A poetic vision of Paris’ crumbling suburban high rises
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In Britain, where I live, there is a general tendency to view older buildings as nicer buildings. Generally this is because only the stuff that's nice enough to keep/protect ends up surviving. This leads me to wonder what will we choose to keep from the 20th century. Which buildings will still be standing in 2500?
Buildings like those in the article make me sad. They are currently in horrifically poor condition after decades of neglect. On top of that, they are very unfashionable, brutalism seemingly suffering a similar fate in France to the UK: association with low-quality housing projects, a mid-century utopia that quickly became a dystopia. In London I am surrounded by treasured buildings nearly all of which had to fight against demolition at some point - for example the gothic hotel at St Pancras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pancras_Renaissance_London.... I wonder, if we hung on to them for long enough for the associations to dissipate, would we come to treasure them?
It's unfashionable to argue that there are timeless principles of aesthetics, but I believe that Brutalism is inherently in violation of them. Concrete brut is not a visually appealing medium like brick, stone or wood, especially once it's been weathered for a bit. And people prefer adorned surfaces to huge flat stark unadorned ones.
Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface. Building materials all go in and out of fashion - this is not about concrete.
What I love about brutalism is that the forms of the buildings are totally different to anything that came before them. Concrete freed architects - allowing them to build 'floating' buildings on thin stilts, huge overhangs and flying walkways and bridges. Now of course, more freedom is not always a good thing. I am not an advocate for every brutalist building - many are terrible, but there are some (like the ones in the article) that are gems, and should be preserved for the wonderful things they are.
The problem I have with them is they are profoundly not human scaled. They are enormous monuments, not livable community. They are the antithesis of the medieval urban center of Paris and other European cities, where everything is walkable.
It's about gargoyles. Once upon a time we knew that every great building had gargoyles, nowadays we don't seem to bother with anything that impressive...
Newer buildings are still built with beautiful guttering and drainage systems, but since we have drains now, there is no need to build gargoyles to spew water onto the street.
Grey floor, grey pillars, grey ceiling. Slight intrusion of toothpaste/fake verdigris green. There isn't so much as a poster.
I'll grant that the first two are pretty good: concrete castles. The first one in particular has a slight Art Deco sensibility to the windows. The third is horrendous; it's hard to tell whether the decor was meant to be like that or whether bits of it have fallen off. All the round windows are weeping black drip lines below them.
#6 Les Espaces d’Abraxas again has a bunch of features cribbed from other styles: classical columns. #18 at the same site has a triumphal arch!
Finally at "Cité du Parc et cité Maurice-Thorez" we're back to inhospitable pointy angles, but with foliage growing among them in a post-apocalyptic manner.
Yeah those are quite good looking buildings. But I wonder how much of what makes them look beautiful is the fusion of previous architecture movements with the construction techniques of brutalism and how much of it is pure brutalism?
I have no objection to preserving a few buildings, a few particularly interesting streets or city centers. But, I generally object to the common European policies of forces stasis. In any case, I think it also goes against the brutalist, modernist ethic or aesthetic. These buildings intended to be rational & practical. If we have to "preserve them," they've failed, to an extent.
*I'll also admit that I'm a fan of brutalism. These are beautiful (the photography too).
https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp-content/uplo...
In general, if we look out of the eyes of a pedestrian entering or leaving one of the depicted estates (pick an estate at random, and pick the moment at which we look out at random) chances are fairly high that there will be hardly anything in our visual field to draw our "involuntary attention".
If I'm sitting in a library or something and 5 feet away is a wall of unfinished concrete, that can be a pleasant experience because there tends to be a lot of irregularities in the surface (and I don't share grandparent's dislike of unfinished concrete) but there was a temptation in the brutalist movement to require pedestrians to walk along or near blank walls 100s of feet long, and that certainly can be an alienating feeling, just like for example being in the middle of a vast frozen lake can be an alienating experience.
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These look like entrances into the Soylent Green factory, where the old people in the pictures are about to get turned into food. Wretched, unfriendly, unlivable public spaces.
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
The problem with brutalist buildings is not so much the unfinished raw concrete aesthetic or the imposing stature, etc., it's that this new concrete building technique allowed them to build cheaply without much thought to anything else like livability, use of public spaces, connection with surroundings, upgradability, etc.
Even the cookie cutter tile-clad midrises of china are better suited to human habitation than most brutalist estates because these tileclad midrises are weaved perfectly into the fabric of the cities they rise in.
One of the more telling examples of that is a building near me, where the street-front vegetation is done in these huge concrete planters suspended by huge concrete pillars. Sure you can see if from a block over, but at street level, you can't. It's almost like they are holding it over your head to tease you.
