What's Your Opinion of Brutalist Architecture?

[Portzania]

When I got my first computer at age 13, I decided that the default desktop background looked too distracting so I changed it with a flat pastel-colour background. That should tell you everything you need to know about my aesthetic preferences.

I like geometric simplicity and dislike complex decorations.

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

God that looks so lifeless.

[Ifreann]

If I was talking to Nathan J. Robinson five years ago then I might put some effort into actually responding to his article, but I'm talking to you now so I didn't bother myself too much.

I would respect it more if you simply said you didn't care to read it in the first place.

I skimmed it.

A strange point for him to raise in opposition to modern architecture, because what democracy was there in architecture before hated modernity invented ugliness? Cathedrals weren't approved by referendum of the local parishioners. The beauty he praises was dictated by designers, as far as their patrons would allow them discretion in design. An entirely top-down process with two decision-makers. But now when the government or a corporation commissions an architect this same process reveals arrogance and disdain.

There is nothing strange about this at all. In fact, let's make a little step-by-step process of the argument:

-People like the old style.
-People don't like the new style.
-Elites are (now) forcing people to live with the new style, which they do not like.
-Given this development, perhaps people should have more of say.

Is this hard to understand? It's not like Mr. Robinson can teleport into the past and tell the old architects how things should be done, so why are you acting like his argument is supposed to apply retroactively or something? It's simply good fortune that yesterday's elitism happened to produce something people like; that doesn't belie the point that it's bad for architect weirdos to impose their psychotic vision (just take notice of how bizarre some of Eisenman's work has been) on people.

But Robinson is not appealing to the virtues of democracy in and of itself. He is indicting modern architecture as being insufficiently respectful of democracy. Disdain for democracy is an aspect of contemporary architecture, he says, not simply a problem in general.

See, I don't think that association of totalitarianism with ruthless "efficiency" and imposed misery is actually a sensible one, in and of itself. Of course a dictator is hardly going to care for the aesthetic preferences of their people, but dictators have their own aesthetic preferences. Is it not perfectly reasonable to believe that a dictator would want the nation they command to be adorned with symbols of national pride, of righteous faith, of monuments to their own power? When I imagine totalitarianism it's not unadorned and aggressively functional blocks of concrete and steel, it's art and beauty meant to please only one person in the whole nation, a misappropriation of the styles of a bygone age, applied so as to create a pleasant view from the dictator's balcony or motorcade, an imposed vision that harkens back to whatever false glorious history they believe they're restoring. I think of Saddam Hussein living in a gilded palace, not British council housing. Or of Qatari stadia that may as well be built on foundations of bones.

You say nationalistic celebration, I say fascist austerity (just google fascist architecture and you'll see some spartan edifices).

Literally, I'm sure, as fascists would tend to be big fans of Sparta.

However, that's besides the point, because totalitarianism need not be limited to one style. The extreme opulence that comes with gold palaces can perhaps even be soulless and alienating in its own way. That doesn't mean brutalism doesn't project an atmosphere of totalitarianism, though. Because while you're associating totalitarianism with nationalism (certainly, the two mix), I am thinking of it in terms of thought police, extreme alienation and hopelessness for the future - and that atmosphere is perfectly encapsulated in buildings that look cold, hostile and like they were built with the specific purpose of reminding people that they're worthless proles.

I guess I just have a different image of totalitarianism.

[HISPIDA]

When I got my first computer at age 13, I decided that the default desktop background looked too distracting so I changed it with a flat pastel-colour background. That should tell you everything you need to know about my aesthetic preferences.

I like geometric simplicity and dislike complex decorations.

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

my little autistic brain FROTHING at the geometry....... it's so nice....

[Dumb Ideologies]

It has its purpose - in this style you can easily deliver large buildings with decent amounts of space at a relatively low price, which in the context of recovering from a war or major disaster where buildings need to be constructed quickly with limited resources is the priority. There is also the argument that no-frills functionality has its own beauty.

