In this installment of 10 Questions for . . . , Senior Editor Daniel DiClerico speaks with Marianne Cusato, author, architect, and number four on Builder magazine's "Power on 50" list of the housing industry's most influential people. Cusato talks about the rise of the McMansion, what makes a great neighborhood, and why the green movement still has room to grow, and gives her opinion on "no-maintenance materials.

When did the McMansion era begin?
It all started in the 1980s. McMansions were a natural reaction to other bad architecture: cookie-cutter homes. Someone came in and said, "These houses are ugly. What can we do?" And the answer was, "Let's add this, let's add that, let's make them bigger." Little by little the houses kept growing and growing. There was an "I see your gable and raise you two" attitude. At the same time money and gas were really, really cheap. So it was easy to expand outward.

It's not just the architecture then. It's also the location?
The issue is that the farther out homes get from stores and other amenities, the more we depend on the home to meet all of our daily needs. We used to be able to meet our needs with a 5-minute walk, then a 5-minute drive, now it's a 45-minute drive. That means if you want to watch a movie, you need a media room. A developer in Texas told me recently that he can't sell a home without a room called the "hair salon."

But aren't developers just giving people what they want?
Everybody is responsible. Everybody is held hostage by what they think everybody else wants. I'll have this conversation with a builder, and he'll say, "I agree with you, but I can't sell it." This is why the McMansion movement got so big. It happened a little bit at a time, and nobody stepped in and stopped it. It's taken a major intervention—that being the cost of oil and the mortgage crisis—to shake everything up to a point where we come in and say, "Actually there's another way to build and it's more efficient."

What role can home buyers play?
The key piece of the puzzle is telling home buyers that they can have something other than the default setting. An educated homeowner walking into the builder and saying "I will buy something other than what you are offering" is the key to releasing this endless cycle.

You use the term streetscape in your book The Value of Design. What do you mean by streetscape?
It's the feeling of an outdoor room. When you walk out your front door, you should feel like you're in a place, not just a space. The front door in many American homes is just a giant garage door. A street of garage doors is usually quite wide and is not designed for pedestrians to share. I fully acknowledge t