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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Even though this article contrasts brutalist buildings with the more modern glass-and-steel aesthetic, I think both are products of their time and may age equally badly in the eyes of future generations. On the other hand, the architectural styles of the older, more historical buildings in New York, London, etc. seem to have aged well. In that they look old, but not "brutal". There may come a time when even the modern glass and steel facades will look brutal...

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They've aged well because they were deemed worth saving after several decades. Since Penn, Euston stations the interest in saving as much as possible rather than just the best examples has caused some lesser quality old buildings to be kept.

I’ve heard this explanation (i. e. selection bias) a few times, but I don’t think it holds true. I live in a 190x building in Berlin that was nothing special for its time. Yet people prefer this style to anything built later, including most modern buildings (which are, however, preferable to the abominations of the 60s, brutalism or not).

Here’s a streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/bmFBmYywHAF2 walk around a bit and you see many such buildings. Only where bombs destroyed the older houses in WW2 will you find anything build after 1920.

The reasons aren’t necessarily a loss in taste: the older buildings have far higher ceilings, which may be due to them often being filled with far more people than is usual today. Alternatively (or because of that) heating costs did not factor into such decisions.

As to skyscrapers and larger buildings such as museums or hospitals, it’s important to remember that glass & steel & concrete is rather new technology. It’s far cheaper than brick, and simply a compromise between costs and appearances that was not commonly available back then. It’s also somewhat inconsistent but undeniable that we appreciate the decorative elements on the exterior, or the stucco inside, yet it feels somewhat tacky to make them today: McMansions are what happens when you think you can plunder all that’s beautiful from previous eras.

Very high ceilings is one technique used to keep buildings cool during the summer before AC or even electric fans were around.

The street view shows what I think would have been housing for people moderately high up the scale. I'm pretty sure that none of the initial residents would have washed the floors themselves... certainly upper half, right? So there's something in the selection view.

I don't know what happened to the buildings which housed the lower half. I know Berlin in 1900 was famous for having lots of awful newly-built tenement buildings, much lower standards than NYC or London at the same period. Maybe these were much less likely to be restored?

But I agree that selection isn't the whole story. Technology is some of it: heating was never cheap, but lighting was even more expensive, which is why old factories have huge windows. I think formality was another part, having a big formal room for guests was important for respectability, whereas today most housing is designed much more around its daily use... so things get subdivided to have more separate bedrooms.

I regret that five minutes searching didn’t lead me to the original article I found this so this is all if I recall correctly stuff.

The average architect lives in a building over a hundred years old.

The most desired buildings in the Netherlands are equally over a hundred years old, with people basically preferring faux copies (because buildings that inaccessible to the disabled are now illegal to build) to more modern architecture.

I’m aware there’re a lot of old buildings in most developed countries but there are more new ones. While there may be some bias towards keeping nice old buildings it’s not enough to explain the difference in quality. Old buildings straight up look better, they were designed by better architects.

Glass and steel dates to about the same time as brutalist concrete, maybe a few years earlier. International style is still going strong, brutalism came to be a abhored years ago.

Some ideas are just bad, not merely out of fashion, and history recognizes them as such.

My feelings exactly,but I have never come accross a profession more obsessed about winning awards than architecture.

They will continue designing in a style that wins awards and professional recognition, while the public are stuck with them for decades.

Are you sure there isn't an element of selection bias in that opinion?

I mean, sure, the designer of the Stata Center [1] at MIT might have been aiming to impress other architects and win awards. That's why we've heard of it. The designer of Knox Road Multistorey Car Park in Cardiff wasn't aiming for architecture awards - which is why you've never heard of the place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center

Google "architect award winning car park".

(I am pretty sure that every architectal project over a certain number of million dollars is guaranteed to win one or more awards)

I don't think it's selection bias. It's the same in software. User hostile faddish resigned are common, backed by some BS narrative. But other than the few times it had destoryed shareholder value (Snapchat) it doesn't really matter because the entire site/app will be redesigned in a couple of years. But a terrible concrete monstrosity can be around for decades and decades.

And yet the Cardiff car park is likely more pleasant to park in than building 32 is to work in.

We used a semi-fancy architect to design our house, and while I'm glad we did we had to push's a lot to design in things like closets, much less other "habitability" features. Many award-winning buildings aren't actually as functional as the awards would imply (just think of the open office trend, which photographs well but is hardly good for productivity!). Ironically that same architect designed...a car park, which is actually quite nice.

(I object to MIT's relatively recent decision to start using names of donors for buildings rather than simply the building number -- building 32 is the stata building).

> And yet the Cardiff car park is likely more pleasant to park in than building 32 is to work in.

I can find pictures of the outside of the Cardiff car park, but I can't find anybody showing off the inside. What's so nice about parking in it?

I don't know, but building 32 is pretty terrible.

brutalism does not mean "brutal". It comes from "béton brut" which means "raw concrete" in French. Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/brutalism

The bland glass and steel "international style" aesthetic largely overlaps with and arguably predates the "brutalist" style though, and seems to have attracted rather less of a backlash.

Glass has a tendency to reflect the sky, while concrete only blocks it out.

another poster mentioned a recent article on similar buildings in Poland. For me it comes down to, is it perceived as an expression of the government and times for when it was built or was the expression of a people and times when it was built, the latter is much more forgiving.

Brutalism is a uniquely bad-looking part of architectural history - you can look anywhere in the world at any other point in history and you'll never find the same ugliness. My pet theory is that it's a style that was made to look good in black-and-white photographs at the expense of looking good in reality.

Barbican is one of the best examples of Brutalism in the UK and I love it! Its far from Ugly. Its functional and interesting, far more so than the bland glass builds down the road in the city.

The Barbican is popular with a) architects b) people who endorse the political movement that built it. Even in your post you don't seem to be able to bring yourself to describe it positively in aesthetic terms - "functional" and "interesting" are usually euphemisms for ugly.

The fundamental bottom line is that hardly anyone likes grey, and - in real life rather than black-and-white photos - no amount of interesting texture makes up for that.

As a resident of the Barbican I'm in this minority that likes grey then. I love it and I'm neither a) or b), and I'd say the majority of the residents no longer match b)

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