10 ms·

Melancholy of obsolete futures: on Soviet Brutalism

75 points by prismatic 6y ago

hevelvarik 6y ago
Hardest thread to read without the article in HN history
smileypete 6y ago
Best description I've come across of architecture like this is 'ego driven utopia'...
vidarh 6y ago
It's an odd title; most of the article talks about books that are not focused on Brutalism, but on a range of styles of which brutalism appears to make up a limited part. E.g. it references "Imagine Moscow", but Stalin forcefully rejected Le Corbusier twice, and Moscow was never re-imagined in a brutalist manner in Moscow, but possibly in Brasilia (Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse[1] was inspired by his plans for Moscow, and Brasilia was designed to incorporate aspects of Ville Radieuse). I'm sure there are interesting examples of brutalism in Moscow (though most of the brutalism in Russia are down to Khrushchyovka [2]), but they postdates the era the book is about, and the most prominent design ideas for Moscow at the time were not brutalist. "Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia" seems to focus on the work of Zivorad Jankovic, much of which isn't brutalist either. Lastly it references "Soviet Metro Stations", but most of them are not brutalist at all - certainly not the most famous examples. If it wasn't for numerous references to brutalism in the text, I'd have assumed this was an editor messing around, but I'm not convinced the author of this piece knows what brutalism is. The books might well be interesting, though, but when the article tries to shoehorn them into a box they don't appear to fit in, it makes it hard to tell. It'd be nice if the author tried harder to describe the books in more detail rather than try to invent his own narrative around it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka
m0llusk 6y ago
It can make sense to remove art from its context, but romanticizing Soviet underground stations should always involve some humility to the sacrifice involved. Those stations cost phenomenal amounts at a time when much of the population was starving. The laborers that built them were pushed mercilessly, suffered terribly, and many died. To anyone who understands how those structures came to be they must be seen as monuments to human folly and misery.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  We should never forget the human cost of our civilization, from the people who toil endless hours to assemble our phones and computers, to the near slaves who extract the raw materials used in them, to the nomadic workers who pick the crops that end up in our supermarket, to the employee that restocks the shelves that has to work two shifts to feed their family and still requires food stamps to do that. Of course, some follies had higher human cost than others, but our comfortable lives are not entirely bloodless.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    The difference is that, unless they have been scammed by traffickers, every one of these workers chose that fate over a worse fate. If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      There's no talk of "choice" when, as you admit it, the choice is between near-slavery or death.
      - gridlockd 6y ago
        I don't admit that. However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.
airstrike 6y ago
My issue with Brutalism is that it seems to evoke a sense of helplessness of the individual against the sheer size of the State. No wonder it was so popular in totalitarian regimes. I often think of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. A city literally built in the middle of nowhere and with virtually no sidewalks, making it incredibly costly for individuals to reach it and organize themselves to protest against the government. Its streets literally have no name⁰. Imagine living on SHS W2 or SEN L1! I was raised to love Oscar Niemeyer, but nowadays I can't help wishing he chose to lend his beautiful creativity to something other than architecture. __________ 0. https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-living-in-Brasilia-refer-to-their-city-streets https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-living-in-Brasilia-refer...
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Why not? Imagine those addresses belonged to Logan V and Caprica VI :-)
- walrus01 6y ago
  Having seen both Brasilia and Islamabad, two contemporary master planned cities, I prefer the latter. Islamabad is just chaotic enough and weird enough, and every sector is unique... G9 is not like F7 and so on.
- forinti 6y ago
  The first time I visited Brasilia I saw a cleaning lady changing her uniform under a bridge. This describes perfectly the Brazilian state: big, distant, not prepared to deal in practical day to day issues (like having a place to change clothes or a sidewalk to walk on). The architecture underlines this mentality quite well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- gtpedrosa 6y ago
  Benjamim Moser wrote a whole book no the matter, called "Autoimperialismo". It litterally goes on how Brasilia's architecture is designed to convey the superiority of the state over the people. In fact there is no space for people. No sidewalks. Nothing is "reachable" by a pedestrian. And yet, it is the seat of the three powers.
Muromec 6y ago
Article has a weird claim about Kyiv metro and decommunisation. Kyiv metro stations are full of advertising eysores, that's true, but that predated decomunnisation laws by few decades. Actual decommunisation mostly affected station names (one can't have anything named after Lenin or his boys in Kyiv), removal of occasional scicle-and-hammer here and there and few major replacements. In some places communism-related imagenary was replaced with something more neutral and matching the style of the station, in others removed completely [0]. [0] http://www.berlogos.ru/article/dekommunizatsiya-kievskogo-metropolitena/ http://www.berlogos.ru/article/dekommunizatsiya-kievskogo-me...
michaelchisari 6y ago
I've always hated brutalism, but one look at green brutalism, which intersperses brutalist architecture with trees, foliage, plants and overgrowth and I fell in love. https://www.google.com/search?q=green+brutalism https://www.google.com/search?q=green+brutalism The greenery makes it look more like a mountain and less like a building. It tempers the coldness and abstraction of brutalism with the beauty of the natural environment.
- tylerscott 6y ago
  Thank you for providing me the phrase to describe my favorite architecture! TIL
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I can't help but think long term it is a ton of added maintenance costs as pretty as it may look in the moment. Ivy clinging to your stucco walls is not a good thing iconic as the look may be.
zanderz 6y ago
I recently learned that the word brutalism comes not from the imposing stature of the structures but from the French term for raw concrete: béton brut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
For a sneak peek into some of the most unexpectedly fascinating architecture in the Soviet Union (some brutalist, some very much not so), don't miss Soviet Bus Stops: http://herwigphoto.com/soviet-bus-stops/ http://herwigphoto.com/soviet-bus-stops/

