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> Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by politica

• bad_username 11d ago
  > Why would someone invest in an elaborate and expensive design when they could simply throw up a slab of brutalist concrete and punch some windows into it? But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? I don't believe they factor the financials in when they choose which picture they like better.
  • 7bit 11d ago
    Because the commenter you're replying to has no idea what brutalism is, and is confusing a ugly concrete block with holes in it with brutalism.
    • IslandRebel 11d ago
      I've seen plenty of examples of Brutalism in architecture (in the UK) first hand and to most people it looks like ugly concrete blocks with hole in it.
      • rbanffy 11d ago
        Sometimes being "ugly" is the point. You want to bring out emotions - the building can be grandiose, imposing, surprising, but, if you look closely, it's a carefully crafted work of art that's also highly functional. One great example from the city where I grew up: https://hicarquitectura.com/2024/09/lina-bo-bardi-sesc-pompeia/ https://hicarquitectura.com/2024/09/lina-bo-bardi-sesc-pompe...
        • IslandRebel 11d ago
          I don't care for this argument at all. There are functional buildings where I live from the Industrial Revolution that look quite nice. I want things to look nice where I live. I don't want them to be ugly and demoralising. As for the building you showed me. I think it looks awful. It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium. https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-architectural-reviews/a6236-an-architectural-review-of-the-movie-equilibrium/ https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-architectural-revie...
          • rbanffy 10d ago
            > It actually looks worse than the architecture in movie Equilibrium. Taste is extremely subjective. I am an engineer and I've spent a whole career training my tastes (for system design, hardware architecture) to be less subjective and help guide my work towards what's good. Some of that seems to have leaked to building and city planning, because my taste seems to align well with the experts in those fields.
            • IslandRebel 10d ago
              The article is about the schism between the experts and what people generally prefer and recommends that said experts should try to take that into account. People almost always prefer traditional architecture. Is it really subjective when a vast majority of people agree? I suppose technically it is, but at the same time not really. There is obviously something that people prefer about it other than it being old.
  • dxdm 11d ago
    Why, indeed.
    • rbanffy 11d ago
      We really need to understand why people who study a subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding would show a clear preference for something...
      • dxdm 10d ago
        Yes, I would like to understand why this is their preference. Aren't you curious? I don't think it's enough to say: these people are experts, so in this issue of style and taste their answer is automatically correct, no more info needed, thank you. Also, I'd be surprised if ALL "people who study [this] subject and dedicate their lives to studying and perfecting their understanding" would share the same preference.
        • rbanffy 10d ago
          > their answer is automatically correct, No, but I'll trust their opinion on building design and urban planning over yours the same way I wouldn't trust you to do brain surgery or landing an airliner. I am a skilled pilot in simulators, but I still wouldn't trust myself to land a real plane.
          • dxdm 10d ago
            I thought we were talking about how things look, not the skill that goes into making them look like it. These are sufficiently different things. Fashion. Taste. Informed by functional and economical requirements, materials, surroundings, urban planning, yes, but in the end, there's also an element of taste and subjective preference that can clump together in periods or zeitgeist forms or whatever you like to call it. As taste and preference go, you are free to delegate yours to others without question, as you seem to be doing here so passionately. I don't find empty appeals to authority very convincing. But maybe I misunderstand what you're saying. I'm willing to hold two concepts in my head: my own impression of the appearance of different examples of a certain architectural style (which, like all others, has better and worse ones); and the question why some people who know a lot more than me might see it differently than me. Their reasons and my reasons might both be valid, but mine would be far less interesting. Hence, my question. Finally: You seem to think that I asked you to trust my opinion, or even to change yours. You might want to look into why you think that, because that's not at all what I did. I asked something entirely different.
  • AlanYx 11d ago
    >But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
  • Zigurd 11d ago
    Brutalism isn't cheaper. Not even in the secondary market. Brutalist masterpieces like the Barbican are highly desirable residences.
