The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
The article demonstrates well the idea of "typology" - how we came to associate Brutalist structures with FBI-style surveillance states. Did you know we also associate stuff like Greek Columns with government in general?
The "human scale" term refers to how a building's shape and texture should be broken up to break up any notion of the building being looming/threatening to tiny humans by comparison - kind of like how a person would prefer wearing different colors as opposed to a monocolor jumpsuit.
Almost all "evil" architecture fails human scale design on purpose by making oversized elements or using the same material everywhere - the idea is to make the organization seem greater than the individual or even society, and make it seem impossible to challenge. This is also seen in architecture built or designed by fascist Germany and Italy back in the 1930s, for exactly this reason. Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_architecture if you want more.
Here in Boston, the brutalist monstrosity that is our city hall has its Soviet oppressiveness enhanced by the pillbox-laden concrete wasteland that surrounds it. It really is a monument to government power.
I'd also note that the brutalist addition to the Boston Public Library always struck me as rather a desecration of the original Beaux Arts structure but the recent remodel and cleanup actually created a rather open and airy space. I still don't love the architecture but it's a big improvement.
[1] https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/boston-city-hall-plaza-rede...
I think, just for the building itself, that the Houston Public Library serves its function very well. It is an excellent building for its purpose, and I rather like going there. The courtyard outside, though, is a stellar example of how US culture has completely forgotten how to create public spaces of value. (Why is it that Houston, of all places, seems to be challenged to remember why shade is useful!)
That's not to say that public parks need to be crammed full of commerce but people often need some reason beyond "open space" to go into an area.
I wish I had a copy-it is an enormously enjoyable piece.
(waltlockley.com still exists although it looks as if it hasn't been updated for almost 10 years. But some of the older content doesn't seem to be there any longer.)
ADDED: One fun paragraph from the piece:
So imagine the real experience of government through the eyes of a pedestrian forced to traverse a windswept empty plaza ('windswept' is just a word, but, please, understand that it's a whole set of unpleasant sensations, 'windswept' is shorthand for windswept, snowswept, exposed to cold wet penetrating Boston wind, featureless, hard and flat, forbidding, uninteresting, vulnerabilzing, isolating, scaled-to-intimidate), past the broken promise of a fountain that has never ever worked (too bad we don't have a Broken Fountains theory to go along with the Broken Windows theory), to approach the underside of a top-heavy, brooding, hulking concrete fortress (and by 'fortress' I mean instantly, cinematically, viscerally, recognizably-by-shape-alone out of human scale, comparable to the worst of Soviet work), rough to the touch and confusing as hell, a building that wastes your time, a building with cavernous voids vaguely threatening and vaguely empty, so he or she can climb upstairs and register to vote. All metaphors aside, that voter learns things during a journey like that. That voter draws certain conclusions about Boston and voting and his role as a citizen. Whether he knows it or not.
As the Wikipedia article also notes the Seven Sisters have considerable similarities to icons like the Wrigley Building in Chicago. (Not sure I buy a couple of the other comparisons.)
Not sure which part brought the worst failures :-)
The SIS still suffers from a limited material palette and needs further break-up to reach the human scale. Especially at the ground level - imagine standing next to that building - it would feel like standing beside a huge wall!
Some of my favorite brutalist buildings are libraries, somehow it works very well for the kind of very public building a library is. And the best definitely feel human-scale to interact with (often _especially_ in the interior plans, which you can't get from a picture really), and are more visually interesting than a big rectangle. I don't think anyone said if it's not a big rectangle it's not brutalist!
Here's one I'm fond of:
Rarely if ever did I see anyone at UCSD taking advantage of the area underneath the stack tower, even for shade on hot summer days. That said, the view from the stacks, with the floor-to-ceiling glass, was spectacular. Especially looking north, down the slope of pepper canyon. The rest of the library has the sort of issues that are common to Brutalist buildings in La Jolla-for instance, reinforced concrete is not as durable when sitting close to the ocean as you might hope. As was put by a faculty member I worked with "...the windows don't open; but they do leak!"
I prefer the enthusiastic futurist poured-concrete '60s buildings to the craptacular corporate office-park nonsense that so many newer buildings on campus have.
Fun fact: Pereira did not intend the Geisel Library stacks to look like the concrete & glass banyan tree that got built...it was originally supposed to be a concrete sphere on a single, giant column!
