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Presumably, he means a single window we see is made up of 4-6 panes and those panes are bigger than a single story

I am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help.

The first mentioned buildings seem brutalist esp. the second one. It is a form of utilitarian architecture that has great appeal to me. I think in part because it is rare now.

I find them far more pleasing to the eye than the giant glass clad high rises that was the fashion for a long time. I have read that it is now going out of fashion, but I have not yet seen any examples locally.

Wanting to give my dogs new and exciting places to sniff and pee I try to walk around in different neighborhoods in the area. As have been doing this for many years now and the unexplored neighborhoods are getting farther and farther out.

About two years ago, at random, I found a brutalist single family dwelling. It is a big house for a single family but it is the smallest such building I have ever seen, it is beautiful. (to me)

I truly stands out from all the other nearby houses. I have visited that area often to take pictures and just look at it. I would love a chance to see the inside.

If I had the money and I most certainly do not, id love to live in a house like that. It would make giving directions a lot easier as well.

I wonder if there exists brutalist "tiny homes". That would be something to behold

For an explanation of the term brutalist see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut

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> I am having trouble seeing the 4-6 windows combined from the photos of the Bellagio. The close up does not help.

You can see it better in this high-res photo from Wikimedia Commons [0]. Each of the square windows appears to span four rooms on two floors, while the lower floor rectangular windows appear to span three floors, making it six rooms.

0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bellagio_hotel.jpg

Do the windows span multiple floors?

Yeah. What looks like 1 window from the outside is actually 4 windows for four rooms, two below and two above. The scale is hard to get a sense of but those subwindows are quite wide floor-to-ceiling windows in each of those rooms (at least in Treasure Island’s case; I’d assume others are similar).

That’s why it shrinks the apparent visual scale of the hotel, which has twice as many floors and twice as many rooms per floor as it seems from the “window” frames outside.

A lot of things about the Strip in Vegas, deliberately or not, really throw your sense of scale off. "Oh it's just the next hotel over, how far can it be?" A ways it turns out.

Totally. “Ah just over there no problem”.

30 minutes later…

That is the absolute worst. You walk halfway there and it looks exactly as far away as when you started.

We watched Penn and Teller at the Rio. You look at a map, see its a block over from the strip, no problem. You walk out your hotel room and see the giant Rio sign, totally fine look how close it is!

20 minutes later you stare in horror at the same sign wondering how it hasn't gotten an inch closer to you.

I had the exact opposite experience in really dense cities funnily, you look at a map and see dozens of streets between you and where you're going, and it seems like it's half a city away. In reality it's just a 15 minute walk.

Yeah, depends on what you're used to. I've grown up in fairly dense cities so I was not expecting the density of the strip.

It doesn't help that there's nothing in between the Rio and the rest of the strip. I've gone up and down the strip before and there's at least things to keep you occupied for those distances. But seeing nothing but that stupid sign is hell.

Had this experience recently in Kyoto, where it was amazing how "far" you could walk in 20-30 minutes, in a city designed for walking.

How are you getting "a block over" from the map? Just because almost no streets go through there doesn't make it a block! The strip hotels, especially those on the west side, are several blocks deep (counting their parking lots) themselves, then there's a dead zone of the freeway, then the multiple blocks of the Rio. There's little room there for practical streets although in most places there's one street behind the casinos.

The point is that someone accustomed to regular city downtowns is used to ordinary city blocks and hotels that sit within a block. A quick glance at a map doesn't really communicate the scale of the casinos on the strip or the distance you need to walk to get from one to the other in many cases.

(It's not all that bad. The Venetian really is more or less across from the Mirage and Caesar's Palace is then reasonably close.)

Is that really how "city blocks" are supposed to be modelled? AFAIK a "block" is one atomic unit of a particular grid of city streets — and a city can have multiple such grids, with different block sizes. Like a computer with disks with different block sizes. It's my impression that the Las Vegas strip forms its own distinct grid, with very large blocks.

No. The Strip doesn't have a separate grid. Rather, it has many objects which occupy multiple grid cells. I'm looking at the Strip and surround on Google as I write this--and it is completely clear that the Strip properties are far above normal city blocks. (Admittedly, I'm a backcountry hiker and thus more used to map reading than your typical city dweller that always uses Google or the like.)

