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Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures
- treve 7y agoI'm kinda surprised at the lack of graffiti
- hcrisp 7y agoNothing in the article explains why it is Kafkaesque.
- kken 7y agoIndeed, looks like the word is a bit misplaced here.
- duelingjello 7y agoI think "brutalist architecture" would be a better description.
- robocat 7y agoI also likes the misuse of “distempered dogs”. I actually like “incorrect” words being used - it makes writing far more friendly and sometimes allows me to feel invalidly superior. Intentionally misabusing words is a personal hobby, copied from the best speaker of English that I know.
- gherkinnn 7y agoSome brutalist buildings do instil the same sense of cold, surreal, and inhuman qualities Kafka does with his writing. Insurmountable oppression. Also, Kafkas protagonists are often stripped of any sense of intimacy. Laid bare, much like the naked concrete and straight lines seen in brutalist architecture. So I do see where OP could be coming from. Then again, LA is not able to drown me in dread the same way a dreary Soviet administration building does.
- projektfu 7y agoTrue, Kafkaesque would imply something like you get on the elevator to floor 5 and the 5th floor is labeled 6. You take the stairs down two flights to floor 5, skipping floor R. You go to the door labeled for the office you want and they tell you the office you seek is actually in a different building, which they do not know the address to, and you must now wait for the elevator which has stopped running until an hour from now because reasons and the stairs do not let you back to ground level.
- ddtaylor 7y agoSince the server linked doesn't provide a secure version of the content here is a link to avoid MITM/downgrade attacks: https://archive.is/de6d https://archive.is/de6d
- jerry40 7y agoIs it a place from this episode of the 'Terminator 2' movie? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwMMpmaQPPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwMMpmaQPPA
- aasasd 7y agoYes. Also in ‘Grease’, ‘Drive’ and a bunch of other films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_River#Entertainment_setting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_River#Entertainmen...
- adunk 7y agoThis is great reading for everyone who grew up watching Terminator 2 and was fascinated by the chase scene where the T-1000 terminator bursts through a bridge down into in the LA river. This seems to be the bridge: https://goo.gl/maps/3v3LK6h75LqrzexSA https://goo.gl/maps/3v3LK6h75LqrzexSA
- bufordtwain 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z9qws7M8q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z9qws7M8q8
- ekianjo 7y agoThis was my first reaction seeing the picture: "Isn't that the bridge from T2??".
- tinym 7y agoIt's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg
- sworc 7y agoI'm surprised that this construction is considered a "river".
- NullPrefix 7y agoWhat would you call it? Half-pipe ?
- tpm 7y agoIn our country, we would call it a drainage channel or something like that. We expect rivers to at least look a bit natural, even if most of them are heavily regulated anyway.
- nullc 7y agoThere was a pre-existing river. They paved it to make it better at draining floodwaters. If not for that history it would probably just be called the LA storm drain network or something like that.
- alfanick 7y agoAmericans tend to call artificial structures with names usually associated with more natural structures: they have a lot of “parks” in their cities, which usually end up being just a concrete avenue with a few trees in it (still infinite progress from concrete avenues with no trees at all). I’m always so sad to visit US cities as European
- carlob 7y agoAlso a European, but I really don't understand you. I don't know what you think park means in a urban context, to me a park is a man-made green area. Anyway, even when you go to a forest in Europe you likely have no idea of how much managed they are, it's exactly like farming, just on a different time scale. There is really almost nothing that is not somehow man-made on this side of the pond.
- gonzo41 7y agoCivil engineering is awesome. Those canals look boring but it's better than having that water making it's own path.
- seibelj 7y agoBoston City Hall routinely ranks as one of the ugliest buildings on earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall Brutalist concrete building straight out of 1984. Really gets you mentally prepared for the labyrinth, dispassionate and uncaring bureaucracy that awaits you inside. > The building has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and is often called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished. I highly recommend anyone who visits Boston take some time to walk around it and even inside of it. It really is something to experience, unfortunately for me I experience it every day of my life.
