Crimes in Concrete
firstthings.com
firstthings.com
Modernism got a bad name in many Western countries, because it was used as an architectural and philosophical justification for cheap and shoddy system-built housing to fill the post-war housing gap. That doesn't make rectilinear forms and bare concrete inherently bad; we don't blame vernacular architecture for characterless mock-Tudor estate houses and vulgar McMansions, we blame bad architects, profit-hungry developers and philistine houses.
I admit I wouldn't be asking if it agreed with my biases, but how do we know this? Seems hard to control for all the other variables.
Is that because they are good, or because they serve to signal class status?
Only it's really not that neat. When the brutalist monstrosities (you may correctly infer I don't like most of them one bit, though I do like much modernism) were being designed and built post-war, brutalism particularly was embraced as enthusiastically on all parts of the political spectrum. The mood was to build a "better world" and to borrow a cliche, embrace the "white heat of technology". Futurism, science, nuclear and modernism - including brutalism - was good. End of. Many fine examples of classic architecture were levelled, like the oft mourned Penn station, to put in an awesome, imposing brutalist slab that was looking tired and shabby within a decade. I'm sure the comparative cheapness and quickness of build won more fans in one part of the political map though.
As people started to live in them, use them, and live around them, it very rapidly became clear that brutalism - like much post-war architecture - didn't give a toss about humans. That was the real exciting new development in post-war architecture. The vision was inspiring, the reality was counter-productive in so many cases, as the scale or the amount of extra walking required wrecked the reality. They may have been impressive to look at, but so frequently fail to work as a building, or for people.
There are a few brutalist that work, and far more considered modernist, but in the main I call the brutalist experiment failed for those who have to use, inhabit or visit them. The ones that really work, seem to have one common feature - they remember the humans - you know, those things that use buildings? :)
This was also a time of far heavier air pollution than we today ever experience, at least in "the west". The typical multi-family building were therefore built not right at the sidewalk, but about 15m further back. Adjacent buildings no longer connected, but had similar spacing. The fraction of open space vs that used by buildings easily tripled, and the free space was planted with grass or brushes.
This was also the time when mixed zoning was mostly abolished in favour of homogenous residential or commercial areas.
As it turned out, this style isn't necessarily what people want. It tends to be too quiet, distances increase linear with lowered density, cars became somewhat required, etc. But the motives were mostly pure.
Bear in mind I'm in the UK, where Europe's post-war rebuilding was also large part of the motive. The American experience was necessarily a little different - no bomb damage, and a large profit from WW2, thank-you-very-much.
The huge areas of bomb damage, and decades of soot and other pollutants meant many of those fine classic buildings were looking old, tired and in need of sand-blasting, or at least a good wash. The 50s brought coal restrictions and clean air legislation, so pollution and smog had passed. Cars weren't yet common. Looking to the future concrete was "clean", and very much of the Jetson's future, and you got so much more of it for every pound spent. Steam trains, and Victorian gothic fussiness were of the mucky past. Yet unlike marble, granite and even sandstone and brick it so often weathers and ages horribly.
There was, as you note far more space - and in architect or promotional artistry before they were built this usually had trees, planting, and very often a view through trees. The other style was of people and cars as cells in the futuristic city organism - that Jetson future once again. The 95% reality had a few feature trees set in concrete or flagstones, some feature planters for flowers - horse trough or hot tub sized that in the sea of concrete looked comical afterthought. By the 70s the trees most especially were dying, horribly sad or missing. Turns out mature trees need more than 2 sq m of water capture. I remember very little grass in the brutalist bits of the city I grew up in or those I visited in the 70s and 80s. The sweeping walkways in the sky meant walking a mile to cross a road, or endless steps - horrible if mother with pram, and lastly plenty of dark gloomy spots to get mugged or lost in.
The pre-war modernist, or the garden city movements, and even pre-war social housing had, in the UK, far more of the natural world, grass, large grass verges with mature trees and play spaces or parks. They hadn't yet discovered separating shopping centre from housing, so they were still working communities.
So yeah, it's easy to see why they tried and the motives that brought them, but it's as easy to see why it so often turned out dystopian nightmare to be demolished as soon as affordable. We'll be stuck with those car-first choices for a century though. Today's alternative of finding lowest possible bid unless it's a feature tower block isn't that much better.
But I wouldn't idolise pre-war architecture. There are some shockingly awful 1930s estates around London, and they're almost as dispiriting in their own way as archetypal brutalist tower blocks.