Since when is there a standardized distance for a "block"? My entire point is that one block (ie. the distance between two streets perpendicular to the one you are on) is much larger on the strip than in a regular city.

Going down Flamingo, the only intersection between the Bellagio and the Rio is I15. You could say maybe a block and a half, but that's still nowhere close to 30 minutes' walk.

When you have objects far bigger than a typical city block of course you have few streets. That's your fault in map reading, not anything deceptive about the city.

Considering how several people have anecdotally also had the same problem, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my and everyone else's map reading skills are just fine.

> not anything deceptive about the city.

The entire purpose of the strip is to be deceptive, so it's hilarious that this is even an argument.

Sorry that you're so defensive when minor criticisms are levied against a stretch of road in your city. It's certainly a weird hill to die on, but you do you.

The reason for this is the same reason they employ the window trick in the headline: the properties on the strip are enormous, scaled completely outside most people's day-to-day experience; the Bellagio property, for instance, covers 77 acres and has just shy of 4000 rooms.

This is the scale that you need to wrap you mind around. The maps are deceiving. Stayed recently at Park MGM to attend conference at Aria. They share the same physical "Block" so it appears they are close. It still took 30 minutes of walking through connecting hallways and up and down escalators to traverse between the two hotels/casinos.

And it's worse if you want to cover distance that is at odds with where you are intended to go. e.g., from oversized parking behind casinos. You end up walking on roads without footpaths/sidewalks, climbing up/around service docks, etc.

The strip has always reminded me of the old western towns (at least, in movies) where there is a high street of grand facades, but it's chaos behind.

That place was not meant for humans to exist in it. At least not at the scale it happens right now.

It's car sized, much of American signage and affordances are designed to be viewed from your car at speed.

No one is driving down the Las Vegas Strip at speed.

It's about a certain type of spectacle.

It’s not really any different from other places that require environmental support to make it livable (e.g. New York).

The only reason Las Vegas even has water issues is because of water rights, not anything that makes it inherently worse than the rest of the southwest.

Its proximity to the Colorado river arguably makes it inherently better than most of the rest of the southwest

I always blow away my step goal in Vegas, and that's even though I spend at least 4 hours a day at the tables.

It’s quite easy to imagine if you combine the inside shots for the rooms[1] with the outside one.

1: https://bellagio.mgmresorts.com/en/hotel.html

Zoom in on the wikimedia commons high-res one (thanks for that high res link!), and then look at the balconies in the middle column of the building. See the door in the balcony? Each of those four-window blocks is two stories high. Which means each "pane" is pretty big -- others have said each of those four-window blocks is actually four hotel rooms.

The picture in the OP didn't make it totally clear, which left me wondering too, although I figured that's what they meant so it must be that way -- the fact that we have to look so carefully to verify it, I guess shows the success of the "illusion"!

Also there's only a balcony every other floor, again fooling the casual observer into seeing one floor where there's two.

That’s so odd, so the floor above can look down into the balcony below

Also handily enabling price differentiation and therefore improving profitability...

Thank you!!

Each of the square windows appears to span four rooms on two floors, while the lower floor rectangular windows appear to spam three floors, making it six rooms.

Yes, it's easier to tell in night time photos:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Las_Vega...

Thank you! I couldn't see what the article was telling me I should from the photo the author used. This photo makes it very clear how the windows are designed.

That makes it far more obvious, cheers :)

And a fun hack would be people on the upper floors making every version of a Tetris piece by turning on or off lights in the appropriate room :-)

Yes. A comment on the post points to the TASS building in Moscow, which nicely illustrates this trick at a smaller scale: https://discovermoscow.com/en/places/dostoprimechatelnosti/z... — at first glance and from a distance it seems to have four floors. But it has nine, as is clear if you look more closely or compare nearby buildings (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Moscow_T... is the same image).

Yes, it is a bit hard to tell from his photos but obvious when you are there in real life.

I am surprised brutalist became popular. Concrete ends up really weathered over time and to me you end up with drab and dingy looking buildings after a while: “oh that building is from the 70s”.

I guess there were practical reasons in the beginning to not focus on adding additional finishes?

It was a design choice to celebrate the material being used - concrete. I think only architects ever really loved them.

I’m a huge fan of brutalist architecture and am not ann architect.

I live in a brutalist townhome and it exemplifies the things I love about the style, lack of ornamentation, function over form, yet scaled and appropriate to its location.