    • rbanffy 11d ago
      I am a fan of brutalism, but there is also some survivorship bias at work - I'm sure some brutalist hellscapes were demolished because nobody wanted to live in them. Now, as a contrast, another masterpiece from the city where I grew up: https://www.scribd.com/document/955270807/g10-Cultural-Center-Sao-Paulo-Case-Study https://www.scribd.com/document/955270807/g10-Cultural-Cente...
  • jpalawaga 11d ago
    brutalism doesn't refer to the architecture being "brutal". it refers to "béton brut" - french for 'raw concrete'. in this case, brutalism could be more readily understood as 'rawism'. it also emerged during (and is a descendant of) the modernist architectural period, which is well known for those boring, non-descript office towers. there's nothing wrong with the simplicity of raw concrete. but just like other architecture, it can be done well and it can be done poorly. it can be done for utility, and it can be done for extravagance. I think many people think of non-descript office towers when they think of brutalism, rather than all of the interesting things that can be done with a single material (shapes, textures, designs, etc. it's a very versatile + strong medium!).
  • rbanffy 11d ago
    > But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism? Because they study architecture. The article is profoundly anti-intellectual. This discourse, that colleges indoctrinate people and, thus, cause them to disagree with some form of "truth" that the uneducated masses know.
    • tengbretson 11d ago
      > Because they study architecture. If the architecture they're studying is divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? They may as well be studying their own butts.
      • rbanffy 11d ago
        > divorced from the preferences and needs of the uneducated masses then who cares? Preferences, perhaps, but needs, I'm sure not. On this, I much prefer being divorced from preferences, than designing soul-less buildings designed solely to cater to preferences, without leveraging the knowledge gained through years of study.
        • bobthepanda 11d ago
          Modernist architecture certainly has its fair share of misfires, particularly where the postwar architects were attempting social engineering to be “cleaner” or more “rational.” The schools were often teaching ideals based in no empirical evidence.
          • rbanffy 10d ago
            It's hard to build something new based on empirical evidence because the thing you are building might be such a radical departure from previous experience the data you have simply does not apply.
            • bobthepanda 10d ago
              The problem is that a core group of modernists kept doggedly insisting on it after it was proven to not work. For example, we know now that pedestrian skyways only work in limited contexts and have plenty of downsides; or that a large, concrete windswept plaza is pretty to look at but pretty antisocial and unusable space, and yet you still see this kind of thing in the latest from say Zaha Hadid et al. It’s why a next wave of architects and planners have coined terms like “bird-shit architecture” that only looks good completely devoid of context and landed from the sky.
• ithkuil 11d ago
  Plenty of old people now grew up in a phase in history where we were building ugly cheap things
  • bradyd 11d ago
    That was all of history.
• rdwrrr 11d ago
  Perhaps counter intuitive but beauty standards are not simply just sentiment.
  • rbanffy 11d ago
    And also change a lot over time.
• fangspire 11d ago
  >In the old days, buildings were made to impress Google "survivorship bias".
  • like_any_other 11d ago
    If survivorship bias had anything to do with it, you would not have old villages where every house is in the same style, and they're all beautiful. There's simply no evidence that old buildings were randomly ugly or beautiful, and only the beautiful ones survived. Look at 1950s New York - almost every building is beautiful, and every building is more beautiful than modern ones: https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2020/01/31/new-york-city-in-color/ https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2020/01/31/new-york-city-i... That's not survivorship bias, that's going from near-uniformly beautiful to uniformly-ugly.
