In April, after months of tech-dipshit palace intrigue, photos of Mark Zuckerberg’s long-rumored D.C. mansion finally spread their way through social media. Because Zuckerberg is an immensely disliked figure for democracy-destroying and culture-annihilating reasons, mass architectural criticism was equally swift.
To social media users, the house looked like everything from a dorm at a mid-sized state college to, well, a McMansion—which it is, in spirit. The building itself, designed by long-time domestic architect for various elites, Robert Gurney, is not particularly flamboyant, at least as far as rich people’s houses are concerned. (Certainly it lacks the foam appliques so beloved by Donald Trump.) Clad monotonously in red brick, it features a central pared-down gable complete with a garage-door-esque picture window, flanked on either side by similarly gabled and frankly barn-like wings, each connected by breezeways.
As soon as I saw the images, it made total sense that this was the kind of house someone as aesthetically beleaguered as Zuck would want to buy in order to cement the cultural and political capital he’s looking for in D.C. Perhaps most importantly, like Zuckerberg’s various “inventions” there is nothing original about a house like this, despite the fact that architects are often employed to give a building a “customized” feel. The true irony is that these kinds of rich people’s houses are bespoke, but all in the same way—a way that says: “I can afford an architect.”
While their celebrity buyers range from Kim Kardashian to Gene Simmons, these houses are definitionally sleek and modern, each with a modicum of personality. In Zuckerberg’s case it’s a nod to more traditional house forms, albeit in a slightly abstracted way: an image of “house” instead of house itself. The interiors, of course, are identical. They look either like a computer rendering or an expensive furniture catalog. Massive slab sofas, minimalist fare, gray walls, spartan kitchens, and ambient lighting are the norm. If you thumb through the pages of Architectural Digest or scroll through the feeds of ArchDaily, you will see plenty of houses similar to this one, which is half the point of their existence in the first place: to buy one’s way into architectural culture.
If you want to get a bit into architectural history, houses that look more or less like Zuck’s have been floating around since the early ’80s, and were considered to be a later part of the movement known as postmodernism, which we now mostly associate with neon-heavy mall interiors and squiggly lines. In architecture, postmodernism explored themes and forms from the historical past and syncretized them (often ironically) with the compositional, construction and fabrication techniques gleaned from modernism. At first, such combinations were inventive and playful, an important intervention at a time when “form follows function” had lost the plot a bit. As the movement went on, its traditionalism intensified, as seen in the work of architects like Robert A. M. Stern and Leon Krier. By the 1980s, when Gurney hit the scene, postmodernism had taken a rather politically conservative anti-modernist turn, the echoes of which can still be heard in the trad-guy debates of our own time.
If we get more specific into the Zuck House’s precedents, the D.C. blob connection lingers. Among postmodernism’s select house peddlers, the most influential has to have been Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who, if we’re talking D.C. power brokering, was one of the most ingratiated in the business. The firm worked both on the restoration of the U.S. Capitol and a summer house for Jackie Onassis in Martha’s Vineyard. Jacobsen’s houses perfected the Zuck House’s synthesis of traditional American residential architecture (think: Colonial and Greek Revivals, Cape Cods, farmhouses, shingle-sided saltboxes, etc.) with postmodern techniques of repetition, pastiche, and abstraction.
More than any other architect, Jacobsen is the most responsible for the kind of pared-down gabled “style” that so plagues rich people’s houses both today and yesterday. His most famous project, the Fletcher Residence in Nashville, consists of several little gabled house forms flaring outward like some kind of accordion. The sparseness of these forms and their decidedly modern, protominimalist interiors were a marked departure from the byzantine details and excessive ironies lavished upon more well-known postmodern projects, like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s design for the Houston Children’s Museum, or Michael Graves’s Portland Building. Like most PoMo architects, Jacobsen’s private clientele consisted almost entirely of rich people.
This is an important architectural context if we think about the political and cultural position Zuckerberg occupies now. For a long time, Zuckerberg and the other tech billionaires, though never truly liberal, were thoroughly Californian in the way they presented themselves, especially culturally. Theirs was an ostensible futurism with “benevolent” capitalist characteristics. Wanting to be on the cutting edge of design, sleek, new, and modern was the tech modus operandi and remains so, albeit without the liberalism part. But Zuck is now playing a different game. The internet Facebook helped to ruin is less forward-thinking and more parasitic in what it wants to achieve. Outside of crank anti-human AI millenarianism, there’s not much futurism left in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps that’s why access is Zuck’s new economic game plan. In this respect, there’s a reason his new house is only a 12-minute drive from the Oval Office. In order to ingratiate oneself with the traditionally styled Trump set (think Rococo revivalism, but put into a blender), one can’t be architecturally communicating “coastal elite” status through the usual method of “modernism”—by which is meant stacks of cubes with Swiss cheese windows. More importantly, it is specifically a D.C. house. The choice of architect and the precedents of that architect’s style reflect Zuckerberg’s desire to ingratiate himself with the good old boys of the Swamp, who have been living in Beltway houses like this for 40-odd years. I find this embarrassing, and this play-pretend impulse makes the house not that different in spirit to the McMansions which capitalism’s dumbest minor magnates fashion to look like the White House itself.
Finally, Zuckerberg is the type of guy who thinks cool is something you can buy. Not unlike his shift toward dressing like the average podcast fuckboy, his house is also a “lady doth protest too much” situation. It professes a kind of unearned but thoroughly purchased normalcy. Whatever paeans it makes to more quotidian fare, its bloated size undermines.
But Mark Zuckerberg is not normal. The general securitized state of D.C. as a place with sensitive individuals may temper the impulse to build a Trump-sized wall in front of the hedgerows, but Zuckerberg possesses a notorious fortress mentality. The man operates more and more like a feudal lord, to the extent that he’s bought most of a Hawaiian island for the purposes of living out his paranoid fantasies. Perhaps it’s an expression of a truer power, but I kind of think the glass walls of his newer abode offer a deeply ironic transparency.
At the end of the day, architecture for billionaires like Zuckerberg has always been about the communication of power and status. But unlike previous generations, wherein clients gave architects more freedom to use their money to advance architectural ideas in exchange for seeming culturally forward-thinking, this new wealth has had a mostly stifling effect on architectural form-making. In our image-driven culture, “architecture” has become a brand, or even worse, a style. Like Facebook itself, and the apps Zuckerberg has since bought instead of developed, the house is derivative, joyless, and accumulative. In order for a house to be “architecture,” it must look like an endless array of other houses designed by architects. After all, originality becomes a liability when the primary purpose of a house is to serve as an investment, a reserve of illiquid capital. It’s no wonder then that Zuckerberg would be attracted to a house like this. It’s something he can put on, just like a gold chain, and for the same reasons.