Every time a holier-than-thou architectural magazine waxes poetic about the beauty of "poor forgotten brutalism", they make their point by showing extremely well-cropped, always black and white, high contrast images to make the shadows pop. And then say wow isn't it a shame we're tearing these down?
It's because that's not what crumbling Soviet-era buildings look like. Sure they're fun to photograph. I've seen these buildings from Prague to Prizren and they are categorically awful, as most others agree. Concrete doesn't aesthetically age well. Preserve one or two for historical importance and raze the rest.
It's fair to open dialogue about the importance of preserving historical buildings even if most people think they're ugly. After all, we've committed countless "mistakes" in the past when taste has changed (Penn Station anyone?).
But the least we can do is start with some honest photography.
Brutalism produced disasters and masterpieces like any other artistic trend. Let's do what we've been doing for thousands of years and keep the masterpieces and a few of the disasters to show the range of the style and move on. Badly designed, built, or photographed buildings exists regardless of their style. You don't have to go too far (in the US at least) to find examples of awful neoclassicism for instance.
I'm not even sure why exposed concrete architecture took off. It's not economical, it looks rudimentary and institutional (functional without adornment). But, it costs more, is tougher to maintain, and has drawbacks --like massive loads which must be accounted for when building them. Raw concrete makes sense for dams and hydroelectric projects because you need mass to hold water. Otherwise, it's a poor choice and in today's climate with carbon footprint considerations, it should be a choice of last resort.
Concrete = fast and cheap for post WW2 reconstruction. Which built up excess of labour / expertise in concrete construction that also spread abroad with post war emmigration. It's still the only economical choice for many regions. Not everyone has access to cheap, renewable lumber.
Concrete is useful. Large imposing structures poured in lace like a slurry wall doesn’t make sense. As a component of the structure yes, but not as used in typical unfinished concrete of that style. Steel and glass is cheaper, easier to maintain and has more flexible design. Plus it doesn’t look dystopian.
If memory serve, it wasn't at the time. There wasn't sufficient industrial capacity for steel + glass post war to address scale of ongoing construction demands. Building form work out of wood and pouring concrete from local aggregate was cheaper in terms of labour, materials and logistics. It became self reinforcing with economies of scale as concrete supply chains popped up regionally. Which is building science in a nutshell, do what makes most economic sense at the time. Usually limited by transportation costs. Ergo cladding eventually replaced by cheap light weight building envelop systems due to increase in global trade and sourcing from Asia.
IMO applying dystopian to Brutalism is an label applied after the fact due to various cultural factors. The style itself was continuation of modernism. Of course modernism since inception has been a friction point between academia and popular sentiment. I do think many architects did delude / post rationalize concrete aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic neccessity. Architecture school is very good at brainwashing students who entered due to love of classical aesthetics into embracing modern aethetics, because there just aren't much opportunites to build outside of dominant building systems of the era. So designers learned to love and celebrate concrete.
I love how the most beautiful old quarters in the Baltic states are there because the Soviet Union "punished" those cities and didn't get Kruschyovas built there.
I'd agree with you if you were talking about generic "commieblock" buildings, but the ones presented in this article are pretty original and have a monumental feel to them. Pretty sad to see your sentiment upvoted this high on HN.
Brutalism was popular in France too, withmany extremely popular proponents (Le Corbusier to name one). Many big projects in the 50-60-70-80s were built in a brutalist style. Most have aged terribly though mostly IMHO due to poor maintennce.
I spent almost a year living in a brutalist building in Prague. It was a concrete slab with an huge central courtyard, like a prison yard. You could not access the courtyard, it was dark and dingy. But it was completely full of pigeons. Maybe a thousand pigeons lived there. The inner balcony at the back of the apartment was caked with about 3" of pigeon shit. One day I woke up and found they were power washing the entire inside of the building. This caused the volatilization of several metric tons of pigeon shit into large white clouds over several days.
