Brutalist buildings should stay, even if people think they're ugly | Hacker News Reader

Brutalist buildings should stay, even if people think they're ugly

npr.org

> These buildings were meant to stand the test of time, Person says. But they’re in need of significant investment if they are going to exist for another five decades.

Daily reminder that people pay millions of dollars to live in what were originally brick warehouses, factories and power stations.

If you build nice looking, properly proportioned buildings out of humane & durable materials, they will get maintained and reused. If you build abstract garbage that appeals only to bean counters and an intellectual elite interested in theory and posturing as innovators, people will tear them down as soon as they have the socio-political power to do so.

Christopher Alexander tried to warn us.

> in what were originally brick warehouses, factories and power stations

That sometimes happens, but how much of that is attributable to survivorship bias, market pressure from increasing density, and maybe some favorable grandfathered-in legal quirks? (As opposed to raw architectural appeal.)

Maybe all the uglier and worse-proportioned and lower-quality warehouses and factories and power-stations tend to get demolished long before anyone could think of converting their interiors to apartments or offices--or they persist but in unfavorable locations.

survival bias is the last refuge of the modern architect

Abandoned power stations found in the middle of rural California built by nameless workers simply using pattern books are more aesthetically significant buildings than most high end projects today

> Abandoned power stations found in the middle of rural California built by nameless workers simply using pattern books are more aesthetically significant buildings than most high end projects today

I would say that the time will tell.

I bet it will definitely hold true for some cases (as you are imo correct, there are plenty of awful high end projects out there), but I am not so sure if it will hold true proportionally (i.e., the ratio of aesthetically significant to non-significant buildings among nameless abandoned power stations vs. high end projects).

A lot of it is also just about the tastes of time. I remember when brutalism felt overplayed to hell by the end of the 20th century (in eastern europe especially, which is where I lived at the time), and I was somewhat sick of it myself. But as the time went, brutalism fell out of favor, and the dust was settling, I reversed my opinion on it. I disliked it because it was overplayed and annoying, but in balanced amounts, I really appreciate certain aspects of it now.

Brutalism will never be anything more than an eyesore to the vast majority of people. Architecture is as much about agreeability as anything, which is the problem: most architects (and most intellectuals) have an adversarial relationship with the majority of the people they share an aesthetic space with.

> “…pay millions of dollars to live in what were originally brick warehouses, factories and power stations.”

Not because they are ‘beautiful’ in and of themselves. Residential living in a space designed for industry is an aesthetic of scale and human triumph over the machine.

Residential living in an open space located in a busy, high density, high value, urban setting is a statement of wealth—I have so much money I can have this much space with nothing in it. And you live in a cramped three floor brownstone walk-up? Ha! (Which would be a traditional and normative sign of wealth, short of the last detached single family house in Manhattan.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schinasi_Mansion)

> > These buildings were meant to stand the test of time, Person says. But they’re in need of significant investment if they are going to exist for another five decades.

The romans would like to have a word of two. I mean: if these things were meant to stand the test of time and now already need significant investment, they failed. Not a surprise seen the mindset that created those monstrosities.

If there was ever a case to link to a text only version a discussion of architecture isn't it. The full article with images: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/12/g-s1-6417/brutalism-architect...

Thank you! I was so confused, reading the article and scratching my head wondering why there were no pictures. In the end I started doing image searches to see what the buildings looked like for myself.

The only valid argument I see is that some brutalist buildings are historically important and even we don't like them today we should keep some of them for future generations to visit and see what we have tried, and disliked.

But to use the environment as an excuse is silly. There are always things that can be done for that: recycling the concrete, rebuild to reduce car dependency and improve energy efficiency, choose more sustainaible materials (like wood) that can easily be replaced in the future (instead of more concrete), etc

The sunk cost of carbon, sand, etc in the concrete and construction would be sad to throw away.

Making people live or work around those depressing monstrosities is even sadder.

I understand wanting to leave a few of them as warnings to future generations, but i think the the surviving WWII-era bunkers and flak towers in mainland Europe capture the same basic style and are enough of a representative sample.

