Prague's Brutalist Buildings
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It's because that's not what crumbling Soviet-era buildings look like. Sure they're fun to photograph. I've seen these buildings from Prague to Prizren and they are categorically awful, as most others agree. Concrete doesn't aesthetically age well. Preserve one or two for historical importance and raze the rest.
It's fair to open dialogue about the importance of preserving historical buildings even if most people think they're ugly. After all, we've committed countless "mistakes" in the past when taste has changed (Penn Station anyone?).
But the least we can do is start with some honest photography.
That doesn’t mean it can’t look nice. The DC subway is brutalist, and very well might be the most beautiful subway system in the US.
If memory serve, it wasn't at the time. There wasn't sufficient industrial capacity for steel + glass post war to address scale of ongoing construction demands. Building form work out of wood and pouring concrete from local aggregate was cheaper in terms of labour, materials and logistics. It became self reinforcing with economies of scale as concrete supply chains popped up regionally. Which is building science in a nutshell, do what makes most economic sense at the time. Usually limited by transportation costs. Ergo cladding eventually replaced by cheap light weight building envelop systems due to increase in global trade and sourcing from Asia.
IMO applying dystopian to Brutalism is an label applied after the fact due to various cultural factors. The style itself was continuation of modernism. Of course modernism since inception has been a friction point between academia and popular sentiment. I do think many architects did delude / post rationalize concrete aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic neccessity. Architecture school is very good at brainwashing students who entered due to love of classical aesthetics into embracing modern aethetics, because there just aren't much opportunites to build outside of dominant building systems of the era. So designers learned to love and celebrate concrete.
National Theatre https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Pr...
The Transgas building https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Pr...
Koospol (The CUBE) https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-waymarking-images/315ed165-5a22-...
DBK Department Store https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Pr...
The building had one other interesting feature, which was an old style sliding-cage elevator, just big enough for two people. The inner gate of the cage was missing, so there was nothing between you and the massive concrete floors sliding past as you crossed each level. From the 5th level down to the 2nd, each white-painted floor featured a giant dark blood stain, in the same general area. This started very wide and got thinner at each floor, so it was obvious someone had lost a leg or an arm, or maybe a head.
The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries.
Most colleagues bought rather houses quite far from the city in the middle of nowhere, dooming themselves to another 30+ years of daily miserable commutes by car. These days, even this is unattainable for most due to price boom. Its a strange place, folks are smart, work is often good but I wouldn't want to live there or raise kids no matter what.
So if the argument is Totalitarian Socialism of the late 20th Century kept us poor, and now we're green, well that would be an argument.
I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that there is anything other than that going on, as those formulations for living are otherwise identical to those in more capitalist W. Europe.
The architecture itself I don't think lends to any argument one way or the other, other than most people who have to live with it don't like it.
The 'prison' analogy used by some commentors here is apt, the fist time I visited the areas in E. Berlin with those types of buildings I literally thought they were reformatted prisons.
It was the first city I've been to that felt truly oriented around walking and public transportation instead of being swarmed by cars. And I really enjoyed the overall aesthetic of the city.
I have some good news. Naked concrete crumbles. Especially in a place like Prague, with acidic coal smoke, lots of rain, and a freeze thaw cycle.
I hate this shit. All of it. If there ever was an architecture designed to squeeze the soul out of you, spit on it, curb-stomp it AND, to add insult to injury, age like milk in absence of proper maintenance, this is it.
The modern glass-and-steel architecture is "only" soulless in comparison.
I used to live next to two rather famous Brutalist buildings. One of them was actually kept in good order and the original architect seemed not to be outright enemy of mankind. It still had a score of problems, but well.
The other one was beyond ugly; it was actively evil. I wasn't surprised when I later learnt that the Communist secret police (StB) had extensive wiretapping and surveillance facilities there, among others. It was just a perfect fit.
Isn't it incredible that people who had so much hate of their fellow man were allowed to design entire environments for people to spend their lives in? And that we were actually taught about this as a "movement" in school, as if it were just a natural extension of modernism?
You say you've been to Prague, well, have you ever been to the rest of the country? How about eastern Slovakia? Poland? Compared to some other places, Prague looks like an architectural masterpiece.
The Kremlin is a type of thing like that, even though it existed long before brutalist architecture; its purpose is the same. A boot stamping forever on a human face.
