Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
seriss.com
seriss.com
When the Panama Canal locks were nearing completion, some artists were sent down to Panama to advise on decoration. There was talk of building stone lions at the locks. The artists came back and reported that the works had been carried out with no regard for decoration, and the best thing to do would be to keep them that way, purely functional. That was done, and the locks, impressive but plain-looking, are still that way.
River control for intermittent floods through populated areas has produced some good solutions. The Guadalupe River goes through San Jose, and floods every few years. The river now runs through a narrow channel deep in a big, wide channel. The big wide channel has walkways and bike paths, which will be underwater during a flood. And now, multiple homeless encampments.
Tapei has a similar setup on a much larger scale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(California)
This seems to be the bridge: https://goo.gl/maps/3v3LK6h75LqrzexSA
Brutalist concrete building straight out of 1984. Really gets you mentally prepared for the labyrinth, dispassionate and uncaring bureaucracy that awaits you inside.
> The building has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and is often called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished.
I highly recommend anyone who visits Boston take some time to walk around it and even inside of it. It really is something to experience, unfortunately for me I experience it every day of my life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2...
Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things.
I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant.
> I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant
The ordinary people of Boston shouldn’t have to “cultivate a sensitivity” to something sitting on their public land, built for their use paid for with their tax dollars. Public architecture should cater to the tastes of the masses—that is the sole legitimate criterion for judging public art and architecture—not the egos and fantasies of the architectural elite.
Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and provides a sense of calm and space. The Simon Fraser U campus is a good example: https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutali...
And yet common folk - unfairly deprived of an education in hifalutin architecture-speak - still seem to consider brutalism to be as ugly as sin.
https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/
In every case the campus is used to represent the headquarters of some government agency or military facility, or as the setting for some dystopian sci-fi.
I'm interested in both brutalism and dystopian sci-fi, but I don't want to live in a dystopian future, and I don't like being around the brutalist architecture in my city either.
Brutalism is like the worst of modern art in that it's ugly unless you spend a lot of time and effort deliberately altering your preferences, but much worse because you can't escape it because it's architecture, not decoration. Brutalism, like so much of modern architecture, is for and by architects with no consideration given for people who have not spent tens to hundreds of hours learning to perceive striking, visually interesting but ugly buildings as beautiful.
When I look at brutalism abstracted from its surroundings and signs of everyday life, it really hits me how it resembles Quake maps. I.e. it embraces variety of structure just as much as uniformity of the looks: https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpt...
> Almost everyone now understands that the Corbusian legacy was entirely malign, even if they have never heard of the man himself. And the question is often asked how his grim concrete megalomania ever came to hold such sway in the first place. Step inside a Western school of architecture to pose this question, and you might get a shock. You are likely to find that the so-called “fathers” of the International Style in general, and Le Corbusier in particular (he of the tabula rasa concept of urban renewal in which everywhere “must” be “totally rebuilt” using only concrete), are still revered as the philosopher kings of architecture.
“Architects and critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture.”
A horrible blunder which shows the limits of giving a tiny elite control of the process. When it’s gone no one will shed a tear except a few professors. In the modern era everything is debated on the internet, and this disaster would have been shouted down before ever happening.
Most of them have recovered like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology. Economics and architecture really haven't.
For instance, this building was controversial, but you couldn't call it boring: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/sixcms/media.php/1685/thumbnails...
It has now been demolished, and is being replaced with this glass thing which is approximately identical to all other office buildings built in Dublin in the last decade: https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2674616.1465234544!...
(It used to house the embassy of Australia among other stuff, which always felt a bit odd. Probably Dublin's second weirdest embassy venue; Japan, whose embassy is in a shopping center above a large Tesco, still wins that one).
https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/flood_control_dam3.ht...
The underground Flood Control Dam #3 is a staggering engineering feat that must be seen to be believed. It was constructed in year 783 of the Great Underground Empire to harness the mighty destructive power of the Frigid River. This work was supported by a grant of 37 million zorkmids from the Central Bureaucracy and the local omnipotent tyrant of the era, Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive. This impressive structure is composed of 370,000 cubic feet of concrete, is 256 feet tall at the center, and 193 feet wide at the top. The huge reservoir created behind the dam has a volume of 1.7 billion cubic feet (an ancient document, perhaps in error, records that the volume of the reservoir is 37 billion cubic feet), an area of 12 million square feet, and a shore line of 36 thousand feet (an alternate dam guide book found in 1067 GUE states that the shore line is only 35 thousand feet).
(I sorta can imagine one option, but curious about other opinions.)
I also much prefer brutalism to soulless glass and concrete skyscrapers or nondescript office buildings. At least brutalist buildings look like something.
Signed,
A Brutalist Hater
A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth necessitated the building's inhuman size.
Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the forces of chaos.
In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that is very large.
Or it can resemble a turkey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robarts_Library
Brutalist structures are hideously ugly and oppressive to the human spirit. Why anyone thinks architects and advocates for the dehumanizingly ugly should be allowed to use public spaces for these projects is a mystery to me. We have to share these spaces, and for people to say things like "sometimes you should feel insignificant" and then impose it on the rest of us in building form is objectionable.
The LA river drainway lets you appreciate the power of the river even when its not completely flooded. Towards the end, where the bed must become dirt, you see the far future of the entire drainway, where it's not a decrepit building, but just rock that has returned to nature.
http://seriss.com/people/erco/fovicks/roll1/pic00026-mod.jpg
I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with the style - I was traveling north on a streetcar on Spadina avenue in Toronto, back in 2005, and I caught a glimpse of the John P Robarts library, and it really did change my outlook. I grew up in Plymouth, which was blighted with poor examples of the style imposed on the town after heavy war damage. Much of the hatred of brutalism stems from the contemptuous attitude these planners and architects displayed to the pre-existing urban fabric.
I felt like the only one until about 5 years ago however, then suddenly there was this revival.
Now I'm more into medieval cathedrals, but it's worth noting that 'sophisticated' tastes were against them for centuries (hence the pejorative term Gothic). I don't think anything can be beautiful without irritating somebody ...
I don't think it's all that recent. The Barbican has been widely admired for a long time, say.
Also, Kafkas protagonists are often stripped of any sense of intimacy. Laid bare, much like the naked concrete and straight lines seen in brutalist architecture.
So I do see where OP could be coming from. Then again, LA is not able to drown me in dread the same way a dreary Soviet administration building does.
Edit: Looks like they have recently struck a deal to turn it into a "tech center" - seems like brutalism + tech overlap in this case. Edit 2: Changed to Pyramid of Tirana instead of Enver Hoxha's Pyramid
They paved it to make it better at draining floodwaters.
If not for that history it would probably just be called the LA storm drain network or something like that.