they seem to be under control now. Frankly I have to wonder if it's the environment, especially for a man who used to enjoy a large garden and walks in the woods. I'm don't believe that I'm poetically overstating how utterly vapid this neighborhood was, and I was only there for a 15 minute visit with my mother. Perhaps I'm just too sensitive to such things, but it was like someone asked, "How can we translate 'blah' into architecture?" They outdid themselves. I only thank goodness it was summer, as I can't imagine how that place would feel in winter and I hope we don't go there for the holiday get-together...pardon me, I'm shivering in July...

I haven't lived in what I'd call a suburb since I was 10 years old, and I was fortunately too young to know what depression was at that age. After that I lived in a more rural area until I was about 25 where we had a real yard and literally miles of woods behind us. Then I moved to where I am now, which is a kind of suburb a few miles outside of Atlanta, but it doesn't FEEL like a suburb.

Rural isolation has it's drawbacks as well as urban blight, but the attempt to combine those two worlds into the "suburban home" has resulted in a very bleak, inane caricature of the "country home."