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Is there something wrong with me that I love Brutalist buildings? The Barbican in London is my favourite building and it feels so futuristic to me for some reas

• mercacona 8mo ago
  Not just futuristic, they’re designed with intention. That’s what I miss most of all about the current buildings.
• cbeach 8mo ago
  Futuristic in a Bladerunner way, not a Star Trek way. The kind of future where it always rains, it’s always nighttime, and people hide themselves away in fear.
  • saaaaaam 8mo ago
    I’m sure it would rain all the time in Star Trek were it not for the fact that it’s set on a space ship.
  • rob74 8mo ago
    The word you're looking for is dystopia (Star Trek being mostly utopia, at least in the original timeline and as far as Earth/the Federation is concerned).
• keiferski 8mo ago
  I like them for two reasons: 1. They go really well with greenery. There is a book and social media account that covers this called Brutalist Plants. The contrast works exceptionally well and reminds me of nature-integrated architecture. I’d almost even say that brutalist buildings without the exterior greenery are incomplete. 2. They are buildings created with a visually coherent philosophy, even if we might disagree with it. That makes them more interesting than most contemporary buildings, which are basically just generic shells made for the smallest budget possible.
  • roryirvine 8mo ago
    To illustrate your first point, it's worth having a look at the Southbank Centre's roof garden: https://thenudge.com/london-bars/queen-elizabeth-hall-roof-garden-southbank/ https://thenudge.com/london-bars/queen-elizabeth-hall-roof-g... The people in this thread complaining about how grim and grey it is have clearly never ventured up the yellow staircase!
• jillesvangurp 8mo ago
  Some buildings can be nice. But the real crime with brutalism was the stuff that got demolished to make room for it. Also, a lot of brutalist buildings have not aged well. Concrete gets ugly after a few decades. And there's also the notion that a lot of brutalist architecture that isn't all that beautiful. There are some counter examples of course. But there are also plenty of really nasty urban areas that aren't exactly attracting hordes of tourists because it makes people feel miserable rather than amazed. Cheap construction, a vision that never panned out, etc. I'm a big fan of the Bauhaus movement because it combines elements of what later became the brutalist movement but with a human perspective. There's something very optimistic about it and they thought hard about the human scale of things and how people would live in these buildings. A lot of that design still feels modern and progressive even a century later. Brutalism lost that human perspective.
  • louthy 8mo ago
    > But the real crime with brutalism was the stuff that got demolished to make room for it The Barbican was a literal bomb site after the war [1]. Blame Hitler, not urban planning. [1] https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/building-the-barbican/ https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collecti...