The simplicity and usefulness of the house lends it as much elegance as it needs.

It's the appearance of function over form. That's why USSR used it as propaganda. Concrete is terrible surface material because it is impossible to maintain and repair.

No. The concretes function may not be optimal, but it is there to hold the building up, to form the walls, to provide conduits for people and services, etc.

It is not a facade, it is not cladding, it is the functional building its-very-self.

Brutalist buildings celebrate their exoskeletons.

The USSR used it as a cheap means of trying to meet a massive housing shortage first and foremost.

It abandoned the far more ornamental Stalinist style for brutalism as part of Khrushchev's push for that.

Note the far more ostentatious buildings under Stalin and Stalin's rejection of Le Corbusiers extremely radical proposals for redevelopment of Moscow in favour of far more traditional designs.

To the extent it was later used as propaganda, that was a follow on effect once stagnation forced doubling down on construction that had initially been intended as relatively short term cheap housing.

You get that you're criticizing a house you haven't seen, right?

We've all seen enough post-Soviet cities to make an educated guess.

lol i don't think so.

I wonder if we will feel the same about “minimal” design in the future. I really don’t see anything beautiful about a white box with black windows, yet architects seem obsessed with it.

Probably because it’s called good design yet it’s almost the cheapest possible design outwards. Convenient. But I think in 30 years we will facepalm at these white boxes we call houses.

These things often oscillate around certain aspects. We bounce between ornate and simple over history for example. Minimalism is handy because it's a cheap and hard to mess it up. Like pop music.

Look at McMansions, which is a cohort of styles that are much easier to get wrong, and there are many objectively bad homes. But for minimalism, the worst you can often say is it's boring. Correct, but boring.

My father was an architect and designed brutalist buildings back in the 60s and 70s, some of them windowless. By the 90s he had come to regret this work deeply.

Stone also gets really grubby over time, but for some reason that still looks okay but the concrete doesn't so much.

>I am surprised brutalist became popular

it never was popular, it wasn't an organic movement. It was pushed by the Soviets and those sympathetic to them in Western governments and academia who used tax payer money to construct hideous buildings

I’m not sure why you’re framing an effort to construct a ton of housing as efficiently as possible as some spooky Soviet conspiracy. Maybe governments and academia were just sympathetic to the idea of using that tax payer money on cheaper buildings, would you prefer they pay more to suit different aesthetic tastes?

Tangentially, speaking of non-organic movements, the history of the CIA funding abstract expressionist art in the Cold War to serve as a foil to Soviet realism is fascinating. Arguably there are echoes of those influences in this conversation.

I don't think so. Initial Soviet architecture wasn't brutalist. Stalinist architecture was in fact very classical inspired. You can see that in the seven sisters buildings in Moscow. Even the late Soviet era blocks were not brutalist. That style came up in the UK and was more popular in the Western world than outside of it.

Brutalism like all other styles is a mixture of the requirements of the time and a response to the culture at the time. The building features the original article is railing against is simply poor design. A poorly designed classical inspired building will look exactly as bad.

Le Corbusier tried pushing his designs on the Soviet Union, and Stalin rejected it in favour of a far more ornamental style.

The push towards stripping back ornamentation gained traction in the west long before the time Khrushchev was able to push for this in Soviet construction.

The essence of brutalism's success is not about leftist propaganda or whatnot. It's simply a byproduct of war, and of the postwar economic boom.

Basically, cities were left levelled [1], and the postwar population and economic boom created an intense housing and building shortage over a few decades. new construction methods centered around concrete proved cheaper and faster, and helped bridge that shortage.

Brutalism can also be pretty pleasant when it's well done - which most of the building in that style aren't, due to being build as fast and as cheap as possible to address the situation at hand.

[1]: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-story-...

I think our tastes just changed.

It’s like vinyl floors, it was the rage at some point and people really valued them. Or heavily decorated wallpapers. So many of that stuff is just considered fugly now.

The functionality of vinyl is making a comeback, we just make them look like wood now.

which is the most terrible, fake and cheap looking way how to bring it back

Vinyl has never become unpopular in the Netherlands. Especially because most rented flats don't allow wooden floors for noise reasons. Vinyl gives a similar though cheaper look but dampens noise a lot more.

It was made to be ugly by people so traumatized by war that they no longer believed in beauty.