The building had one other interesting feature, which was an old style sliding-cage elevator, just big enough for two people. The inner gate of the cage was missing, so there was nothing between you and the massive concrete floors sliding past as you crossed each level. From the 5th level down to the 2nd, each white-painted floor featured a giant dark blood stain, in the same general area. This started very wide and got thinner at each floor, so it was obvious someone had lost a leg or an arm, or maybe a head.
The stain was probably from spit and dirt. I lived in an apartment with a similar elevator. Nothing happened in 30 years that I know of. Just the dirt was never removed.
It was blood. The sheer volume of it, the color, not to mention the distribution pattern, left pretty much no room for doubt. Also, one floor above where it started there was no stain at all - but nothing appeared to be repainted.
Sounds like central Prague. Its a strange place (lived there 5 years, moved to better places), what tourists see / are lured at is big pretty medieval centre with rich history. Almost nobody actually lives there, too expensive and impractical.
The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries.
Most colleagues bought rather houses quite far from the city in the middle of nowhere, dooming themselves to another 30+ years of daily miserable commutes by car. These days, even this is unattainable for most due to price boom. Its a strange place, folks are smart, work is often good but I wouldn't want to live there or raise kids no matter what.
Yeah, central Prague - borderline Vinohrady. I loved the people. Old Town is beautiful but a bit depressing because of the tourists; but I grew up in Las Vegas, and I found it similar to that and to New Orleans, where I also lived. Once you live there you never really spend time in the tourist district. Outside the tourist areas it's really cool, punk, underground all night places. (This is true for Vegas, NOLA and Prague, in my opinion. I put them in the same category because people in all three deal with floods of tourists and have great underground local culture).
I am a little surprised by what you say. I've been living in Prague for 9 years (moved here, not Czech) and 8 of them I lived in Prague 5 bordering the Old Town, in 2 buildings build in Art Nouveau style, from around 1900. They were renovated, with modern elevators and looked pretty good both inside and outside.The area was very beautiful. Now I live in a communist tower block in Prague 4 and to be honest it's really not so bad. The apartment is OK, kind of small, especially American standards, but what i really like is the way the area was build. For example, in the middle of the area there is a school, a kindergarten and a nursery. And there are plenty of green spaces. This is definitely communist urban planning, but in this case, at it's best.
That’s because it was socialist modernism - a utopian vision that drove support. A sort of more sustainable socialist version of the American dream. I live in such a neighborhood myself - it’s not very glamorous but it’s what living should be like in the age of environmental collapse.
Yes, nations with less wealth, more poverty and lower productivity consume fewer resources.
So if the argument is Totalitarian Socialism of the late 20th Century kept us poor, and now we're green, well that would be an argument.
I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that there is anything other than that going on, as those formulations for living are otherwise identical to those in more capitalist W. Europe.
The architecture itself I don't think lends to any argument one way or the other, other than most people who have to live with it don't like it.
The 'prison' analogy used by some commentors here is apt, the fist time I visited the areas in E. Berlin with those types of buildings I literally thought they were reformatted prisons.
It's partly personal preference and partly which areas you frequent, I guess. I like the 19th/early 20th century apartment buildings, family houses that weren't built in recent homogenous developments are usually nice as well. Places like Jižní město (less artsy than the article's examples, but still brutalist) are irredeemably ugly though, so if that's your experience of Prague...
Brno was a really nice place to visit, as an uncultured American :)
It was the first city I've been to that felt truly oriented around walking and public transportation instead of being swarmed by cars. And I really enjoyed the overall aesthetic of the city.
Interesting! You might also enjoy Vienna, as that's where a lot of inspiration of the old (<1914) buildings comes from & its also very pedestrian and public transport oriented. :)
I got Disneyland vibes from central Prague, probably for that reason that nobody really lives there. A lot of people say it’s their favourite place in Central Europe, but the short visit I had to the central areas just didn’t click for me. I’d be interested in seeing more of the normal areas where people actually live
I hate this shit. All of it. If there ever was an architecture designed to squeeze the soul out of you, spit on it, curb-stomp it AND, to add insult to injury, age like milk in absence of proper maintenance, this is it.
