Melancholy of obsolete futures: on Soviet Brutalism
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
I often think of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. A city literally built in the middle of nowhere and with virtually no sidewalks, making it incredibly costly for individuals to reach it and organize themselves to protest against the government. Its streets literally have no name⁰. Imagine living on SHS W2 or SEN L1!
I was raised to love Oscar Niemeyer, but nowadays I can't help wishing he chose to lend his beautiful creativity to something other than architecture.
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0. https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-living-in-Brasilia-refer...
This describes perfectly the Brazilian state: big, distant, not prepared to deal in practical day to day issues (like having a place to change clothes or a sidewalk to walk on).
The architecture underlines this mentality quite well.
https://trip101.com/article/famous-buildings-in-vienna
Most of these look pretty safe to me and objectively prettier than cubes of exposed concrete
Where German forces tried to pierce the Maginot Line, they were crushed. It worked exactly as designed. As usual, the lesson that History tends to recall is incorrect.
First, in part, the intention of the Maginot line was to make the Germans go through Belgium. French planners assumed their German counterparts were smart enough not to attempt a direct assault on the line, and felt that a maneuver battle in Belgium was safe for them in terms of stopping the Germans there, after which they could settle into stable lines or possible attack through the Maginot Line.
It wasn't literally a single road through the Ardennes, but the French did assume it was impassable and only weakly defended it; the Germans did gamble on attacking through the Ardennes and succeeded, flanking the French and British, forcing the evacuation at Dunkirk and permanently breaking the French lines.
A few minor or weakly held forts in the Maginot Line were taken at the northern end, but none of the major forts were taken, the Italian invasion was stopped at the Line, and the Line was becoming the main point of resistance where French forces would hold out; German attacks against the main forts failed utterly. The defense of the Line was ended by the surrender of France.
So, they were only mostly useless, and there's a big difference between mostly useless and all useless.
Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/EmpirePl...
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I would not want to live there either, just like I probably wouldn't enjoy living in an equally sublime Tadao Ando house. But in my opinion, Brasilia, regardless of its failure, is a sublimely beautiful work of architecture. I for one am glad it was built. I'm fairly certain it will serve [at some point in the future] as a 'blueprint' for a vocabulary of elements of architecture, in the same way that Vitruvius and classical orders played the muse for a resurgent European architecture.
I think the design and living considerations of these structures outstrip American development in virtually every regard: https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/bublik-circular-apartment...
I would not attribute that specifically to Brutalism.
I tend to find that style more likely to evoke a sense of modesty. The lack of ornamental or ostentatious features tends to make Brutalist designs feel, to me, more egalitarian.
You have this backwards. Brutalism was popular in the Soviet Union because it is austere, symbolizing equality and utilitarianism. Back in the early days, brutalism was actually seen as progressive. It’s association with totalitarianism is a result of western propaganda and the failures of the soviet bureaucracy.
> I often think of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. A city literally built in the middle of nowhere and with virtually no sidewalks, making it incredibly costly for individuals to reach it and organize themselves to protest against the government. Its streets literally have no name⁰. Imagine living on SHS W2 or SEN L1!
Basically none of this is related to brutalism. What you are describing is a failed attempt at new urbansim. Brasilia is divided into "superblocks", which are essentially self-contained communities with all required services in the center. This design was similar to soviet urban planning at the time, though the superblocks were much bigger (and less successful) in Brasilia. This design ultimately resulted in large boulevards and car centric transportation, defeating its initial goals
I don't disagree it's purported to be egalitarian, but to me that's just a codeword for suppressing individual expression as I've said elsewhere.
And utilitarianism at the expense of beauty makes for terribly sad creations.
I'm on Roger Scruton's side on this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc
Some people might say that various religious monuments remind them of how that religion suppresses individual expression. On the other hand, the same might be said about certain architecture in say Japan, that it evokes a sense of collectivism. Yet some people will find that beautiful while others might find it stifling.
