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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

It’s an architectural style called “brutalism”, which has the predominant aesthetic of “a boot stamping on a human face forever”.

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I mean, not really? I think you're projecting the behaviour of the USSR (or whatever) onto the architectural style. From an aesthetic perspective, brutalism can be surprisingly pleasing -- especially if you throw in some trees: https://twitter.com/Karl_poyzer/status/1246511600300896257

For me, the trees are the only things about those examples that I actually like. Absent the trees, they remind me of the Tricorn center in Portsmouth, which local folklore claims won two architectural awards: a professionally awarded one for being good, and an award from locals who had to live with it for being the worst.

The place has long since been demolished; I remember it from personal experience as a shopping centre where all the shops had closed, and as a car park where nobody parked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorn_Centre

The concrete are still rather ugly to me.

It's the distinctness and uniqueness of those examples, as well as that they're surrounded by trees/nature, that make them so beautiful. Brutalism as intentional art, not as an unintended byproduct of cost-saving or simply not caring.

The depressing nature of a lot of brutalist architecture (especially that created by governments) is the uniformity, homogeneity and the mass-produced faux-utilitarian feeling it evokes, as if the inhabitants are all interchangeable peons with no individual spirit. It's a reminder of the depressing local conditions that lead to that architecture coming into being in the first place.

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/jan/13/brut...

Brutalism is simply an architectural style characterized by the use of raw concrete. It can be done well in various ways and badly in various ways, like virtually any style.

It's worth noting that Phil is not just wrong about brutalism but also wrong about these examples being (primarily) brutalist. Not generally using raw concrete, they would not be considered brutalist. The modern "box" has been largely discarded by contemporary institutional architects in favor of rough, pseudo-gabbled, uh, crap, as shown in the majority of these examples.

I'd say a bad brutalist building is like a rough bureaucratic dictate whereas present bad institutional architecture is like a bureaucratic dictate but rewritten with contemporary niceness guides - "this is a notice concerning your rights under the involuntary amputation act"

To my aesthetic sense, virtually every “brutalist” structure feels authoritarian and dystopian to me. It is not only a good architectural style for prisons, but for any other building that is built with the intention of resembling a prison, which is what makes it so useful for government offices and the like.

Have you ever set up a high-occupancy building in a structure that isn’t rectilinear? It’s a space efficiency nightmare to fit naturally rectangular fixtures and appliances to rounded walls. I worked in a beautiful post-modernist building with a terrible architectural oversight: the aesthetically charming glass panels acted as a lens that focused light in a way that heated the whole office up. The AC had to be cranked up high just to survive in there. I would take a well-lit, well-ventilated box over a more architecturally creative space that causes its occupants problems.

Feelings on brutalism aside, only one[0] of the ten buildings could reasonably be called categorized as such.

Boring? Yes. Cold and functional? Sure. Just not brutalist.

Brutalist architecture is often considered soulless, but soullessness (in and of itself) !== brutalism.

[0] https://res.cloudinary.com/schoolprison/10_wwfagw.jpg (which was a school)

Ah yes, neoclassical facades, the defining feature of brutalism.

https://res.cloudinary.com/schoolprison/7_pexlbe.jpg

Although your classification of the images presented above is incorrect, brutalism can actually be quite a beautiful architectural style. Except perhaps when attempted by American educational institutions.

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