This comment has proven to be very unpopular, but I stand by it. Do you guys think it a coincidence that such an ugly anti-humanist style was developed in the immediate aftermath of a huge and brutal war?

The whole point of brutalism was that Concrete doesn't wear much over time. A high pressure hose will remove 'weathering' of concrete buildings very effectively and cheaply. I think your problem arises not from concrete but from these buildings often being public (including public housing) and having shoestring maintenance budgets. You spend the same to maintain most other materials and they will have fallen down by now, or at least parts of them would.

A good example of one where they did care a lot about the finish and its lasting finish is the Barbican in London - there's a little about it here [0]

[0] https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/barbican-story/construction...

> I think your problem arises not from concrete but from these buildings often being public (including public housing) and having shoestring maintenance budgets.

This is what I was thinking looking at that first Hong Kong building--it would look a lot nicer if it wasn't so dirty.

>Concrete doesn't wear much over time.... A high pressure hose will remove 'weathering' of concrete buildings very effectively and cheaply.

Concrete eventually starts spalling, and high pressure washing actually accelerates the spalling process. The reason these buildings aren't washed more regularly is because of that tradeoff; it's not (generally) because of maintenance budgets. Once you get spalling, maintenance becomes expensive. The Barbican can afford it, but this is one of the reasons a lot of brutalist buildings in Eastern Europe are getting sealed and painted.

It's possible to tint concrete and use different tints for different sections to make it less concrete-ish.

My pet theory is that it became popular in an era where buildings were judged by black-and-white photographs of them. In real life bare concrete is drab and grey - but in a black-and-white photograph textured concrete is one of the more interesting surfaces to look at.

I don't buy this theory, brutalism comes chronologically after color photography.

Also, more importantly, buildings are judged live by who sees them.

> Also, more importantly, buildings are judged live by who sees them.

They should be. But in that period of time there was a whole lot of internationalism even as international travel wasn't cheap enough to be routine. So you could imagine a committee commissioning a famous architect like Le Corbusier from another country when most of them had only seen his buildings in photographs - and while colour photographs existed, printing them was expensive, so most widely circulated photos would have been black and white.

My understanding is Brutalism arose when building codes still had limits on window size and proportion of glass vs other materials on the facades of large buildings. This prevented the glass curtain towers that became popular later until codes changed.

Brutalism embraced this constraint as well as the most expedient materials for building skyscrapers. Intellectually and aesthetically I like this choice of honesty in reflecting materials personally.

Where Brutalism failed is similar to other grand modernist projects: it failed to engage properly at the human scale, creating environments that look striking, but that also read to most people as cold and alienating. In practical terms this sort of grand architecture usually fails to anticipate how humans will actually use the spaces, leading to spaces that are opposed to humans organic behaviors.

All that said, when Brutalism is tempered with empathy, and combined with interior design that both features and softens its starkness, I quite like it. The old library in my home town was brutalist.

This is the exterior: https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8b7a56ab55fbd5227b8d5c04be176e56...

Unfortunately there's no photos online of the old interior, but it did a good job of humanizing the starkness.

On the other hand, the exterior also showed the flaws of brutalism, having wide empty featureless grass plains that I never once saw anyone use for relaxation, a picnic, etc, in two decades of living in that town.

Additional flourishes cost money.

Keep in mind, that at the time these were built, these were generally meant as rapid responses to cheaply house large amounts of people with basic living standards. After the war, most places had most of their housing stock destroyed, and whatever was left was also in high demand due to postwar baby booms, and for rapidly developing "Asian tiger" economies like Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, rapid urbanization.

When you need to house millions and your budget is paltry, aesthetic is one of the first things to get chopped. And for many of the people who would live in them, having a unit with its own running water and electricity, toilet, bath and kitchen was a significant upgrade, especially if their previous residence was a tin shack in a slum or a refugee camp.

I thought that was the purpose of using concrete: that it weathers and develops a much nicer patina than many other buildling materials.

I see how brutalist architecture may be endearing because it looks so dated, like retrofuturistic imagery usually does. But take a a moment at imagining a city where most buildings are really high slabs of grey concrete darkened by damp and pollution and try not to feel depressed. That kind of architecture was born from the need to build fast and cheap in order to avoid slums. Architects who embraced those projects invented it a style and aura.

Any city with a single aesthetic feels oppressive to me. Design needs to serve people, not vice versa.