Edit: The tower block that is National Trust listed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/11129845... Designed by a Bond villain, of course.
[NB Not to be confused with St Andrews House - which is really rather nice.]
This thread contains stories of people deliberately painting their houses with yoghurt, soot, and cow shit to make them age faster: http://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/how-to-age-stone-faster-th...
All that this affects is the texture and patina of the surface. What is it that makes particular patinas desirable and others not? I'd say it's entirely cultural, and cultural perceptions change.
Brutalism scarred much of Britain's skylines. Here in Nottingham we have some truly disgusting looking buildings marring an otherwise nice skyline. The quicker they all get knocked down, the better.
It's Sheffield I feel most sorry for. They got their eye sore listed by idiots.
* The Eiffel Tower * The Golden Gate Bridge * Battersea Power Station etc. etc.
Look at an aerial shot of Paris, it's so incredibly out of place.
Actually, the current trend is rather to prevent the aging... It seems that early designers and implementers of concrete construction believed that concrete is waterproof - it is not. Water percolates, rebar inflates from rust... It is necessary to inject anti-rust to stop the process and then coat the concrete with waterproofing - an expensive process to ensure the concrete's stability over time. Uncoated reinforced concrete exposed to rain is doomed.
In my opinion this is one of the most beautiful and influential architectural designs of the 20th century. I'm not saying it was constructed very well, but it is a thing of beauty!
When I first walked up to it, I wasn't sure if it was a public rec center, library, school or prison.
On the other side of that same hotel are several quite beautiful modern, non-brutalist buildings (like the station). My gut tells me that the Library won't last 30 more years before tear down, but the station and the hotel will make it long after.
It reminded me of my high school, which, the rumor was, was influenced architecturally by mid-20th century minimum security prison architecture.
http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2015/july/british-library-re...
For the content certainly. The architecture is lowest-bidder-public-building, like they make schools and public swimming pools out of. My wife rather aghast that the treasures inside would be housed in such an ugly box and talked about it for several days after we visited it.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library#/media/File:Br...
Edit: OK, I think my definition of Brutalism vs. yours is far more conservative. The Parisian manifestation seems to be far more artistic.
Lived in a 1969 built high-rise, surrounded on all sides by other high-rises of the same design. Check out Crystal City in Arlington, VA. That's where I was living. The older buildings are all like that.
DC's metro stations are all the same way, and most of the federal buildings also.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8521471,-77.0498227,3a,75y,5...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crystal+City,+Arlington,+V...
If you don't mind the French, http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/visuel/2014/02/08/en-seine-sai... has more.
For a more representative portfolio of Paris suburb "architecture", you can look http://www.thecinetourist.net/93---seine-saint-denis-la-cour... and it's bleak.
http://filmgeek.fr/2014/05/09/tournage-hunger-games-3-a-nois...
I insist on the notion of timelessness. The Louvre for example, is almost 400 years old and yet; there are few monuments in the world that can rival with its beauty.
Here is the power of the classicism, and even the baroque movements: creating masterpieces that are not only useful for the people living in them but also inspire and please their eyes. They survive time.
It's tragic and beautiful (in my opinion).
Those visual representations ask a lot of questions too! For example, if we choose that stuff to live in at a certain time, what did we clearly decide on others politicals levels way more abstracts?
You can't live in the Louvre, and even if you could, you'd have to be rich.
I think a lot of brutalist architecture gets a bad rap because it became so commonplace in the mid 20th century. Just like anything that's done "too-much", it became overdone as lesser and lesser architects created less inspirational designs.
PS. Also loved the old Best stores, with ACTUAL crumbling facades as a self-aware statement of consumerism: http://www.failedarchitecture.com/the-ironic-loss-of-the-pos...
So good.. you could say they were the Best.
The problem is that the brutalist movement, at least in the UK, overlapped with the poor construction methods of the 50s and 60s and economic realignment that resulted in brutalist social housing projects. In the long term, extreme under-investment in maintenance of these projects means that they deteriorate into uninhabitable hellholes.
But there are exceptions - the Barbican estate in London, which is as brutalist as it gets, is a great example of how this sort of architecture can work when properly funded and maintained.
This often failed really badly, much worse than other schools of architecture. The unpopular Brutalist buildings are not just aesthetically hostile but have poor "UX".
My favourite examples of this kind of thing are the 'New Towns' in the UK. These were build in the late 40s through to the mid 60s to deal with overspill from cities. Towns like Cumbernauld and Livingston in Scotland were designed to be very human-focused – easy to walk through, segregated road systems, distinct districts with local services, central civic centres and so on. A genuinely utopian vision of the future, in some respects.