The modern glass-and-steel architecture is "only" soulless in comparison.
I find it gorgeous in "wow look at the scale of things that humanity can do, if we set our mind to it". It makes me think of spaceships. The grey provides backdrop for greenery, of which there is a lot in Prague, especially now in fall when trees turn all colors each of them striking (the winter looks the worst here I think). It gives me the same vibe as Nordic minimalism, except it looks lived in, and used, not "fake perfect". It is very much alive.
Meanwhile, my friends laughed at me when I called American suburbs "featureless wasteland" after driving hundred miles through it.
I think this just shows that architecture is art, and opinions differ.
Mm, this makes me miss tramping through the snow to walk into a warm wooden bar, sit down for a beer and a big plate of food. There's something special about that in Prague. I lived a few winters in France (Avignon, and some villages) - but there's a certain magical feeling in Prague when you get off a tram and walk through a silent, snowy street and find yourself in a loud, bright, warm cellar, with good cheer.
To be honest, I am more at peace with brutalist buildings in Ostrava, the city I was born in.
There are more trees around them and the city itself is pretty rugged, a former heavy industry center with corresponding soul, so to say. Even though the "sorela" in Poruba is actually nicer. (Early 1950s style, very specific, sort-of socialist Baroque.)
But Prague used to have, and partly still has, a different soul, so the combination feels inorganic, especially close to the center.
Best quote in the article, on a design from Peter Eisenman (who IMO lived up to his last name):
"A Peter Eisenman building. Note the total lack of plant life. Plant life might accidentally make you feel happy and comfortable, and happiness is a bourgeois illusion. The tiny figures on the left seem to be attempting a picnic on the curve. They are probably cold and windswept—as they should be."
If you are into these sort of things, here's an interesting read: a debate between Eisenman and Alexander where the latter accuses the former of "fucking up the world"
Many of the brutalist buildings, perhaps not those in the USSR, are designed with humans very much in mind. Many of the issues that have been with life in brutalist builds are down to them being frequently used for social housing. Placing a large number of relative poor people, drug users, people with mental health problem and a myriad of other issues in the same place will cause trouble regardless of the building type.
That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.
Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side.
But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles kicked flat.
This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an English translation of the heroin story "We Children from Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F. She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost constructed to make childhood more complicated and less joyful.
A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at least not without good evidence.
There is a much simpler explanation: People who can will eventually move into new (or renovated) construction, because of substantial improvements in quality of life. People who can't are left with the older buildings.
The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.
> A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand
That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them.
My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.
One issue with many Czech brutalist buildings is that they are brutally impractical - no heat isolation, mold problems, clogged toilets, not enough natural light, not accessible for the disabled, hard to repurchase, slowly falling apart yet using many custom parts that are no longer available & and the buildings are like 50% made of asbestos by weight.
They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but often not very useful.
Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman.
Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.
The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").
What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.
If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!
--
p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.
And then we can ask the questions:
Does architecture favor a specific class?
Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.
Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?
Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?
And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?
I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast.
> Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life
This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.
> because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Lol. Plenty of density is relative. It does give you more than the average density of a West coast city, which is enough to get upvotes here, though, so there is that.
> Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries.
There is an order of magnitude more regulation. Or maybe an order of magnitude more paperwork?
The metaphysical BS is the problem, architects treat buildings like sculptures, novels, and stories; as vehicles to say something as much or more than livable places. I don't know why we have the idea that structures need to be an artistic representation of ideals like sculpture when they are designed to be used primarily by people to live in and customize as they see fit.
It would be like designing hammers that are commentary on the homelessness problem in the world today but are strikingly ineffective to actually hammer nails; its fine if the only result is to be part of a museum exhibit but the architects force us to use the hammers.