In a non-emergency situation a less narrow definition of functionality applies where you're looking at creating buildings that make people happy - the people living in them, in the wider community, and people visiting. While tastes vary, most people seem to find these buildings depressing and uniform. If most people are wanting to leave asap to go somewhere else that's probably not going to help the area in the longer term. They are also maybe not good in terms of natural navigation and concrete is not environmentally the best material. There are alternative methods of quick to build modular construction these days that people have a better reaction to.

[Forsher]

The death of this mode of building was not, again, due to some cultish demand for efficiency - the Great Depression killed off demand for new construction in general, the war lead to the redirection of rail traffic, and of course the postwar dominance of truck transport and the decline of the railroads sealed its fate.

That mode of building isn't dead... it's just substituted one thing for another.

The wholesale kitset model isn't dead either. Like, I literally live round the corner from a development building homes that way. Unsurprisingly to me, but surprisingly to you, they lack ornamentation.

We have established that certain kinds of ornamentation are fiscally irresponsible, but that doesn't establish that all ornamentation is. We aren't talking about why complex ironworking or intricate wood filigree don't exist. We're talking about why we're living in an period where buildings have essentially no ornamentation whatsoever.

The two questions are intimately tied together. Aesthetics responds to material conditions as much as the other way around.

Ornamentation is not difficult to do or mass produce. You have established that there are clear reasons why particular forms of ornamentation died out through material analysis. It is not an unconvincing argument. The problem is that you keep trying to extend "these specific forms" to "all ornamentation", which is the actual subject of the discussion. I have shown you a cheap, mass produced and distinct type of ornamentation that could be used but which is not.

The disappearance of complex and expensive forms does not explain the disappearance of less complex and cheaper forms. The argument "aesthetics responds to material conditions" even inhibits the natural explanation, i.e. that these alternative expressions were seen as cheap/tacky/etc and so excluded, because it predicts a change in taste to reflect new material conditions.

I suspect the reason you can't get over this hurdle is because your argument can't explain it. The material conditions of our time are quite different to those of the 1970s, say, but the ideas informing the shells of 70s buildings are the same as those we have today. Are they expressed in the same way? No, but they share, for example, this distaste for ornamentation.

I don't think there is any one universal conception of what a home is.

Firstly, I already pointed out that I should've said "house".

Secondly, universality is not something either of us are talking about. You might be sympathetic to the idea that the working Englishman is more similar to the working Frenchman than either are to their capitalist compatriots, but I believe in the existence of English-ness and French-ness. OTOH you are Canadian, so perhaps you also find this argument unconvincing. Nevertheless, even if you do subscribe to the universality given material circumstances, that does not require you to hold that all material circumstances everywhere are the same. So, neither of us are talking about universality.

Aside from anything else, French notoriously lacks a word for "home"... which says a lot about Le Corbusier's ideas, I suspect.

Thirdly, this is a very high level idea. I'm not saying, and there's no reason to imagine I am saying, that the ideological house has a mere four walls and a sloping roof. No, I'm saying the ideological house has opaque walls and a roof.

There's probably a jargon term for it (that I don't know), but I thought the meaning was obvious enough. I've asked ChatGPT (by feeding that definition to it) and it thinks "ideal type" is what I'm going for:

If I wanted to ask chatGPT I would ask it. I'm talking to you.

If you asked chatGPT it could not explain "ideological house" to you... I know this because I tried to get it to do so. HOWEVER, if, and I repeat myself, you asked chatGPT to say what word (academic) architects would attach to the definition I wrote for "ideological house" then "ideal type" is one of the results they'd give.

Thus armed, you are invited to investigate the concept of the ideological house by reference to what people have to say about "ideal types". Obviously this did not happen, but it could've.

[Northern Seleucia]

Lived in a commie brutalist apartment building for 13 years. Worst decision of my life. But brutalism isn't bad when it's put in the right place.

Hey, my family in the former USSR can agree.

---

[Northern Seleucia]

I have to see it almost daily. Don't remind me.

Proposition to trade places.

