To be fair, brutalist buildings are fugly
I dunno, I think they’re kinda … neat, I guess? Like, yeah, they’re technically pretty ugly, but somehow in a way that makes them interesting.
Trying…and failing, to think of a good portmanteau of interesting and ugly.
Edit: intugly? Ugteresting?
“Striking” is usually the word. It can be used for bad looks as well as good.
Well, as with all my attempts to shine…this has crashed and burned. And not even gloriously…
Hey, there’s no reason to not come up with new words. You could bring the world the next ‘yeet’ or ‘bussy’.
Just imagine the possibilities!
Naw…my heart’s not in it any more…
I actually just tried looking that up, to see if such a word actually exists in English. I found a stack exchange thread asking this same question but no one had a suitable answer. So, yeah, I guess it’s up to you to contribute to society by inventing and popularizing this new word. Enjoy your new destiny.
puts big boy pants on, and refills coffe My time to shine!
Ugleresting.
Interesgly?
KAKT.
No rounded letters. Sounds gross but kinda like cracked.
KAKT.
That would make the cybertruck a brutalist car.
I guess this is technically the opposite of what you are trying to convey, but your comment reminded me of a song I haven’t thought about in a decade
https://theendlessbummer.bandcamp.com/track/boring-but-beautiful
To you.
The peak of brutality architecture beats any other type in my eyes. It’s beautiful in a way no other building or style compares.
Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that’s besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn’t be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I’ll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I’ll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don’t really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I’ll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that’s as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it’s beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that’s beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
I get where you’re coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn’t cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don’t get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I’m currently homeless and I’d take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there’s some people who’d rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they’re comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
I think you may be confusing functionalism with brutalism. In the UK, these two styles were combined but that isn’t necessarily true. Brutalist buildings can very much eschew function in order to be more imposing, memorable or unusual.
Functionalism is the style that is all about minimizing the resources used to get the most useful building you possibly can.
Yeah, I know there’s impractical brutalist buildings, but those are the big expensive projects, right? The cheap ones are practical as far as I knew
Cheap brutalism can look good.
Can you share examples of good and bad brutality buildings that are cheap? I’m just curious what you like
Yes but I’m currently traveling and have very limited Internet access… I’ll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I’m back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
No sweat, I was jw
For good brutalised, look at the Barbican or Habitat 67
That habitat 67 building is crazy looking!
They look depressing and I hate being around them. A city should be a nice place to live, not a playground for architects’ experiments
I love being around them. Visiting Tokyo right now and there are so many gorgeous concrete buildings.
The last thing I’d want is to live in a city that was so stuck in the past that all buildings look 100 years old.
Give me buildings from the 2020s not the 1920s. Give me sleek and light concrete, metal and glass.
Death to brick and wrought iron.
Huh…my preferences are literally the opposite of yours. History FTW!
Damn. I rather like the interwar style of architecture: pretty lines and compelling nuances and decorations. Something to distract myself with as opposed to brutalist architecture.
Brutalism is beautiful in its simplicity and honesty. Combine that with some green and it’s a 10/10 to me.
Give me a verdant bunker any day.
A city should be a place for people to live, not some artsy space for real-estate developers to inflate living costs.
Have your artsy architecture projects, but also have functional buildings too please
I like it.
I think the greenery in these pictures is doing quite a bit of lifting. Brutalist buildings without plants are less fun to look at
I think that was the original idea for brutalist buildings, complementing them with plants? I don’t want to look for a source right now though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Any building without plants is less fun to look at
Brutalism without greenery does not work well in general. I love the post apocalyptic vibes of a concrete building overgrown by plants.
These look like defensive structures from a war movie with some plants on them
I’ve been looking for a reason why I find them unpleasant and you found it for me. They look like the decaying Nazi bunkers I got to explore on a Danish beach when I was a kid.
Though I also don’t like massive towers of glass. Or rowhomes. Or really cities in general. Give me a nice cave in a swamp any day.
