Brutalist Architecture Masterpieces (2016)
architecturaldigest.com
architecturaldigest.com
If it were about functionality you wouldn’t build massive structures at weird angles like the Wotruba Church. You wouldn’t build physics-defying overhangs to compensate your wanting for a nonexistant first floor like the Giesel library.
There’s no functional basis for the design of the buildings outlined here. Only some superficial notion of functionalism because of the revealing of the underlying structure. Meanwhile, so many creators of brutalist structures are on the record for hating humans for messing with their grand designs.
The world would be a better place without this blight masquerading as some purity of design.
functionality
The former has nothing to do with brutalist architecture and is now available for all styles of architecture. The latter was a crazy mistake.
Generally speaking, fundamentalism is usually a bad word. We use it when people seem to view the world through a narrow framework, and can't even engage with ideas, facts or truths from outside that framework. We tend to think of authorotarian religions, strict political doctrines and such.
But... there are other examples of fundamentalism, that we call out more rarely. Science, for examaple, is very fundamentalist. It is, after all, a narrow framework for determining truth that ignores anything which can't fit into it's framework.
Anyway.... the modernist movement(s) failed, in terms of proving it's principles but it did have some significant influence.
Personally, I think the biggest reason was economics. Architects (especially the more ideological types) often hate having commercial decisions impact their work in any way. Ultimately, I don't think you can (philosophically) have a truly rational "theory of buildings" that ignore economics. Economy of space, materials, labour... money.
Still... I think there's some value in purity, embodying ideas as fully as we can. Not everything that fails is a failure.
Imagine a town that's fundamentally democratic. It probably won't work, but we need someone to try it so that we can learn.
Outside, Government Center plaza channels the wind coming off the nearby harbor. It's also the site of one of the most infamous images from the 1970s bussing crisis (https://www.npr.org/2016/09/18/494442131/life-after-iconic-p...) which tainted that space early in its existence.
There's always a discussion going on about what to do with Government Center and City Hall. To me the best thing to do would be to admit the entire enterprise was a tragic mistake, and restore the original street layout. I'm not suggesting they restore the old look - sadly that's lost forever, but at least give the place some actual street life.
If the City Hall building really must be saved, then deconstruct it instead of just demolishing it, and rebuild it out in some industrial park in the suburbs where it would blend in with its natural environment.
Particularly in Boston, which has its own style and so many beautiful old buildings.
It's trendy to hate because it supresses opportunities for new interesting architecture to preserve older (but not neccessarily interesting or even good) façades, simply to prevent people moaning about ugly new buildings.
Fun fact about the Barbican: The central heating is controlled centrally. Tenants get a notification about which day it will be turned on for winter.
Compare that to the Centre Pompidou in Paris [1], on which arguments about the building will probably never cease (personally I think it's brilliant), which went up at about the same time. But it's hard to argue about its quality as an exhibition venue (or rather venues).
[1] https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/five-facts-about-t...
I prefer the Lloyds building to the Pompidou. Less Fisher-Price colours.
One of the distinctive features of the Centre Pompidou is the striking presence of colour. Four strong colours – blue, red, yellow and green – clothe the structure and enliven the façade, their use governed by a code laid down by the architects:
blue for circulating air (air conditioning)
yellow for circulating electricity
green for circulating water
red for circulating people (escalators and lifts).
https://www.google.ca/search?q=macblo+building+vancouver&oq=...
The macblo building is also CGIed into the New York City Nazi party HQ in Amazon's adaptation of The Man in the High Castle.
The other is pretty much the entire SFU campus.
This is not to say that some brutalist architecture can't rise above that. But the major works by the major architects behind the movement often turned out to fail miserably at their stated purposes, putting the lie to the form-as-function ethos.
This tends to be blamed on the lack of 'proper' maintenance, or the people just not grokking it properly.
What we in the UK are left with in the main is ugly grey-brown hulks that scream poverty, deprivation, violence and depression.
The Barbican is a very interesting design, but anyone who has actually been there would agree that it is ugly.
Contrast them with something like a modern glass skyscrapers (e.g. the walky talky). They may be rather bland and boring but I don't think many people would say they are ugly.
