What's Your Opinion of Brutalist Architecture?

[Bewaffnete Krafte]

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.

It's also hard to feel welcome when the architect (at least sometimes) specifically designs the building to be unwelcoming.

[Cydathenaeum]

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.

Perhaps it is a top down redefinition. But one which is of far lesser a degree than closing people off from the outside world for their own good and certainly a decision which has been successful in the long term.

Parks in London were an opening of land, not an appropriation and this was certainly the case for the most famous of them: I choose my words very carefully. It was the landscaping, for which I think the Victorians had a talent, as much as was simply the land that I credit them for, which was pre-existing. Even the parks of Haussmann were largely a reuse of land, to my knowledge.

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.

The Parthenon was prohibitively expensive and why I choose it as an example! It nearly bankrupted the Athenian state. Or the cost of the Parian Marble for the temple of Delphi, for that matter, if you want a more remarkable example, which was also ruinously expensive. The Greeks did not this idea of nearly calculated credits and debits in their minds and you err to think they do: it was all terribly impractical—why go to such great trouble to make all this? I do think Finley has the jist.

You have side-stepped my points, by saying the Greeks built non-symmetrical buildings, which I never disputed & a rather bizarre addendum about the 'ease' of this or that, which doesn't explain why forms of their sculptures were as they were.

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?

I'm well aware of how modern logistics works, thank you. You are arguing that the ability to move large objects has decreased with time, due to the use of trucks and their smaller cargo capacity vs a train, rather than the reverse, which I can assure you is quite wrong. How did they move a craftsman house at all past once it had left the train? As not all wrought-iron is located immediately besides a railway station, it is the same way a prefabricated house was sent to the Swan River Colony—in small pieces, just as all that cast iron would have been disassembled. This is a complete failure of imagination if you extrapolate at all from your assumption.

It is cheaper to scavenge building material than to start an entire production line to make it again; society is very large and there is no universal taste—why do people still buy antiques? Spolia has, after all, existed for millennia.

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

Because it is wrong. Many decisions concerning aesthetics are made with little respect to materiality. Only in the strictest, most literal and most unimaginative sense are they related.

[Senkaku]

When has brutalism ever been so in vogue as to 'suppress' demand for other styles of building? The era of brutalism was filled with other styles of architecture. More importantly, the types of artisan work required to build things like mass production wrought iron fixtures were gone long before brutalism came about.

Brutalism is but one manifestation of the bias against ornamentation. It's not a comment about Brutalism specifically, but a comment about how all in vogue styles share an anti-ornamentation bias.

Ok, but this is a thread about brutalism specifically lol— these seems like an incredibly surface-level dismissal of pretty much all of modernist design as “anti-ornamentation” without considering how brutalist or different styles of contemporary architects have actually rethought, iterated on, and created new forms of ornamentation for public monuments.

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.

Why couldn’t you just say “upon investigation I think what I meant was ‘ideal type’” instead of dragging the droids into architecture criticism lol

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.

Neoclassical buildings would have a much better reputation if “they” didn’t keep them so humid inside. Hard to feel welcome when dew is condensing out of the air onto your skin at 60 degrees. All neoclassical buildings are like this, by the way, I’ve checked

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;

I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, you can analyze it as a simple output of superstitions that helped uphold the reigning political economies and regimes of those eras. Ornamenting areas no one on the ground could see serves to increase the expenditure and number of artisans required, creates secret knowledge that can be revealed as propaganda to express the power and wealth of the cathedral’s sponsor or sponsors, legitimizes them further in the eyes of the church, and reinforced the regime’s own self-belief in its divine favor. They also just loved beauty, I’m sure, but pretending like it’s absolutely incomprehensible from a political-material perspective why they might undertake such efforts is kind of a stretch.

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

“Killed beauty”? Can we please be serious for a minute and chill out? Just because you don’t find certain styles beautiful doesn’t mean your taste is universal— I genuinely enjoy just looking at a lot of brutalist architecture and monuments, I think they’re often quite beautiful, just in a different way from your baroque or gothic cathedrals or your classical basilicas or what have you. Brutalist and modernist buildings can have plenty of ornamentation and style, the fact you don’t recognize it as such doesn’t make your taste somehow objectively correct.

Yes, there’s a lot to be said about the rise of minimalism and its consequences for the human race or whatever, but honestly I’d be more interested in hearing about the aesthetic consequences of this trend for interior design, vehicles, clothing, personal effects, and appliances— not public architecture, where I would submit that a lot of contemporary ornamentation (glasswork, decorative metal and stone claddings, screens & audio, water features, gardens, disrupted surfaces, abstract sculpture) maybe just often isn’t recognized as such, since we’re used to imagining things like realistically-styled friezes and colonnades with elaborate capitals and ironwork and stained glass as default decorative elements. The foam-core non-load-bearing decorative column is a rather tragic consequence of this failure of imagination— to borrow from Forsher, those are our “ideal type” of architectural decoration, but we miss a lot if we narrow our focus to only finding the ideal type of a thing beautiful.