The eisenmann snippet of the second page has him try to defend his work because it is supposed to say something, a commentary on modern dislocation. But that's a message designed for people to not escape, and most arcihtecture in that sense is the tyranny of the artist or government trying to immortalize feelings in books which you can only close the cover of by moving away.
While I tend to agree that brutalist is sometimes an excuse for ugly, even you gotta admit that most of the pictures in the article are quite stunning.
I think they are stunning because they are so ugly. Looking at pictures once is one thing and living or working there is another thing. Add the unwanted associations with the totalitarian regime... I have to admit that I am in favor of destroying them and replacing them with something nicer wherever possible. I respect that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; just my $0.02.
The totalitarian association is what makes them so fucked up. The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind. And anyone who celebrated them, even as a cerebral exercise was evil as well. There are certain buildings in Buenos Aires that you know were where people were tortured in cages in the basement; under the dictatorship, this functioned as a type of psychological abuse of the population who have to walk by that place.
The Kremlin is a type of thing like that, even though it existed long before brutalist architecture; its purpose is the same. A boot stamping forever on a human face.
Statistically, I hate totalitarianism more than the next guy, but these buildings don't really embody evil to me, for the most part. They embody the necessary concomitant of evil, power, and broadcast it, which suggests totalitarianism in some cases but not in others. In some of these cases it's appropriate. A bank, for example, wants to project an image of invulnerability; a bridge, likewise, doesn't have to be friendly-looking or inviting, but needs to look like it can ignore traffic, storms, bombs, or whatever else is thrown at it. And for a power station a powerful appearance is obvious. Not all power is a boot to the face.
A lot of these buildings look like they're designed with an aesthetic appropriate to their function, which I think is a good principle for architecture in general.
> The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind.
??? Of course not. They probably thought they were building happy communities under the glorious sun of communism. Unfortunately they were tragically wrong (on both their buildings and their economical system)
One of the main drivers of later Soviet Bloc architecture was relentless uniformization and centralization of industry. By far the fastest way to churn out apartments was to standardize a few typical panels, produce them en masse and cover the entire country in just a few types of buildings.
My Google search results were probably skewed towards architecture by the facts that I am a native of the city where "sorela architecture" is found, that I was actually very recently there for a visit and that I searched for several architectonic terms right before engaging in this discussion.
I don't think that's true for all brutalist architecture, otherwise how could you explain its presence in the UK and other countries where there was no communist regime?
The thing is, quite a lot of those things look better when photoed from a distance and much less so when you actually need to walk around them in your daily life.
I used to live next to two rather famous Brutalist buildings. One of them was actually kept in good order and the original architect seemed not to be outright enemy of mankind. It still had a score of problems, but well.
The other one was beyond ugly; it was actively evil. I wasn't surprised when I later learnt that the Communist secret police (StB) had extensive wiretapping and surveillance facilities there, among others. It was just a perfect fit.
Isn't it incredible that people who had so much hate of their fellow man were allowed to design entire environments for people to spend their lives in? And that we were actually taught about this as a "movement" in school, as if it were just a natural extension of modernism?
Jfc, dude, don't you think you are projecting a bit? The article contains photos of, in order, an office building, a theatre, another office building, a TV tower, a small office building, a bridge, a bank, a metro station, a shopping centre. These are not buildings people lived in, and in any case these are some of the more beautiful buildings of the period. Certainly no worse than the average office building of the period (including those in the West). Like, seriously, have you ever seen what ugly commie architecture looked like? The commie blocks built in the 80s when cost cutting was the norm? The ones that are hundreds of meters on the longer side?
You say you've been to Prague, well, have you ever been to the rest of the country? How about eastern Slovakia? Poland? Compared to some other places, Prague looks like an architectural masterpiece.
I wasn't speaking strictly about Prague, much of which is beautiful. I'm talking about the misanthropy of Brutalist architecture in general. Some of the worst examples are in Western Europe.