Deal. Don't even know where I'm going.

[Forsher]

I guess I just have a different image of totalitarianism.

You have an utterly idiosyncratic definition of totalitarianism which suggests either you don't know what totalitarianism is or believe all dictatorships are totalitarian states.

In a non-emergency situation a less narrow definition of functionality applies where you're looking at creating buildings that make people happy - the people living in them, in the wider community, and people visiting. While tastes vary, most people seem to find these buildings depressing and uniform. If most people are wanting to leave asap to go somewhere else that's probably not going to help the area in the longer term. They are also maybe not good in terms of natural navigation and concrete is not environmentally the best material.

This is what I was saying before... if we were to see Brutalism as an urbanist ethic, the ideas it proceeded along have been discredited wholly in favour of something more like this.

I suggest, similarly, people consider solarpunk.

[-Astoria-]

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

How is that disadvantageous, though?

---

Aside from anything else, French notoriously lacks a word for "home"... which says a lot about Le Corbusier's ideas, I suspect.

That is incorrect: there's (le) domicile and (le) foyer, for starters.

[Grand Emilia]

When I got my first computer at age 13, I decided that the default desktop background looked too distracting so I changed it with a flat pastel-colour background. That should tell you everything you need to know about my aesthetic preferences.

I like geometric simplicity and dislike complex decorations.

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

Holy fuck, I love these examples. They look like buildings straight out of Halo: CE and I love that

[Portzania]

When I got my first computer at age 13, I decided that the default desktop background looked too distracting so I changed it with a flat pastel-colour background. That should tell you everything you need to know about my aesthetic preferences.

I like geometric simplicity and dislike complex decorations.

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

The last one kind of reminds me of "YOU VILL EAT ZE BUGZ" thing
how could canada truly become worse

[Bewaffnete Krafte]

That's fine but Brutalism isn't even always simplified. It's often needlessly complex beyond reason, y'know?

How is that disadvantageous, though?

---

Aside from anything else, French notoriously lacks a word for "home"... which says a lot about Le Corbusier's ideas, I suspect.

That is incorrect: there's (le) domicile and (le) foyer, for starters.

I'm not saying it is, complexity in buildings is something i love (when it's done well, but those buildings do NOT do it well, imo), but he said he likes brutalism for it's simplicity. It's often not any simpler than any other style, but at least those styles use complexity well.

[Bewaffnete Krafte]

It has its purpose - in this style you can easily deliver large buildings with decent amounts of space at a relatively low price, which in the context of recovering from a war or major disaster where buildings need to be constructed quickly with limited resources is the priority. There is also the argument that no-frills functionality has its own beauty.

In a non-emergency situation a less narrow definition of functionality applies where you're looking at creating buildings that make people happy - the people living in them, in the wider community, and people visiting. While tastes vary, most people seem to find these buildings depressing and uniform. If most people are wanting to leave asap to go somewhere else that's probably not going to help the area in the longer term. They are also maybe not good in terms of natural navigation and concrete is not environmentally the best material. There are alternative methods of quick to build modular construction these days that people have a better reaction to.

I agree, Brutalism in it's true form (just blocks of concrete, not this "neo-brutalism" that's just a bunch of squares haphazardly glued together) serves a very real purpose. But America (and most every other country that uses Brutalism) is not in that situation, so there's no reason to use it.

[Cydathenaeum]

I said no such thing. Instead, I'm pointing out that the history of brutalism is inextricably linked with its use in major social housing developments, and said social housing has been the target of a culture war, real estate speculation and purposeful neglect going back decades.

Conversely, an architect could build these sorts of buildings as the people for which they were built had no choice in where they were to live!

The vision of 'streets in the sky' is the conceit of some over-mighty architect who thinks he can arrange people's lives better than they themselves. A vision, it should be noted, that ended in failure every where it was tried and an adoration drawn from more an abstract appreciation more than actual experience.