This reminds me of a very short but very good documentary
The Barbican: A Middle Class Council Estate
I was watching this and thinking, almost. How did a country start building like this, for the people and then stop. Then it is all apparent, the Witch got in power.
It appears the growth of these “for the benefit of people” views were replaced with the old ages of the greatest and silent generation, and replaced with the “me, me, me. My money” of the boomer generation.
I can’t help but thinking how things could have been different if we continued on from the old timers. I know ww2 destroyed an economy that was lucky to survive it, that’s in itself is also an interesting thing to think how the world would have been without it.
the Witch got in power
Not British and haven’t watched the video you linked, so I’m guessing… Thatcher?
Yea. He didn’t actually mention her just said the conservatives got in power and sold the country.
It’s the perfect architecture for any of the non-squishy government organizations like the FBI or the Department of Urban Works.
You, oh lowly peasant should be intimidated in the halls of governance, for you don’t belong here.
I like them…
Idk man, they’ve kind of grown on me
I have a fairly functional form of autism, but I sometimes struggle finding balance in points of interest I get enthusiastic about, and nobody really matches my enthusiasm, even though they try. It often feels like rejection, but this post really puts it in perspective for me. I’m not always reasonable/flexible when I’m like that. Thanks for sharing.
(To give an example related to this post; I wouldn’t assault someone for having a different opinion, but I could definitely debate them with a passion that’s a little out of place and not as reasonable as I’d like to believe it is. “Building with concrete blocks? What is even wrong with you, where you never thought proper construction? What do you mean cheap building costs? People who want to build cheap buildings shouldn’t be allowed to build anyway”.
“Building with concrete blocks? What is even wrong with you, where you never thought proper construction? What do you mean cheap building costs? People who want to build cheap buildings shouldn’t be allowed to build anyway”.
The internet suddenly makes a bit more sense to me
I think a lot of “bad faith trolls” are exactly this.
What’s bad faith trolling? I tried to google it, but struggle to understand
Nice try 😉
No but look up “arguing in bad faith” and if that doesn’t make sense let me know.
if even after asking for an explanation your explanation is " try googling it" I’m going to assume you dont want to be understood.
If I’m trolling I’m definitely not doing it consciously. I know “I’m not a troll” is about the most suspicious thing on the internet, especially from a baby account, but sadly I cant be fucked to make a better point
Unfortunately for folks with genuine curiosity, feigning ignorance on information that is perceived to be commonly known or understood is a very common tactic of bad faith actors who attempt to slowly erode a discussion as part of trolling or manipulation. It has put a lot of folks off to the point where they would rather advise to look it up and disengage rather than take a chance it’s another game down the rabbit hole. Reading your dialogue as a third party it illuminates as such even if unintentionally so.
I think I understand? Thanks for claring things up, and sorry if I accidentally distracted from the actual topic (although mentioning the bad faith trolling has probably done that more effectively… but whatever)
I want to add my hesitation came from it being hard to describe adequately and assuming someone else would do better.
Edit: and I never actually thought you specifically were trolling, I was just being cheeky
A bad faith troll is a troll that makes arguments in bad faith. Read more about bad faith arguments here or you can search the web for “bad faith arguments.”
What’s a “good faith troll”?
Your point about matching enthusiasm resonates with me. I am fortunate nowadays that many of my friends are neurodivergent, and we seem to enjoy each others’ enthusiasm. We have some shared interests, but I think in a context where I can just listen and learn and not necessarily be expected to be a part of a “regular conversation” (i.e. when the primary mode of conversation is neurodivergent), I really enjoy listening to my friends nerd out about things outside of my own interest, as well as sometimes explaining my things to other people.
Outside of that framework though, before I had my current friends, I often felt like it was a smarter social strategy to just not talk about my interests at all because tempering my enthusiasm was difficult and seemed to never been enough.