    • vel0city 11d ago
      Almost all the buildings in those postcards look old, plain, and boring to me. Some look decent. The Radio City Music Hall building, while definitely impressive for 1932, just looks old and worn out and it's and old postcard. Ooh wow another government building in the classical revival style with big tall roman pillars making up a Portico made from white stone, how original, never seen that before. And are you really telling me the building on the left here actually looks good? That's the kind of building you'd love to walk past every day, the kind of building you'd want to spend all day inside? These buildings look like they're covered in tons of nasty soot and gunk and generally don't seem like clean places to be. https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Postcard-park-avenue-new-york-central-building-color-1950s.jpg https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01... Personally I'd prefer to spend my time in and around a building like this than any of those: https://labs.utdallas.edu/mems/files/2021/08/nserloutside.jpg https://labs.utdallas.edu/mems/files/2021/08/nserloutside.jp... To me a building like this looks a lot more interesting. Lots of mixtures in materials, textures, and colors. And as mentioned before, this building lets in a lot of natural lighting. It lets you see outside instead of just constantly feeling like you're trapped in a jail cell. Its not even like I really hate old architecture, I just think a lot of these examples given suck. I like this, for example (although it is getting close to overstylized for my taste): https://www.adventuresofacarryon.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/dallas-foto-walk-2.jpg https://www.adventuresofacarryon.com/wordpress/wp-content/up... Buildings like this as well, although definitely not as much natural light. Notice its actually nice, clean, and maintained compared to the other examples given. Still kind of old and boring though in the end. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Dallas_County_Admin_Building.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Dallas_C...
• like_any_other 11d ago
  > In the old days, buildings were made to impress, to project wealth, to show the generosity of wealthy benefactors to their town or city. Take a look around somewhere like historic Bruges, which benefited from the wealth of local merchants. Incredibly impressive. Take a look at any old poverty-stricken farming village. It'll be strikingly beautiful compared to anything modern. This is the Anamosa state prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/media/File:Anamosa_State_Penitentiary_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamosa_State_Penitentiary#/me... This is Anamosa middle school: https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG_8670.jpg https://www.anamosa.k12.ia.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/IMG... > Not remotely cost effective. This is the main building of the Ontario college of art and design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OCAD_University_(52662465213).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCAD_University#/media/File:OC... Why are we still humoring the "cost effective" explanation, when, whenever the people in charge of design are given free reign, they make non-cost-effective, ugly buildings, ugly in the exact same way all the other "cost effective" buildings are ugly? Whenever they are asked which they prefer visually, ignoring cost, they pick the ugly buildings. Meanwhile anything old, from farms to literal prisons, is beautiful. And all those old buildings you claim didn't care about cost effectiveness, were built in a time when the GDP per capita was 4.6x lower than today [1]. If you believe GDP measures wealth, if you believe there was economic progress and we are materially better off than in the aftermath of WWII, we should have ~4x more "wealth to project". And yet this is what we get. The explanation that fits the data is that they're building exactly what they want to build, and they're building ugly on purpose. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/
  • vel0city 11d ago
    Personally I'd rather spend my time in the building with large windows and tons of natural light than holed up in that dark old castle thing. That prison building is overly stylized to my taste. And given how complex the exterior is and seeing it's state it's obvious it's hard to maintain. Unless you like all the gunk growing all over the building all the time. Is the old building "fancy"? Sure. So is that fragile china that's kept in the fancy vitrine but rarely actually used because it's such a pain to maintain and actually use.
• bobthepanda 11d ago
  Also there is survivorship bias. The olden times were no stranger to slapdash, poor quality construction, but most of it has been demolished either due to having low perceived value or due to not lasting as long and people not doing the necessary lifecycle replacements.
  • xmcqdpt2 11d ago
    I had to scroll way too far to find this comment! All the terribly kept tenements that housed 10 families on two floors were also "traditional," but you can't even find them now. Even in places where there are some left, the ones still standing were probably the best of the bunch AND have been extensively repaired since.
• Zigurd 11d ago
  The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.
  • rbanffy 11d ago
    Design, like so many disciplines, can't serve two masters.
• graemep 11d ago
  So new buildings ignore externalities in the economic sense but also very literally.
• rawgabbit 11d ago
  https://www.habitat67.com/en/ https://www.habitat67.com/en/ I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?
  • rbanffy 11d ago
    We need more of this.