I'm no designer either, but I think Caddy fins were great examples of baroque flourishes -- excessive extensions to past design motifs that give a heightened sense of motion or flow or accent. Future designs can't build on such flourishes. They were stylistic endpoints, like the accents in Art Deco, but often use a coherent set of design principles within a time period and thus create a harmony of their own.

But McMansions lack common flourishes or motifs. They share only size and a brutal ostentation intended only to say, "I have money, and taste be damned."

The best exposition I know on the suburban blight AKA McMansions is "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler.