Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

That postcard with an aerial shot of housing blocks in Novi Beograd must represent a regional trend.

Reminds me very much of what I saw in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. Also, modern-day Seoul, and many other large Asian cities.

I think it's just a different mindset. Where the West puts a high value on uniqueness, conformity is prized in other cultures.

See also: Vancouver's skyscrapers, and suburban tract housing, both of which are ridiculed for their sameness.

View on HN

And yet, pre-soviet Russian architecture doesn't seem to share that trait.

Pre-Soviet Russian architecture served tens of thousands of highly privileged people in metro areas and estates. Meanwhile everyone else lived in izbas with no electricity, running water or sanitation, or worse.

The khruschyovkas and neobrutalist apartment blocks, for all their faults, lifted tens of millions of people out of medieval living conditions. They made extensive use of mass production and prefab.

Well, khruschyovkas and neobrutalist apartment blocks were started some 40 years _after_ Soviet rule was established.

So their primary target before that was not to take millions out of mediocre living conditions, but world revolutions and such.

That it was. I am under no illusion about the communists.

Before they had khrushchyovkas they had komunalkas. Most everyone is familiar with Doctor Zhivago, aren't they?

Their primary target of those apartment blocks was to serve urbanization - to house millions that were moving (or were moved) out of rural villages, with their quite mediocre living conditions, to the industrialized cities. That process was quite ongoing 40 years after Soviet rule was established; lots and lots of peasants in 1950s-1970s USSR lived with a home environment that was quite comparable to early 1900s except with kolkhoz tractors and a propaganda radio. Moving to an apartment with running hot water, indoor toilet, and centralized heating was a major improvement for millions of people during Khruschev era, because their previous dwelling did not have those 'luxuries'.

No doubt, but that just reinforces my point; the conformity was the result of trying to build them out rapidly, not due to some preference in Russian culture. I wasn't criticizing the architecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com