I would guess that the vast majority of people have never heard of "Brutalism", and if you were to show them examples there would be a wide range of responses. How many people could say whether something was influenced more by Brutalism vs Modernism vs Minimalism?
Take the Guggenheim. It was not well received when first revealed, but is now considered a prime example of Modernism, and even Brutalism, though I expect many everyday people would be still divided on whether it's beautiful or not.
Beauty is subjective and multidimensional, so when you say " utilitarianism at the expense of beauty", what I hear is "utilitarianism at the expense of a particular aesthetic of my preference."
An example that many people would be familiar with is IKEA. Yes, some people do find the Modernism of IKEA to be sad or lifeless, but others find pleasure in the simplicity and clever functionality.
I haven't even discussed how cultural and historical contexts influence these perceptions, and how that will differ depending on the audience. I think this plays a significant role in coloring our judgments of Brutalism.
Anyway, my point is just that it's not so simple, people define and find beauty in many different ways.
Stalin rejected brutalism firmly. Brutalism first gained traction in the Eastern block after it had gained popularity in the West.
He rejected the austerity, and he rejected examples of it such as proposed by Le Corbusier twice: both when Le Corbusier proposed an austere Palace of the Soviets, and secondly when Le Corbusier wanted to raze large parts of Moscow for a redesign along similar principles as what Brasilia adopted.
The austerity in Soviet design came under Khruschev as a cost-cutting measure to increase the housing stock, primarily, and while you certainly find more monumental buildings built in a brutalist style, that was the same thing: It was an end to the excesses of Stalinist architecture in favour of signaling a focus on saving money, and an actually desperate need to cut costs.
You're right that brutalism was seen as progressive, but initially that was the case in the west.
Le Corbusier actually accused Stalin of betraying the revolution when his proposals were rejected - he saw his proposals as revolutionary, but Stalin wanted a much more traditional style.
Stalinist architecture is anchored in the French Empire style, which you also find echoes of in parts of the US Federal style [1]. See e.g. Moscow State University as a prime example [2]. It has columns, and all kinds of architectural flourishes that you expect on more monumental Empire or Federal style buildings, and no sign of brutalism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_architecture#/media/Fi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture#/media/...
https://www.google.com/search?q=green+brutalism
The greenery makes it look more like a mountain and less like a building. It tempers the coldness and abstraction of brutalism with the beauty of the natural environment.
Of course, some follies had higher human cost than others, but our comfortable lives are not entirely bloodless.
If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.
It's trite, humiliating and shows your lack of knowlege beyond what is, essentially, western propaganda tropes. Most of those weren't built by starving people and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this. Please don't post these insulting messages unless your knowledge of history and sorrounding context of the achievements actually goes beyond single page textbook of a UK/US.
So... you think you don't have too?
If only as a purely practical concern – how many paragraphs does it take to enumerate the sins of the United States? Or any permanent member of the UN Security Council? Imagine every news story getting an additional six paragraphs of boilerplate for every country mentioned!
If an article were specifically about Antebellum architecture, some mention of slavery seems fairly reasonable. If an article were instead about snowboarding in America, mention of slavery is probably less expected.
Think about it this way: you don't rehash the rules of football (or "soccer", if you're from the US) every time you talk about a match. You don't go into the history of how those rules came to be what they are now. It's all part of the context and you only revisit that context when there's a reason to do so.
The relationship of slavery and the US constitution should be part of the context everyone is aware of. That means it should be part of education everyone receives. Thinking that it needs explicit mention in every discussion of the constitution implies a belief that most people aren't aware of the context, and that is a problem that needs a proper solution.
Why should someone in for instance Brazil know of these details of the USA history? The context for the Brazilian constitutions is part of the education everyone receives here in Brazil, but I don't recall learning anything about the USA constitution in school. Don't forget that HN has an international audience.
I believe that we should live in a society with much better education. An essential ingredient of that education -- much more important than the mere learning of facts -- is the understanding of how to approach a discussion, how to think logically, how to question things, etc. A crucial element of that "essential ingredient" is the understanding of the importance of context and of being informed.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that someone in Brazil should be taught, as part of their standard education, about the US constitution. But that puts the onus on them to get informed about the topic of the discussion before jumping into a discussion of it. And when participating in such a discussion, they should also probably indicate that they might not have the same understanding of the context that everyone else might have.