You can make stunning pictures of almost anything. I bet you could make stunning pictures in concentration camps full of starving prisoners if you processed them correctly.
This is just my take on it, but I've always viewed art that is beautiful as something that points to transcendence beyond the piece itself, it breaks the closed loop and points to some higher ideal.
Anti-human art and architecture, of which Brutalism is one example in my book, is revolutionary in that it attempts to sever the connection between humanity and higher ideals / planes of existence, creating closed loops of despair and grayness.
In Japan (where I have the most cultural experience outside of the US), there is a phrase "inki-kusai" which is similar to our word "inky" - it calls to mind dark, moldy places filled with litter and insects. I think it's one reason that solar reverence has been so prevalent in their history, sunlight and fresh air serve as disinfectants.
Separating humans from simple beasts of burden, toiling away in suffering, hoping only to be well-fed, and survive another day -- but no more.
Aesthetics are a respite.
Without, man becomes alienated from his humanity. Demoralized from losing a powerful moralizing force.
My interpretation of Marx, Engels, Hegel, et al.
In a certain vein, the U.S. lacks the same richness for it, compared to much older Western European countries (who haven't had theirs, their history, their culture, their identity, the very things that enliven their soul, destroyed by oppressive regimes. E.g. Stalinist communism).
Why do the French constantly raise hell when things are going poorly? Because it's in their history, it's their aesthetic that they cling tight to; for otherwise, they would be swallowed up by the world, and swept away.
One could even postulate that this is why our nation (the U.S.) has had such a rough adolescence, and hasn't yet made any truly novel attempts at Making Things Better (TM).
All are demoralized, with no true moralizing factors besides one's kin (but those are always unstable sources of moralization, and liable to one day disappear -- compared to the more concrete nature of culture).
If you kill a man's family and friends, what can bring him out of this abyss? Having lost his only moralizing force, that which enlivens the soul, what is there truly left for him to do, but become an animal toiling away until he one day dies?
Attacks on culture are rampant eveywhere, but the U.S. has not yet cemented theirs in the ground -- so there's not much at all of a culture to attack.
Truly exciting times: to think what happens in the next hundred years will serve as a foundation for the future.
There will still be strife; but what type of culture will mature?
There are two stories that come to mind, and I agree with your assessment.
1. In 2007 during the height of the financial market crash CNBC had a helicopter hovering over the northern VA house of a finance guy from one of the banks / insurers who was going belly up that had killed himself. The striking thing to me was how poor, aesthetically, the house was. Typical DC burbs McMansion trash. Plastic (vinyl) patio railing that was leaning here and there as it began to fail, landscaping that was obviously maintained by someone who had no concept of the original landscape design (bushes were either over or under trimmed). Windows that didn't match, but were rather selected from a catalog of pre-made designs haphazardly to fit a pre-drawn opening. Of course he killed himself when the money was taken, he had nothing of real value... if his living arrangements were any indication he spent all his money on worthless shit.
2. The story about the all glass Apple HQ injuring its employees because they couldn't subconsciously tell where the walls were as they walked around the building. They would incessantly walk into glass walls and break their noses, bruise their chins, etc. I wanna say I heard later that Apple silently had the building modified. If the ideology that built such an office building had to describe itself in a sentence, it would have to be "turning the collective eyes of the employees into the eye of Sauron, only without the dark lord's self awareness."
I like a lot of brutalist buildings.
If I could, I would build a brutalist building
for my home. I have my truly amateur drawings
ready. Given that I have 0 education as an architect
or civil engineer it would probably collapse before
it was ever finished.
I am only aware of one brutalist private dwelling in
Oslo, there might be more.
Another was planned but that is a long story, and it was not approved in the end.
Most brutalist buildings have some character and they
cannot be ignored
I fully understand that the brutalist esthetics is lost
for most people.
According to Wikipedia we are now in the postmodern phase of architecture.
