In terms of buildings, I've always had the impression but brutalism wasn't so much about being unhelpful, but more about making the users feel small and unimportant...
... Which in a weird way describes some rather snazzy websites with inconsistent content policies and Kafkaesque appeals.
Since it's hidden, it's a kind of cryptobrutalism, to (perhaps unnecessarily) coin a new term.
The “purpose” (for lack of a better word) of brutalism was never to make people feel small and unimportant—though individual architects might have had different motivations from time to time. Rather, the style is about making buildings that are true to their purpose, simple and without ornaments, and that show the materials (concrete mostly) they’re made of.
This specific website we’re discussing is actually quite full of flourishes, and so not brutalist in the architectural sense.
I think Christopher Alexander has some good arguments that modern “functional” architecture is the least functional of all. So while the stated aim is to be functional without ornaments, instead, it lays bare how irrelevant the human experience is, in the name of supposed functionality.
I don’t really see that site as really brutalism even in this sense. If anything, it hews a lot closer to the Small Web, such as what one might find in Gemini space.
On the surface that seems correct. But let me go on a tangent. Brutalism is functional in the sense that a space is designed only with the task at hand in mind. In a narrow sense, a library should be a place to come to and read and borrow books. Nothing else matters, so bare concrete surfaces are the efficient ideal. But critics would justifiably point out that there's more to a library than that. It's a place of community, imagination, inspiration. If we see the purpose as fostering those things, then the architecture should be visually stimulating, culturally resonnating, architecturally consistent with the buildings around it, etc.
But this is a bit of a charicature of brutalism. In reality it does consider human experience, but it perhaps values different aspects of it. Brutalist paces are built to facilitate flows of people, to make it easy to get done what you need to. But it is also a reaction to traditional architecture styles which carries with them a lot of baggage: often certain social structures such as stratification, empire, patriarchy, racial inequality, etc. When we consider brutalism as an act of opposition to these, the humanistic intent behind it shines through, even though it make the building no more appealing.
Brutalist spaces can in my opinion be welcoming and inviting if furnished correctly. To me they have a nostalgic and hopeful connotation because I walked through them growing up. Nowadays they're a refreshing change from the kind of corporate glass and plastered concrete spaces of today.
> But it is also a reaction to traditional architecture styles which carries with them a lot of baggage: often certain social structures such as stratification, empire, patriarchy, racial inequality, etc.
So kind of like the positive-spin version of "this entity doesn't care who you are", in that it has no particular bias or judgement.
GP mentions brutaldon.org and I cannot understand how to use it or what it is. I spent ~30sec there and it was not enough to learn how to use it. Doesn't look as user-friendly for me.
I like this, but it makes me sad: there would be no point to this if RSS was still widely supported by both the publications and clients. You could subscribe to the ones you want and read them with the local formatting you want. That was the case ~two decades ago and we've fallen far.
Sure, RSS readers do still exist, but they are anything other than brutalist. Janky UI/UX combined with rent-seeking subscription models, ultimately doing little or nothing that your native client couldn't have done.
Don't get me started on the fact that apps like Feedly are now trying to add AI/ML to the mix, entirely missing the point that if I'm using an RSS reader it's because I want to be the one to choose what I read and how.
Then even if all of that wasn't an issue, most publications wouldn't want to make it any easier to avoid their advertising and tracking interactions.