In short, I believe that we should all receive the education that teaches us not only the relevant context of the things we are expected to be dealing with in the future, but also that it's our responsibility to be informed when participating in discussions.
Whatever your point, this is a strange hill to die on because slavery is explicitly discussed in the US Constitution. It was a foundational to the founding of the US (three-fifths compromise) and remains legal as a form of punishment to this very day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
We should utterly destroy and banish the kind of national pride over symbols that carry with it the opportunity to become an unchallengeable chant.
Talking about the founding of a country should be a bit like reciting the Miranda rights in an arrest. It's a moment for the citizens to remind themselves of their rights and responsibilities, of pride and humility.
It's perfectly acceptable to discuss the politics of a fragmented new nation struggling to establish a new government, post revolutionary war without feeling obliged to discuss the institution of slavery.
Indeed, starving people don't make for good builders.
Instead, the starving people were the peasants who had their produce expropriated, which was sold to acquire the imported materials and machinery that the soviets could not yet produce themselves.
> ...and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this.
It isn't, unless they had any say in the matter and a view of the big picture, which they didn't, but if they did, all humiliation would be justified.
That's kind of misleading, given how the average USSR citizen had more food on their plate than even in the US https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/
...are you thinking of the pre-WW2 famines?
> Was Soviet caloric intake higher than the US'?
No. In saying this, I'm saying the FAO is wrong, and that Robert Allen, who based his calculations in FAO data (and used their multipliers), didn't notice. To say this, I had to go through a full literature review, and I come to this opinion. Before reading my post, you were totally justified in believing that caloric intake was higher.
Utterly ridiculous nonsense. USSR's stats were fudged from the lowest state farm levels up to the highest corridors of the Kremlin. That's where the HBO Chernobyl series shines - it's a great example of how the whole system became detached from reality, fudging had become so widespread that nobody knew the truth anymore nor could tell facts apart from "propaganda numbers". Official statistics are a total trash and I see no way to reconstruct actual figures so long after the fact.
Anyway, better ask someone who lived in the USSR how they felt when they first visited a standard supermarket in the West. I know a woman who had a mental breakdown on her first trip to Stockholm because she thought that stores stocked full of food were a CIA propaganda, and couldn't believe that she had been lied to all her life.
Maybe we should ask some of these slum inhabitants if they'd prefer to be allocated a menial job, be deported, or keep living their lives in the slum.
No, you weren't.
101-st km was applicable only to Olympic games of 1980.
This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, the system prevented people from the countryside to move into the city on their own accord, unless they happened to fit within some quota for laborers.
None of this is propaganda, it is historical fact that you seem to conveniently choose to ignore.
Someone wants to move to the big city from flyover country in 1980[2].
In the US: Unless they're rich, they first get a job in the big city, then run a credit check and pay deposit and get an apartment and open bank accounts, etc. If they are hustling and have friends in the city they crash with them while looking for a job.
In the USSR: Unless they're rich, they first get a job in the big city, then change their propiska and get an apartment and open bank accounts, etc. If they are hustling and have friends in the city they crash with them while looking for a job.
[1] My wife lived with me for years but never bothered updating her papers until we married, at which point we were doing the paperwork anyway. No one cared.
One advantage of the registration is that here, just as it is illegal to be homeless, it is illegal for one's registered domicile not to provide housing. The law cuts both ways. (Similar symmetry occurs with health insurance: it's illegal to not carry insurance, but it's also illegal for an insurance company to deny anyone coverage.)
The en.wikipedia article suggests the USSR had similar advantages:
> "On the other hand, the propiska underlined the mechanism of the constitutional obligation of the state to provide everyone a dwelling: no one could refuse or be stripped of the propiska at one location without substitution with another permanent propiska location.