Is brutalist architecture actually unpopular, or is it just popular to rail against brutalism?

Totally. If the movement was called geometrizism or edge-ist would we have this discussion? No one likes to be brutalized but we want to have an edge. I have a Pinterest board full of brutalist architecture. I love it.

Right... people who have Pinterest boards of architectural styles tend to appreciate brutalism much more than your average bear.

By analogy: if you are going to play music loudly for potentially millions of people over the course of decades or centuries, you have a responsibility not to play either pop that's likely to be shortlived or esoteric niche music that many people will not like.

This is the task that architects have with every building they design, yet for some reason[1] decide against building the styles that we empirically know have unbelievable lasting power and extremely broad appeal. So broad and so long lasting, in fact, that we simply call them "classical."

[1] They do this because architects and architect-adjacent people, like those with Pinterest boards, give them awards and clout for their "remarkable" and "boundary-pushing" and "thought-provoking" designs, as if those are desirable traits for music played for millions of people across a hundred years.

I don't know about America but in my country a bunch of historians and architects can decide something becomes a monument and then society has to spend tax money on it for the rest of eternity.

Normal people can understand a castle. They do not understand a 1970s police station.

t's an architectural style with many examples that don't appeal to a lot of people. It also literally often doesn't age well from a materials standpoint. When the Boston Public did a renovation a number of years back to the brutalist wing, I'd argue it still doesn't compare well to the original McKim Building but was a lot more attractive externally and much more welcoming internally.

I grew up in a city called Coventry in the UK- if you like brutalist architecture it was paradise.

For me, it was a decaying, grey, tumour-ridden, thorny & hideous hell-hole.

The whole city center was wrapped[0] in a snaking, concrete slabbed, elevated road.[1]

Every corner of every stairwell waiting to take its toll out of your flesh with its sharp edges.

The grey of the sky blending without contrast into the towering blocks of a building so revered that it would be eponymous with the city[2] and dominated the city center[3] yet was quite literally so forgettable that I could not tell you how large it was or what it looked like- despite seeing it daily.

And flanked on all sides by dingy towers[4], each identical, cold, and somehow peering at you: telling you that this place was poor, poor not only in funds, but poor in culture, beauty or any sense of personality.

No, it was shit. Fuck brutalist architecture and the car dependent designers of the 60’s. They destroyed even more of what was a beautiful city than the blitz did.

Even King Charles said as much “property developers have been more destructive […] than Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe.”

Pictures (that, if anything, make it look much better): https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jan/27...

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Coventry...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Moat_str...

[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Coventry...

[3]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/WTC_Anth...

[4]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Samuel_v...

Those are actually nice brutalist. I'm sure any communist east-europe city can beat your city in uglyness.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/411375747199903984/

Sure, but it hurts to see what we lost.

https://www.historiccoventry.co.uk/broadgate/broadgate.php?p...

This seems like a really lazy argument. You could say the same argument about getting rid of almost anything thats old and isn't working 100% for current requirements

Buildings from 50+ years ago are not necessarily the most well insulated and efficient. Nothing is going to unrelease the carbon that was involved in making them, but they also consume energy on an ongoing basis and replacing them with something more efficient might be a net reduction overall.

I love brutalist architecture, and find it beautiful in it's own way. I suspect that how it feels to me, doesn't differ much from how it feels to those who dislike it: stark; sterile; imposing; impenetrable; alien.

I submit that it is okay for art to make us feel this way. There is plenty of art, architectural or otherwise, that make us feel other ways, and having a variety in this respect adds richness to one's life (as well as options for those of us who enjoy it).

Yeah I didn't like the article in part because it works from an odd premise, that any building that many people dislike essentially is disliked by everyone, and therefore is not in need of saving. If that was the standard, almost no modern art or architecture would be preserved.

I love brutalist architecture. Why, I don't know, but it has always felt interesting, clean, and serene — even cozy in its own way — to me. I grew up around and spending a lot of time in brutalist architecture, and have fond memories of a lot of it. It's also different from a lot of other architecture, as you point out, and worthwhile in that regard alone I think.

