5 ms·

Brutalism was no accident. I think cars, and almost everything related to them, are waaaay worse than ugly buildings for our physical and mental health but I a

Brutalism was no accident. I think cars, and almost everything related to them, are waaaay worse than ugly buildings for our physical and mental health but I am afraid I'll die alone on this hill. The vast majority would kill for a parking spot, let alone giving up their smelly, loud chunk of metal

toshredsyousay 3y ago
I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more. A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter. I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    And there are going to be compromises in any case. Lots of residents will want to own cars to go to surrounding areas not all of which are ever going to be easily reachable by public transit and vice versa.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    It is mostly a communication issue. Seattle took relatively minor steps that have had a huge impact on building more housing: - eliminate parking requirements. Developers are still allowed to build as much parking as they want, but they are no longer required to. The impact on existing residents can be blunted by making the street parking timed and zoned unless you have an exemption permit, which is granted to all existing residents and doesn’t expire, but decreased over time to new ones. - mandate separating parking from rent. Renters only pay for parking if they use it. In practice, people will debate if having a car is worth it every time they change a lease. - employers over 100 employees are required to have commute management plans, and are incentivized/required to achieve lower single-person car commutes. Notably, how they do it doesn’t really matter, but it can help mitigate a large portion of car dependency which is the suburbanization of jobs into areas only accessible by car. The last one I actually think is the most important, and it’s also the easiest because it doesn’t impact residents and if anything mitigates the most common complaints about new jobs.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> Brutalism was no accident. Care to expand on that? If it was on purpose, whose purpose, and why?
- Tanoc 3y ago
  Brutalism was designed to expose the functionality of the way everything was built. We'd been using Portland cement for a few decades at that point, but we always hid it behind facades meant to harken back to traditional architectural functions. Covering Portland cement in brickwork or arranged timber was a common way of doing that. By exposing the underlying core of the building Brutalism was meant to display that transparency would only be allowed so far as to show what a monolith the power structure who used it actually was. Brutalist architecture has few glass openings, vertically massive internal atriums, large thick columns, interior or exterior walls rising at harsh unnatural angles, and consecutive terracing without bracing, all unachievable with traditional building methods or in then-contemporary Mid-Century Modernist architecture. All of this was only possible due to the strong central structure, representative of the aforementioned "monolith" of power.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Well it was deliberately created and sold by a specific architecture school. Not all brutalist is bad though.
  - barry-cotter 3y ago
    Not all brutalism is bad. But none of it is beautiful and most of it is so ugly it’s an assault on the soul. It can relatively easily be striking or interesting to look at but it’s a testament to how difficult or expensive it is to make concrete an attractive colour that no one ever does it.
- trgn 3y ago
  Modernism. Infatuation with the transformative power of high technology (both the physical and bureaucratic kind). The preceding bourgeois order was held responsible for class extortion (from the perspective of the emancipating proles) and synonymous with a small minded pettiness (from the perspective of a libertarian youth). Modernism was an iconoclastic project, a submission to an engineering fetish.

toshredsyousay 3y ago

I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).

sokoloff 3y ago
I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more. A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter. I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.
- ghaff 3y ago
  And there are going to be compromises in any case. Lots of residents will want to own cars to go to surrounding areas not all of which are ever going to be easily reachable by public transit and vice versa.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  It is mostly a communication issue. Seattle took relatively minor steps that have had a huge impact on building more housing: - eliminate parking requirements. Developers are still allowed to build as much parking as they want, but they are no longer required to. The impact on existing residents can be blunted by making the street parking timed and zoned unless you have an exemption permit, which is granted to all existing residents and doesn’t expire, but decreased over time to new ones. - mandate separating parking from rent. Renters only pay for parking if they use it. In practice, people will debate if having a car is worth it every time they change a lease. - employers over 100 employees are required to have commute management plans, and are incentivized/required to achieve lower single-person car commutes. Notably, how they do it doesn’t really matter, but it can help mitigate a large portion of car dependency which is the suburbanization of jobs into areas only accessible by car. The last one I actually think is the most important, and it’s also the easiest because it doesn’t impact residents and if anything mitigates the most common complaints about new jobs.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

> Brutalism was no accident. Care to expand on that? If it was on purpose, whose purpose, and why?

Tanoc 3y ago
Brutalism was designed to expose the functionality of the way everything was built. We'd been using Portland cement for a few decades at that point, but we always hid it behind facades meant to harken back to traditional architectural functions. Covering Portland cement in brickwork or arranged timber was a common way of doing that. By exposing the underlying core of the building Brutalism was meant to display that transparency would only be allowed so far as to show what a monolith the power structure who used it actually was. Brutalist architecture has few glass openings, vertically massive internal atriums, large thick columns, interior or exterior walls rising at harsh unnatural angles, and consecutive terracing without bracing, all unachievable with traditional building methods or in then-contemporary Mid-Century Modernist architecture. All of this was only possible due to the strong central structure, representative of the aforementioned "monolith" of power.
ghaff 3y ago
Well it was deliberately created and sold by a specific architecture school. Not all brutalist is bad though.
- barry-cotter 3y ago
  Not all brutalism is bad. But none of it is beautiful and most of it is so ugly it’s an assault on the soul. It can relatively easily be striking or interesting to look at but it’s a testament to how difficult or expensive it is to make concrete an attractive colour that no one ever does it.
trgn 3y ago
Modernism. Infatuation with the transformative power of high technology (both the physical and bureaucratic kind). The preceding bourgeois order was held responsible for class extortion (from the perspective of the emancipating proles) and synonymous with a small minded pettiness (from the perspective of a libertarian youth). Modernism was an iconoclastic project, a submission to an engineering fetish.