The garden cities are much more pleasant, but then you're not comparing like with like. Tower blocks were built to replace Victorian slums, with relatively high population density in both.
Some of the original designs were terrible, but sometimes they can be salvaged.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/12/grand-p...
You're completely right about the brutalist campuses, btw.
Maybe egalitarianism isn’t as humane as it seems. Maybe if you bring everyone down to the same level, you find that you’ve reduced everything worth striving for to rubble.
And maybe all those artisans and decorators the modernists drove out of business deserved to make a living too.
Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Favorite_Architect... - modernist buildings barely show up in that list. Of course you're right - beauty is subjective. So when a simple popularity poll fails to show support for their chosen style, architects resort to pseudo-intellectual justifications of why the people are wrong to dislike the featureless blocks of glass, steel and concrete built in their cities.
I am not sure, searching for "modern" reveals 27 hits and postmodern 14. Also, landmarks dominate the top 10 so i am not sure whether the poll more accuratly tracks the most liked building and not style. A style with more distributed votes would suffer (and, for example, there are more hits for postmodern than for art-deco).
Edit: By 'suffocate all others', I mean in an academic sense. Look at the designs produced by major architectural schools. They have been purged of older styles, just like the art world was purged of 'traditionally beautiful', confining it to art history.
This is a poll about americas favourite architecture and not in which style to build. I think the poll is largely a function of fame. Buildings are being build in all sorts of style, but I think the sobering result is that a style in itself is not really saving anyone. I also don't think style can only suffocate? A lot of cities are mixed in style.
He's incapable of not being political. Publishing conspiracy theory garbage about Soros at the time of a major hunt for antisemitism in public life was what got him fired.
(The author of the original article, Dalrymple, is also a full time culture warrior)
Building at the low end is apolitical. With razor thin margins that crap doesnt make the cut. No matter how many millions of square feet of warehouse and pole barn you build there is no room for opinions, style and politics when your margin is pennies on the dollar.
>Building at the low end is apolitical.
You have an decidedly odd view of what people are interested in and what makes something political.
Yes, but only because the heart of the modernist movement has been an attempt to deny, belittle and mock the idea that the instinctive aesthetic reaction of the majority to their creations is important or valid. If you think their constructions are ugly, that's not their problem, it's your problem. Firstly, you're too stupid, conservative and narrow-minded to perceive its genius, and secondly, in fact, you actually do like it, or eventually you will, if you just shut up and wait long enough.
It's as if avant-garde jazz advocates were put in charge every radio station and music streaming service on Earth, and given free rein to remorselessly enforce their taste on the whole population, with any dissenter being shouted down and told that, when they eventually forget what all other music sounded like, they'll come to love atonal jazz noise.
In such a situation, the fightback would have to begin with people being told it's OK to trust their own instinct and hate the music that's been forced upon them. Likewise, the fightback against overweening modernism has to begin by bursting the elitist bubble of faux-intellectual obfuscation that modernists have created around architecture. It has to begin by telling people that they have as much right to judge the aesthetics of huge changes to the places they live and work as anybody else, and that if they think the changes are ugly, then that's valid, without any "but..." unfolding into a lecture about how daring and original the latest edifice being foisted upon them actually is.
- Modernism isn't a collection a movements across different countries/mediums in the early 20th century, but a "movement" whose "heart" is making intellectuals feel better than regular folks.
- No space for differing aesthetic opinions, the only real art is what you feel in your gut.
- Modernists are actively trying to change the places you live in work, despite the fact that the height of the movement happening decades ago.
- Specifically call out Jazz/Atonal music, apropos nothing.
Look, I'm all for differing opinions, but yours are more political than aesthetic (proving the parent's point). Plenty of modern architecture is aesthetically pleasing to the untrained eye. Some of it is not, and some of it is just objectively bad. However, your particular point of view, which presupposes some elite cabal, pushing there modernist agenda/degenerate art on an unknowing and unwilling populace, deserves some more scrutiny.
And the Modernists very much were trying to change the landscape.
Here's a video about the Smithsons who designed one of the UK's largest housing projects. They're clearly serious and well-intentioned, but also... "eccentric" is probably a diplomatic description.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5thwHTYNk
But... it's worth remembering that these projects were replacements for slum housing, not showcase palaces and cathedrals. While they weren't ideal, they did usually manage to be warmer, healthier, cleaner, and more sanitary than the hovels they typically replaced.
Over time some of the harder egdes of modernism have been filed off, and modern projects seem to be trying to learn from the past, while still keeping the functionalism of the original modernists.
