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Eco-brutalism: when angular concrete meets the wonder of nature
- hhshhhhjjjd 2y agoThe reinforced hill in Japan is fascinating. For stability during earthquakes?
- morsch 2y agoMore information, I think: https://www.arinoki.com/en/travel/aogashima/page07.shtml https://www.arinoki.com/en/travel/aogashima/page07.shtml
- littlestymaar 2y agoThe buildings pictured in illustration of the article are almost certainly made out of reinforced concrete, which is really antagonistic to the “eco” qualifier, given how short lived these buildings are due to rebar corrosion.
- medo-bear 2y agoI think you are misinformed. Reinforced concrete buildings can easily outlive 2/3 generations.
- dlahoda 2y ago60 years is way small. one person could have move in the end of of life. it should be 200.
- bluGill 2y agoI live in a 50 year old house and there are a lot of things we wouldn't do today. The walls are not well insulated and hard to retrofit. The attic meets minimum standards only because I added extra myself a couple years back - I wanted to do more than the minimum but the way it is built there isn't room for more. At least I avoided aluminum wiring (which was common a couple years before this house was built) but there is a lot about the wiring that doesn't meet todays standards. It isn't just style that we layout houses differently today. This house has been remodeled at great expense (30 years ago) and there are some things that are still wrong. Which is to say tearing down and building new to the latest standards is a good thing.
- littlestymaar 2y agoI live in a house that was built in 1840, and none of the issues you're complaining about exists here, since I had everything refurbished when I bought it. Destroying an entire building to fix the wiring or insulation would be insanely wasteful. Concrete is one of the most CO2 emissive technology, and it also consumes way more sand than what natural erosion produces, and thinking that all of this will be rotten in a century is heartbreaking.
- medo-bear 2y agoI also refurbished my 50 year old apartment which is part of a cute concrete monster i wouldn't change for the world. I've had no issues doing this and attained the highest possible energy rating because the architect that designed the building was a genius.
- littlestymaar 2y agoThat doesn't surprise me, the problem with reinforced concrete starts getting out of hands around a century.
- medo-bear 2y agoI think you are overstating the problem. No one expects these buildings to start falling apart any time soon
- littlestymaar 2y agoIf they are 50 years old, they are already, it may be hidden but the concrete cancer has most definitely kicked in at that point. Don't worry it's not going to have dramatic structural impact for the next 50 years, but at some point the bill will start coming to try and keep the building from falling apart. Until it's not economical to do so…
- 2y ago
- littlestymaar 2y agoNo I'm not, getting reinforced concrete to last beyond a century requires an increasing high amount of effort, which isn't the case with most other building materials.
- medo-bear 2y agoSuch as ?
- littlestymaar 2y agoStone, rubble masonry, brick (both fired and mud), wattle and daub or non-reinforced concrete! As long as you keep a roof on top of them, you'll have mostly local/superficial degradation, but with reinforced concrete you'll eventually end up with concrete cancer everywhere which is harder and harder to fight. See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Qew_bruecke_nf_beton_kaputt_34_von_46.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Qew_brue...
- medo-bear 2y agoNone of these come close to the performance of reinforced concrete in highly dense urban areas. They could be used in non supporting walls sure. I live in a statically outstanding building (very important where I live) that is over 50 years old and my apartment has the highest energy efficiency rating possible. The latter is not due directly to use of reinforced concrete but architectural design enabled by it
- littlestymaar 2y ago> None of these come close to the performance of reinforced concrete in highly dense urban areas. Paris, which is mostly made out of stone buildings and is among the densest city on earth, disagrees.
- medo-bear 2y ago
- Fricken 2y agoBrutalism has been very popular in civic architecture due to it's appearance of megalithic permanence but humans find it so ugly that a great deal of brutalist architecture has, ironically, been torn down.
- medo-bear 2y agoHumans also find it appealing and keep building brutalist architecture. Some other humans pay astronomical amounts of money for such pleasure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Building
- richrichie 2y agoThey look hideous.
- martindbp 2y agoIt's certainly an acquired taste
- mattkevan 2y agoI love the Barbican conservatory, it's one of my favourite places. It makes me feel like I'm in some kind of 1960s futuristic space arcology. Looking through the windows it's disappointing to see not the strange, alien landscape of another planet on the other side, but instead the strange alien landscape of central London.
- TallTales 2y agoThis is a matter of opinion but brutalism is so hideous.
- danlugo92 2y agoI hate brutalism but when it's sorrounded by nature it's like it "breathes" and the contrast is interesting.
- TallTales 2y agoIt makes for interesting photography, but I really dislike ugly concrete buildings. Post apocalypse photography of them is kind of appealing.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoThe problem with brutalism is that it is literally inhuman - it creates an environment in which humans do not fit. So in theory, nature could help, because humans feel that they fit in natural environments. But in practice, at least in the photos in the article, it doesn't work, because the nature doesn't look like it belongs there either. It looks either like weeds growing through cracks, or "tacked on", ineffectively trying to make you ignore the ugliness.