The problem is that shoddy construction and poor maintenance made living conditions unacceptable. Demographic changes and the mass overspill from cities made for less cohesive communities – segregated underpasses for example became sites of violent crime.
I think that in most cases the reasons for certain brutalist developments being unpopular is down to causes distinct from the architecture – and I think it's a mistake to conflate the issues. Though it does explain the unpopularity.
Blaming it on brutalism is also, IMO, missing the mark.
The core blame here lies in the fact that these complexes are built in the style of the Radiant City, which encouraged monolithic buildings surrounded by "parkland" and public spaces. It was imagined as a utopian balance between urban and rural - everyone living in a tower would have ready access to ample public space.
In reality of course these projects are largely defined by their emptiness, and these public spaces unused (and consequently, unsafe). The shoddy construction and maintenance surely didn't help, but IMO was not the root of the problem - we have seen more traditionally built communities fall into disrepair but never reach the level of isolation and segregation we see in these buildings.
It's just coincidence that brutalism reached its popular height along with Radiant City urban planning.
More importantly, even though brutalism has fallen out of vogue, Radiant Cities have not - most new American urban cores (particularly in the Midwest/West) are built around this philosophy still, and the net result has been the gutting of once tight-knit neighborhoods and replacing them with soaring towers and empty sidewalks (see: Belltown in Seattle). Brutalism may be gone, but 50 years from now someone will write another article about this exact phenomenon, with glass-clad apartment buildings in their place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture#History
That focus on functional needs is precisely why Brutalism prevents human prospering: man doesn't just have rational, functional needs, but also emotional ones. That 'pomp' and 'frivolity' is actually far from pompous or frivolous: it satisfies the emotions and exalts the spirit.
A Brutalist approach to food would be to redirect all agricultural output to producing Soylent; a Brutalist approach to clothing would be for everyone, male and female, to wear a Mao suit in identical colours and fabrics, in varying weights to account for temperature; a Brutalist approach to poetry would be a rhyming dictionary.
> But there are exceptions - the Barbican estate in London, which is as brutalist as it gets, is a great example of how this sort of architecture can work when properly funded and maintained.
From these pictures, it is absolutely hideous and should be scraped from the face of the Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate
What's remarkable to me is that anyone ever thought that these eyesores were attractive. The only possible explanation is a kind of mental illness brought on by the catastrophic destruction and dehumanisation of the World Wars. Witness the post-WWI art scene, in which the beauty and form of Art Nouveau were replaced by the horror and ugliness of surrealism and expressionism (Art Deco, with its clean lines, purity and colour, can be seen as a striving to preserve or restore some small piece of beauty in a world gone mad).
I disagree with this, based somewhat on personal experience. While modern architecture did away with ornament in the name of "functionality", but that is a misnomer. Whether a building is functional ought to be judged by it's layout, not by ornament; by ergonomics, not aesthetics.
I live in Brasilia, which I once saw described as "something out of a bad science fiction movie". And I can say there's nothing more annoying than trying to navigate through any public building, as they try to compensate their lack of ornament by being over-sized and obtuse. And though this particular experience is my own, I don't it would be hard to find similar examples of how hard navigating in any modernist design (building, neighborhood, town) can be - another poster mentioned Moscow. It's no wonder that the the period between the 1960s and 1970s is also the nadir of urban planning, with widespread use of single-use zoning and awkward car-centric planning.
These classic places you speak of survive time because they are attended to furiously. They are things which degrade exponentially without attention and they are ongoing sinks for human capacity in support of their own ostentatiousness. They may please some eyes because they are so out of character. They are rebels against nature and humanity. The inspire us to be other than what we are - godlike and beyond our natural limitations. They are feats of design, but they are more limited in what they express. The idea of working in them makes me feel like I am being conquered by other people's limitations and conformist ideas of beauty.
In disrepair, both will eventually crumble. In brutalism, I see my condition, but also my opportunity. In classicism, I feel distracted from my condition and oppressed by those who would put forth pomp while taking away individuality and opportunity.
Trophies of monarchies vs. triumphs of people.
Many ugly, pointless buildings were constructed in the 17th century as well, but our ancestors have simply not felt a need to preserve those.
Most of these buildings you have a distaste for will reach the end of their useful life, be demolished and replaced with something new. I like to think that the nicest ones will be preserved, and will become the monuments to late 20th century architecture for our descendants to enjoy.
Les Menuires in the 3 valleys is particularly bad.