??? Of course not. They probably thought they were building happy communities under the glorious sun of communism. Unfortunately they were tragically wrong (on both their buildings and their economical system)
https://www.google.com/search?q=sorela
One of the main drivers of later Soviet Bloc architecture was relentless uniformization and centralization of industry. By far the fastest way to churn out apartments was to standardize a few typical panels, produce them en masse and cover the entire country in just a few types of buildings.
will net you something more useful for this discussion..
https://www.google.com/search?q=sorela is a music group.
My Google search results were probably skewed towards architecture by the facts that I am a native of the city where "sorela architecture" is found, that I was actually very recently there for a visit and that I searched for several architectonic terms right before engaging in this discussion.
Here is a good video about it: https://youtu.be/VGwVAxRHxgM
A lot of these buildings look like they're designed with an aesthetic appropriate to their function, which I think is a good principle for architecture in general.
LIving in a brutalist building still sucks.
So I guess this should be a discussion about how we can romanticize and contextualize anything with art.
I visited one of Le Corbusier's "creations" once (this one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9_radieuse_de_Marseill...)
Soul-crushing is indeed the only thing I could think of while there.
[EDIT]: Here's a good article on function vs form:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
Best quote in the article, on a design from Peter Eisenman (who IMO lived up to his last name):
"A Peter Eisenman building. Note the total lack of plant life. Plant life might accidentally make you feel happy and comfortable, and happiness is a bourgeois illusion. The tiny figures on the left seem to be attempting a picnic on the curve. They are probably cold and windswept—as they should be."
If you are into these sort of things, here's an interesting read: a debate between Eisenman and Alexander where the latter accuses the former of "fucking up the world"
https://www.ahenryrose.com/resources/alexander-eisenman-the-...
That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.
Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side.
But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles kicked flat.
This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an English translation of the heroin story "We Children from Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F. She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost constructed to make childhood more complicated and less joyful.
A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at least not without good evidence.
That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them.
My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.
The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.
Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.
The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").
What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.
If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!
--
p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.
And then we can ask the questions:
Does architecture favor a specific class?
Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.
Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?
Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?
And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?
Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast.
> Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life
This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.
Lol. Plenty of density is relative. It does give you more than the average density of a West coast city, which is enough to get upvotes here, though, so there is that.
> Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries.
There is an order of magnitude more regulation. Or maybe an order of magnitude more paperwork?
It would be like designing hammers that are commentary on the homelessness problem in the world today but are strikingly ineffective to actually hammer nails; its fine if the only result is to be part of a museum exhibit but the architects force us to use the hammers.
The eisenmann snippet of the second page has him try to defend his work because it is supposed to say something, a commentary on modern dislocation. But that's a message designed for people to not escape, and most arcihtecture in that sense is the tyranny of the artist or government trying to immortalize feelings in books which you can only close the cover of by moving away.
They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but often not very useful.
Same here.
I love it.
I find it gorgeous in "wow look at the scale of things that humanity can do, if we set our mind to it". It makes me think of spaceships. The grey provides backdrop for greenery, of which there is a lot in Prague, especially now in fall when trees turn all colors each of them striking (the winter looks the worst here I think). It gives me the same vibe as Nordic minimalism, except it looks lived in, and used, not "fake perfect". It is very much alive.
Meanwhile, my friends laughed at me when I called American suburbs "featureless wasteland" after driving hundred miles through it.
I think this just shows that architecture is art, and opinions differ.
There are more trees around them and the city itself is pretty rugged, a former heavy industry center with corresponding soul, so to say. Even though the "sorela" in Poruba is actually nicer. (Early 1950s style, very specific, sort-of socialist Baroque.)
But Prague used to have, and partly still has, a different soul, so the combination feels inorganic, especially close to the center.
Separating humans from simple beasts of burden, toiling away in suffering, hoping only to be well-fed, and survive another day -- but no more.
Aesthetics are a respite.
Without, man becomes alienated from his humanity. Demoralized from losing a powerful moralizing force.
My interpretation of Marx, Engels, Hegel, et al.
In a certain vein, the U.S. lacks the same richness for it, compared to much older Western European countries (who haven't had theirs, their history, their culture, their identity, the very things that enliven their soul, destroyed by oppressive regimes. E.g. Stalinist communism).
Why do the French constantly raise hell when things are going poorly? Because it's in their history, it's their aesthetic that they cling tight to; for otherwise, they would be swallowed up by the world, and swept away.