The example buildings form makes me think that a lot of the world has not
made it that far yet.
Buildings being erected over the past 20 years all seem to be rectangular
boxes. If they want to be fancy its glass and steel.
Extremely generic. Some try to make up for it by having a lobby with a ridiculously high ceiling.
The open space is not used for anything creative or anything at all really.
The huge empty space speaks for itself.
I highly prefer the brutalist era.
If nothing else, it is less boring.
I'm presently looking into building my residence using precast concrete. I love the raw concrete aesthetic,all the benefits from an insurance and maintenance perspective. You folks here are making me doubt the resale value...
I think it depends... I really dislike brutalist architecture but I have seen same concrete buildings that I really liked. I remember university library where I used to spend a lot of time reading - it was made from raw concrete but in more modern style: huge windows (basically all glass wall), the concrete was contrasted with wood and some bright colors (orange carpets if I remember correctly) - it was really pleasant to be there, it felt sunny and somehow "natural".
You might be in the minority enjoying precast concrete. In good news, you can easily wrap it in a variety of exterior materials when you want to sell.
Everything from thin cut stone (imitating brick or mortared rock foundation) to half-log siding to plain vinyl siding would be am option, though the half or quarter-log siding might be tricky wrt moisture retention up against the concrete- not sure if that would affect the expected lifetime of the wood.
I think it’s alright. This architecture mostly gets depressing if it gets dominant. One concrete house in an otherwise normal neighborhood may actually look quite interesting.
I mean yea most people don’t want to live in a bunker. Ask yourself why everyone talks about and photographs places like Nyhaven in Copenhagen and not Boston City Hall.
With enough money and smart uses of glass you can make a house that is made of concrete but getting it right is going to be a big challenge. A good rule of thumb is to use building materials that would be local to the area and climate and then go from there.
Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.
I had the misfortune of being forced into the only good high school option in my city, a brutalist structure made in the 60s.
It was so ugly. Every time it rained, the concrete became streaked with sludge and gross lines. The few windows weren't glass, they were semi opaque plastic to save money. They put in extra small windows so they could fit in window AC units, but ran out of money, so there was neither AC nor large windows nor even screens. The stairwells all had these "artistic" gaps on the sides, 4 inches of nothing, so many kids threw shit down those and there was no reason for them, they limited the useful width of the stairs.
To top it all off, there was asbestos and lead paint everywhere, we knew we were exposed to toxins but they had no budget to repair it. They actually cut music completely for half of my years because it's less important than the other subjects, I suppose? Inner city public schools in the USA, very budget limited.
Brutalism was, in my aesthetic opinion, one of the downright ugliest movements in art history.
The photos in the article look very similar to the Czech embassy in Berlin, definitely one of the more interesting buildings in Berlin, especially compared to the more modern, and more bland buildings which are being built today:
> the Barrandov Bridge is one of the most crucial arteries. Designed by Karel Filsak, author of the similarly impressive Hotel Intercontinental on Pařížská Street
That hotel was also impressively filled with asbestos:
I visited Czechoslovakia and East a few times when the Wall was still up. The biggest impression was how gray and drab everything was in the cities. It seemed everything was gray and covered with a thin layer of dirt. Very depressing. The countrysides were just neglected and decrepit. Also depressing in a different way.
I grew up in Czechoslovakia and I remember vividly how we visited Austria shortly after the fall of iron curtain. Everything seemed so clean and colorful and well maintained - it was shocking. I saw billboards for the first time in my life and they seemed incredibly beautiful to me. Until that visit I never realized how gray and falling apart was my normal environment (I was 13 at the time) - it seemed normal and I assumed it was like that everywhere.
Yeah, flaking of facades not repaired in decades used to be the norm, with some of them even still having shot holes from the last days of WWII! And all that covered by soot from all the many houses burning poor quality coal.
It took many years after The Fall to put things in order and now such a facade is the exception, not the norm.
