I actually find brutalist architecture charming, and not sure why the BBC opted to use such overloaded language such as "~ apartment blocks that DOMINATE Eastern Europe" lol relax.
Form gets so much attention because the public conversation around housing is dominated by older and more wealthy NIMBYs who don't have to live in apartments, so their only consideration is how they look as they drive past them on their way to work.
This is such a strange mode of thinking, one I don't subscribe to (I'm usually quite painfully utilitarian) that I struggle to understand it. But I suspect that just tells me I'm not quite "grokking it", and it's not that their values are just decadent and bourgeois. Though I will admit, this tendency does seem to show up strongest among the decadent bourgeois.
Aesthetics over matter, form over function is one of a well-know defining trait of fascism. Not the only one, but one of the main one. It create a hierarchical order, a new one, amongst structure, amongst objects, to enhance the society hierarchical order. Somehow, Fascism, despite sometime using "egalitarian" politics at first (i will note that those policies aren't really egalitarian, but meritocratic at first, even if in most historical cases this meant the same), manage to create the ultimate hierarchical society.
"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life". ("Work of Art", W. Benjamin).
It's why Fascism is called "far-right". And it's why, dear friends from AF and other royalists, fascists _are_ more far-right than you, ultimately (sorry).
(i'm taking the standard definition of left and right here: left is a push toward egalitarianism, right is a push towards hierarchical society, whether it is economic, politic or other reasons that makes that hierarchy. Nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism or any -ism, so USians and the rest of the world can agree).
It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision.
I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.
It's not the form that sucks (they don't have any), it's the build quality, the amount of indoor space -- everything is min-maxed to the limit and then still underdelivered even against soviet-grade cheapness (two bedroom, 55 sqm for a family with five kids on a peak of soviet glory).
And they also look bad on photos and in winter, when the greenery is gone and all you see is gray aged concrete, but hej, everything there looks depressing in winter to me.
Do skyscrapers dominate American cities? Well, yes, regardless of whether you like them or no.