
Brutalist Architecture Masterpieces (2016) - ur-whale
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/brutalist-architecture-masterpieces
======
rtpg
> Proponents praised its explicit functionality

If it were about functionality you wouldn’t build massive structures at weird
angles like the Wotruba Church. You wouldn’t build physics-defying overhangs
to compensate your wanting for a nonexistant first floor like the Giesel
library.

There’s no functional basis for the design of the buildings outlined here.
Only some superficial notion of functionalism because of the revealing of the
underlying structure. Meanwhile, so many creators of brutalist structures are
on the record for hating humans for messing with their grand designs.

The world would be a better place without this blight masquerading as some
purity of design.

~~~
YorkshireSeason

       functionality
    

Functionality has multiple dimensions. Often brutalist buildings were rather
functional on a micro level (e.g. central heating, indoor toilet etc) which
was usually better than what they replaced. But on a macro level they were
often terrible, e.g. the extreme focus on being car friendly (e.g. you had to
cross an 8-lane motorway to meet your frriend in the neighbouring building).

The former has nothing to do with brutalist architecture and is now available
for all styles of architecture. The latter was a crazy mistake.

------
ilamont
Boston City Hall is not only ugly on the outside, it's ugly on the inside. For
one of the meeting areas (city council, I believe) they have this wooden
furniture and some tapestries and old paintings on the concrete walls, but it
can't make that cold space warm.

Outside, Government Center plaza channels the wind coming off the nearby
harbor. It's also the site of one of the most infamous images from the 1970s
bussing crisis ([https://www.npr.org/2016/09/18/494442131/life-after-
iconic-p...](https://www.npr.org/2016/09/18/494442131/life-after-iconic-photo-
todays-parallels-of-american-flags-role-in-racial-protes)) which tainted that
space early in its existence.

~~~
thrower123
It's a profoundly ugly building. The whole hulking slabs of inevitably
discolored and gross-looking concrete look is really not good for a government
building; it just looks seedy and corrupt and authoritarian. It gives off too
many dystopian vibes, and makes me think of the police station in Mad Max or
City 17 from HL2.

Particularly in Boston, which has its own style and so many beautiful old
buildings.

~~~
paleotrope
It's even more evocative of a totalitarian state with the giant face of John
Collins on the side of the building.

------
ablation
What a really unpleasant website to use. Horrible slideshow functionality,
interstitial adverts breaking screen flow, rise-up article suggestions. Ugh.

~~~
jmkd
Despite a strong interest in Brutalism I couldn't make it through because of
all this

~~~
John_KZ
Same. I tried to mess with the grid in dev tools in a last attempt to make the
damn carousel resize appropriately but to no avail.

------
YorkshireSeason
Summary: The article doesn't really answer the question why the buildings in
question are masterpieces, or why they should be reconsidered. Likewise, it
doesn't engage in a meaningful sense with the question why brutalism is so
widely disliked. Instead 22 photos are presented, over half of which are _not_
of buildings, but of detail (e.g. a door handle, or grafitti).

~~~
Cthulhu_
So generic listicle image gallery on a generic content farm?

------
fredley
The architectural school it's trendy to hate at the moment is Façadism[1],
whereby the façade of an older building is preserved, the main structure
demolished behind it and a modern building built, eventually connecting with
the façade so that the new building is 'invisible'.

It's trendy to hate because it supresses opportunities for new interesting
architecture to preserve older (but not neccessarily interesting or even good)
façades, simply to prevent people moaning about ugly new buildings.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facadism)

------
VBprogrammer
Anyone who studied CS at Edinburgh University grew fond of Brutalist
Architecture through repeated exposure to this monstrosity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleton_Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appleton_Tower)

~~~
fergie
Made all the more jarring by the general Harry Potterness of the surrounding
city.

------
gadders
Too much of this architecture in London. I wish the South Bank centre and the
Barbican would be demolished and re-developed.

Fun fact about the Barbican: The central heating is controlled centrally.
Tenants get a notification about which day it will be turned on for winter.

~~~
CaptainZapp
I'm not disturbed by the Barbican as such (it can be argued that it really is
a masterpiece), but by the exhibition venues, which, in my opinion are really
utter crap. Unfortunately they sometimes run really good exhibitions.

Compare that to the Centre Pompidou in Paris [1], on which arguments about the
building will probably never cease (personally I think it's brilliant), which
went up at about the same time. But it's hard to argue about its quality as an
exhibition venue (or rather venues).

[1] [https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/five-facts-
about-t...](https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/five-facts-about-the-
construction-of-the-pompidou-centre/)

~~~
gadders
Yeah, I guess the Barbican flats don't look as bad as the theatre bit etc.

I prefer the Lloyds building to the Pompidou. Less Fisher-Price colours.

~~~
CaptainZapp
The colors are not arbitrary, since they encode functionality. From [1]

 _One of the distinctive features of the Centre Pompidou is the striking
presence of colour. Four strong colours – blue, red, yellow and green – clothe
the structure and enliven the façade, their use governed by a code laid down
by the architects:_

    
    
      blue for circulating air (air conditioning)
      yellow for circulating electricity
      green for circulating water
      red for circulating people (escalators and lifts).
    

