Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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?

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.

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...

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