4 ms·

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.

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.