It is too bad Thomas Heatherwick’s “let’s try AI” project is sarcastic.
Imagine CAD is first invented and your world class creative shop is like, “Let’s make a poop doodle.”
Then there are comments here noting some of these buildings are pretty nice looking. Sarcastic is 200% the wrong approach. And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.
> And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.
But people who have to live around brutalism tend to suffer because of it. It's like abstract contemporary art made into your living space. But you're not abstract and so you don't fit in.
I love Barbican. One often overlooked quality of Barbican is how much design work went into it: these corridors, galleries, balconies are all unique, many design elements are one-off, and there are more than 80 flat types https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/plans/
This makes it much more organic, surprisingly, than most modern developments. It's not just the same thing copypasted over and over, Barbican has a very human, natural variety to it, despite the superficially harsh appearance.
Sometimes this variety can even backfire, because Barbican can feel like a maze. But that's a consequence of it not being the standard street grid. I wish we had more architecture like that.
We're talking about subjective things, like the appearance of buildings. Not a crack den. If the neighbors of Brutalist structures don't like it so much, they can build whatever else they want. Anyway, "live around" Brutalism doesn't sound like much suffering. On the flip side, all the twee Victorians I "live around" are very beautiful, but their occupants are so broke they are rarely repaired, and their tax assessments are so low, I also have a claim that a piece of architecture "makes me suffer," but of course, communities are made of people, not buildings, so that's ridiculous.
Imagine CAD is first invented and your world class creative shop is like, “Let’s make a poop doodle.”
Then there are comments here noting some of these buildings are pretty nice looking. Sarcastic is 200% the wrong approach. And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.