Which is why I find paens like Robinson's so unsatisfying - they rail at the various tyrannies and totalitarianisms seemingly generated by modernism, where in reality they are reflections of scarcities and constraints imposed by very concrete (geddit) material forces.

At no point in human history was ornamentation necessary or economical. What material explanation is there for why the Greeks built the Parthenon as they did? If material forces so dominant, why then do medieval cathedrals include decoration which is not possible to see from the perspective of someone on the ground? Both were, in a sense, ideologically attached to the expression of beauty and societies were prepared to go to great lengths to provide their outlay; Oleg Grabar's The Mediation of Ornament has much good written on the mentality of the concept. Civilization would be a poorer thing were we to follow the precepts of Lycurgus' rhetra against extravagance.

People now place great emphasis on interior design, purchasing products from extensive catalogues most often created in workshops in a manner similar to your example of Philadelphia—merely shipped from overseas— it follows: is there a law of material forces that prevents this very thing?

It is a very blinkered thing to try to justify: material forces killed beauty and this is why it is a good thing.

[Bewaffnete Krafte]

Not to mention Concrete doesn't at all age well, especially in damp environments. They quickly start to look moldy and even more ugly

[Portzania]

Not to mention Concrete doesn't at all age well, especially in damp environments. They quickly start to look moldy and even more ugly

Usually people who like brutalist architecture don't care about such a thing. It's supposed to be ugly, or bland.
It's made that way so other people aren't jealous of other's class standing/living situation, at least that's how they justified it in the soviet union.

[Bewaffnete Krafte]

Not to mention Concrete doesn't at all age well, especially in damp environments. They quickly start to look moldy and even more ugly

Usually people who like brutalist architecture don't care about such a thing. It's supposed to be ugly, or bland.
It's made that way so other people aren't jealous of other's class standing/living situation, at least that's how they justified it in the soviet union.

For the record, Lenin had a summer home mansion.

[HISPIDA]

Not to mention Concrete doesn't at all age well, especially in damp environments. They quickly start to look moldy and even more ugly

joke's on you we found out the secret to roman concrete and that repairs itself

[Nilokeras]

That mode of building isn't dead... it's just substituted one thing for another.

The wholesale kitset model isn't dead either. Like, I literally live round the corner from a development building homes that way. Unsurprisingly to me, but surprisingly to you, they lack ornamentation.

See, again, the changes in production imposed by the move away from railways.

Ornamentation is not difficult to do or mass produce. You have established that there are clear reasons why particular forms of ornamentation died out through material analysis. It is not an unconvincing argument. The problem is that you keep trying to extend "these specific forms" to "all ornamentation", which is the actual subject of the discussion. I have shown you a cheap, mass produced and distinct type of ornamentation that could be used but which is not.

The disappearance of complex and expensive forms does not explain the disappearance of less complex and cheaper forms. The argument "aesthetics responds to material conditions" even inhibits the natural explanation, i.e. that these alternative expressions were seen as cheap/tacky/etc and so excluded, because it predicts a change in taste to reflect new material conditions.

I suspect the reason you can't get over this hurdle is because your argument can't explain it. The material conditions of our time are quite different to those of the 1970s, say, but the ideas informing the shells of 70s buildings are the same as those we have today. Are they expressed in the same way? No, but they share, for example, this distaste for ornamentation.

There clearly are lots of less complex and cheaper forms of ornamentation available - your hardware store website is full of them. People don't seem to be buying them though, which leads into your second paragraph. There seems to be a cultural consensus that cheap, mass-produced and truck-portable ornamentation looks tacky. Material conditions (the proliferation of cheap materials, the death of handicrafts, even mass-produced ones) influence culture (a rejection of ornamentation and move towards other forms of expression).

There are also other material considerations beyond the purely aesthetic response to what the market offers. How much is the millenial attraction to 'minimalism' a function of the fact that millenials have to move places, on average, every two years, rent from landlords who forbid them from hanging pictures on the wall and have less purchasing power for stuff to begin with?

Firstly, I already pointed out that I should've said "house".