There is just something oppressive about them. It makes you feel insignificant and the whole thing feels inhospitable. The concrete also gets too hot when sunny & too windy due to the long-flat alleyways it creates.

UMass Amherst's campus is famously too-brutalist [1] for the university's 21st century tastes. From my years there, the embarrassment was for good reason. The buildings make you feel all of the things I mentioned above.

Brutalism works when it either contrasts contrasts with its surroundings. Implant concrete-laden sharp-shapes into nature and the contrasting outcome[2] is beautiful. Even America's most famous house : Fallingwater [3], uses huge concrete slabs exclusively while looking absolutely stunning. Another form of contrast is the Velasca Tower [4] which standout out like a sore thumb when set against its very Italian surroundings.

Brutalism wears on you the second it is used as a template for huge repeating projects. It has good shock value. But, do it enough times, and it is exhausting.

[1] https://www.darrenbradleyphotography.com/post/umass-amherst-...

[2] https://archive.is/P30RD

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater

[4] https://goo.gl/maps/qo3XGFoabPj1VJa59

You described most eastern European cities built under the Warsaw pact.

Albeit, as a Pole myself I think soviets created the best and most livable and efficient neighborhoods I've ever seen in the world.

There was no shortage of green spaces, parks, benches, people spent a lot everything was close on foot, public transport was efficient.

American style suburbs where development is horizontal rather than vertical are miles and miles of nothing where everything is far and requires a car.

Post 1990 economic gains killed soviet style neighborhoods as they were not designed for so many cars, people don't have as much space to socialize, kids have to go more far to play because parkings are put in those spaces.

I kinda hate cars for that.

Absolutely! It's easy to find it wanting in comparison to middle-class Western living, but my East German relatives still wax lyrical about the day they got to move from the cramped, war-damaged room in an old townhouse to the apartment in the newly-built "Platte", clean, dry, "modern", washing lines on the lawn out the back by the playground on the way to the tram stop and the kindergarten, the doctor's kids playing with the factory worker's... It was an efficient way to provide decent living space with limited resources.

And that's setting aside the question of why that system was so impoverished and what it chose to invest in. But the architects and urban planners deserve some praise.

I prefer the suburbs with the car over dense housing. So much nicer to have tens of acres to yourself and expansive parking lots at the places you want to go to. It really works for me over having to take public transport and live in close quartered apartments.

I actually did not think about Eastern Europe. I was more thinking of my western european country where it traded poor people inside the city in slums for poor people outside the city in almost decent buildings. I should have emphasized more that those buildings were really better that the slums that hosted the common people before. But yeah, cars ruin everything. Even the live of car drivers.

This is a good test to apply to architectural styles. People often cite Fallingwater (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Fallingw...) as a triumph of modern architecture. In my view, it only really looks good because of its surroundings. If you'd erase the trees and river, it wouldn't look good anymore, especially if you zoom in to the rounded off smooth brown slabs. If, on the other hand, you erased the house and kept the trees and river, it would still be a beautiful scene. If you replaced the modern house by any old watermill constructed by 18th century peasants, it would look just as good as what a famous modern architect was able to achieve. Therefore, I claim people's aesthetic senses are primarily responding to the trees and water, and not to the product of the architect.

A similar phenomenon occurs when architects place a modern building in a scene of beautiful classical architecture, sometimes even connecting the new building to the old. The "beauty" of this type of modern architecture is parasitic on pre-existing beauty and cannot stand on its own.

Definitely, almost any house would look good sitting on a frickin water fall.

Part of architecture is working with the surroundings. If anything I'm more sold on Fallingwater than I was before.

That's fine, selecting a beautiful location takes a certain amount of skill. Not as much as designing a beautiful building, but still. The issue is that this approach doesn't scale. We can't all live in a forest on top of a river. At some point, you have to build a city where you have lots of the given architecture. You can have a city center made entirely out of classical architecture, or such a city center with an interesting sprinkle of modern architecture. But if you build it entirely out of modern architecture, it will not be interesting, nor beautiful, nor hospitable.

Not just site selection, but working to make the building cohesive with its surroundings. Like how the stone foundation rises from the natural stone, and the waterfall seems to come from the house itself.

You may like this brutalist church in Palo Alto.

https://sika.scene7.com/is/image/sika/usa-first-methodist-ch...