There are plenty of blocks on the European mainland which are very liveable, built in that style. And unless Mr Dalrymple wants to propose a new archiectural style that he thinks can improve on them, it's not worth taking him seriously - except as a self-indulgent grumbler.
But you look at what young travellers
and photographers actually spend time
appreciating and sharing images of
I think the animus towards Brutalism is far more prevalent and justified than animus towards modernism.
(in french but it you don't really need to read the text to appreciate the pictures)
Crimes in concrete really irked me in the way the author just assumes that they hold the truth about architectural beauty.
Well, in the case of such buildings, most of the subjective opinion is a resounding "nah".
>But you look at what young travellers and photographers actually spend time appreciating and sharing images of, the modernist parts of Chicago, London and New York seem be appreciated at least as much as other cities and districts with well-regarded pre-20thC building
What tourists take pictures of (and even for that, old buildings are unmatched in popularity) is hardly the criterion to judge buildings other unfortunate people have to live in, and with.
It's nice and edgy to photograph a brutalist monstrosity with some filters (oh, apocalyptic dystopian chic). It's another thing to live there.
This has become a cliché talking-point, but it isn't entirely true. Or, at least, it doesn't fully apply here.
The best contrast to "modernism" would be the episode directly preceding it, namely Art Nouveau or Jugendstil.
There are lots of European cities both large and small that were predominantly built in this style, because it coincided with the rapid growth of cities as industrialisation swept (parts of) Europe. While British cities and Paris are somewhat older, everything east of France saw a major growth spurt in this time.
Because construction was rather centralised, a great many houses of rather similar style were built.
My city, Berlin, is a prime example of this. The core city centre is somewhat older, but about 80% of the housing stock were built within 25 years around the turn of the 20th century.
Here's a street view of my house: https://goo.gl/maps/NRhfef2KEdx7yAET8
If you walk around a bit, you will see newer, mostly ugly buildings. But essentially no houses were ever demolished for aesthetic reasons. Every new house owes its existence to World War 2.
Here's a map showing building age on a block-by-block level: https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt-berlin/ (click on "Karte aktivieren" to the right). If you hover over different blocks, you will note that for the vast majority, houses were built around the same time. The same is true for wider areas, generally becoming younger as one leaves the centre (as expected for a growing city.
For the "survival of the pretty" theory, one would expect more within-block heterogeneity, with one house surviving and it's direct (ugly) neighbour having been demolished and rebuilt.
Go to cities that weren't bombed, such as Budapest, and you will find entire quarters unchanged since they were built about 120 years ago.
Wasn’t Art Deco in between?
As an aside, I honestly don’t know why anyone tried to ‘improve’ art away from Art Nouveau/Arts & Crafts/Jugendstil: as far as I’m concerned they were the absolute pinnacle, the ne plus ultra of artistic endeavour. I mean, just look at William Morris’s work!
The older buildings probably haven't been replaced because they're attractive enough and work for the residents.
The post-war buildings probably haven't been replaced because, although less attractive, it isn't economical to do so.
There may also be municipal restrictions preventing them from being torn down and replaced, restrictions that probably wouldn't have existed pre-20th century.
If one were going to tear down such buildings and replace them it would probably be best for the replacement to be significantly taller, in order to make more money. But that might not be allowed.
You live in perhaps the nicest residential neighborhood in the developed western world, as far as I can tell.
Sometimes the new is all that is required to be better than the old.
Many structures survive because their destruction would release regulated toxins, which were unregulated when built.
Well since we're playing the false dichotomy game I'd gladly take prosperity with a side of lung cancer over cancer free stagnation.
Your notion of progress is weak.
Unfortunately, the city I live in has been burned, bombed, or otherwise destroyed a couple of times since it became a city in the late middle ages. This destruction happened regardless of likeability or sturdiness of the buildings involved.
> Making Dystopia is much more than a very detailed critique of a building or two here or there. It is an angry criticism of an entire worldview—the worldview of the type of person who much prefers his worldview to the world, and in so doing causes untold ruination.
Specifically the modernists ala Le Corbusier, Robert Moses etc. were prone to a view that everything that had come before was garbage and that we needed to tear it all down and start over.
> While claiming to be continuators, the modernists also claimed to be revolutionary, wanting to rebuild the world from a blank slate. Considering what they actually achieved, this was a more accurate representation of their activities; and Le Corbusier hardly saw a city that he did not want to knock down and build again, as if no one had ever thought of anything before him.
So the book (and this review) aren't talking so much about a particular style of building (and hence the lack of photos) but rather the cultural phenomenon of the modernist movement in architecture and how remarkably well they stamped their oppressive worldview on the world.