- Finnucane 7y agoIt seems particularly bad in its surroundings, the barren concrete plaza that it looms over. The whole effect as you cross in front is of a projection of Stalinist state power.
- ekianjo 7y agoJames H Kunstler had a great talk mentioning the Boston City Hall among many things that's wrong with modern design: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
- biztos 7y agoPreparing you for the soulless bureaucracy is probably good form-following-function, unless of course it is also helping to create that soullessness.
- notatoad 7y agois the red brick construction in front of it [1] part of the original design? i could appreciate it if it were a purely brutalist concrete design, but it's the mishmash of bare concrete and brick in weird shapes that makes this truly ugly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2017_Boston_City_Hall_side_view.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:2...
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- jmkd 7y agoOne of the world's best examples of industrial architecture creating an inadvertent skateboarding Mecca.
- harimau777 7y agoIt frustrates me that so many people hate brutalist architecture. I definitely wouldn't want every building to be brutalist but I'm glad that some are. I also much prefer brutalism to soulless glass and concrete skyscrapers or nondescript office buildings. At least brutalist buildings look like something.
- waserwill 7y agoI would agree with you: there are interesting and appropriate uses of brutalist design. The issue I have is that many brutalist structures are "soulless glass and concrete," with inverse proportions!
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoWhy are you glad some are? Signed, A Brutalist Hater
- harimau777 7y agoHuman beings are physical creatures and our physical environment can communicate messages that are more powerful than if you just read them in a book. I find that brutalist buildings often communicate a visceral sense of power, profundity, inhuman scale, etc. A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth necessitated the building's inhuman size. Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the forces of chaos. In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that is very large.
- baked_ziti 7y ago
- mikorym 7y agoReminds me of an anecdate from South America: "This is not like Europe, if you see a river in a city on the map, it is not a river, it is a sewage storm drain."
- rehasu 7y agoThis reminds me of GTA and probably a few Hollywood movies.
- DonHopkins 7y agoBrings me back to the good times on Flood Control Dam #3 in Zork. https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/flood_control_dam3.html https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/flood_control_dam3.ht... The underground Flood Control Dam #3 is a staggering engineering feat that must be seen to be believed. It was constructed in year 783 of the Great Underground Empire to harness the mighty destructive power of the Frigid River. This work was supported by a grant of 37 million zorkmids from the Central Bureaucracy and the local omnipotent tyrant of the era, Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive. This impressive structure is composed of 370,000 cubic feet of concrete, is 256 feet tall at the center, and 193 feet wide at the top. The huge reservoir created behind the dam has a volume of 1.7 billion cubic feet (an ancient document, perhaps in error, records that the volume of the reservoir is 37 billion cubic feet), an area of 12 million square feet, and a shore line of 36 thousand feet (an alternate dam guide book found in 1067 GUE states that the shore line is only 35 thousand feet).
- boringg 7y agoDoes Pyramid of Tirana, Albania qualify as Kafkaesque? I was there half a decade ago. Fascinating building especially with it's dilapidated state at the time. Edit: Looks like they have recently struck a deal to turn it into a "tech center" - seems like brutalism + tech overlap in this case. Edit 2: Changed to Pyramid of Tirana instead of Enver Hoxha's Pyramid
- Animats 7y agoIt's just functional. It has a job to do, moving water, and it does it. When the Panama Canal locks were nearing completion, some artists were sent down to Panama to advise on decoration. There was talk of building stone lions at the locks. The artists came back and reported that the works had been carried out with no regard for decoration, and the best thing to do would be to keep them that way, purely functional. That was done, and the locks, impressive but plain-looking, are still that way. River control for intermittent floods through populated areas has produced some good solutions. The Guadalupe River goes through San Jose, and floods every few years. The river now runs through a narrow channel deep in a big, wide channel. The big wide channel has walkways and bike paths, which will be underwater during a flood. And now, multiple homeless encampments. Tapei has a similar setup on a much larger scale. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(California) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(California)
- mushufasa 7y agoThis seems like a good opportunity to post this book review about an alternate take on the intellectual history behind modernist / brutalist architecture. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...