Secondly, universality is not something either of us are talking about. You might be sympathetic to the idea that the working Englishman is more similar to the working Frenchman than either are to their capitalist compatriots, but I believe in the existence of English-ness and French-ness. OTOH you are Canadian, so perhaps you also find this argument unconvincing. Nevertheless, even if you do subscribe to the universality given material circumstances, that does not require you to hold that all material circumstances everywhere are the same. So, neither of us are talking about universality.

Aside from anything else, French notoriously lacks a word for "home"... which says a lot about Le Corbusier's ideas, I suspect.

What a bizarrely parochial view of French culture. Do you really think that they have no concept of 'a place where one lives and finds comfort/meaning' because they have no word that is a direct translation for the English 'home'? What do you think 'chez moi' means?

Thirdly, this is a very high level idea. I'm not saying, and there's no reason to imagine I am saying, that the ideological house has a mere four walls and a sloping roof. No, I'm saying the ideological house has opaque walls and a roof.

It feels like we're approaching spherical cow levels of inapplicability to the real world.

If you asked chatGPT it could not explain "ideological house" to you... I know this because I tried to get it to do so. HOWEVER, if, and I repeat myself, you asked chatGPT to say what word (academic) architects would attach to the definition I wrote for "ideological house" then "ideal type" is one of the results they'd give.

Thus armed, you are invited to investigate the concept of the ideological house by reference to what people have to say about "ideal types". Obviously this did not happen, but it could've.

You could have just pulled up JSTOR and searched for the history of human habitation and its relationship to architecture. Why you decided to ask the magic conch shell is beyond me.

[Ifreann]

Not to mention Concrete doesn't at all age well, especially in damp environments. They quickly start to look moldy and even more ugly

joke's on you we found out the secret to roman concrete and that repairs itself

Witchcraft.

[Nilokeras]

Conversely, an architect could build these sorts of buildings as the people for which they were built had no choice in where they were to live!

The vision of 'streets in the sky' is the conceit of some over-mighty architect who thinks he can arrange people's lives better than they themselves. A vision, it should be noted, that ended in failure every where it was tried and an adoration drawn from more an abstract appreciation more than actual experience.

Architects are not city councils. They are commissioned by people who have the ultimate say in what a space looks like. They can certainly pitch certain things, but they have absolutely no guarantee the client will go for them. If we can't even get social housing built today that has air conditioning, a seeming requirement for our warming world, how do you think your average Tory city council will respond to a big expensive ornamented social housing block?

And speaking of capitalism's descent into ugly, atomistic individualism, one can't help but marvel at your bristling at the idea of social housing providing some sort of public space for its tenants as 'think[ing] he can arrange people's lives better than they themselves'.

At no point in human history was ornamentation necessary or economical. What material explanation is there for why the Greeks built the Parthenon as they did? If material forces so dominant, why then do medieval cathedrals include decoration which is not possible to see from the perspective of someone on the ground? Both were, in a sense, ideologically attached to the expression of beauty and societies were prepared to go to great lengths to provide their outlay; Oleg Grabar's The Mediation of Ornament has much good written on the mentality of the concept. Civilization would be a poorer thing were we to follow the precepts of Lycurgus' rhetra against extravagance.

People now place great emphasis on interior design, purchasing products from extensive catalogues most often created in workshops in a manner similar to your example of Philadelphia—merely shipped from overseas— it follows: is there a law of material forces that prevents this very thing?

It is a very blinkered thing to try to justify: material forces killed beauty and this is why it is a good thing.

Material conditions absolutely determine the aesthetic choices made by societies. Ornamentation and the creation of beautiful spaces is a common goal, but what materials are used, what level of quality and how much human labour has to go into them are absolutely determined by material forces. You can chart the fortunes of Egypt's pharaonic dynasties by the style, size and level of effort placed into their tombs, for example.

Similarly, you can chart the death of the single family home and younger generations' ability to own housing stock by their preferences for interior design. Interior products are smaller, more easily containerized and shipped in a logistic network dominated by trucks. They are portable, capable of moving from rental home to rental home. They are more capable of being made by small-scale artisans, at farmers' markets, Etsy stores and the like, as they don't have to be part of construction supply networks managed by corporations.

