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The Humanise Campaign call for an end to boring buildings
- zeristor 3y agoI love the Brutalist Houses of Parliament! That’s such a good idea.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GeoAtreides 3y agoI think brutalist Houses of Parliament + whatever style the Tower of London was would make an amazing backdrop for an AU tv series, something like Kings (2009); the contrast between the drab modern buildings and the old monarchic traditions and pomp (think Gormenghast), the disconnect between our real-world familiarity of what the buildings are and what are we seeing, would be really interesting to explore. And I think there's something to putting mundane established knowledge against new backdrops to see new perspectives and new nuances.
- peterstjohn 3y agoYou would just film almost _directly_ across the river and shoot on the South Bank, one of the major brutalist outposts in London. It's lovely.
- teddyh 3y agoBrutalism is the new gothic.
- Aeolun 3y agoI think there’s a lot to be said for buildings that consist solely of glass and steel. Sunlight is the single best thing that a building can have in my opinion. That’s not to say that we cannot make them look nice. You can probably do the same thing with elegant buildings, but if you try to build one of those now your costs rise by 400%.
- llamaimperative 3y agoYou can make buildings that get ample light (and don’t require as much internal climate control) without covering them in windows.
- cj 3y agoCan you elaborate? In my experience, more windows = more light (and more climate control needed)
- voisin 3y agoClerestory windows allow in tons of natural light while allowing you to have something less than floor to ceiling glass, so you can maintain a high R-value in the wall assembly. Think: a long strip of glass toward the ceiling with smaller windows elsewhere on the wall for visual connection to the outside.
- llamaimperative 3y ago“Ample” meaning a sufficient amount of light for a building to feel airy/bright/well-lit. Of course more windows = more light. And by “covering with windows” I mean actual wall to wall floor to ceiling windows like modern personality-free skyscrapers.
- Aeolun 3y agoAbsolutely, but glass is cheap. It also allows you to make your building a bit deeper because of the little bit of extra light. Even better, it weighs relatively nothing, and you can stack it as high as you want.
- a3w 3y agoI have no clue what the original buildings look like. But if we need to run a campaign about how to build, it should be "build like in africa - low resource investments, heat-resistant living spaces"
- myspy 3y agoI went to school in a brutalist building from the 70ies? and I always hated it. I didn‘t know why at the time but the concrete everywhere and the soullessness influences the inhabitants. This could be done better with wood paneling or painting it. But even as architecture from the outside it just looks sad, cold, depressing.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoThere's a video on YouTube of the Smithsons - a couple who built some landmark Brutalist projects in the UK. They're clearly either mentally unstable, or on drugs, or both. They made a name for themselves by designing a modernist not-quite-brutalist-yet school - plenty of concrete, glass and rectangles, which turned it into a greenhouse in summer, a fridge in winter, and an echo chamber for shrieking kids all year round. Some architects are very strange people, far more interested in building huge sculptures that happen to have rooms in them than creating inspiring usable spaces.
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- kouru225 3y agoAI is the solution to this issue. AI increases the amount of variation that automation can produce, and we can bring back all those maximalist designs from the past.
- Dalewyn 3y ago[flagged]
- HPsquared 3y agoUnstyled plain HTML is the web version of Brutalism.
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- doctorpangloss 3y agoIt is too bad Thomas Heatherwick’s “let’s try AI” project is sarcastic. Imagine CAD is first invented and your world class creative shop is like, “Let’s make a poop doodle.” Then there are comments here noting some of these buildings are pretty nice looking. Sarcastic is 200% the wrong approach. And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.
- yostrovs 3y ago> And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism. But people who have to live around brutalism tend to suffer because of it. It's like abstract contemporary art made into your living space. But you're not abstract and so you don't fit in.
- jdietrich 3y agoSome of the sought-after addresses in London are in brutalist developments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate
- heyoni 3y agoThat doesn’t look too bad from the outside. Must be all the water and greenery.
- dgroshev 3y agoI love Barbican. One often overlooked quality of Barbican is how much design work went into it: these corridors, galleries, balconies are all unique, many design elements are one-off, and there are more than 80 flat types https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/plans/ https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/plans/ This makes it much more organic, surprisingly, than most modern developments. It's not just the same thing copypasted over and over, Barbican has a very human, natural variety to it, despite the superficially harsh appearance. Sometimes this variety can even backfire, because Barbican can feel like a maze. But that's a consequence of it not being the standard street grid. I wish we had more architecture like that.
- Mumps 3y agoI'm so happy to see this - the enshitification of housing worldwide (but especially in London, looking at you Royal Wharf) has been on my mind for ages. I'd love to see 'architectural beauty' be regulated. Unfortunately, developers literally only want one thing and it's disgusting (most money for cheapest possible build).
- CommieBobDole 3y agoNote that this is not a campaign for a return to traditional design - it's run by Thomas Heatherwick who designs weird modern buildings and giant public art-adjacent things, like the Vessel at Hudson Yards which is closed because people keep jumping off of it to their deaths, or that giant spiky thing in Manchester that was unstable and was sold for scrap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Heatherwick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Heatherwick
- sidewndr46 3y agoSo basically comes from a purveyor of state sponsored Urban trash?
- trebligdivad 3y agoThat giant spiky thing actually looked quite nice before it fell to bits. (I think it was 'The B of the Bang'). Maybe he could have done a better job of the new music venue here; 'the coop arena' which the BBC rightly describes as 'a giant black box'. Alas with less aesthetics than a Borg cube.
- praptak 3y agoI think Christopher Alexander still has the best answers as to why the contemporary buildings suck. Lack of ornament and boring shapes are just the tip.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoIt's really a tragedy he died before The Nature of Order could break into the architectural mainstream. It's chicken soup for the aesthetic soul every time I see yet another terrible new project go up.
- HPsquared 3y agoBrutalism looks terrible in the UK climate, the damp concrete gets stained and watermarked, it looks diseased.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoWe have boring buildings because they are cheap. Can some wacky design be cheaper than boring building? Unlikely. Is investor willing to voluntarily spend more money to build wacky design? No. There you go, your campaign makes no economical sense
- snapplebobapple 3y agoI'm still waiting for the mind your own business campaign to end people butting into what other people are building on their own property to show up, it's the actual campaign we need.