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Comment by cassepipe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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