It's a long read, but worthwhile.
[1] https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern-ho...
[2] https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/g8674077/modern-ho...
We don't need styles, movement or whatever, we need forms evolved for a long time by normal humans (on this point I'm a fan of Christopher Alexander position on architecture, see A Pattern Language or The Timeless Way of Building). Modern architecture is just a fraud based on nothing.
Look at those : * http://www.hugues-bosc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/M... * https://sunnyspainholidays.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/su...
I don't think this is true. Some of the most energy efficient houses are passive solar houses that use large glass surfaces for heating that are covered using shades in the heat, but also use high thermal mass materials for heat/cold storage.
From an aesthetics perspective, many people like natural light, I wouldn't want to live in the houses you provided as examples for that reason.
(I'm not surprised you hate the grey concrete one. Most people do).
https://foursquare.com/v/the-habitrail-parking-garage/4eb994...
Same thing with the new Broad Art Museum by the late architect Zaha Hadid. Totally looks out of place in a Big 10 college town. Yet inside the light is the most fantastic of any art museum I've ever visited in the world.
https://www.archdaily.com/293358/eli-edythe-broad-art-museum...
Course sometimes something is built with zero redeeming value. I'd wager that something built from concrete can be beautiful.
Compare this monster in New Haven.
What I don't understand is how this came to be?
In the Soviet Union, for example, all resources come from the single source, so the distribution of funds becomes politicized and all kinds of crazy shit can fester simply because the group promulgating said shit was better at politicking (see: Lysenko). All universities then have to teach the same stuff. Groupthink. Monoculture. I get it.
But how did the western world succumb to this? Surely there are different architectural schools? Different funding sources? What is going on the minds of the people who are writing checks for all these modern Paris buildings [1]?
[1] By the way, the author forgot to include the Mitterrand library in his list of peace crimes in Paris: https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/diaporama-7866-bnf-20-ans
Very few people would have been in a position to complain about the ballooning price.
But it's glass, wood and greenery, what's so bad about it? There's little concrete there. I find it a really nice place, both from the wooden terrace and from the reading rooms which have a view on the forest.
But it's the outside that's truly awful. Living to the north I had to walk the entire length of the building to get to the only open entrance at the south. The entire space on top is eerie: wast, windy, exposed, gray, empty, with four impersonal gigantic building towering in the distance. No a person in sight, no one reading a book on the bench (no bench either), no one chatting with a friend, no one decorating their place of business. The ultimate anti-human space. It all makes you feel small and insignificant. It's the same feeling I got from walking the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg - being completely oppressed by the scale and indifference of the architecture. In the latter case it was obviously intended, but I have to wonder what happened with the Mitterrand library?
It all stands in stark contrast with, say, the Notre Dame. There are tourists upfront, there are locals in the park behind the building, there is always someone reading a book on the bench, there are children playing, there is tree cover, there are flowers, and if you walk a couple minutes you will be on the riverbank that actually has people on it (mostly locals). Keep walking along the bank and you will find someone practicing a trombone or a violin during their lunch break, or an evening waltz party on occasion.
Breuer's student center building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_D._Lincoln_Campus_Cente...
The nearby parking garage is better, actually.
The Fine Arts Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Arts_Center_(Amherst,_Mas...
I am not sure how to interpret your comment. Was this meant to be in a negative sense or in a positive sense? Or without any judgement?
That's a very convincing argument right in the second paragraph.
I have often felt that a lot of the hate for 60s/modernist/brutalist architecture comes from the stand out bad examples. For example the works of John Poulson, an inept architect who landed loads of massive and lucrative contracts because he was really good at bribery. His practice churned out building designs at a ferocious rate and while some are considered decent (e.g. Leeds International Pool) the vast majority are just bland, soulless blocks designed and built to a price point. Many also had serious structural issues too.
There is a lot of modern architecture to love and appreciate if you can filter out the bad.
The dominant architectural style reminds me a lot of the style discussed in this article. None of it has a concrete facade, but otherwise it would fall right in line. It's ugly, depressing, and distressing.
https://www.allurausa.com/blog/17-fiber-cement-siding-color-...
He can sort-of draw buildings and architectural details but basically he doesn't really have a great eye for architecture. If he did, he would think twice before making the tedious old right-wing arguments in the book. He's an example of someone who is conservative in way that's not grounded in practicality. Disliking the way 20th C architecture played out is one thing, trying to convince us to return to pre-modern architecture is something else.
