7 ms·

I am surprised brutalist became popular. Concrete ends up really weathered over time and to me you end up with drab and dingy looking buildings after a while: “

• beardyw 4y ago
  It was a design choice to celebrate the material being used - concrete. I think only architects ever really loved them.
  • kasey_junk 4y ago
    I’m a huge fan of brutalist architecture and am not ann architect. I live in a brutalist townhome and it exemplifies the things I love about the style, lack of ornamentation, function over form, yet scaled and appropriate to its location. The simplicity and usefulness of the house lends it as much elegance as it needs.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      It's the appearance of function over form. That's why USSR used it as propaganda. Concrete is terrible surface material because it is impossible to maintain and repair.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        No. The concretes function may not be optimal, but it is there to hold the building up, to form the walls, to provide conduits for people and services, etc. It is not a facade, it is not cladding, it is the functional building its-very-self. Brutalist buildings celebrate their exoskeletons.
      • vidarh 4y ago
        The USSR used it as a cheap means of trying to meet a massive housing shortage first and foremost. It abandoned the far more ornamental Stalinist style for brutalism as part of Khrushchev's push for that. Note the far more ostentatious buildings under Stalin and Stalin's rejection of Le Corbusiers extremely radical proposals for redevelopment of Moscow in favour of far more traditional designs. To the extent it was later used as propaganda, that was a follow on effect once stagnation forced doubling down on construction that had initially been intended as relatively short term cheap housing.
      • tptacek 4y ago
        You get that you're criticizing a house you haven't seen, right?
        • password11 4y ago
          We've all seen enough post-Soviet cities to make an educated guess.
          • arpa 4y ago
            lol i don't think so.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • cloutchaser 4y ago
    I wonder if we will feel the same about “minimal” design in the future. I really don’t see anything beautiful about a white box with black windows, yet architects seem obsessed with it. Probably because it’s called good design yet it’s almost the cheapest possible design outwards. Convenient. But I think in 30 years we will facepalm at these white boxes we call houses.
    • ehnto 4y ago
      These things often oscillate around certain aspects. We bounce between ornate and simple over history for example. Minimalism is handy because it's a cheap and hard to mess it up. Like pop music. Look at McMansions, which is a cohort of styles that are much easier to get wrong, and there are many objectively bad homes. But for minimalism, the worst you can often say is it's boring. Correct, but boring.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • Telemakhos 4y ago
    My father was an architect and designed brutalist buildings back in the 60s and 70s, some of them windowless. By the 90s he had come to regret this work deeply.
• parenthesis 4y ago
  Stone also gets really grubby over time, but for some reason that still looks okay but the concrete doesn't so much.
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  >I am surprised brutalist became popular it never was popular, it wasn't an organic movement. It was pushed by the Soviets and those sympathetic to them in Western governments and academia who used tax payer money to construct hideous buildings
  • jdgoesmarching 4y ago
    I’m not sure why you’re framing an effort to construct a ton of housing as efficiently as possible as some spooky Soviet conspiracy. Maybe governments and academia were just sympathetic to the idea of using that tax payer money on cheaper buildings, would you prefer they pay more to suit different aesthetic tastes? Tangentially, speaking of non-organic movements, the history of the CIA funding abstract expressionist art in the Cold War to serve as a foil to Soviet realism is fascinating. Arguably there are echoes of those influences in this conversation.
  • pkd 4y ago
    I don't think so. Initial Soviet architecture wasn't brutalist. Stalinist architecture was in fact very classical inspired. You can see that in the seven sisters buildings in Moscow. Even the late Soviet era blocks were not brutalist. That style came up in the UK and was more popular in the Western world than outside of it. Brutalism like all other styles is a mixture of the requirements of the time and a response to the culture at the time. The building features the original article is railing against is simply poor design. A poorly designed classical inspired building will look exactly as bad.
  • vidarh 4y ago
    Le Corbusier tried pushing his designs on the Soviet Union, and Stalin rejected it in favour of a far more ornamental style. The push towards stripping back ornamentation gained traction in the west long before the time Khrushchev was able to push for this in Soviet construction.
  • pyrale 4y ago
    The essence of brutalism's success is not about leftist propaganda or whatnot. It's simply a byproduct of war, and of the postwar economic boom. Basically, cities were left levelled [1], and the postwar population and economic boom created an intense housing and building shortage over a few decades. new construction methods centered around concrete proved cheaper and faster, and helped bridge that shortage. Brutalism can also be pretty pleasant when it's well done - which most of the building in that style aren't, due to being build as fast and as cheap as possible to address the situation at hand. [1]: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-story-of-how-le-havre-was-rebuilt-after-wwii/ https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-story-...
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  I think our tastes just changed. It’s like vinyl floors, it was the rage at some point and people really valued them. Or heavily decorated wallpapers. So many of that stuff is just considered fugly now.
  • brewdad 4y ago
    The functionality of vinyl is making a comeback, we just make them look like wood now.
