
Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures - luu
http://seriss.com/people/erco/fovicks/
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Animats
It's just functional. It has a job to do, moving water, and it does it.

When the Panama Canal locks were nearing completion, some artists were sent
down to Panama to advise on decoration. There was talk of building stone lions
at the locks. The artists came back and reported that the works had been
carried out with no regard for decoration, and the best thing to do would be
to keep them that way, purely functional. That was done, and the locks,
impressive but plain-looking, are still that way.

River control for intermittent floods through populated areas has produced
some good solutions. The Guadalupe River goes through San Jose, and floods
every few years. The river now runs through a narrow channel deep in a big,
wide channel. The big wide channel has walkways and bike paths, which will be
underwater during a flood. And now, multiple homeless encampments.

Tapei has a similar setup on a much larger scale.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(California)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_\(California\))

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adunk
This is great reading for everyone who grew up watching Terminator 2 and was
fascinated by the chase scene where the T-1000 terminator bursts through a
bridge down into in the LA river.

This seems to be the bridge:
[https://goo.gl/maps/3v3LK6h75LqrzexSA](https://goo.gl/maps/3v3LK6h75LqrzexSA)

~~~
ekianjo
This was my first reaction seeing the picture: "Isn't that the bridge from
T2??".

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seibelj
Boston City Hall routinely ranks as one of the ugliest buildings on earth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall)

Brutalist concrete building straight out of 1984. Really gets you mentally
prepared for the labyrinth, dispassionate and uncaring bureaucracy that awaits
you inside.

> _The building has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and
> is often called one of the world 's ugliest buildings. Calls for the
> structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction
> was finished._

I highly recommend anyone who visits Boston take some time to walk around it
and even inside of it. It really is something to experience, unfortunately for
me I experience it every day of my life.

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xenocyon
You're conflating brutalism and soulless/inhuman/ugly concrete-heavy design;
this is a common misunderstanding.

Brutalism when done thoughtfully and well is beautiful, uplifting, and
provides a sense of calm and space. The Simon Fraser U campus is a good
example:
[https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutali...](https://modernistarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-brutalist-
acropolis-in-great-white.html)

~~~
Fricken
Check out this list of movies that utilized the SFU campus:

[https://604now.com/movies-filmed-at-sfu/](https://604now.com/movies-filmed-
at-sfu/)

In every case the campus is used to represent the headquarters of some
government agency or military facility, or as the setting for some dystopian
sci-fi.

I'm interested in both brutalism and dystopian sci-fi, but I don't want to
live in a dystopian future, and I don't like being around the brutalist
architecture in my city either.

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DonHopkins
Brings me back to the good times on Flood Control Dam #3 in Zork.

[https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/flood_control_dam3.ht...](https://www.thezorklibrary.com/history/flood_control_dam3.html)

The underground Flood Control Dam #3 is a staggering engineering feat that
must be seen to be believed. It was constructed in year 783 of the Great
Underground Empire to harness the mighty destructive power of the Frigid
River. This work was supported by a grant of 37 million zorkmids from the
Central Bureaucracy and the local omnipotent tyrant of the era, Lord Dimwit
Flathead the Excessive. This impressive structure is composed of 370,000 cubic
feet of concrete, is 256 feet tall at the center, and 193 feet wide at the
top. The huge reservoir created behind the dam has a volume of 1.7 billion
cubic feet (an ancient document, perhaps in error, records that the volume of
the reservoir is 37 billion cubic feet), an area of 12 million square feet,
and a shore line of 36 thousand feet (an alternate dam guide book found in
1067 GUE states that the shore line is only 35 thousand feet).

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ddtaylor
Since the server linked doesn't provide a secure version of the content here
is a link to avoid MITM/downgrade attacks:

[https://archive.is/de6d](https://archive.is/de6d)

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aasasd
What threat model do you envision for a visitor on this site?

(I sorta can imagine one option, but curious about other opinions.)

~~~
ddtaylor
Someone at the same coffee shop or the owner of the shop injecting ads or
botnet mining.

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harimau777
It frustrates me that so many people hate brutalist architecture. I definitely
wouldn't want every building to be brutalist but I'm glad that some are.

I also much prefer brutalism to soulless glass and concrete skyscrapers or
nondescript office buildings. At least brutalist buildings look like
something.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Why are you glad some are?

Signed,

A Brutalist Hater

~~~
harimau777
Human beings are physical creatures and our physical environment can
communicate messages that are more powerful than if you just read them in a
book. I find that brutalist buildings often communicate a visceral sense of
power, profundity, inhuman scale, etc.

A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of
hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth
necessitated the building's inhuman size.

Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where
the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the
forces of chaos.

In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say
that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that
the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say
that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern
technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media
allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable
to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that
is very large.

~~~
baked_ziti
> A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of
> hundreds of generations.

Or it can resemble a turkey:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robarts_Library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robarts_Library)

Brutalist structures are hideously ugly and oppressive to the human spirit.
Why anyone thinks architects and advocates for the dehumanizingly ugly should
be allowed to use public spaces for these projects is a mystery to me. We have
to share these spaces, and for people to say things like "sometimes you should
feel insignificant" and then impose it on the rest of us in building form is
objectionable.

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gonzo41
Civil engineering is awesome. Those canals look boring but it's better than
having that water making it's own path.

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mikorym
Reminds me of an anecdate from South America: "This is not like Europe, if you
see a river in a city on the map, it is not a river, it is a sewage storm
drain."

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treve
I'm kinda surprised at the lack of graffiti

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rehasu
This reminds me of GTA and probably a few Hollywood movies.

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hcrisp
Nothing in the article explains why it is Kafkaesque.

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projektfu
True, Kafkaesque would imply something like you get on the elevator to floor 5
and the 5th floor is labeled 6. You take the stairs down two flights to floor
5, skipping floor R. You go to the door labeled for the office you want and
they tell you the office you seek is actually in a different building, which
they do not know the address to, and you must now wait for the elevator which
has stopped running until an hour from now because reasons and the stairs do
not let you back to ground level.

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boringg
Does Pyramid of Tirana, Albania qualify as Kafkaesque? I was there half a
decade ago. Fascinating building especially with it's dilapidated state at the
time.

Edit: Looks like they have recently struck a deal to turn it into a "tech
center" \- seems like brutalism + tech overlap in this case. Edit 2: Changed
to Pyramid of Tirana instead of Enver Hoxha's Pyramid

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jmkd
One of the world's best examples of industrial architecture creating an
inadvertent skateboarding Mecca.

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jerry40
Is it a place from this episode of the 'Terminator 2' movie?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwMMpmaQPPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwMMpmaQPPA)

~~~
aasasd
Yes. Also in ‘Grease’, ‘Drive’ and a bunch of other films:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_River#Entertainmen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_River#Entertainment_setting)

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sworc
I'm surprised that this construction is considered a "river".

~~~
alfanick
Americans tend to call artificial structures with names usually associated
with more natural structures: they have a lot of “parks” in their cities,
which usually end up being just a concrete avenue with a few trees in it
(still infinite progress from concrete avenues with no trees at all). I’m
always so sad to visit US cities as European

~~~
carlob
Also a European, but I really don't understand you. I don't know what you
think park means in a urban context, to me a park is a man-made green area.
Anyway, even when you go to a forest in Europe you likely have no idea of how
much managed they are, it's exactly like farming, just on a different time
scale. There is really almost nothing that is not somehow man-made on this
side of the pond.

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mushufasa
This seems like a good opportunity to post this book review about an alternate
take on the intellectual history behind modernist / brutalist architecture.
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-
lik...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-
state/)