Nobody is debating whether art pieces like that can exist, in general.

These are not mere art pieces that one experiences at their leisure. These are environments that people must live and work in and around, often with little choice in the matter.

I submit that deliberately making the environment inhospitable for the people living there requires more justification than “I decree this discomfort is artistic, and will be good for you”.

I believe that the number of people who are forced to view a given piece of brutalist architecture all day constitutes a small fraction of its dislikers.

I walk a mile through my city and I see buildings of all shapes and sizes, and if I don't favor one, I note that I do not favor it, and at worst, look in a different direction, and am past it in a matter of seconds (and I don't think it should be destroyed either). Beyond that, I could walk 1 block one way or another to avoid it, if it was sufficiently objectionable.

Having said that, if you work or live in a building you do not favor, or perhaps across the street from one which obscures your view (assuming you have one), that isn't great.

Having spent many hours working at a window table in the now-Geisel Library, looking out over the chaparral canyons to the east, I will submit my lived experience of it as having been highly hospitable.

By analogy, if you are playing music over your entire block 24/7 and you pick music that is really pushing the boundaries of most people's tastes: you're not sophisticated, you're just an asshole.

To continue the analogy, each building plays its own music to the city, and the 'destroy art I don't like' here is akin to saying "no, don't play THAT genre to the entire city, only play THIS genre of music to the entire city"

Does liking THIS genre of music somehow make one more sophisticated when playing it to the entire city?

No, it's really not.

http://architecture-history.org/schools/BRUTALISM.html

> the Brutalist apothegm “An ethic, not an aesthetic” acquired significance.

Explicitly held aesthetic appeal as a non-goal. From day one it has always been identified as "bold", "provocative", and "radical".

These arguments for brutalism -- since day one -- are literally describing its lack of harmony in time and place.

Evans Hall [0] on the UC Berkeley campus is a brutalist building completed in 1971. My friends and I watched for many months as a steady stream of cement trucks drove up Hearst Avenue; we joked about how there would eventually be a similar stream of dump trucks carrying away the refuse when it was demolished. Little did I know that would probably be in my lifetime -- see [1]. For 1971 views from the balcony of my then second-floor Evans office, see photos 3 through 7 of [2] (the final two photos were taken inside that office).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evans_Hall_(UC_Berkeley)

[1] https://www.dailycal.org/archives/tends-to-stick-out-evans-h...

[2] https://caltss.computerhistory.org/image/campus-1971/index.h...

This is my favorite style of architecture. I only really came to appreciate it after seeing 33 Thomas Street in NYC in person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

If you’re ever in NYC, I highly recommend going to check it out.

There's a similar building in San Francisco, I think it's near the new Transbay Terminal? I've moved away so I can't drive down and search for it myself, sadly.

I was shocked when I first encountered it: "What eldritch thing broods in a windowless skyscraper?" But of course, a phone exchange.

(Any hams here? I remember seeing a tall building in S.F. with a log-periodic antenna on its roof; a consulate, maybe.)

I'll have to go find it next time I'm in SF then. :-)

> I was shocked when I first encountered it: "What eldritch thing broods in a windowless skyscraper?"

That was my exact reaction!

Too little info in the article to judge the value of the position suggested.

Brutalist buildings are hard to maintain and update. They tend to not be accessible.

If you believe they "should" be preserved, perhaps write up guidelines on how to update them and publish it.

They are raw concrete. Surely someone could potentially paint them to improve their appearance.

One thing I find interesting about brutalist architecture is that the name originates from the term 'Béton brut', which translates to raw concrete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut

Yeah, I think this leads to some of the misconceptions about Brutalism. People think of the violent and aggressive connotations of the word, when it really just means "raw" like unpainted, or more accurately as opposed to the sculpted concrete of Art Deco. Being associated with Soviet and low-income apartment buildings, and urban decay in general, didn't help though.

Also being generally hideous, inhumane, and poorly aging. Those don't help either.

And when you dig even deeper, its not about raw concrete, its about honestly in materials. Some brutalist buildings are brick, as long as brink is doing its brick thing.