One could even postulate that this is why our nation (the U.S.) has had such a rough adolescence, and hasn't yet made any truly novel attempts at Making Things Better (TM).
All are demoralized, with no true moralizing factors besides one's kin (but those are always unstable sources of moralization, and liable to one day disappear -- compared to the more concrete nature of culture).
If you kill a man's family and friends, what can bring him out of this abyss? Having lost his only moralizing force, that which enlivens the soul, what is there truly left for him to do, but become an animal toiling away until he one day dies?
Attacks on culture are rampant eveywhere, but the U.S. has not yet cemented theirs in the ground -- so there's not much at all of a culture to attack.
Truly exciting times: to think what happens in the next hundred years will serve as a foundation for the future.
There will still be strife; but what type of culture will mature?
1. In 2007 during the height of the financial market crash CNBC had a helicopter hovering over the northern VA house of a finance guy from one of the banks / insurers who was going belly up that had killed himself. The striking thing to me was how poor, aesthetically, the house was. Typical DC burbs McMansion trash. Plastic (vinyl) patio railing that was leaning here and there as it began to fail, landscaping that was obviously maintained by someone who had no concept of the original landscape design (bushes were either over or under trimmed). Windows that didn't match, but were rather selected from a catalog of pre-made designs haphazardly to fit a pre-drawn opening. Of course he killed himself when the money was taken, he had nothing of real value... if his living arrangements were any indication he spent all his money on worthless shit.
2. The story about the all glass Apple HQ injuring its employees because they couldn't subconsciously tell where the walls were as they walked around the building. They would incessantly walk into glass walls and break their noses, bruise their chins, etc. I wanna say I heard later that Apple silently had the building modified. If the ideology that built such an office building had to describe itself in a sentence, it would have to be "turning the collective eyes of the employees into the eye of Sauron, only without the dark lord's self awareness."
Anti-human art and architecture, of which Brutalism is one example in my book, is revolutionary in that it attempts to sever the connection between humanity and higher ideals / planes of existence, creating closed loops of despair and grayness.
In Japan (where I have the most cultural experience outside of the US), there is a phrase "inki-kusai" which is similar to our word "inky" - it calls to mind dark, moldy places filled with litter and insects. I think it's one reason that solar reverence has been so prevalent in their history, sunlight and fresh air serve as disinfectants.
I am only aware of one brutalist private dwelling in Oslo, there might be more.
Another was planned but that is a long story, and it was not approved in the end.
Most brutalist buildings have some character and they cannot be ignored
I fully understand that the brutalist esthetics is lost for most people.
According to Wikipedia we are now in the postmodern phase of architecture. The example buildings form makes me think that a lot of the world has not made it that far yet.
Buildings being erected over the past 20 years all seem to be rectangular boxes. If they want to be fancy its glass and steel. Extremely generic. Some try to make up for it by having a lobby with a ridiculously high ceiling.
The open space is not used for anything creative or anything at all really. The huge empty space speaks for itself.
I highly prefer the brutalist era. If nothing else, it is less boring.
With enough money and smart uses of glass you can make a house that is made of concrete but getting it right is going to be a big challenge. A good rule of thumb is to use building materials that would be local to the area and climate and then go from there.
Everything from thin cut stone (imitating brick or mortared rock foundation) to half-log siding to plain vinyl siding would be am option, though the half or quarter-log siding might be tricky wrt moisture retention up against the concrete- not sure if that would affect the expected lifetime of the wood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernő_Goldfinger
Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.
It was so ugly. Every time it rained, the concrete became streaked with sludge and gross lines. The few windows weren't glass, they were semi opaque plastic to save money. They put in extra small windows so they could fit in window AC units, but ran out of money, so there was neither AC nor large windows nor even screens. The stairwells all had these "artistic" gaps on the sides, 4 inches of nothing, so many kids threw shit down those and there was no reason for them, they limited the useful width of the stairs.
To top it all off, there was asbestos and lead paint everywhere, we knew we were exposed to toxins but they had no budget to repair it. They actually cut music completely for half of my years because it's less important than the other subjects, I suppose? Inner city public schools in the USA, very budget limited.
Brutalism was, in my aesthetic opinion, one of the downright ugliest movements in art history.
Probably overstates the case a little, but interesting nonetheless.
That hotel was also impressively filled with asbestos:
https://newsbeezer.com/czechrepubliceng/the-people-around-th...