- d3w3y 2y agoThat seems to be the majority opinion, at least in my experience, but I've always really liked it. Maybe because it reminds me of so many science fiction settings. I do think blending the buildings with plants goes a long way to making them look more hospitable.
- input_sh 2y agoFor me the design always comes second, their sheer scale is what makes them amazing. Seeing them from the distance, thinking they're nearby, but then you just keep approaching and approaching and they keep getting bigger. What this slideshow does perfectly is picture them from a POV perspective, nowadays you mostly see drone shots.
- diydsp 2y agoIt's probably a lost cause like a lost trademark like Kleenex, crazy glue, and band aid, but since this is an intellectually-curious crowd, you might like to know that brutalism is not a 1:1 replacement of "visible concrete." It is so much more. Even in wikipedia, the general definition is there but obscured. Despite nearly every pictorial example in wikipedia featuring exposed concrete (as well as reddit's r/brutalist), any material can be found in a brutalist design. It must merely be exposed and accepted for what it is. e.g. wood shown to be wood and allowed to warp, decay, or even grow, as opposed to being overlaid with drywall. Stones not just in a foundation or a garden, but in a living room. This honesty and connection to materials is in contrast to the "dominating" sense of "brutalism," of which cheap government buildings are often twisted up in. Though the pictures on wikipedia are misleading, certain quotes from the page are worth reading. Specifically when brutalism is described as "an ethic, not an aesthetic". And also: "Peter Smithson believed that the core of brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly, stating "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material",[33] and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand." Source: wikipedia and have lots of architect friends.
- Eric_WVGG 2y agohuh. I had no idea. I live in a cool old concrete factory in Brooklyn that was haphazardly converted into lofts back in the nineties, and more recently purchased by developers to convert into "luxury" lofts. The conversion consists mostly of throwing a cheap wood veneer over the floors, carpeting in the hallways, newly painted drywall over various surfaces… I had never thought of the building as particularly "brutalist" before, but I lamented the covering of the worn concrete. "If people didn't want to live in an old factory… why would they move into an old factory?" I keep asking myself. Fortunately — believing these changes are upgrades — they haven't changed much for the residents that they didn't manage to evict, so my unit is still honest. And since it has an east-facing-window, it's even covered mostly with plants, like these photos :D
- somedude895 2y agoInteresting, but wouldn't that make every brick building, like, say, on a street in the UK, "brutalist"? I suppose you could argue there's a lack of brutalist intent, but still.
- recursivedoubts 2y agoarchitects and the politicians that approve their works should be forced to live in their creations
- sn0wleppard 2y agoLe Corbusier did, Goldfinger did, Neave Brown did. Have you seen the price of flats in the Barbican? Just because you don't like them aesthetically doesn't mean no-one does.
- recursivedoubts 2y agoyes it does
- neilknowsbest 2y agoSimilar to this is the Weyerhaeuser headquarters building [0] in Federal Way, WA. The campus is also home to the Pacific Bonsai Museum, which is a real gem. Not too far out of the way for anyone visiting Seattle (just a little ways south of the airport). [0] - https://www.som.com/projects/weyerhaeuser-corporate-headquarters/ https://www.som.com/projects/weyerhaeuser-corporate-headquar...
- andy99 2y agoI feel like there should be something in Montreal that would fit in here but I can't come up with a good example. The habitat '67 is close but doesn't have enough vegetation. There's various decaying concrete stuff in that area by Parc Jean Drapeau but again it doesn't quite fit. Any ideas?
- d3w3y 2y agoAnybody who likes this kind of architecture should check out the series of paintings "Visions from Another World" by Jean-Pierre Ugarte.
- self_awareness 2y agoI have a hypothesis that brutalism is only liked by people who don't have to live in it. Like communism I guess. For the rest, they don't want to have anything in common with brutalism (and communism).
- the__alchemist 2y agoIf you're interested in this juxtaposition in game form, check out The Talos Principle 2. Most of the game environments follow this pattern. (And with Unreal Engine 5's lighting effects!)
- martindbp 2y agoI want to dislike brutalism and generally prefer older European architecture, but after seeing a brutalist library on a sand beach in China I kind of learned to like it. Maybe it was the surrounding nature in combination with it that made it click. It's located in a gated community that has several brutalist structures: https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2018/11/16/china-changing-scapes-in-architecture-aranya-beidaihe.html https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2018/11/16/china-cha...
- zarazas 2y agohttps://www.bunker-stpauli.de/en/ https://www.bunker-stpauli.de/en/ In Hamburg an old big WW2 Bunker is currently being converted into Eco brutalism
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- indigo0086 2y agoThis is ugly