Oscar Niemeyer’s French communist party headquarters
interiordesign.net
interiordesign.net
Whether the peasants would be oppressed is another can of worms topic, but I think it would be best expressed by growth rates of the USSR and China compared to their peers in similar conditions of industrial development.
The building is on this foto [1], the Jetsons-like structure in the front didn't exist back then. It was just the long white slab on the back, without windows. Behind there is a preserved rainforest. The place is very humid and, for aesthetic reasons, the building had no windows and horrible ventilation. It was cold and very moldy and respiratory diseases were very common among the staff.
As some people say in Brazil, as an architect, Niemeyer was a very good sculptor.
However, some brazilian disciples of him (e.g: Ruy Ohtake) are actually careful about the comfort and well being within their projects.
[1] https://curitibaspace.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Muse...
OTOH, other buildings are woefully impractical. Niemeyer was a brilliant sculptor, but living and working in his sculptures is frequently challenging.
Still, most of the time it's like living in a utopian science-fiction movie. And that's insanely cool by itself.
Oscar Niemeyer like others of his ilk were really really fond of drafting machines. Drafting machines encourage long straight lines and right angles.
CAD is the same except now with splines.
We indeed have a lot of those fancy buildings from famous architects, mostly from the 70s.
They all share a common pattern:
- a repressed artist who became an architect
- a beautiful piece of concrete modern art on the outside and that makes fancy design magazine photos
- an oppressive building and a complete failure in term of comfort/ergonomy
Another example is the "Espaces d'Abraxas". But there are even worse examples when you look at brutalist architecture.
I wish that it was replaced with something in the old colonial style. A man can dream, right.
(Also, the problems that you're highlighting are easy to explain if you remember that Niemeyer assumes a tropical country, not a temperate and rather wet city. He simply failed to take the environment into account.)
Eye of the beholder, I suppose.
There's parts that suck, over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to. But overall, Brasília had more easily accessible green space dedicated to people than most cities in the world imo.
I bet that your part of town was the one that kept the poor plebs away.
> over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to.
That by itself already should be an immediate disqualification to consider a city "nice".
> Brasília had more easily accessible green space dedicated to people than most cities in the world imo
I guess if you stick only the planned area and exclude the satellite cities, that could be true. Even then, I'd really like to see some data on that.
It's not a perfect city, but it's way better than the vast majority of north American cities, which isn't reflected in all the negative comments here.
The city was designed in the 50's. We need to consider the decisions in that context.
OTOH, even Disney's original EPCOT concept had mass transit baked in, and it was imagined in the US, land of the automobile.
Also, public transport is awful. Buses don't have air conditioning and the metro comes within 2km of the airport and turns away!
Still, people I know who grew up there say it was great to be able to roam and play freely around the residential areas.
That's an administration issue, not related to Niemeyer's design.
Niemeyer designed the buildings. I hear they are not the best places to work, but I do like the spaces inside the ones I've being to.
You can walk to many places, apartment buildings don't block your path, there are plenty of parks, and you don't need cars for everything like in American cities.
If that's your criticism, then I wish more cities were designed, and as similar to Brasília as possible.
If it's just a normal vertical wall it's naturally "balanced", but slanting walls would have a tendency to, I don't know, fall down? How does it support the next floor on top?!
Likewise with Frank Gehry's designs. Look at MIT buildings. People might probably consider it works of art, but I — a nobody — consider it cringeworthy.
https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5ad6/3db5/f197/cc73/2...
Islamabd has always been right next door to the very old city of Rawalpindi and now the two have essentially grown together into one urban conglomeration.
from Turin to Florence (temporary, 5 years 1865-1870)
from Florence to Rome (1871)
In theory Rome was the capital of the new Reign of Italy since 1861, but in practice Rome became "available" only 10 years later.
Even old New York, was once New Amsterdam… ;)
Phoenix, Arizona? That's the first one that came to mind, but I'm sure there's others.
Besides, that's not why DC is where it is. Our early leaders, for better or worse, thought it was best for it to be an independent district. Making NYC (or any other predeveloped city) into an independent entity is much harder than just creating a new one.