[Cydathenaeum]

Conversely, an architect could build these sorts of buildings as the people for which they were built had no choice in where they were to live!

The vision of 'streets in the sky' is the conceit of some over-mighty architect who thinks he can arrange people's lives better than they themselves. A vision, it should be noted, that ended in failure every where it was tried and an adoration drawn from more an abstract appreciation more than actual experience.

Architects are not city councils. They are commissioned by people who have the ultimate say in what a space looks like. They can certainly pitch certain things, but they have absolutely no guarantee the client will go for them. If we can't even get social housing built today that has air conditioning, a seeming requirement for our warming world, how do you think your average Tory city council will respond to a big expensive ornamented social housing block?

And speaking of capitalism's descent into ugly, atomistic individualism, one can't help but marvel at your bristling at the idea of social housing providing some sort of public space for its tenants as 'think[ing] he can arrange people's lives better than they themselves'.

At no point in human history was ornamentation necessary or economical. What material explanation is there for why the Greeks built the Parthenon as they did? If material forces so dominant, why then do medieval cathedrals include decoration which is not possible to see from the perspective of someone on the ground? Both were, in a sense, ideologically attached to the expression of beauty and societies were prepared to go to great lengths to provide their outlay; Oleg Grabar's The Mediation of Ornament has much good written on the mentality of the concept. Civilization would be a poorer thing were we to follow the precepts of Lycurgus' rhetra against extravagance.

People now place great emphasis on interior design, purchasing products from extensive catalogues most often created in workshops in a manner similar to your example of Philadelphia—merely shipped from overseas— it follows: is there a law of material forces that prevents this very thing?

It is a very blinkered thing to try to justify: material forces killed beauty and this is why it is a good thing.

Material conditions absolutely determine the aesthetic choices made by societies. Ornamentation and the creation of beautiful spaces is a common goal, but what materials are used, what level of quality and how much human labour has to go into them are absolutely determined by material forces. You can chart the fortunes of Egypt's pharaonic dynasties by the style, size and level of effort placed into their tombs, for example.

Similarly, you can chart the death of the single family home and younger generations' ability to own housing stock by their preferences for interior design. Interior products are smaller, more easily containerized and shipped in a logistic network dominated by trucks. They are portable, capable of moving from rental home to rental home. They are more capable of being made by small-scale artisans, at farmers' markets, Etsy stores and the like, as they don't have to be part of construction supply networks managed by corporations.

And neither were the city councillors forced to live there, I imagine. Nor have I advocated for some grotesque white elephant: Plan Voisin was not an improvement over Haussmann, even if it were to include volutes and acroteria. Besides, there is more to contemporary architecture than brutalism alone and I am not responsible for the architectural decisions of whoever you think 'we' may be.

It is a typical thing for a high modernism to attempt to reinvent an organic concept such as a 'street' or 'community', winning aplomb from the architectural élite, and failing entirely in the execution. Take Chandigarh as a choice example.

I would contrast it with what I believe to be the very best amenities, those built by the Victorians, that being their public parks and botanical gardens, accessible to all and providing the respite of nature in the middle of a crowded city.

---

You describe practical matters of construction but fail in explaining why the Greeks (and later Romans) were as select with their stone as they were i.e. their aesthetic choices. How exactly does the Greek love of symmetry descend from 'material forces'? Or the form of their sculpture?

I've seen physical houses in their entirety, placed onto trucks, then moved. Or older houses stripped and then their decorative elements placed upon a truck to be sent away and resold. Everything that was put on a train had to be delivered by a horse and cart, logically more powerful trucks should mean larger objects then?

If it is purely economic, why is it the preference for the interior's of the homes of the rich to be so austere and minimalist? Are you so dogged you cannot admit the existence of fashion?

[Forsher]

That mode of building isn't dead... it's just substituted one thing for another.

