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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I suspect what the article was complaining about was Canadian brutalist architecture for example, the Mathematics building at the University of Waterloo, but really, that was mostly the style of the 1960s and 1970s (although the buildings are still around)

http://www.essential-architecture.com/IMAGES2/WaterlooMathBu...

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Growing-up in Southern/South-western Ontario during the 70's/80's, I had a rare health condition which had me in and out of all sorts of hospitals. I suppose that because they were successful and kept me alive, this is one of the fundamental reasons I love brutalism in architecture - it was "futuristic / modern / high-tech".

While I'm sure that it's also a style-choice, it may have also been partly functional. The building was built in the 60's, and I believe that it was intended to host strategically important computing power in its basement, which was designed to protect this asset in the case of a nuclear attack (it was the cold war). IIRC, there was a slightly-lower sub-basement in the center of the building which was the effective bomb shelter.

In any case, I think the article is complaining mostly about the unoriginal glass clones that have gone up over the last twenty years.

I think there's also a difference between buildings that architecturally aren't aligned with today's aesthetic, versus those that are truly ugly due to poor design or lack of consideration for any aesthetic.

A brutalist or Bauhaus building today could look old, ugly, etc. but one can still appreciate its aesthetic in context... A glass condo copy and pasted in CAD software and then rotated to fit a plot of land without consideration for anything... That's ugly.

> A glass condo copy and pasted in CAD software and then rotated to fit a plot of land without consideration for anything...

There's a similar issue in new suburban neighbourhood, where the same floor plan is copied and pasted down a whole street, yet the house on the corner lot lacks windows on wall facing the perpendicular street... It's so disheartening to see.

Oof. :(

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