> All employers were strictly forbidden to give jobs to anybody without a local "propiska". To provide themselves an extra labour force, the largest enterprises had to build housing for their workers beforehand."
[2] Peter Norman got all sorts of grief for his role in "politicising the games" but the latter seems not to have been a major talking point in 1980.
While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major Soviet cities.
Yes, I accepted that from the outset, and I gave you the reason: Lack of freedom of movement. Poverty in the USSR was spread out further across the countryside.
Either way, it's easy to show that, by the soviet states own admission, poverty even in relative terms was greater in the USSR:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/world/soviet-openness-bri...
In absolute terms, the difference is far greater. Living below the poverty line in the US was materially better than in the USSR.
> Even today, I live in a big Central Asian city, and I see a lot less despair and disparity than what I saw in Philadelphia and NYC.
What you see is not a statistic. If all that despair may be hidden from plain sight, how do you know it doesn't exist? Just because there's few people suffering in the city doesn't mean there aren't people suffering in the countryside.
> There was no horrible segregation policies...
I beg to differ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
> ...women till 1980-s had a lot more rights...
Sure, because that happened to be part of the ideology. A particular women in the USSR may have had some rights that a woman in the US may not have had, at that time. Within a communist regime that limited rights in general, of course.
> ...there were so many things not to like in the US and some other western countries to counterbalance the abundance of western supermarkets.
And yet, of all the people that managed to emigrate to the US, few would return.
> While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major soviet cities.
I think that's the crux of it. The soviet system treated you relatively well, brought you "progress". I'm aware that in central asia, support for the Soviet Union was the greatest even at the time of its dissolution, while other more developed countries couldn't wait to leave.
However, the USSR dissolved for a good reason: It was, overall, an dysfunctional system. Surely there were people who profited, many peasants were turned into great mathematicians or musicians. I wouldn't deny that.
We can compare the US system with the soviet system all day, either has had winners and losers, either has had done certain things better than the other. However, the soviet system is dead and gone, and communist parties in former soviet countries rarely form a democratic majority.
Which, in modernity, we invariably do.
What you're engaging in here, has its own Wikipedia page:
It's probably no coincidence that the heyday of subway construction in NYC was over not long after the immigration ban of 1924 removed a source of plentiful cheap labor. (Of course, the Great depression not withstanding new deal subsidizing of IND lines, general impossibility of private transportation to stay profitable, and then WWII diversion of the production obscures this.)
I scanned the linked article and I noticed several instances where the author made explicit references to contrast between these grand architectural gestures and the plight faced by many Soviet workers and commoners.
Did you feel the author failed to adequately address those realities?
It's always a bit difficult to strike the right balance between "talking about the subject at hand" and "acknowledging human suffering that was directly or tangentially related", particularly when discussing historical matters, since just about any event in history will be at least tangentially related to various horrors suffered by assorted individuals and groups of people.
The linked article appears to be written for an audience that has a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union and therefore gives only short mention to the (extremely important, more so than architecture!) human cost of such achievements.
At any rate, I do suppose it's better to err on the side of over-acknowledging human suffering than to do the opposite.
A lot of the buildings from the early 1900s look impressive even today (despite being terribly maintained) - when you see the level of detail, luxury and attention to craftsmanship it's obvious that those people are not of the same kind that lived there later. Communism started by "socialising" the property of previous owners and exiling/killing them - the new owners were not fit to govern them.
This is also what happened post civil war - "privatisation" ended up with generals and people with political collections acquiring major companies and then running them to ground with incompetence, or zombifying them at the expense of public spending.
You don't see the worker housing from before, because it's been torn down, or because the people in question didn't live in towns, but what was there was even worse.
The buildings in the quarter where my great aunt grew up in in Oslo is in a museum, as the last example of the awful conditions the working class lived in back then. The replacement was a brutalist tower block that certainly looks atrocious compared to the lovely early 1900's city blocks that remain in Oslo.
But those city blocks that remain are where the rich people lived.
The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.