Meh, to round

looks like something out of planet of the apes!

Ok, that is pretty cool.

It's not that small but Brandlhuber built a single family brutalist building fairly recently called Anitvilla: https://www.archdaily.com/627801/antivilla-brandlhuber-emde-...

I love it, my wife would hate it

I had the same reaction. They staged it to increase the starkness. If they'd used bright, natural fibers in the interior it would go a long ways towards making it feel more livable.

It looks like a building site.

I struggle to imagine someone actually living there. To me it looks like an art piece, and perhaps it is only intended as such.

The PVC curtains seem particularly icky to me, reminding me of naff shower curtains and hospitals.

Just looking at it made me feel cold, physically and spiritually. Also the acoustics are probably terrible.

This is awesome, I didn't know what this style is called. I love these environments though, they can be paradoxically cozy. Strategic lighting, right furniture, maybe wooden elements and it's a dream.

Looks great! I would completely dig living in such place.

This looks like a mixture of a building in a war zone and a house-sized prison. Looks very repulsive to me and I like brutalism.

Feels like an unfinished parking garage.

Here’s site showing closeup of the four pane panel window:

http://www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/windows.htm

The site linked therein shows this even better. In the third photo, compare the building on the foreground vs background.

http://www.vegastodayandtomorrow.com/dunes_bellagio.htm

Wow, that is money pic, showing was looks to be two different scale buildings.

The most controversial part of the transition from the Dunes to the Bellagio was that stupid golf course! Wynn bought the property because it had an artesian well and accompanying water rights. They should have listened to him and did canals in downtown/old Vegas - that overhead screen is just meh.

I remember eating at the Top of the Dunes restaurant as a kid - we would sometimes go there for Sunday brunch. Right before they demolished the Dunes to build the Bellagio they had a property-wide auction and the entire property was open during the process. I went through it with a couple of friends and we went up to the top of the Dunes - and I was shocked at how small it was vs. what I remembered from being a kid. I think the dining room was maybe 4 tables wide and 10 or so long - the space was TINY. But I guess being a kid and surrounded by windows on three sides made it feel much larger back in the day.

It would appear the linked article plagiarized from this site (vegastodayandtomorrow). I mean, the concept of "window trick" and every hotel used as an example, is identified first right here.

Winston Churchill famously said, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us."

I agree with this and believe we should make beautiful structures. I’m not sure much architecture since the 1950s in the west really does this. Modernism was the last consistently great style imo. Post Modern styles just seem so temporary and self indulgent which I suppose reflects our time.

"On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please."

--Thomas Jefferson

Churchill in that quote was making an argument to rebuild the House of Commons exactly as it was before getting destructed, rejecting new ideas.

If anything, I think the 50s architecture opened the door to new ideas, helped us see what works and what doesn’t. Villa Savoye is a bit from before the 50s, but it basically feels like it could be built today it wouldn’t be out of place in any bit.

TBH I’m glad the 50s architects opened the future instead of clinging to the past.

Kind of weird you make a statement that values post modernist/international architecture while using modernist architecture as an example of why it’s good. Even still I’d say that was getting to the beginning of the end in many ways. Glass houses are stupid for numerous reasons.

Even your extremely arrogant musing on “clinging to the past” sums up the problem with post modernist ideas. You think we suddenly know better than thousands of years of experience. That much of what was done in architecture (and everything else) wasn’t just old ideas that were stubbornly held onto but rather the result of thousands of years of refinement about what works and has meaning.

Yes, it was a weird way to put it, I was expressing that the modernist/international architecture trend stood the test of time and is still valued today. It's not just some fad in reaction to other trends.

> Glass houses are stupid for numerous reasons.

I don't know how much glass you see in "Glass houses", so I'd agree there can be extremes (same as for any style). Now, normal houses I've seen built in modern style are very pleasant to live in, highly practical and I wouldn't want to get back to a 19th century house short of getting paid millions to do so.

> You think we suddenly know better than thousands of years of experience.

Those thousands of years of experience brought us new techniques, new insights on what works and what doesn't. Builders have constantly moved forward for these thousands of years. People in the 12th century didn't stop innovating telling themselves "why would we know better than the 3 thousands of years of experience that led us here".

We stand on the shoulder of giants, to me it's our duty to push the envelope and not stand there ordering buildings to be exact replicas of what came before.