I find it one of the most beautiful and peaceful places in London. Some of us actually like these sort of forms and concrete as a material.
> walky talky
I find that thing grotesque, it's like a bad joke on the London skyline. Some skyscrapers are nice like 30 St Mary Axe but when they're done bad the fact they're made of glass doesn't make them any more attractive.
In the end its all completely subjective.
To many/most the concrete monstrosities of the 60s and 70s are actively oppressive.
The worst examples seem to have come from the biggest names in the movement, at least in the UK.
It was just a random aesthetic theory, with some random justifications.
People don't hate it "blindly" (e.g. as some mimetic superstition), they hate it at a gut level, because they find it ugly.
Even if they haven't heard of others describing such a building as ugly, and not knowing what brutalism is, they'd still find it ugly.
Just show some brutalist building pictures to some common Joe that knows neither, and he'll call it ugly with 99% chance.
This common Joe doesn't hate "brutalism" (which he ignores) and is not copying some other's opinion on brutalism, he just hates how that building looks.
This place is horrible!
I spend a lot of time exploring and studying music in former Yugoslav countries, and while I find the Brutalism fascinating in it's relationship to Soviet/Yugoslav poverty & austerity, beauty is not a word I would ever use positively in the same sentence.
(A) It's a form or contrarianism, in that it's an negation of mainstream preference, hence unusual. Even better, this negation of mainstream preference isn't really threatening anybody, hence good way of attracting mainstream attention.
(B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically quite false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't like.) So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and self-consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An example of such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].
(C) Cities with a lot of brutalist architecture, prevalent in the former Soviet block, use it to market themselves are tourist destinations. This ties in with (A), for why would you go and visit a city unless it had something unusual to offer, something Instagrammable, something to talk about when you are back?
Huh, quite an interesting take. On the contrary, I associate an appreciation of brutalism with those who post staunch free-market capitalist comments.
I have many taken architectural tours in Bucaresti, Plovdiv, Sofia, Skopje, Moldova, Tbilisi, Beograd, Kiev, and Moscow. Unanimously, the tour-guides presented these buildings with disdain for their aesthetics and association with authoritarianism. All of the tour-guides were definitely left/liberal-leaning, some to the point of dreadlocks and Che Guevara hats. (Thanks for the links, by the way, I had never heard of Own Hatherly before!).
I find that surprising. I associate them with architectural symbols of neoliberalism, namely modernist architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture). Libertarians, I associate with the weird branch of modernist architecture that builds everything out of glass and trees and matt white surfaces and everywhere looks like Dubai. Perhaps a subset of contemporary architecture? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_architecture)
> Che Guevara hats
There's some real semiotic collapse going on here. What does it mean to wear a Che Guevara hat? In the west you might see it alongside people trying to unironically revive the hammer and sickle. But there are plenty of people who lived in eastern Europe under Communism who would regard that symbol as just as symbolic of authoritarianism as the swastika.
presented these buildings with disdain
As far as I'm aware, Own Hatherley is a high-ranking cadre in UK communist parties, although I have lost track which, since they have a tendency to split and splinter. As far as I'm aware, publishers like Verso Books and Zero Books were outlets of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), although that no longer exists. I don't know which of the SWP-descendants is now in control of those publishers.
Misplaced romanticism. AFAIK historically Americans didn't park their poor people or immigrant workers into these huge brutalist apartment complexes like in Europe, or if they did it is somehow a new phenomenon.
And I can assure you it's the same in western Europe. Not a lot of people value that architectural style given what it represents: a lot of political and social failure that carries so much shame and embarrassment we are trying to remove any trace of it.
As for the more extreme postwar architecture, it feels quite homey to me. Although I like it best when it's subverted by the inhabitants, humans living and leaving their mark, think flowers growing in a concrete crack.
It's just a term that got into fame (from a brutalist web design trend and manifesto) recently (a few years ago), and as thus it's in our mid-term memories from our web surfing, so folks on HN periodically rediscover it and post links about it here.
No special attraction to Brutalism.