In some ways your example is timeless for the fact that it's an amalgamation of 400 years of architectural movements, from the remnants of Medieval fortress to modern offices and galleries. Who's to say how modern architecture will evolve over the coming years?
It's like saying "I only value the Dutch Masters" because the collection that's left has been honed down to concentrated beauty. Of course Rembrandt's corpus is wonderful. What of the other 99/100 that threw together derivative mediocrity?
But I agree that sometimes, neo classicism is more suited to our way of life. A small city near Paris, Le Plessis Robinson, has switched in less than 15 years from the typical "banlieue", with hideous towers, to a fake typical old french city (fake old church, fake old market, fake old city hall, etc). http://www.plessis-robinson.com/uploads/media/DSC_8867.jpg
I think it's a beautiful pastiche. Quality of life is now very appreciated here.
Here are some pictures before/after : http://www.pss-archi.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?id=34108
Yet, there are a few beautiful examples of the style, many of them are in the article here, there's others as well (see Saarinen's works for examples).
I know there's an unusual contingent of brutalist fans here on HN...I know they're unusual because by and large people don't travel to take pictures of brutalist buildings, but they'll take pictures of just about anything else.
Very few people pay brutalist architecture much attention other than how they're going to deal with these expensive, often poorly designed, crumbling buildings, very few of which last more than a few decades.
The nearest major city to me is full of brutalist buildings, and after just a handful of decades of use, it's being found cheaper to tear them down and start over than to try to fix them. People who work in them avoid them as much as they can, nobody likes walking near them or in their courtyards, they've proven to be terrible public spaces in general.
I wonder if what makes the examples in the OP look worth saving is that they're brutalist or that they're brutalist forms of other, previous, architecture movements?
I spent my childhood in the "sleeping districts" of Moscow, which are as brutalist as it gets. Not a store in sight, just high-rise apartment blocks, huge spaces between them, and howling wind. Never met a person who could honestly claim to love it. Now I live in a European city where housing and commerce are thoroughly mixed, and it's wonderful.
Thanks!!
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Beautiful, scenic, futuristic. But it does not look like a place I would ever want to live in. It really does look brutal, it almost has a fascist vibe.
It's just like I sometimes see pictures of what in the US are ghetto suburbs and I think: this could actually be a lovely neighbourhood. (As a European who has lived all his live in densely populated urban environments it baffles me how people can't turn a neighbourhood where everyone has a free standing house with a yard into a pleasant place to live.)
Reminds me of a documentary I saw once on the plans for Germania, Hitler's proposed capital: everything out of human scope, sending the message that men are the mites of the state.
Opposed to 'Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre, 2014. (Laurent Kronental)' which appears like a regular tower high rise, but with round windows.
While 'brualism' is a term that refers to concrete structures built in the 50s/60s/70s, take a look at a castle on top of a hill. It is brutalist. Take a walk down a street in London next to multi-story pre-Victorian office/official building, it is brutalist. Early US inner-city multi-story apartments (when the elevator started to become more commonplace) equally. The tripod stlye Hong Kong housing estates (central life block, with a corridor leading off at 120, 240 and 360/0 degrees, with 6-8 apartments per corridor).
It is brutal. It is beautiful. And a lot of think is evident. It isn't to be confused with high-rise in general, which be it office or housing, is dreadful: "We have some land, put a building here, make it tall." That fails.
I lived in one of those apartments for a few years, with stunning view of whole of Paris - on the 14th July I could see a dozen different fireworks shows ! Big spaces, large terraces, huge windows... I love this place. The duplex apartments near the top of the buildings are my dream homes !
Alas it is not well maintained and a vicious circle having taken root it is now extremely expensive to maintain. Two thirds of the complex have been emptied and will soon be demolished to make room for a hugely tall Dubaï-like Russian office/apartment/hotel complex.
> Opposed to 'Les Tours Aillaud, Cité Pablo Picasso, Nanterre, 2014. (Laurent Kronental)' which appears like a regular tower high rise, but with round windows.
The apartments there are most definitely not as nice as Les Damiers - unlike Les Damiers, Tours Aillaud is cheap social housing. Used to be a difficult neighborhood, but being so close to La Défense it has improved a lot. The roundness and the colors are dear to my heart - I also have fond memories in those livingrooms with one round wall.
There are far worse places around Paris - those chosen by the author are absolutely not "crumbling neighborhoods". Vision 80 (one of his pictures), right on Le Parvis de La Défense as the ideal embodiment of the Athens Charter even qualifies as luxury brutalist housing - the top floor apartment with three half levels might not be wheelchair accessible but they are otherwise gorgeous spaces... I would probably have bought one of them if I had not so many children. Their Achille's heel is the maintenance and running costs.
