Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by fgoesbrrr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

fgoesbrrr

I was told we can't build like that anymore.

View on HN

Shocker, the Bauhaus graduates didn’t want people thinking different. ;)

Brutalism is yet another form of socialism that managed to make the world a bit sadder.

Brutalism-as-an-aesthetic-choice is cool, as-mandated-dogma just god awful.

It always was an architectural movement influenced by political motivations: reaction to nostalgic architecture of the 40s and low cost social housing influenced by socialist principles. It was pretty much imposed in uk by the government after the war and created a series of terrible housing estates in which crime proliferated (because they are impossible to police). Brutalist aesthetic became a thing long after, as an acquired taste.

Also tbh when people think of brutalist aesthetics they usually think of the same few grand building (like the Barbican Centre in London) that costed a lot of money, are constantly maintained to this day and are kind of an one-off. The day to day reality of brutalism, unfortunately, are huge blocks of high density houses in terrible maintenance conditions (reinforced concretes dissolves easily and leaves leaks and rusty rebar exposed) that cannot be replaced anymore.

I don't disagree, but i don't like how you make out socialism as the villain, sounds like you grew up with a lot of cold war propaganda. The absence of socialism means violence and war. If the states had a working social system, crime rates would be much lower. Personally I like to blame humanism for everything, that is, the delusion that humans are somehow better than what we really are.

I don't disagree that some degree of social policy is needed for a country to be healthy. Brutalism, though, was the blind application of the socialist principles to architecture, which generated more misery than what it tried to prevent.

So maybe it was the blind (I'd say ignorant, grandiose, paternalistic) application, and not the principles, that caused the misery?

Btw, I'm neither a socialist or proponent of modern architecture. Will call those out for their bs anytime too.

Please don't use socialism as a word for "thing I don't like".

I am so tired of this. No, I am not siding with socialists. I despise them, but I don't make the mistake of blaming bad things like me stubbing my toe on "socialism" just because I don't like a group of people.

Brutalism isn't socialism. I hope you will remember that.

Brutalism and socialism are so intertwined, it’s like saying women and people aren’t the same thing. Technically true but it’s still a stupid point.

Most brutalists might have been into socialism but definitely not most socialists are into brutalism. So blaming socialists for the failures of brutalism is logically wrong.

The stones are just outer cladding. Like any large modern construction it's all poured concrete inside. You can see rebar in some of the pics

That is kind of sad. Any building using rebar won't last as long as a purely compression based structure.

Well, technically, at the scale to house urban populations - no, because a) it’s expensive b) the talent is super scarce c) it’s so much cheaper and easier to source concrete buildings

I’m sure one could source enough talent for few baroque villas or such but I have no idea what the budget would be.

Obvious example is Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia - don’t know how much of that is ’traditional’ vs ’non-traditional’ though.

And as the article notes, the monks quickly learned that doing all this manually would have been cost prohibitive.

I think we romanticize in our day and age the “method”. That is, we think that gothic architecture can only be built using the methods of the middle ages, that otherwise it is “fake”. It’s a strange prejudice that would have been foreign to the builders and architects of the original gothic cathedrals. These were people who were at the cutting edge of architectural technology and skill, certainly the cutting edge in Europe, not people who romanticized “being artisanal”. Frankly, the sophistication of gothic architecture rivals much of what we build today in many respects.

We also suffer from the strange, progressive, prejudiced belief that older styles are “anachronistic” if used today. They’re just styles. What does time have to do with anything? Architectural developments since the middle ages might change how we build such architecture or remove what had previously been a constraint imposed by the methods of the day (note the neogothic), but the essential character can remain the same…or it can undergo development.

I think that the availability of CNC machines makes architecturally beauty all the more accessible. Why we aren’t taking more advantage of the possibilities, I don’t know.

b and c aren’t really applicable if you use modern methods for producing the decoration and still use concrete for the underlying structure. Modern builders just hate decoration due to bias. I’m not even sure cost is necessarily a reason because lots of bizarre and unnecessary structure is added to some buildings just to make them unique.

Look into:

Institute of Classical Architecture & Art : https://www.classicist.org/

National Civic Art Society: https://www.civicart.org/

We cannot, but there are several specialists from Turkey, Iran and other Middle Eastern states who can still do.

> there are several specialists from Turkey, Iran and other Middle Eastern states who can still do

That makes it sound like somehow only those people can carve stone? That is far from the truth.

Look at this guy for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCVaDTxTC4

He is a young fella somewhere in a UK happily knocking on stone until it becomes part of a cathedral. It is merely an economic decision how many of the like of him we wish to pay for.

Because when those old buildings get destroyed (usually in a war, because they last forever), you would not find anybody in the west to be able to repair or re-erect it. You can only fly in specialists from there.

Such as the stonebridge from Mostar.

Wait till you hear about how modern metallurgy and material science is better than ancient katana hammer smiths. There was a post here earlier today about how an overpriced comb is better because it's artisanal and handmade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com