There has to be an answer as to why we build such ugly and monstrous homes nowadays. Gone are the houses with balance, symmetry and grace. In their place are the wildly unbalanced and discordant houses with randomly placed windows and entrances that are hung with heavy mouldings that look like a guillotine.

Some other bloggers, most notably “Slighty Slack” have offered some sort of an ethnic explanation, in an attempt to charge purely American bad taste crimes on our most recent arrivals. But the ugly house has been around since at least 1945, when it was just merely plain and homely. It took the Clinton years for it to morph into something obese and garish.

It would take too long to go into the “rules” for creating a pleasant looking building. The simplest and easiest and most elegant route is just to build symetrically, so that three windows are all on the same plane and the same size. A door should at least be proportional to the size of the house. An East Hampton, NY home (in top photo) built about 1999, adheres to these guidelines.

There are thousands of beautiful homes built before 1945, many of them in Studio City, and they are being torn down and replaced by the type of monstrosity seen in the bottom photo.

Is there an ugliness drug in our water supply or is it just plain builder’s ignorance?