Asbestos has been known to be a big health hazard since 1900s and has been heavily regulated since:
https://www.oracleasbestos.com/what-is-asbestos/asbestos-reg...
I personally can't appreciate or commend a building that was knowingly made with such a hazardous material.
It took many years after The Fall to put things in order and now such a facade is the exception, not the norm.
Still, there is that one house with nicely painted iron fence clearly showing WWII bullet holes, from a long forgotten firefight.
My favourite brutalist building is in Belgrade: the Western City Gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/sep/02...
A couple of years ago I stayed at an AirBnB apartment in New Belgrade. Beautiful apartment, but the building was brutal and huge, built in a long sort of zig-zag that went on and on. The name of the street nearest to the entrance I was using translated as "Anti-fascist struggle street".
Here's a picture of it:
https://belgrade.tips/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kineski-zid...
And here's the full article (not terribly good) about the building, from which I took the picture link.
https://belgrade.tips/index.php/2021/04/27/belgrade-is-adorn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thamesmead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov2btkixcAc
The architecture there should be apparently Cubist/Brutalist/Modernist.
It contrasts with everything else so much.
As a Westerner, when you visit, it makes you feel like there was a giant foot on the neck of all of the people for generations.
Or like there was a 'Concrete Ice Age' over everything.
We reiterate the stories about the Nazis quite a lot, because 'we fought them', but we don't do a good enough job in entertainment of providing a visceral exposure to that era, and what it meant for so many.
To add salt to the wounds and make an even more complicated argument, so many of the most talented people have left these countries for W. Europe, thanks to the EU. This actually might be net-net beneficial in the economic short run (i.e. market clearing for labour), but in the long run it also means a hollowing out of the most precious resource of these places, and leaving them to be the West Virginia's of the EU. Not quite, but almost.
The population of E. Europe is literally in decline [2]
It's not birth rate [3] (it's note hugely different in Europe, but errs higher in the East).
The people leaving E. Europe are 'able bodied workers' and 'the educated' and 'students leaving to get education and jobs in the West' - i.e. E. Europe's absolutely most valuable 'assets'.
E. Europe is clearly being hollowed out in a very material way.
The 'freedom of movement' foundation of the EU is not really a humanitarian issue, though it's usually framed popularly as such, it's fundamentally a neoliberal policy, i.e. 'worker mobility' as European leaders believe this is a fundamental advantage of the US.
[1] https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202106161...
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/eastern-europ...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/612074/fertility-rates-i...
A lot of commenters have mentioned New Belgrade municipality of Belgrade, and it is a great example of this. The exterior is very often quite well though out — lots of space, lots of trees and parks, playgrounds (looked at from the ground there's hardly any of the oppressive concrete feeling often associated with brutalism), general living affordances like schools, public services integrated into complexes... But on the inside, even ignoring long term issues of maintenance stemming from broader social issues, things are dysfunctional, ugly and generally of poor quality. It's a byproduct of cost cutting commonly associated with these types of projects. But just like with apartments in Soviet Brezhnevkas and even some Khrushchyovkas, when renovated with care and attention the apartments are just fine for what they are.
And it's not just a feature of Cold War socialist brutalism. In Trieste for example there is a somewhat (in)famous Rozzol Melara building[1][2]. As an idea it's great, the complex has everything for day to day living, a post office, a supermarket, an elementary school, a kindergarden, even a small medical facility, all connected with tunnel bridges or roofed passageways (except the small chapel) so you're never exposed to the elements when going somewhere inside the complex. But it seems as though the architects thought about how can we make this cheap but practical and then got the practical part completely wrong. For example, the passageways and tunnel floors are completely covered with anti-slip rubber matting, but the problem is these passageways are almost too practical and inviting so people end up using them to take their dogs out for walking, and so the result is rubber covered with sticky, dried dog piss (sometimes even poop) every 5 to 10 meters in all directions. You can imagine how this smells, encased in concrete and glass during the summer in a moist coastal city. The terrace views from higher apartments on the side overlooking the city and the sea are beautiful though, so you get some satisfaction if you live in one of those.
[1]: https://www.greyscape.com/architects/rozzol-melara-trieste/ [2]: http://architectuul.com/architecture/rozzol-melara-complex
I guess architects are a bit like hedge-fund managers in that regard; they all keep their investments in index funds and not hedge funds.
Complete hypocrisy imho.