We were relaxing on the beach last week. I was reading this month's Oxford American Magazine which was devoted to houses and housing. Hal Crowther's The Cult of House Worship is a fantastic read. Here is a snippet I will post without further comment:
On the lovely beach west of Panama City, Florida, part of what was once known as the Redneck Riviera and recently as the Emerald Coast, a fifteen-mile hell of reckless development and architectural psychosis is crowned by a stadium-size beach house (built, I was told, by an heir to one of America's famous fortunes) that looks like an alien spaceship crash-landed on the dunes. If its architect didn't subsequently take his own life, he must have been one of the aliens.