    • omnimus 4y ago
      which is the most terrible, fake and cheap looking way how to bring it back
    • wkat4242 4y ago
      Vinyl has never become unpopular in the Netherlands. Especially because most rented flats don't allow wooden floors for noise reasons. Vinyl gives a similar though cheaper look but dampens noise a lot more.
• LarryMullins 4y ago
  It was made to be ugly by people so traumatized by war that they no longer believed in beauty.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    This comment has proven to be very unpopular, but I stand by it. Do you guys think it a coincidence that such an ugly anti-humanist style was developed in the immediate aftermath of a huge and brutal war?
• twelvechairs 4y ago
  The whole point of brutalism was that Concrete doesn't wear much over time. A high pressure hose will remove 'weathering' of concrete buildings very effectively and cheaply. I think your problem arises not from concrete but from these buildings often being public (including public housing) and having shoestring maintenance budgets. You spend the same to maintain most other materials and they will have fallen down by now, or at least parts of them would. A good example of one where they did care a lot about the finish and its lasting finish is the Barbican in London - there's a little about it here [0] [0] https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/barbican-story/construction/hammered-and-brushed-finish/ https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/barbican-story/construction...
  • MichaelDickens 4y ago
    > I think your problem arises not from concrete but from these buildings often being public (including public housing) and having shoestring maintenance budgets. This is what I was thinking looking at that first Hong Kong building--it would look a lot nicer if it wasn't so dirty.
  • AlanYx 4y ago
    >Concrete doesn't wear much over time.... A high pressure hose will remove 'weathering' of concrete buildings very effectively and cheaply. Concrete eventually starts spalling, and high pressure washing actually accelerates the spalling process. The reason these buildings aren't washed more regularly is because of that tradeoff; it's not (generally) because of maintenance budgets. Once you get spalling, maintenance becomes expensive. The Barbican can afford it, but this is one of the reasons a lot of brutalist buildings in Eastern Europe are getting sealed and painted.
  • tabtab 4y ago
    It's possible to tint concrete and use different tints for different sections to make it less concrete-ish.
• lmm 4y ago
  My pet theory is that it became popular in an era where buildings were judged by black-and-white photographs of them. In real life bare concrete is drab and grey - but in a black-and-white photograph textured concrete is one of the more interesting surfaces to look at.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    I don't buy this theory, brutalism comes chronologically after color photography. Also, more importantly, buildings are judged live by who sees them.
    • lmm 4y ago
      > Also, more importantly, buildings are judged live by who sees them. They should be. But in that period of time there was a whole lot of internationalism even as international travel wasn't cheap enough to be routine. So you could imagine a committee commissioning a famous architect like Le Corbusier from another country when most of them had only seen his buildings in photographs - and while colour photographs existed, printing them was expensive, so most widely circulated photos would have been black and white.
• jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  My understanding is Brutalism arose when building codes still had limits on window size and proportion of glass vs other materials on the facades of large buildings. This prevented the glass curtain towers that became popular later until codes changed. Brutalism embraced this constraint as well as the most expedient materials for building skyscrapers. Intellectually and aesthetically I like this choice of honesty in reflecting materials personally. Where Brutalism failed is similar to other grand modernist projects: it failed to engage properly at the human scale, creating environments that look striking, but that also read to most people as cold and alienating. In practical terms this sort of grand architecture usually fails to anticipate how humans will actually use the spaces, leading to spaces that are opposed to humans organic behaviors. All that said, when Brutalism is tempered with empathy, and combined with interior design that both features and softens its starkness, I quite like it. The old library in my home town was brutalist. This is the exterior: https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8b7a56ab55fbd5227b8d5c04be176e56?rik=T6APBDIYVCGavw&riu=http%3a%2f%2fmedia.bizj.us%2fview%2fimg%2f4950251%2fwichitapubliclibrary1*1200xx2250-1266-0-117.jpg&ehk=qFNtfskRbvqCyjHJf%2fBxXoPQ6oT%2bk%2bSR866IY5UM7%2bM%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0 https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8b7a56ab55fbd5227b8d5c04be176e56... Unfortunately there's no photos online of the old interior, but it did a good job of humanizing the starkness. On the other hand, the exterior also showed the flaws of brutalism, having wide empty featureless grass plains that I never once saw anyone use for relaxation, a picnic, etc, in two decades of living in that town.
• bobthepanda 4y ago
  Additional flourishes cost money. Keep in mind, that at the time these were built, these were generally meant as rapid responses to cheaply house large amounts of people with basic living standards. After the war, most places had most of their housing stock destroyed, and whatever was left was also in high demand due to postwar baby booms, and for rapidly developing "Asian tiger" economies like Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, rapid urbanization. When you need to house millions and your budget is paltry, aesthetic is one of the first things to get chopped. And for many of the people who would live in them, having a unit with its own running water and electricity, toilet, bath and kitchen was a significant upgrade, especially if their previous residence was a tin shack in a slum or a refugee camp.
• peepee1982 4y ago
  I thought that was the purpose of using concrete: that it weathers and develops a much nicer patina than many other buildling materials.