Disclaimer: I grew up in La Défense, bathed in construction sites and Charte d'Athènes - I may not be the most objective person about lovely brutalism.
It is urbanism for architecture's sake. Where we tried to make humans fit themselves into immutable ideals.
Such areas stand in stark contrast with favelas, bottom-up vibrant communities (with a hell of a lot of problems for sure) where nothing is permanent, and there are no strict rules and zoning regulations.
http://my-magnit.ru/sites/my-img/st/tuls2.jpg something along those lines
What I really hate is shit like this: https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5602/14833654.30d/0_983eb_cb... Miles and miles of this, as far as the eye can see. Warehouses for people.
The title says poetic, not realistic!
Between dealing in the lobby to urinating into the elevators you had pretty much the entire spectrum of shit going on.
Apparently they cleaned it up some by now.
Amazing is the fact that he still lives in the 19th (which is a very cool part of Paris in lots of respects) some 250 metres away and it feels like a completely different world.
I wouldn't be surprised if he inspired this article given his last one was called "Concrete Poetry":
Because I've never met any non-architect who thought it was nice. It's part of a wider observation on my part about certain aesthetic tastes that only people who are part of specific in-groups declare themselves to enjoy works that 99% of people find unappealing.
Various kinds of modern art, for instance.
I may be heavily biased as having grown up in La Défense, but I thoroughly enjoy brutalism for how it embraces functionality as the yardstick for aesthetics. The outward appearance of brutalist buildings may clash with many people's tastes, but their inside is livable - way more livable than classic architecture and at a much more affordable cost.
Don't forget that brutalism came of age during Europe's housing crisis and that mass manufacture was the key to solving it. As a result, many brutalist products have been cheaply built, giving it a bad name - but as buildings such as La Défense's Vision 80, they can be very nice too and stand the test of time: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9sidence_Vision_80
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
"Brutalism" as an architectural critical term was not always consistently used by critics ... "brutalism" has become used in popular discourse to refer to buildings of the late twentieth century that are large or unpopular – as a synonym for "brutal" – making its effective use in architectural historical discourse problematic.
"Brutalist" in English is a terrible, misleading name. It was about futurism and misplaced faith in concrete as a miracle material, not brutality. Given the way so many bad Brutalist buildings look, it's easy to see how people could make the mistake.
It seems to me that at least a few well-known architectural trends consist of 1) a few amazing masterpieces that become instant classics and 2) 20x as many cheap knock-offs, which everyone comes to hate, which are consequently not maintained well, which eventually give the trend a bad name.
The "International Style" is the other example (alongside Brutalism) that stands out in my mind; for every Seagram building or Lever House, there are dozens (hundreds?) of copycat school buildings or anonymous low-budget office cubes that end up looking like prisons.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-___cRB72NnI/TmmMnkQWPCI/AAAAAAAADT...
http://images51.fotki.com/v1/photos/1/10467/18529/fe820adcjp...
http://www.mndaily.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/slides...
It's been shunned by my school for years; is due to be demolished; and there are few photos of the interior. It's a tragedy to me, since I spent as much time as I could lounging in it.
I've seen way, way worse in dynamic, growing neighborhoods.
The light in the images gives a hint of how the illusion of emptiness was created. They're all shot early in the morning, waiting for the right moment when nobody is in the frame.
I have a book called "Tokyo Nobody" which does the same thing with Tokyo city scenes. It's unsettling because we're so used to seeing the same streets bustling with people.
And siblings hare already answered, they are still used.
I can't believe that in this day and age we are unable to prevent that sort of thing by using the right materials or by directing rainwater to some sort of drain.
Anyone know if the 3rd photo down from the top[0] is part of the setting for the 1995 movie 'La Haine'[1]? It reminds me of the housing projects in the movie where the main characters live, especially that great scene where a dj points his speakers out his window to play for the neighborhood.
The linked wikipedia article about the movie mentions only the Parisian suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes as a filming location, but a cursory web search isn't turning up more evidence.
[0] https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp-content/uplo...
It is not, but your rightly recognized its style - both Les Tours Nuages and La Cité De La Noé in Chanteloup Les Vignes were designed by architect Emile Aillaud.
In 'La Haine' the Cité De La Noé appears as 'Cité Des Muguets'.
http://www.yannarthusbertrand2.org/index.php?option=com_dats...
https://www.google.fr/maps/place/6+Place+des+F%C3%A9d%C3%A9r...
Poetic vision of Paris streets : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Mkz5F_yME