When I look at the Gare du Nord in Paris, I'm not lamenting that they didn't keep the dark and gloomy roof panels that used to be there for decades. I'm super glad it became a warm, luminous and welcoming place instead.

Yeah I hear you, building on the shoulders of giants is best. But I do feel like a lot of post modern stuff changes the way we think of buildings by designing from the inside out. So we are left with ugly structures (like the majority of houses built since 1950) and corporate offices, etc.

It feels like we optimize for the wrong things because the tech allows us to. We build bigger at the expense of quality. Seeing 3000 sq foot homes with a small number of vinyl windows, vinyl siding, laminate flooring, etc is weird. But engineered wood and trusses let us build big, ugly spaces for cheap.

Before I cone off as too much a crank there is a lot of great post modern stuff. Especially more recently.

"The ideologists of socialist realism understood perfectly well the role played by architecture in the creation of human consciousness; they realised that the right architectural ‘setting’ can influence one’s way of life and perception of reality."

https://culture.pl/en/article/polands-surprising-socialist-r...

You might enjoy the movie Columbus (2017). It's a drama about two people connecting through their passion for architecture with gorgeous shots of the modernist/brutalist buildings in Columbus, Indiana.

Would you share a picture of this brutalist house?

I love how people claim brutalist buildings are egalitarian, when it's the wealthy that have the money to never have to see the ugly things.

FYI dont need to escape, you can use IRI:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Béton_brut

You'd love walking round the South Bank of the Thames or the Barbican in London.

The most successful Brutalist designs always seem to be softened with trees, curves, and water - which are the opposite of bare concrete.

The South Bank Centre is on the Thames and is decorated with trees, and the Barbican has a central water feature and garden.

They're also fairly opulent on the inside.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Fti...

Trellick and Balfron Towers have some trees now, but didn't have much greenery when they originally opened.

https://designanthologyuk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/web...

The order/variety observation is absolutely right, and a core feature of practical aesthetics across all domains. Successful aesthetics are a fine balance between surprise and predictability. Even something as basic as proportion is based on comprehensible non-random relationships.

The Wundt Curve describes how too much order and too much chaos are both unsettling/boring.

https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/files/8060373/COXj_2017_cr...

It's a great point. Singapore and Japanese cities can be built quite raw and oppressive because of the wild density, but in both nature is snuck into every nook and cranny. In Singapore it has been a strong architectural design choice, and in Japan it's the cumulative actions of everyone putting pot plants all over the place and leaving "weeds" and moss to grow through on fences and walls.

So I know that pot plants is the term outside of the US for potted plants. Pot plant here means marijuana and I'm dying at the idea of Japanese apartments being covered, inside and out, with various strains of cannabis. I'd like to imagine there's dwarf varieties, lovingly shaped and maintained in the corners of the living space.

As a resident of the Barbican, it is part of our lease that we maintain plants on the balcony. This significantly softens the exterior and adds variety the linked article discusses.

Coincidentally the fountains were fixed yesterday after years of being turned off.

living the dream!

Are you allowed to use fake plants?

What date does the central heating get turned off this year?

Probably end of April, but usually depends on the weather a bit.

Similarly, in recent years people have been talking about "Tropical Brutalism" (e.g. https://www.dezeen.com/2022/11/28/architecture-project-talk-... , https://somethingcurated.com/2019/10/24/the-evolution-of-tro...), and I think a lot of what is appealing about it is the contrast between bare concrete and lush greenery.

That combination is also extremely Bond villain, and who doesn't dream of being a Bond villain?

I'm reminded of Habitat 67, which looks like a utopian future in most pictures with greenery: https://s3-ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/building-ca/wp-content...

And like shipping containers stacked haphazardly in pictures taken in the winter: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Ha...

The Brutalist house is very interesting! Do you have a photo to share?

> utilitarian [brutalist] architecture that has great appeal to me. I think in part because it is rare now. I find them far more pleasing to the eye than the giant glass clad high rises that was the fashion for a long time.

Reminds me of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-11-16.

"Giant glass clad high rises" are not a fashion -- they're popular because most people in the U.S. and Europe like the way they look.

In some sense these pretty glass buildings are a symbol of American ideology. Free markets tipped the balance from the art elite, who wanted people to live in brutalist slaughterhouses, toward the common people, who like their optimistic, futurist buildings and are willing to pay for them.

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