Now that I’m looking for it, though, I cannot easily find evidence that that is true- I wonder why I was taught that?
(I can think of a handful of other factors that contribute to the US's weird capital city distribution, like real estate cost and the fact that many capitals were established after the telegram, making colocation in the largest city of each state less necessary.)
Are we talking about Brazil or the USA?
Here in Brazil, the capital of the state of São Paulo (also called São Paulo, the state and the city have the same name) is the largest city not only of the state, but also of the whole country; according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities), it's one of the largest cities in the world. The same happens for the state of Rio de Janeiro, where I live; its capital, also called Rio de Janeiro (another case where the state and the city have the same name), and which is also the country's former capital, is once again the largest city of the state (and second largest of the country, and also one of the largest cities in the world). Go down the list of "largest cities in Brazil", and you will find several others which are the capital of their state. The capital of the state being the largest city in it is more of a rule than an exception.
New York is a great example. The state is large, historically rich but with very different interests. Albany is sort of a middle ground.
Massachusetts is different. The politics are such that Boston was always dominant.
Nationally, the slave states were agricultural dominated by manor like real estate barons. They were afraid of the northeast states and their traders and manufacturers and felt a capital closer to them would be less hostile to their interests.
I don't understand the siren call of Communism on early XX - midcentury intellectuals. It's like they didn't go to personally understand the atrocities happening in these so-called worker and peasant paradises -what meatgrinders they were. How did ideology so overcome their ability to see what was happening in those places?
The Madras famine of 1877 (in which over 8 million people died) is characteristic. The British Empire didn't just fail to help, it actually made it illegal to offer food relief, on the grounds that it would distort the labour market and violate free-market principles. If you witnessed that, wouldn't you think the market and Moloch were one and the same?
It's worth noting that "concentration camp" is not the English translation of "Konzentrationslager": it's actually the other way around. The German word is the translation of an English phrase used to describe the British Empire's interment camps in the Boer War. IMO, it's impossible to look at, say, a picture of Lizzie van Zyl and not see a premonition of the Holocaust.
Most people who died in the Holocaust did not die in 'concentration camps'. About a quarter of them were killed in mass shootings and buried in mass graves. Another quarter were sent to something better described as 'extermination facilities'. There was no camp and no concentration - all victims were gassed to death on arrival. The most famous concentration camp - Auschwitz - also had a facility like this where around a million people died immediately on arrival. While Auschwitz did have the standard features of concentration camps - imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, and brutal punishment and torture, most people who died in Auschwitz never experienced any of this - they were simply executed on arrival.
So, while the 'concentration camps' were of course unimaginably terrible - and not to excuse other crimes against humanity such as the Boer camps, the gulags, etc - to compare other atrocities to the Nazi Holocaust simply because of the presence of concentration camps erases and minimizes the true extent of Nazi crimes against Jews and Roma.
In principle many of the constitutions of communist countries afford(ed) citizens more freedoms to the people than say the US constitution, but in practice that was blatantly not the case with a bit of happy time in some parts of eastern Europe for a few years before the Soviets went in to quash the threat and establish harder regimes.
Of course, in places like Cambodia, atrocities did take place that were really inspired by some demented but sincere interpretations of communism.
I would say, 20th century communism’s great failure is that it attempts to abolish politics itself by trying to create a utopia where nobody ever disagrees with one another. This is impossible, and totalitarian by definition.
To whit, Mussolini, who incidentally was a socialist before he became a fascist, rose to power in a time when Italy was in a state of crisis and discontent. This was a decade full of national revanchist ressentiment compounded by the economic devastation of the Great Depression. In that era, strongmen of not only far left or far right, but liberal center- consider FDR being the only American president to break the two-term precedence and be reelected to four terms- rose to power. Surely that should tell you people in the era had very different worldviews, concerns, and knowledge from yourself?
"At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. ... The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. ... In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine."
I am an old French (65yo) but what I understand is that statement is only propaganda if only because De Gaule's army was much larger.