There’s this interesting balance within my MTG group where some guys are happy to devote a fair part of their life to learning all the individual cards by heart. They can go on tangents that are just rows of card names describing a turn (think if the F6 to G8 takes rook babble of chess people). I can’t be fucked, but I still love the hobby, so when we get together its trying to find the middle between all these levels of expertise that works. Overall that went well but there was one guy who flat out told me: “Maby if you would just dedicate a bigger part of your life to the game, we wouldn’t have to bother talking around you so much.” Yeah right. Not everyone makes their hobby into their profession.
That being said, its kinda heartbreaking so many people struggle with just letting their enthusiasm about a certain topic flow. If you’d rather not talk about something because you’re afraid you can’t reel it in, that sucks :(
What are you passionate about?
He’s right though, we aren’t building as sustainable as we did back then.
Wonder how this kid reacted to the ending of the Three little Pigs?
With powerful multiple orgasms
He huffed and puffed and blew his load.
I do prefer brick buildings.
It looks nicer but nowadays when it is used, it’s often used as decorative layer. Concrete as a load bearing structure has quite a few advantages over normal bricks.
Anon’s brother hates concret*
I mean, when he’s right, he’s right
I feel seen
This is honestly the first time I have ever understood this community. Thank you.
FUCK CONCRETE!
You can but you have to be quick or the chemical burns are horrendous.
My brother-in-law is obsessed with skater fashion, so I guess we got off light.
Based
Thankfully my interests change so often I am never competent enough to ramble as long as I would like to about them.
I remember my mental spasm about sequels vs prequels, it was months long delirium. I have this kind of intense interest in finding out why something is fun to watch or play. What exactly constitutes for a good experience. What are the objective measures that we can use to decide if something is a work of art or not. Because if art is subjective then why we have famous artists at all and critics that deem some works classic?
Experience; knowledge; understanding. When where and how we acquired these heavily dictate our subjective experience with… well, everything, including media and the art within.
Based on my own observations, the average person follows a very basic pattern and have not bothered to grow as a person beyond this. They want to absorb entertaining content with minimal energy. We all do at our core, but some of us can move beyond it. For those of us that haven’t yet, our media conglomerates are happy to cater with over-saturation such as with Marvel. We can observe the market, but the average person literally doesn’t care. Are they unaware of critical analysis skills? Is there no energy to ponder these things after a 10+h work day? Sometimes both. Perhaps neither.
The Rock was in a lot of famous movies and he has a great public personality. Now he is in low-quality spit-out productions because his face generates
moneynostalgia in his viewers. I can flip this from movies to video games as well with Nintendo. How delusional people were with Violet / Scarlet and the outrage that Palworld caused. PKMN Violet / Scarlet was one of the worst games I’ve played on the Nintendo Switch (which objectively it isn’t but rather is more like the antithesis of what we’re talking about… I sadly digress). As a game, it’s terrible. But some people are eating up the story and pokemon experience. There was a common denominator amongst this group though, and they didn’t care about the garbage quality of the game because they weren’t experiencing it - they were experiencing their pokemon. Likewise my family praises a lot of movies I… rent for them. I always watch them and they’re typically rehashed ideas featuring famous actor(s). I can barely tolerate the experience - Red Notice? It wasn’t even ironically good where it’s so bad it’s good again, but they love it! They’ll eat it up every time and then enjoy the social experience of talking about it.I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have famous artists and critics because humans like to take the path of least resistance.
I’m still ultimately unsure what a good objective measurement would be for works of art, but I think it’s something to do with how the piece may expose peoples thoughts and ideas. Perhaps not just as a socially engaging experience, but something that stirs your soul into a tasty broth, ya know? Something that causes an introspective change within. Outer Wilds, How to Read, The Good Place, these are all works of art to me under this premise.
So ya, I also have an intense interest in the subject and I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the matter :) Please, do ramble on~
Edit: It’s a discussion, not a statement of fact ya downvotin’ goobah and goobahs to be~
A song was listening to used the text ‘find me on Miami concrete’ just as I was reading this. Hope anon’s bro doesn’t randomly get that.
your balls will explode at 19/07/2074 03:17 18s BST under a concrete block