By the way, it sounds odd to describe the content of a book as "one level down" from a review of that book.
As a trained architectural historian (who has spent years in the UK) it's very clear to me where he is coming from, and it's not a rational place. HN is a terrible venue for discussions of architecture because it's full of people who think their own blinkered opinion is the law. Stevens Curl is just like that.
Edit: even the conservative Spectator has Curl's digits: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/modernist-architecture-i...
You might be able to, but if you claim someone is making tedious old right wing arguments, when it according to the reviews he spends his time commenting on Corbusier's fascism and the Spectator lumps him in with Vonnegut, then I can't take your critique all that seriously. Do you think Vonnegut's architectural critiques are also tired right wing arguments?
As far as this kind of thing goes, I love stuff by Altair Alto and Shigeru Ban, whereas I'd happily bury George Marsh under his own concrete. Norman foster I am 50/50 on. Some of his stuff I like, but the tulip and the gherkin are basically just giant tumescent cocks sprouting out of the centre of London.
Curl's book is a mud-slinging rant which accuses modernist architects of being psychotic, deranged, obsessed with hygiene, inclined to erethism (I had to look it up) etc. The claim that Corbusier was a fascist is the least of it. In this sense Curl's argument is a bit like the claims that Corbusier was autistic https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/01/the-perils-of-diagnos... which aren't really taken seriously.
The right-wing aspect of what Curl is saying is his alignment with traditional 'polite' architecture (built by and for the wealthy) and his total dismissal of the social collectivist agenda of much modernist architecture. Modernism, at its best, had a social conscience and tried to serve the people rather than cravenly serving capital.
The opposition Curl is subscribing to essentially distinguishes between individualistic, traditional architecture (with ornament and ostentatious materials) and a collectivistic modernist architecture (inspired by vernacular building and modern machinery). This is exactly the kind of Manichean distinction that you will find in idealistic modernist manifestos. The difference is that Curl takes the side of capital, while the modernists would have taken the side of labour.
The reality of architectural practice is much more complex than that. Positing that opposition as the historical, intellectual reality behind 20th C architecture just isn't a good premise. Curl (like David Watkin in "Morality and Architecture") is attacking a straw man. He's fighting a propaganda war that ended years ago.
There's a ding-dong battle here between Curl (with his uncritical embrace of traditionalism) and Barnabas Calder (who himself is not exactly a hard-line socialist): https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-duel-has-mod...
Curl says things about architecture "generating hostile responses in humans" and it seems clear to me from experience that we are dealing with someone who is reaching for pseudoscientific language because their argument is weak. Nikos Salingaros is another prominent person who loves to science-up his reactionary ideas about architecture.
The truth is that the modernists were acting out of an idealistic conviction that the machine age needed a machine architecture. Of course that wasn't a logical necessity: it was ideology, to some degree. But they were also responding as best they could to genuine changes in the circumstances in which they had to build (caused by modernization).
It's possible for historians to discuss this period now without trying to start a fight or seeing the issues in black and white.
There is (or ought to be) a common enemy to all factions, which is cheap disposable architecture. Long-term structure that are also climate change adaptable seems a decent common purpose, for example.
Somehow, however, the capital A Architect class seems to exist above the buildings designed for and by people who do not care about aesthetics, so the cheap and disposable seem to slip under the radar. Perhaps because Lennar Builders and their ilk don't care what academics think of them?
[Waits]
> Rome was already 1 million people during the first millenia, there were buildings with 6 or 7 floors,
Did you really choose an example of a society that used slave labor extensively?
It's hard to make a comparison due to opportunity cost. Imagine you are a person with the innate competence and dedication to eventually become a master craftsman. Do you learn woodworking, stonework, etc. and labor inexpensively for years as a apprentice to eventually top out at being paid moderately well doing work that benefits a single project .... or do you learn to develop cellphone apps that get used by tens of millions or billions of people?
As we create more jobs which are highly leveraged-- where one unit of work potentially produces an enormous amount of benefit all less leveraged jobs are squeezed by the competition.
In cases where high skills and years of training don't matter the effect isn't so great because skilled industrial production jobs don't compete as much for that labor pool. But for these construction jobs, they do.
(Yes, I read it, go easy on me.)
[1] Link has SPOILERS, so you were warned: https://www.shmoop.com/the-fountainhead/ellsworth-toohey-tim...
Now we're here I can't think of many active celebrations of the form in painting, literature, comics or games either. You?
I wonder how much of this design trend is due to the development of better materials (e.g. more insulating glass).