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Brutalist architecture is often beautiful, but it certainly wasn't designed for people, but rather as a monuments to the ego of the architect. I visited one of

Brutalist architecture is often beautiful, but it certainly wasn't designed for people, but rather as a monuments to the ego of the architect. I visited one of Le Corbusier's "creations" once (this one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9_radieuse_de_Marseille https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9_radieuse_de_Marseill...) Soul-crushing is indeed the only thing I could think of while there. [EDIT]: Here's a good article on function vs form: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... Best quote in the article, on a design from Peter Eisenman (who IMO lived up to his last name): "A Peter Eisenman building. Note the total lack of plant life. Plant life might accidentally make you feel happy and comfortable, and happiness is a bourgeois illusion. The tiny figures on the left seem to be attempting a picnic on the curve. They are probably cold and windswept—as they should be." If you are into these sort of things, here's an interesting read: a debate between Eisenman and Alexander where the latter accuses the former of "fucking up the world" https://www.ahenryrose.com/resources/alexander-eisenman-the-infamous-1982-debate https://www.ahenryrose.com/resources/alexander-eisenman-the-...

m4rtink 5y ago
One issue with many Czech brutalist buildings is that they are brutally impractical - no heat isolation, mold problems, clogged toilets, not enough natural light, not accessible for the disabled, hard to repurchase, slowly falling apart yet using many custom parts that are no longer available & and the buildings are like 50% made of asbestos by weight. They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but often not very useful.
mrweasel 5y ago
Many of the brutalist buildings, perhaps not those in the USSR, are designed with humans very much in mind. Many of the issues that have been with life in brutalist builds are down to them being frequently used for social housing. Placing a large number of relative poor people, drug users, people with mental health problem and a myriad of other issues in the same place will cause trouble regardless of the building type. That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Well, what is the causality there? Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side. But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles kicked flat. This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an English translation of the heroin story "We Children from Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F. She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost constructed to make childhood more complicated and less joyful. A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at least not without good evidence.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    > A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them. My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.
  - def_true_false 5y ago
    There is a much simpler explanation: People who can will eventually move into new (or renovated) construction, because of substantial improvements in quality of life. People who can't are left with the older buildings. The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.
inglor_cz 5y ago
These two links made a very interesting reading material. Thank you!
eternalban 5y ago
Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman. Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life. The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops"). What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs. If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it! -- p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms. And then we can ask the questions: Does architecture favor a specific class? Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case. Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less? Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds? And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?
- cousin_it 5y ago
  I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show. Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast. > Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.

m4rtink 5y ago

One issue with many Czech brutalist buildings is that they are brutally impractical - no heat isolation, mold problems, clogged toilets, not enough natural light, not accessible for the disabled, hard to repurchase, slowly falling apart yet using many custom parts that are no longer available & and the buildings are like 50% made of asbestos by weight. They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but often not very useful.

mrweasel 5y ago

Many of the brutalist buildings, perhaps not those in the USSR, are designed with humans very much in mind. Many of the issues that have been with life in brutalist builds are down to them being frequently used for social housing. Placing a large number of relative poor people, drug users, people with mental health problem and a myriad of other issues in the same place will cause trouble regardless of the building type. That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Well, what is the causality there? Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side. But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles kicked flat. This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an English translation of the heroin story "We Children from Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F. She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost constructed to make childhood more complicated and less joyful. A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at least not without good evidence.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  > A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them. My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.
- def_true_false 5y ago
  There is a much simpler explanation: People who can will eventually move into new (or renovated) construction, because of substantial improvements in quality of life. People who can't are left with the older buildings. The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.

inglor_cz 5y ago

These two links made a very interesting reading material. Thank you!

eternalban 5y ago

Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman. Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life. The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops"). What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs. If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it! -- p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms. And then we can ask the questions: Does architecture favor a specific class? Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case. Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less? Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds? And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?

cousin_it 5y ago
I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show. Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast. > Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.