I guess there were practical reasons in the beginning to not focus on adding additional finishes?
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...
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 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.
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 is not a facade, it is not cladding, it is the functional building its-very-self.
Brutalist buildings celebrate their exoskeletons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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-...