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I grew up in a "radical" concrete neighborhood built by the Soviets in the 1980's. Closest thing to the "garden city" dream promised by concrete utopia planners
by Detrus 12y ago
I grew up in a "radical" concrete neighborhood built by the Soviets in the 1980's. Closest thing to the "garden city" dream promised by concrete utopia planners.
Looks something like this http://www.niekonaujo.lt/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/14-tv_panoramos-20120519.jpg http://www.niekonaujo.lt/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/14-tv_pa...
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/43031765.jpg http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/43031765.jpg
Very fun place when I was a kid. Kindergardens, schools and stores all walking distance in those images. Remove some of the green space and you get a dystopian looking brutalist nightmare.
But functionally you can fit dense housing, a public backyard for your kids, a place to have a picnic, stores, schools in the middle of a city. Some people just balk at the idea because so much of this utopian planning went wrong in one way or another, often in ways that have nothing to do with the housing style but became associated with it.
- noir_lord 12y ago> often in ways that have nothing to do with the housing style but became associated with it. We had a similar problem in the UK, We uprooted and moved entire communities onto vast estates that had no real infrastructure (lack of shops, medical centers etc) and in the process destroyed community bonds. It was an absolute mess often created with the best of intentions (and little thought).
- smacktoward 12y agoIndeed -- here in the US, I not-infrequently hear people describe Brutalist buildings as "Soviet-style architecture." (This of course despite the fact that the Brutalist style had plenty of American practitioners, and derived its name from a French word picked up by a Swede.)
- eru 12y agoPlenty of Singapore looks similar, and works fairly well.
- twic 12y agoI was struck by how similar some of those pictures - both of the old tenements and the new towers - looked to Hong Kong. Hong Kong seems to work quite well; a friend of mine who grew up there waxes lyrical about how wonderful a childhood spent on the streets in the sky was. Although she now lives in a detached house in a small town in Cambridgeshire, so i should take that with a pinch of salt.