75 points by prismatic 6y ago

hevelvarik 6y ago

Hardest thread to read without the article in HN history

smileypete 6y ago

Best description I've come across of architecture like this is 'ego driven utopia'...

vidarh 6y ago

It's an odd title; most of the article talks about books that are not focused on Brutalism, but on a range of styles of which brutalism appears to make up a limited part. E.g. it references "Imagine Moscow", but Stalin forcefully rejected Le Corbusier twice, and Moscow was never re-imagined in a brutalist manner in Moscow, but possibly in Brasilia (Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse[1] was inspired by his plans for Moscow, and Brasilia was designed to incorporate aspects of Ville Radieuse). I'm sure there are interesting examples of brutalism in Moscow (though most of the brutalism in Russia are down to Khrushchyovka [2]), but they postdates the era the book is about, and the most prominent design ideas for Moscow at the time were not brutalist. "Consumer Culture Landscapes in Socialist Yugoslavia" seems to focus on the work of Zivorad Jankovic, much of which isn't brutalist either. Lastly it references "Soviet Metro Stations", but most of them are not brutalist at all - certainly not the most famous examples. If it wasn't for numerous references to brutalism in the text, I'd have assumed this was an editor messing around, but I'm not convinced the author of this piece knows what brutalism is. The books might well be interesting, though, but when the article tries to shoehorn them into a box they don't appear to fit in, it makes it hard to tell. It'd be nice if the author tried harder to describe the books in more detail rather than try to invent his own narrative around it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka

m0llusk 6y ago

It can make sense to remove art from its context, but romanticizing Soviet underground stations should always involve some humility to the sacrifice involved. Those stations cost phenomenal amounts at a time when much of the population was starving. The laborers that built them were pushed mercilessly, suffered terribly, and many died. To anyone who understands how those structures came to be they must be seen as monuments to human folly and misery.

rbanffy 6y ago
We should never forget the human cost of our civilization, from the people who toil endless hours to assemble our phones and computers, to the near slaves who extract the raw materials used in them, to the nomadic workers who pick the crops that end up in our supermarket, to the employee that restocks the shelves that has to work two shifts to feed their family and still requires food stamps to do that. Of course, some follies had higher human cost than others, but our comfortable lives are not entirely bloodless.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  The difference is that, unless they have been scammed by traffickers, every one of these workers chose that fate over a worse fate. If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    There's no talk of "choice" when, as you admit it, the choice is between near-slavery or death.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      I don't admit that. However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.

airstrike 6y ago

My issue with Brutalism is that it seems to evoke a sense of helplessness of the individual against the sheer size of the State. No wonder it was so popular in totalitarian regimes. I often think of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. A city literally built in the middle of nowhere and with virtually no sidewalks, making it incredibly costly for individuals to reach it and organize themselves to protest against the government. Its streets literally have no name⁰. Imagine living on SHS W2 or SEN L1! I was raised to love Oscar Niemeyer, but nowadays I can't help wishing he chose to lend his beautiful creativity to something other than architecture. __________ 0. https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-living-in-Brasilia-refer-to-their-city-streets https://www.quora.com/How-do-people-living-in-Brasilia-refer...

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Why not? Imagine those addresses belonged to Logan V and Caprica VI :-)
walrus01 6y ago
Having seen both Brasilia and Islamabad, two contemporary master planned cities, I prefer the latter. Islamabad is just chaotic enough and weird enough, and every sector is unique... G9 is not like F7 and so on.
forinti 6y ago
The first time I visited Brasilia I saw a cleaning lady changing her uniform under a bridge. This describes perfectly the Brazilian state: big, distant, not prepared to deal in practical day to day issues (like having a place to change clothes or a sidewalk to walk on). The architecture underlines this mentality quite well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
gtpedrosa 6y ago
Benjamim Moser wrote a whole book no the matter, called "Autoimperialismo". It litterally goes on how Brasilia's architecture is designed to convey the superiority of the state over the people. In fact there is no space for people. No sidewalks. Nothing is "reachable" by a pedestrian. And yet, it is the seat of the three powers.

Muromec 6y ago

Article has a weird claim about Kyiv metro and decommunisation. Kyiv metro stations are full of advertising eysores, that's true, but that predated decomunnisation laws by few decades. Actual decommunisation mostly affected station names (one can't have anything named after Lenin or his boys in Kyiv), removal of occasional scicle-and-hammer here and there and few major replacements. In some places communism-related imagenary was replaced with something more neutral and matching the style of the station, in others removed completely [0]. [0] http://www.berlogos.ru/article/dekommunizatsiya-kievskogo-metropolitena/ http://www.berlogos.ru/article/dekommunizatsiya-kievskogo-me...

michaelchisari 6y ago

I've always hated brutalism, but one look at green brutalism, which intersperses brutalist architecture with trees, foliage, plants and overgrowth and I fell in love. https://www.google.com/search?q=green+brutalism https://www.google.com/search?q=green+brutalism The greenery makes it look more like a mountain and less like a building. It tempers the coldness and abstraction of brutalism with the beauty of the natural environment.

tylerscott 6y ago
Thank you for providing me the phrase to describe my favorite architecture! TIL
Nasrudith 6y ago
I can't help but think long term it is a ton of added maintenance costs as pretty as it may look in the moment. Ivy clinging to your stucco walls is not a good thing iconic as the look may be.

zanderz 6y ago

I recently learned that the word brutalism comes not from the imposing stature of the structures but from the French term for raw concrete: béton brut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago

For a sneak peek into some of the most unexpectedly fascinating architecture in the Soviet Union (some brutalist, some very much not so), don't miss Soviet Bus Stops: http://herwigphoto.com/soviet-bus-stops/ http://herwigphoto.com/soviet-bus-stops/