Item — HN Reader

> people prefer adorned surfaces to huge flat stark unadorned ones

Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface. Building materials all go in and out of fashion - this is not about concrete.

What I love about brutalism is that the forms of the buildings are totally different to anything that came before them. Concrete freed architects - allowing them to build 'floating' buildings on thin stilts, huge overhangs and flying walkways and bridges. Now of course, more freedom is not always a good thing. I am not an advocate for every brutalist building - many are terrible, but there are some (like the ones in the article) that are gems, and should be preserved for the wonderful things they are.

6 comments

>Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp-content/uplo...

In general, if we look out of the eyes of a pedestrian entering or leaving one of the depicted estates (pick an estate at random, and pick the moment at which we look out at random) chances are fairly high that there will be hardly anything in our visual field to draw our "involuntary attention".

If I'm sitting in a library or something and 5 feet away is a wall of unfinished concrete, that can be a pleasant experience because there tends to be a lot of irregularities in the surface (and I don't share grandparent's dislike of unfinished concrete) but there was a temptation in the brutalist movement to require pedestrians to walk along or near blank walls 100s of feet long, and that certainly can be an alienating feeling, just like for example being in the middle of a vast frozen lake can be an alienating experience.

you forgot these monstrosities

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

These look like entrances into the Soylent Green factory, where the old people in the pictures are about to get turned into food. Wretched, unfriendly, unlivable public spaces.

I loved those. Though they could do with the addition of some greenery and some extra decoration.

A nature Band-aid?

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

I love the TED talk by James Kunstler on urbanism. Here's the bit where he addresses blank walls:

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

I can find you a similarly sized blank area of wall on any building, including St Pancras. Sure, it'll have denser tiling (bricks instead of concrete tiles), but as far as I'm concerned there's a similar amount of overall visual stimulus in a blank brick wall.

These buildings are beautiful in a sci-fi utiopia/dystopia sort of way.

The problem I have with them is they are profoundly not human scaled. They are enormous monuments, not livable community. They are the antithesis of the medieval urban center of Paris and other European cities, where everything is walkable.

This is not a matter of scale. Is a large city "human scaled"? It's hard to separate Brutalism from its socialistic underpinning. The brutalist monument is centrally planned, whereas the medieval urban center grows anarchically and organically around the community.

The built environment of a large city is made up of neighborhoods, individual blocks, individual buildings... all of which can absolutely be human scale, even at fairly high density.

I reckon people have always had this criticism. The scale of 'human scale' has always needed to go up as there are more humans on the planet. Just as bricks gave a leap in the sizes of buildings that could be constructed cheaply over wood, concrete/steel is the latest step-change in how big we can build. There are plenty of tall buildings that work, and plenty that don't, and the architectural style isn't a direct factor. I think you'll probably find socio-economic factors play a far greater role in whether a community 'works' or not.

The first image is from Les Espaces d’Abraxas. It's a small area (600m by 600m) which combines apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, green spaces, and even a lake. It's definitely meant to be walkable.

The bad thing about brutalism is that while (unfinished)concrete gave architects flexibility in design and allowed themselves to explore new forms, what it actually allowed was cheapness.

The problem with brutalist buildings is not so much the unfinished raw concrete aesthetic or the imposing stature, etc., it's that this new concrete building technique allowed them to build cheaply without much thought to anything else like livability, use of public spaces, connection with surroundings, upgradability, etc.

Even the cookie cutter tile-clad midrises of china are better suited to human habitation than most brutalist estates because these tileclad midrises are weaved perfectly into the fabric of the cities they rise in.

I'd say the fourth image counts: https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

Grey floor, grey pillars, grey ceiling. Slight intrusion of toothpaste/fake verdigris green. There isn't so much as a poster.

I'll grant that the first two are pretty good: concrete castles. The first one in particular has a slight Art Deco sensibility to the windows. The third is horrendous; it's hard to tell whether the decor was meant to be like that or whether bits of it have fallen off. All the round windows are weeping black drip lines below them.

#6 Les Espaces d’Abraxas again has a bunch of features cribbed from other styles: classical columns. #18 at the same site has a triumphal arch!

Finally at "Cité du Parc et cité Maurice-Thorez" we're back to inhospitable pointy angles, but with foliage growing among them in a post-apocalyptic manner.

> concrete castles.

Yeah those are quite good looking buildings. But I wonder how much of what makes them look beautiful is the fusion of previous architecture movements with the construction techniques of brutalism and how much of it is pure brutalism?

I like brutalism too. But preservation is kind of a sign (IMO) that things have gone wrong. You only have to preserve buildings if people don't want them or if they are not economical.

I have no objection to preserving a few buildings, a few particularly interesting streets or city centers. But, I generally object to the common European policies of forces stasis. In any case, I think it also goes against the brutalist, modernist ethic or aesthetic. These buildings intended to be rational & practical. If we have to "preserve them," they've failed, to an extent.

*I'll also admit that I'm a fan of brutalism. These are beautiful (the photography too).

Most preserved buildings are "not economical". Preservation is about valuing a public aesthetic higher than immediate economic gratification.

>Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface. Building materials all go in and out of fashion - this is not about concrete.

It's about gargoyles. Once upon a time we knew that every great building had gargoyles, nowadays we don't seem to bother with anything that impressive...

Of the old buildings that survive, a higher proportion have gargoyles. See my above comment about only the nicer buildings surviving. Wandering around London in 1600 you'd probably see a similar proportion of buildings with gargoyles as you do now.

Newer buildings are still built with beautiful guttering and drainage systems, but since we have drains now, there is no need to build gargoyles to spew water onto the street.