The wholesale kitset model isn't dead either. Like, I literally live round the corner from a development building homes that way. Unsurprisingly to me, but surprisingly to you, they lack ornamentation.

See, again, the changes in production imposed by the move away from railways.

That is a complete non sequitur.

There clearly are lots of less complex and cheaper forms of ornamentation available - your hardware store website is full of them. People don't seem to be buying them though, which leads into your second paragraph. There seems to be a cultural consensus that cheap, mass-produced and truck-portable ornamentation looks tacky. Material conditions (the proliferation of cheap materials, the death of handicrafts, even mass-produced ones) influence culture (a rejection of ornamentation and move towards other forms of expression).

There are also other material considerations beyond the purely aesthetic response to what the market offers. How much is the millenial attraction to 'minimalism' a function of the fact that millenials have to move places, on average, every two years, rent from landlords who forbid them from hanging pictures on the wall and have less purchasing power for stuff to begin with?

We're not talking about interiors. You really don't want to be talking about interiors.

Firstly, I already pointed out that I should've said "house".

Secondly, universality is not something either of us are talking about. You might be sympathetic to the idea that the working Englishman is more similar to the working Frenchman than either are to their capitalist compatriots, but I believe in the existence of English-ness and French-ness. OTOH you are Canadian, so perhaps you also find this argument unconvincing. Nevertheless, even if you do subscribe to the universality given material circumstances, that does not require you to hold that all material circumstances everywhere are the same. So, neither of us are talking about universality.

Aside from anything else, French notoriously lacks a word for "home"... which says a lot about Le Corbusier's ideas, I suspect.

What a bizarrely parochial view of French culture. Do you really think that they have no concept of 'a place where one lives and finds comfort/meaning' because they have no word that is a direct translation for the English 'home'? What do you think 'chez moi' means?

It's the same attitude people take towards English, e.g. hygge, and the linguistic turn takes towards... everything.

Thirdly, this is a very high level idea. I'm not saying, and there's no reason to imagine I am saying, that the ideological house has a mere four walls and a sloping roof. No, I'm saying the ideological house has opaque walls and a roof.

It feels like we're approaching spherical cow levels of inapplicability to the real world.

Do you have a picture of a "house" when it is mentioned to you? If you were to go to an open home and find a "house" which has no roof, the walls are all transparent and there's a long drop in the middle, does that fit your model of what a house is?

Let's try another tack... say that you wanted to know how to tell a human from a chimp, or a tuna from a shark, or Tyrannosaurs rex from Tarbosaurus bataar. In this case compare the ideal type or ideological [noun] to the type specimen.

Not only is this not inapplicable, it's how you conduct everyday life. If your friend tells you it's raining, you have a mental model of what rain is and what it means and how to respond. Were you to exit the building and find a sun shower, you would mentally comment on the inaccuracy of your friend's description.

If you asked chatGPT it could not explain "ideological house" to you... I know this because I tried to get it to do so. HOWEVER, if, and I repeat myself, you asked chatGPT to say what word (academic) architects would attach to the definition I wrote for "ideological house" then "ideal type" is one of the results they'd give.

Thus armed, you are invited to investigate the concept of the ideological house by reference to what people have to say about "ideal types". Obviously this did not happen, but it could've.

You could have just pulled up JSTOR and searched for the history of human habitation and its relationship to architecture. Why you decided to ask the magic conch shell is beyond me.

You can't plonk definitions into a search box expect to get the jargon the definitions describe back out the other end. You can, however, consult a reverse (concept) dictionary or use ChatGPT in such a fashion.

But we have previously seen you don't really get the difference between Google and ChatGPT.

Similarly, you can chart the death of the single family home

No, you can't.

That is a classic example of an ideological war against and then for certain urban forms. In the US, it literally dates back to a supreme court case determining that the state has the legal power to forbid alternative forms of development. I guess you could make a case for economic determinism in the turn against single family zoning, but the market conditions aren't actually new... it has always been the case that the developer will get as many units per area as they can (which is why missing middle housing exists in the US... literally everything but tower blocks and single family zoning was banned for 90+ years, and still is in many areas).