Anyway "resistance" was not a well structured organisation even De Gaulle's organisation, it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day. Many people who actually did resistance acts did not claim themselve to be "résistants".
See [0] "Before the Liberation day, we were 2,500 in the maquis. Five or six days later, we were around 10,000"
At "liberation", people lived in a state of terror, armed young men roamed the cities. Properties were stolen. Many women were shamed, shaved and raped by those pseudo resistants [2]. Neighbors denounced neighbors for profit.
Again see [0] "“There were people killed, one wonders why. Sometimes out of jealousy or revenge. To take their wives... It's easy when you have a gun in your hand, if you're mentally imbalanced. »"
US forces put the number of "summary executions" following liberation at 80,000. The French Minister of the Interior in March 1945 claimed that the number executed was 105,000 [1].
[0] https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2001/08/26/215395-la-terrib...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89puration_l%C3%A9gale
[2] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-...
On my father side, in Brittany, even the wermacht garrison in St clette (totalling 5 men on 2 villages, and no road large enough to let any truck send reinforcements, which were hours, even days away if the road was blocked, which happened often), knew who was making the signal and distributing weapons to surrounding group, but couldn't really do anything about it. My grandma had good stories about how poor the area was, as their lack of electricity made them lit bonfire to signal allied planes, bonfire which were very visible for anyone who would look. While they weren't really communists, the ones in Brest sending plans, radio frequencies and taking weapons were.
Not what I was told (I am born just after the WWII) and not what history seems to tell:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9sistance_en_Bretagne
> "St clette"
You probably mean "Saint Clet"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Clet,_Brittany
Yes lighted road were rare on countryside, it only arrived in 1956 in the street were my parents built their home.
I've researched, and you're right about Brittany, it was MI9 led.
But according to this: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9seaux_et_mouv...
Most movements were on the left, and it seems that the saboteurs and maquisards were communists led. I'm pretty sure my grandmother told me about the Brest communists though, maybe it was just her impression.
This isn't the refutation you think it is. Communists and fellow travelers were much more prevalent in the resistance earlier on (but after Operation Barbarossa!). There are a considerable number of French communist martyrs commemorated in French towns and public places. Most of these died during 1942 and 1943, when resistance was against overwhelming odds. Towards the end of the war, there were fewer actions against the Nazi occupation and more towards collaborators. This is however because in many parts of France, the occupation simply was unable to exercise more than a show of control, because of the success of the resistance.
I am very surprised that as an old French person you aren't aware of the significant role played by French communists in the resistance. Have you heard of Vercors? Colonel Fabien? France d'abord?
Whatever you may think of communism in general these are established historical facts. The mainstreaming of the PCF after the war, in contrast to other places in Europe, is specifically related to recognition of their heroism against the occupation. (The same could be said about the mainstream position of freemasonry in French society.) In fact, the strength and popularity of the communist controlled organizations and the risk of a Tito-style regime was a main reason that the UK and US (reluctantly) gave their full backing to de Gaulle towards the end of the war.
Though many of the communists followed Moscow's order and only started resisting after 1941 and Germany's attack on the URSS; before that Moscow's message to French communists was more of collaboration with its nazi ally.
A communist back then would point to the capitalist countries committing horrible atrocities of colonialism and slavery.
Another factor would be a rhetoric of liberation. Either you fight against the bourgeoisie, or they will keep sucking your blood as long as you live. That's why conflicts were seen as inevitable.
I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder. Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution happened in the second half of the XX century.
Unlike now, where whenever we point to capitalism, we point to shining beacons of freedom and humanity. ;-)
> I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder
The fact the Soviet Union and China didn't succeed at implementing an ideal utopian society doesn't prevent others from trying something slightly different (let's say, socdem) in hopes it'll suck less than unregulated capitalism
But it was all illusion and never delivered. They always ended in oppression, regression and failed experiments (social, economic, environmental, etc.)
To be clear, I'm not saying these countries have done no wrong. They aren't shining beacons, but it is worth examining them in a thoughtful way. It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
Also, I'd argue there are degrees and varieties of both socialism and communism. Is Mondragon socialist? Is Sweden? Is France? What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
I think one could argue that Cuba is not out of line with its peers and might actually be ahead in some ways. It's not perfect, but regionally it's doing pretty alright from what I can tell.