But I've always wondered why more tech companies and corporations don't embrace this aesthetic. The buildings are so distinctive and striking that it would result in very strong branding. And while motivated by questionable ethics, we do associate megacorps in fiction with bleeding edge technology and incredible capabilities.
It is not as if anyone takes the Google happy colors and 'don't be evil' motto as actually indicative of ethical behavior. Conversely, I don't think an insidious aesthetic would imply 'we are doing bad things' as much as a fun nod to sci-fi high tech.
I ordered a Google Home for my dad for Christmas. It's ridiculous the only color available is white. I'm sure they are trying to avoid the 1984/2001 aesthetic by making it look as cuddly as possible, but they are just trading that for a Brave New World/I, Robot aesthetic. On top of that, it really does look like an air freshener.
I was up in the air between a Google Home and an Echo Dot for him, and the color alone would have been enough to sway me to the Dot, but I ordered just a few minutes too late for it to arrive by Christmas. I mean, that white is going to look absolutely awful in such a short time because they put capacitive controls under it. Have you ever seen the palm rests of the White Macbooks? They look like pit stains on the favorite undershirt of a very sweaty man.
I wish Google would stop copying the "look at me" aesthetic of Apple. I like where Amazon was going with the Dot. It looks nice enough that nobody is going to complain if they see it, but it blends in well enough that you probably won't see it unless you look for it. Google products aren't the cheapest things, but they don't "waste" enough money on design elements for them to actually stand up as aesthetic objects like Apple products do.
What do you mean by only color available being white?
Perhaps only organizations that are immune to market vagaries can handle an architecture that does not respond easily to growth/change. Also, many prefer to lease rather than own, and real estate developers are almost universally conservative and conventional, thus unlikely to underwrite the costs of aesthetically significant architecture.
(In my experience it costs at least twice as much to construct things in a way that is outside standard convention.)
A mixed example, Apple's new campus is a more friendly-faced monolith, but will be difficult to expand without breaking the trademark purity of its circular geometry. (An aside, at least as shown in photos, that building puts my creative mind to sleep and carries a message of conformity, like any monoculture gone to far.)
However, to the degree a showcase gets built when a company is riding high and growing, it's not unusual that looking out 5 or 10 years, that company won't be doing so well.
I don't know if it's intentional, but in my mind Apple is also "that organization with the eerily clean white interior" in real life. They are also unsurprisingly very secretive in their organization; I've heard their engineers have little idea what other other teams are doing, but it's a rumour http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsceticAesthetic
The Oracle Corporation's global HQ in Redwood City[0] does look a little like the Bonaventure Hotel[1] referenced in the original article, and has been used as a stand-in for at least one dystopian sci-fi megacorp[2].
[0] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=oracle+headquarters+redwoo...
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Bonaventure+Hotel&tbm=isch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Genisys#Filming
How about, "Evil, it's what we do!" Followed by, "Shush, you're just jealous!"
It's also not as if the sterility that was some kind of "opposite"? For me it's certainly closer to a factory floor than to, say, Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
> Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
-- E. F. Schumacher [ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106019678082;vi... ]
Speaking of dystopian megacorps and their architecture, I bought Invisible Inc during the Klei sale on Steam. I'd highly recommend it. It's a turn-based stealth rougelike based based in a cyber-punk world run by dystopian megacorporations. You control a team of technologically augmented spies who infiltrate these megacorps. The levels are all procedurally generated, which works really well for the inhuman sameness that corporations have in science fiction.
The gameplay is well thought out, and the story mode is well written. It deconstructs a lot of themes typically present in cyberpunk, but the deconstruction doesn't upstage the gameplay (I feel like game designers sometimes try to be 'clever' when deconstructing tropes, to the detriment of fun.) The story mode isn't very long, but it has good replayability due to the roguelike nature and the procedurally generated levels. There is also an endless mode, which adds a lot of replay value, and is something that I miss in other roguelikes, such as FTL.
I played it on Linux, and it runs well. It's $20 normally. I'd say it's a must-buy at $10 or below if you enjoy roguelikes or stealth games. I'd say take a pass if you don't enjoy turn based games or cyberpunk. You can probably get a pretty good idea of the gameplay from watching a video on youtube, but I'd definitely try to avoid spoilers.
Tokyo 42, a supposed spiritual successor of Syndicate, is another new game with a terrific architectural style.
For those of you who enjoy a heaping meal of architectural commentary sprinkled with a generous portion of sarcasm, check out the author's blog [1]. Literally LOL every time I get a chance to read it.