Still, there is that one house with nicely painted iron fence clearly showing WWII bullet holes, from a long forgotten firefight.
I love Belgrade and have stayed there maybe a dozen times in the past few years. Usually I stayed in Old Belgrade, in the formerly (or perhaps still?) state-run hotel, which is partly staffed by students from a hospitality/catering college attached to it as they do their training.
A couple of years ago I stayed at an AirBnB apartment in New Belgrade. Beautiful apartment, but the building was brutal and huge, built in a long sort of zig-zag that went on and on. The name of the street nearest to the entrance I was using translated as "Anti-fascist struggle street".
I was just about to mention Belgrade, imo it has the best brutalist buildings outside of the former Soviet Union countries, that's (also) why it is on my to-visit-soon list.
Might be helpful for people interested in this, an acquaintance of mine recently started working on a project for an online archive of socialist modernist concrete-based (so not only brutalism in strict sense) architecture (contains photos, info, publications, art projects inspired by the subject, etc.): https://belgradesocialmodernism.com/
That's why I've said "outside of the former Soviet Union", inside the former Soviet Union there are cities which can compete with Belgrade on the brutalist front, from what I was able to see from IG Sankt Petersburg and Kyiv are quite interesting on that front. To say nothing of the brutalist Soviet bus stations which deserve an architectural category/style all for themselves [1]
It just hit me that I associate brutalist architecture with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in particular the marina scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtRGeyznv7k&t=27s). I'm not even sure if that's brutalist architecture in the background, but brutalist architecture has a dystopian vibe that goes hand in hand with the film.
My "favorite" brutalist building in the CR is the department store on old town square in Olomouc. It's so wildly and incredibly out of character with everything else around, it's like a space ship landed across from the orloj and somehow nobody noticed.
I'd like to remark that the black&white photography somehow accentuate this "brutalist" feeling. It doesn't look as bad in reality. (I am also from Czechoslovakia).
Well... I am glad that nowadays they often paint "paneláky" with some vivid colors. When I think about cold and gray winter days surrounded by huge blocks of cold and gray concrete - it is like personification of depression for me. And now there is usually lawn and some trees but I remember when we moved into one of then new communist housing projects (how would you translate "sídliště"?) when I was a kid - there was nothing nice to look at, just mud and concrete.
I would be happy if they painted them in less vivid colors. Say you have 4 big panel buildings. Each has its owners association. Each one sets different color from different color pallet. You end up with heaven 1 blue, 1 army green/shitbrown, 1 bright green/yellow and 1 red buildings next to each other. The structure is massive and if you put different colors that dont match it is horrible pain for brain.
In my experience, brutalist buildings are interesting to look at from the outside, but not so great from the inside. Once you've gone inside, you might as well be underground.
Those are all over E. Europe and they are a stark, daily, reminder, like a 'trigger', of the brutal totalitarianism of the past.
It contrasts with everything else so much.
As a Westerner, when you visit, it makes you feel like there was a giant foot on the neck of all of the people for generations.
Or like there was a 'Concrete Ice Age' over everything.
We reiterate the stories about the Nazis quite a lot, because 'we fought them', but we don't do a good enough job in entertainment of providing a visceral exposure to that era, and what it meant for so many.
To add salt to the wounds and make an even more complicated argument, so many of the most talented people have left these countries for W. Europe, thanks to the EU. This actually might be net-net beneficial in the economic short run (i.e. market clearing for labour), but in the long run it also means a hollowing out of the most precious resource of these places, and leaving them to be the West Virginia's of the EU. Not quite, but almost.
Here [1] you see direct evidence of this in the Danish context, but it's the same everywhere.
The population of E. Europe is literally in decline [2]
It's not birth rate [3] (it's note hugely different in Europe, but errs higher in the East).
The people leaving E. Europe are 'able bodied workers' and 'the educated' and 'students leaving to get education and jobs in the West' - i.e. E. Europe's absolutely most valuable 'assets'.