Also, it’s not clear whether you meant to say the Castro brothers are included in strongmen or exceptions, but I assume it’s strongmen.
He saw the poverty and exploitation of LatAm by the US and others and decided to do something about it after the CIA assassinated Arbenz. He was pivotal in overthrowing Batista, an autocratic despot.
He later served in several government programs, and wrote a memoir about motorcycles.
He was eventually executed without trial by Bolivian special forces backed by the CIA.
But college kids probably don't know that much about the flip side of his character. Plenty of stories suggest he enjoyed killing - he certainly had no concerns about executions. He wrote some pretty racist stuff in his early life.
He's a complicated figure, for sure.
I do try to respond to comments here with genuine answers and discourse, but the downvotes here lead me to believe a podcast would likely result in a lot of disinterest or angry mail headed my way.
“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”
Unfortunately, he appears not to have been assiduous in taking notes as Stalin was, so hard evidence, so far, is spotty.
And no, Sweden and France aren't socialist, since they still have private ownership of capital. Capitalism doesn't magically become socialism if you increase the taxes high enough.
This may not be text-book socialism but it is quite different from capitalism as practiced in the United States.
Which sanctions exactly? Surely a communist country doesn't need free trade, that's a capitalist concept and Marx was against it.
> They have higher literacy rates than Canada
This shows you the value of literacy as a metric. North Korea also has high literacy, it's not a reason to prefer living there to Canada.
> It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
The amount of people trying to immigrate to the US vs any other country contradicts this.
> What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
Masturbatory terms dreamed up by people who don't want to understand economics because it deals with real tradeoffs, whereas politics is about promising the impossible while ignoring economics and history. Anarchism and communism are opposites.
And both council communism and Anarcho communism have long histories of communities actually practicing them. From gift economies in smaller indigenous communities to explicitly anarchocommunist zones in Korea and Spain in the 20s and 30s.
Anarchism is not the opposite of communism. It's the opposite of Stalinist communism, for sure. But anarchism is about the removal of unnecessary and unjust hierarchies. That's not in opposition with "and we should take care of everyone without a profit motive".
One could argue (and in fact, many scholars have) that the open source development model of Linux or other large systems are anarchocommunist in nature.
I think it boils down to “enemy of my enemy”. Their main enemy was the establishment, which means capitalism, corporatism and so on. Communism was its declared enemy number one, so to be edgy and radical they picked that.
If the West was trampling over some poor country, whatever that country’s political or cultural preferences, they automatically become appealing to anti-establishment intellectuals in the West as a way to show sympathy.
(There's this myth that's popular with some lefties that Soviets weren't really that oppressive until Stalin. It's not true - mass executions were already in full swing in 1918.)
Mass executions of (certain subsets of) the middle and upper classes, alongside electrification and land reform for the rural poor and trade unions and healthcare for the urban poor, meant an extremely significant improvement in the average quality of life for the Russian population.
If you look at early Soviet history, it's littered with peasant uprisings for this exact reason. In my hometown in Russia, such an uprising was big enough that Soviets decided to use chemical weapons against the rebels; ironically, I used to live on a street that was named after the guy who signed that order.
[1] https://sdg-migration-id.s3.amazonaws.com/Interior-Design-Os...
That translation is a much less neutral than what he actually said. He said "c'est la seule bonne chose que les communistes aient faite", which is quite neutrally: "this is the only good thing that the Communists have done". No "Commies" (I'm not even sure that there's an equivalent in French) or "those Commies".
Les cocos ;) !
Is still a damnation of that death cult though. No neutrality about it.
The discontinuous break in the ceiling here [1] is searing to look at. It looks like a graphics glitch.
[1] - https://sdg-migration-id.s3.amazonaws.com/Interior-Design-Os...
Edit: Perhaps the more obvious answer is that it's an office/professional building, and you're not supposed to fall asleep in the chairs (although I think I could swing it).