It really feels like it went from being a part of the civilized world (it was an important natural port for a long time in history for Austria) to a depressing city of old poor people slowly dying away - and there is so much potential there - the coastline is beautiful (industrial pollution can be cleaned up since the industry is also mostly dead), on a river bed and sunk in between hills (next to Opatija which was a summer place for monarchs). It has all hallmarks of a city and could be turned into an amazing place to live - but the people and the mentality left over from communism just make this impossible - there aren't enough quality people.
Middle class was not "common folk".
> The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.
The cookie-cutter construction of working class housing in Western Europe was largely of very poor quality too, and in much of Western Europe you can't find examples that haven't either been massively renovated, because much of the rest has been torn down, so the point is not that I'm suggesting that there wasn't plenty of really awful architecture in the Eastern Block - especially post-war, but that this was the case in the West too.
But this [1], is an example of the Brutalist post-war architecture in the UK that was built to replace and improve on the 20's and 30's housing.
I live in a 30's UK terraced house which was towards the upper end of what was built to house growing city populations at the time, and the construction methods are ridiculous - it's probably over the years cost several times what it cost to erect the house to bring it to a decent modern standard.
> The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.
Post-war, sure, because the focus was cost-reduction, and meeting demand temporarily. E.g. the housing under Khruschev was built with an intent to replace it within 20 years. Of course they didn't get replaced.
The Stalin-era was a very different issue. The point being that the choice was more housing or nicer looking cities. Stalin was focused on demonstrating power more than anything, and so you got buildings like [2], while Khruschev pushed for more housing, and Eastern Europe followed, and so you got shoddy concrete panel buildings.
But the brutalist architecture of that era was copied from the West, not a "communist" invention.
The focus on cost-cutting itself was a conscious decision, and one you can see all over Europe from that time period, irrespective of political leanings. The big difference is that Western Europe stopped building these sooner and/or started replacing them or upgrading them (and the brutalist buildings in Western Europe were mostly more expensive and higher quality to begin with, though still awful looking), while Eastern Europe and Russia couldn't afford to. But e.g. the UK kept building brutalist concrete monstrosities well into the 80's, and many of them still stands. E.g. this charming thing still stands next to my local train station in London [3] on some of the most expensive land in the borough.
I'm not defending these regimes, they were awful. But brutalist architecture was an import, not something they came up with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trellick_Tower
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture#/media/...
The thing I would put on communism is reduction of wealth and standards, so when the west rebuilt and went forward we got stuck with concrete slabs.
It's just shocking to me how the architecture and aesthetics regressed and never really recovered.
Here's an example of a building from 30s that I would consider built for common folk but inspired : http://www.lokalpatrioti-rijeka.com/forum/download/file.php?...
It's not grandiose - but it follows the hill line and the corner perfectly, it has distinctive visual elements. Compare it to that concrete slab you see in the background which the city is full off.
E.g. it references "Imagine Moscow", but Stalin forcefully rejected Le Corbusier twice, and Moscow was never re-imagined in a brutalist manner in Moscow, but possibly in Brasilia (Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse[1] was inspired by his plans for Moscow, and Brasilia was designed to incorporate aspects of Ville Radieuse). I'm sure there are interesting examples of brutalism in Moscow (though most of the brutalism in Russia are down to Khrushchyovka [2]), but they postdates the era the book is about, and the most prominent design ideas for Moscow at the time were not brutalist.
"Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia" seems to focus on the work of Zivorad Jankovic, much of which isn't brutalist either.
Lastly it references "Soviet Metro Stations", but most of them are not brutalist at all - certainly not the most famous examples.
If it wasn't for numerous references to brutalism in the text, I'd have assumed this was an editor messing around, but I'm not convinced the author of this piece knows what brutalism is. The books might well be interesting, though, but when the article tries to shoehorn them into a box they don't appear to fit in, it makes it hard to tell. It'd be nice if the author tried harder to describe the books in more detail rather than try to invent his own narrative around it.
[0] http://www.berlogos.ru/article/dekommunizatsiya-kievskogo-me...