E. Europe is clearly being hollowed out in a very material way.
The 'freedom of movement' foundation of the EU is not really a humanitarian issue, though it's usually framed popularly as such, it's fundamentally a neoliberal policy, i.e. 'worker mobility' as European leaders believe this is a fundamental advantage of the US.
A common theme with residential (other types don't have these problems, like museums, public office spaces, hospitals, etc.) brutalist buildings is that they were built as low-cost social housing, and the problems are not with the exterior but with the interior, and I think not inherent to this type of architecture. Shoddy workmanship, cheapest materials, etc. The contrast between how stunning it looks (a matter of taste, granted) from the outside and how it's inside is stark — avantgarde, modern, and bespoke, combined with boring, gloomy and depressive apartment interiors.
A lot of commenters have mentioned New Belgrade municipality of Belgrade, and it is a great example of this. The exterior is very often quite well though out — lots of space, lots of trees and parks, playgrounds (looked at from the ground there's hardly any of the oppressive concrete feeling often associated with brutalism), general living affordances like schools, public services integrated into complexes... But on the inside, even ignoring long term issues of maintenance stemming from broader social issues, things are dysfunctional, ugly and generally of poor quality. It's a byproduct of cost cutting commonly associated with these types of projects. But just like with apartments in Soviet Brezhnevkas and even some Khrushchyovkas, when renovated with care and attention the apartments are just fine for what they are.
And it's not just a feature of Cold War socialist brutalism. In Trieste for example there is a somewhat (in)famous Rozzol Melara building[1][2]. As an idea it's great, the complex has everything for day to day living, a post office, a supermarket, an elementary school, a kindergarden, even a small medical facility, all connected with tunnel bridges or roofed passageways (except the small chapel) so you're never exposed to the elements when going somewhere inside the complex. But it seems as though the architects thought about how can we make this cheap but practical and then got the practical part completely wrong. For example, the passageways and tunnel floors are completely covered with anti-slip rubber matting, but the problem is these passageways are almost too practical and inviting so people end up using them to take their dogs out for walking, and so the result is rubber covered with sticky, dried dog piss (sometimes even poop) every 5 to 10 meters in all directions. You can imagine how this smells, encased in concrete and glass during the summer in a moist coastal city. The terrace views from higher apartments on the side overlooking the city and the sea are beautiful though, so you get some satisfaction if you live in one of those.
I fail to see the appeal. Much like most modern architecture this style will be applauded by architects, meanwhile they all choose to live in much older style architecture because it's more homely and non-oppressive.
I guess architects are a bit like hedge-fund managers in that regard; they all keep their investments in index funds and not hedge funds.
Not that I like hedge-fund managers, but isn’t the norm for them to keep a very large portion of their wealth in their own hedge funds? As for the rest of it, it only makes sense to keep it in index funds if not diversify in other types of investments that are not hedge funds?
I've never been to Prague or Czechia for that matter, though that's been on my list for many years now. Every time I start planning a trip, something happens and I have to cancel it. So my current thoughts are based on what I've seen in videos and photos, while my experience with the brutalism comes from the country where I've spent most of my life - Bulgaria. For a million and one reasons, I find brutalism absolutely repugnant. Each time I see a brutalist building(even in a picture) I can feel the smell of moist plywood and depressing stained brown carpets glued to the concrete underneath - I just can't help it. However I find a lot of charm in the buildings from the article, while I can't find any in those I've seen all my life on daily basis. I really can't say why though.
It's because that's not what crumbling Soviet-era buildings look like. Sure they're fun to photograph. I've seen these buildings from Prague to Prizren and they are categorically awful, as most others agree. Concrete doesn't aesthetically age well. Preserve one or two for historical importance and raze the rest.
It's fair to open dialogue about the importance of preserving historical buildings even if most people think they're ugly. After all, we've committed countless "mistakes" in the past when taste has changed (Penn Station anyone?).
But the least we can do is start with some honest photography.