Check out the city of Skopje, Macedonia in the pre 2000s period (max 2010s) for a brutalist-but-good architecture.

Post 2014 it got “updated” with baroque architecture - as most of the brutalist buildings were covered in plaster. Worst decision.

History: The whole city got destroyed in a massive earthquake in 1963. After that it got rebuilt following an architectural plan by a Japanese architect- Kenzo Tange.

In my opinion the city center got the most beautiful buildings at the time - the “City Wall” wrapping around the central square, the building of the “Macedonian opera & ballet” etc.

At the same time the “small city” spirit was preserved - the old Turkish Bazaar, family houses 5min walking distance from the center; and even amplified with the donated “barrack houses” from the worlds nations.

For those interested check out the video “Skopje 1979” on YouTube.

> Nobody we interviewed in front of FBI Headquarters had positive things to say about the brutalist style of the building.

To wander a little off-topic with an excerpt from a favorite fiction book, wherein the head of a Sinister Government Agency wistfully wishes he could upgrade to a prettier building too:

> The Imperial Security Headquarters building stood windowless, foursquare against the light, a vast utilitarian concrete block with enormous gates and doors certainly designed to diminish any human supplicant fool enough to approach it. In his case, a redundant effect, Mark decided. [...]

> "Ugliest building in town," the armsman agreed cheerfully. "It dates back to Mad Emperor Yuri's Imperial architect, Lord Dono Vorrutyer. An uncle to the later vice-admiral. He managed to get up five major structures before Yuri was killed, and they stopped him. The Municipal Stadium runs this a close second, but we've never been able to afford to tear it down. Still stuck with it, sixty years later." [...]

> "What a depressing building to work in," Mark commented, as he rose in the lift tube beside the ImpSec chief.

> "Yes," sighed Illyan. "I visited the Investigatif Federale building on Escobar, once. Forty-five stories, all glass... I was never closer to emigrating. [The architect] should have been strangled at birth. But... it's mine now." Illyan glanced around with a dubious possessiveness.

--- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is an "argument" against demolishing any building ever.

the argument isn't that it's expensive to tear them down, it's that a lot of carbon was released to create them, so to tear them down would be wasteful.

  s/if people/if many people/

Not every people however. "it depends" is big in this. For every sheffield carpark being knocked down, there's a major riverside arts centre much loved by the local community. (Brisbane, Robin Gibson)

I actually like that style of building, I would hate to see them destroyed.

Saw this article title and immediately thought Boston City Hall and sure enough, that's one of the images they included. I know at least one university in Boston that recently renovated a brutalist building to look more "modern".

The article doesn't mention this directly but I wonder if part of the repulsion (at least in the US) is a subconscious association with The Soviet Union.

A very good talk about the topic of old buildings:

https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_heatherwick_the_rise_of_bor...

> Person says brutalism is a style of modernism, a movement that appealed to architects and designers because of its material honesty and lack of ornamentation.

It crushes the human spirit. Our societal renewal will include a return to building celebrating human greatness and lifting us.

Ok I’m sorry but I adore brutalist buildings. I think they can also be quite practical and re-fittable in many ways. I certain like them more than the giant tampon (The gherkin in London) or Mordor by bank (the shard). Give me another few Barbican centres and it’s gorgeous gardens and lakes any day.

I doubt they would be replaced with anything better. Either you get something entirely covered in glass. Or then something similar with something fake aesthetic bolted on the top.

> people think they're ugly

With the right paint job, they can look much more cheerful.

"because demolishing buildings is bad for the environment"

Ok. Remodel them instead.

Nobody wants to because they're ugly and hardly functional. Compare to, for example, a mass-produced low-end rowhouse in more classical styles: https://www.bhsusa.com/brooklyn/carroll-gardens/76-1st-place...

Ok. Now do billboards.

tldr: it’s often more expensive to tear them down than to update them. Okay. Same goes for all buildings.

Perhaps there are worse things for the collective psyche than a bit of extra carbon in the atmosphere.

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