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.

[Nilokeras]

And neither were the city councillors forced to live there, I imagine. Nor have I advocated for some grotesque white elephant: Plan Voisin was not an improvement over Haussmann, even if it were to include volutes and acroteria. Besides, there is more to contemporary architecture than brutalism alone and I am not responsible for the architectural decisions of whoever you think 'we' may be.

It is a typical thing for a high modernism to attempt to reinvent an organic concept such as a 'street' or 'community', winning aplomb from the architectural élite, and failing entirely in the execution. Take Chandigarh as a choice example.

I would contrast it with what I believe to be the very best amenities, those built by the Victorians, that being their public parks and botanical gardens, accessible to all and providing the respite of nature in the middle of a crowded city.

For a long time, a street was just a path between buildings. Urban green spaces were just places to graze your sheep in the city walls for when the Pechenegs rumbled by in Thrace. It took redefinitions, often top-down redefinitions, of these spaces for people to realize they could be more than that. See: Hausmann and his transformation of Paris. Nowadays Hausmannian Paris is pretty cherished, even though it now has its downsides - ie traffic. It wasn't always so. Doubtless the people displaced to create Hausmann's cities disagreed.

Likewise, the people displaced by Victorian park-building. If you were a poor worker getting kicked out of your home because some rich prick down at city hall wants to build a duck pond you would probably be displeased. It's blatant cherrypicking and ahistoricism to pluck out things like Hausmann and Victorian ponds while blaming brutalists for toying with peoples' lives.

You describe practical matters of construction but fail in explaining why the Greeks (and later Romans) were as select with their stone as they were i.e. their aesthetic choices. How exactly does the Greek love of symmetry descend from 'material forces'? Or the form of their sculpture?

The Greeks didn't have a monopoly on symmetry. Symmetry is a common form of architectural expression used in some buildings. Others are not symmetrical. The Greeks used symmetry in some of their building plans, like temples, and not others - vernacular housing, for example. Rich people who commissioned symmetrical, monumental public buildings lived in sprawling villas. They evidently didn't see conflict in that.

The Parthenon was built of marble because that was what was nearby, at Mount Pentelicus. It would have been prohibitively expensive to get other types of stone. The temple at Garni in Armenia is made of basalt, which was local. The Temple of Claudius in Roman Britain, by contrast, was made of local marble and stone, with accent pieces imported all the way from Tunisia as part of a statement of imperial grandeur. Roman imperial authorities evidently had far more resources at their disposal to do that sort of importing than did classical Athens.

And of course this flows downward to other forms of art. It's far easier to take a monolithic piece of marble and carve it into a singular shape than to assemble smaller pieces - hence Greek figurative art, carved out of huge blocks of marble. Or the Parthenon friezes.

I've seen physical houses in their entirety, placed onto trucks, then moved. Or older houses stripped and then their decorative elements placed upon a truck to be sent away and resold. Everything that was put on a train had to be delivered by a horse and cart, logically more powerful trucks should mean larger objects then?

I mean, if we're taking Sears as an example, the way it worked would have been that the Sears plant had its own railway sidings that had trains loaded with material on site. You can fit far more material on one train than you can many, many trucks. Once you can get that train to your small Illinois town where someone ordered a craftsman house it can be offloaded and carried a much shorter distance.

And of course the underlined begs the question - if our fallen society is so uninterested in ornamentation, why are people scavenging blighted row homes in Philadelphia for old iron balustrades?

If it is purely economic, why is it the preference for the interior's of the homes of the rich to be so austere and minimalist? Are you so dogged you cannot admit the existence of fashion?

I don't know how many times I have to say that the relationship between aesthetics and materiality is reciprocal for it to sink in for people here

[Umeria]

Brutalist buildings would have a much better reputation if they didn't keep them so cold all the time. Hard to feel welcome when it's 50 degrees inside.