[1] [https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/The-Centre-Pompidou/The-
Bui...](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/The-Centre-Pompidou/The-Building)

~~~
gadders
A friend was a senior IT guy at Lloyds. He said the building was a pig,
functionally. All the network cables etc had to go down the pipes on the
outside of the building.

------
walrus01
If you're in the Vancouver area there are two noteworthy brutalist examples.
One is the MacMillan Bloedel building:

[https://www.google.ca/search?q=macblo+building+vancouver&oq=...](https://www.google.ca/search?q=macblo+building+vancouver&oq=macblo+buil&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2.3584j0j7&sourceid=chrome-
mobile&ie=UTF-8)

The macblo building is also CGIed into the New York City Nazi party HQ in
Amazon's adaptation of The Man in the High Castle.

The other is pretty much the entire SFU campus.

------
tw1010
Blindly hating brutalism is just as mimetic as blindly loving it.

~~~
IshKebab
I don't think anyone blindly hates it. I mean... use your eyes! It's easy to
see what people hate about it. It's ugly. Simple as that. The very best
examples rise to "ok that's an interesting design" but they're still
undeniably ugly.

The Barbican is a very interesting design, but anyone who has actually been
there would agree that it is ugly.

Contrast them with something like a modern glass skyscrapers (e.g. the walky
talky). They may be rather bland and boring but I don't think many people
would say they are _ugly_.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
> The Barbican is a very interesting design, but anyone who has actually been
> there would agree that it is ugly

I find it one of the most beautiful and peaceful places in London. Some of us
actually like these sort of forms and concrete as a material.

> walky talky

I find that thing grotesque, it's like a bad joke on the London skyline. Some
skyscrapers are nice like 30 St Mary Axe but when they're done bad the fact
they're made of glass doesn't make them any more attractive.

In the end its all completely subjective.

~~~
Nursie
I think your subjective might be a minority view though. I'm not talking
particularly about the barbican, but the worst most people could level at the
glass towers in London is blandness.

To many/most the concrete monstrosities of the 60s and 70s are actively
oppressive.

------
anonu
The website is super non functional similar to the buildings: ads everywhere,
side bars that open up as you scroll, popups to subscribe. It's hard to see
where the content is. I'm on mobile on my home WiFi. I also run pihole and the
website was still a sh*@hole.

------
mothsonasloth
I see your masterpieces and raise you Cumbernauld Shopping Centre in Scotland.

[https://flic.kr/p/7VgANo](https://flic.kr/p/7VgANo)

This place is horrible!

------
expathacker
What's more interesting to me, is why HN is so attracted to Brutalism? Is it a
sense of minimalist aesthetic, an expectation of structural integrity, the
economics of minimalism, a detachment from previous architectural genres, or
perhaps an affinity for the writings of Ayn Rand (whose characters espouse the
virtues of Brutalism, and whose book, "The Fountainhead" was about a brutalist
architect).

I spend a lot of time exploring and studying music in former Yugoslav
countries, and while I find the Brutalism fascinating in it's relationship to
Soviet/Yugoslav poverty & austerity, beauty is not a word I would ever use
positively in the same sentence.

~~~
YorkshireSeason
I can think of three main reasons for this.

(A) It's a form or contrarianism, in that it's an negation of mainstream
preference, hence unusual. Even better, this negation of mainstream preference
isn't really threatening anybody, hence good way of attracting mainstream
attention.

(B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale
social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the
left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically quite
false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't like.)
So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and self-
consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An example of
such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].

(C) Cities with a lot of brutalist architecture, prevalent in the former
Soviet block, use it to market themselves are tourist destinations. This ties
in with (A), for why would you go and visit a city unless it had something
unusual to offer, something Instagrammable, something to talk about when you
are back?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hatherley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hatherley)

~~~
expathacker
> (B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale
> social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the
> left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically
> quite false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't
> like.) So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and
> self-consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An
> example of such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].

Huh, quite an interesting take. On the contrary, I associate an appreciation
of brutalism with those who post staunch free-market capitalist comments.

I have many taken architectural tours in Bucaresti, Plovdiv, Sofia, Skopje,
Moldova, Tbilisi, Beograd, Kiev, and Moscow. Unanimously, the tour-guides
presented these buildings with disdain for their aesthetics and association
with authoritarianism. All of the tour-guides were definitely left/liberal-
leaning, some to the point of dreadlocks and Che Guevara hats. (Thanks for the
links, by the way, I had never heard of Own Hatherly before!).

~~~
YorkshireSeason

       presented these buildings with disdain
    

That could be explained a difference in background (growing up in the west vs
in the Soviet zone of influence): It's much easier to have a rosy view of
communism/socialism if you have no experience of living in a
communism/socialism yourself (or your parents).

As far as I'm aware, Own Hatherley is a high-ranking cadre in UK communist
parties, although I have lost track which, since they have a tendency to split
and splinter. As far as I'm aware, publishers like Verso Books and Zero Books
were outlets of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), although that no longer
exists. I don't know which of the SWP-descendants is now in control of those
publishers.

------
jefurii
I'm surprised there was nothing by Tadao Ando on that list. He is a master of
smooth supple concrete, and of light and shadow.

------
scns
even though i am an atheist i think the shape of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Central_Mosque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Central_Mosque)
is beatiful. Don't know if it would qualify as brutalist though.