[Senkaku]

Are you so dogged you cannot admit the existence of fashion?

https://youtu.be/Ja2fgquYTCg

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

Most post-WW1 architecture is evil, soulless, and dangerous garbage. If the nuclear apocalypse becomes a reality, the cleansing of our sins against art will be the silver lining.

Posadism?

no, posadism is hyperaccelerationist communism. this is just an extreme distaste for recent architecture.

[Senkaku]

Hating brutalism is usually a good litmus test for having bad opinions about architecture and public spaces, particularly since brutalist public architecture was one of the last movements to actually incorporate any public amenities in the spaces they built. Complaints about its ugliness are usually followed by mushy outpourings about some neoclassical pile built by a guy who hated Jews and bulldozed a minority neighbourhood to build their thing of choice.

Ok but on the other hand, which category does most anti-homeless architecture fall into?

Do you just think every building with straight lines and no colonnades is “brutalist”? Anything with concrete? What are you even talking about here, how is not putting benches in a train station “brutalist”?

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

Hating brutalism is usually a good litmus test for having bad opinions about architecture and public spaces, particularly since brutalist public architecture was one of the last movements to actually incorporate any public amenities in the spaces they built. Complaints about its ugliness are usually followed by mushy outpourings about some neoclassical pile built by a guy who hated Jews and bulldozed a minority neighbourhood to build their thing of choice.

Ok but on the other hand, which category does most anti-homeless architecture fall into?

“okay but <bad thing> is part of <group> so <group> is bad”

except anti-homeless architecture is not brutalist so this makes even less sense.

[Nilokeras]

Perhaps it is a top down redefinition. But one which is of far lesser a degree than closing people off from the outside world for their own good and certainly a decision which has been successful in the long term.

Parks in London were an opening of land, not an appropriation and this was certainly the case for the most famous of them: I choose my words very carefully. It was the landscaping, for which I think the Victorians had a talent, as much as was simply the land that I credit them for, which was pre-existing. Even the parks of Haussmann were largely a reuse of land, to my knowledge.

We can look to Central Park for another example. Or, non-park related, Hausmann's clearing of the center of Paris. It was probably the sanitary thing to do, but it did destroy a historic quarter of the city and displace all of the people to the outskirts. His critics in French society like Jules Ferry sound much like the people in this thread describing brutalism in their characterization of his work: 'We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire, of Desmoulins, the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings, the costly confusion, the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism, that we are going to pass on to our descendants'. Now of course, again, his work is inextricably linked to the whole idea of Paris. Hindsight is 20/20, after all.

The Parthenon was prohibitively expensive and why I choose it as an example! It nearly bankrupted the Athenian state. Or the cost of the Parian Marble for the temple of Delphi, for that matter, if you want a more remarkable example, which was also ruinously expensive. The Greeks did not this idea of nearly calculated credits and debits in their minds and you err to think they do: it was all terribly impractical—why go to such great trouble to make all this? I do think Finley has the jist.

You have side-stepped my points, by saying the Greeks built non-symmetrical buildings, which I never disputed & a rather bizarre addendum about the 'ease' of this or that, which doesn't explain why forms of their sculptures were as they were.

And if you asked the Athenians why they didn't ship the marble from Ionia they would have looked at you like you had stepped out of a time machine, because beyond being expensive it was physically impossible.

Again, to repeat myself, material conditions and aesthetics are in dialogue with one another. Traditions in art evolve with the materials at hand, and art can change material conditions. The question at hand here is 'to what extent does the material realities of modern capitalism influence the 'minimalism' seen in architecture and interior design'.

I'm well aware of how modern logistics works, thank you. You are arguing that the ability to move large objects has decreased with time, due to the use of trucks and their smaller cargo capacity vs a train, rather than the reverse, which I can assure you is quite wrong. How did they move a craftsman house at all past once it had left the train? As not all wrought-iron is located immediately besides a railway station, it is the same way a prefabricated house was sent to the Swan River Colony—in small pieces, just as all that cast iron would have been disassembled. This is a complete failure of imagination if you extrapolate at all from your assumption.

The point is not that it's impossible or that we've somehow lost the ability to move large objects. It's that it's now more expensive to do so, and the infrastructure that allowed places like Sears to have the business model they did either no longer exists or is no longer configured in such a way to encourage that type of business model. Most towns in the early part of the 20th century were accessible by rail because that's how large swathes of the country were settled - as suburbanization took off along with the automobile as a dominant mode of transport, a business model predicated along stocking box cars up with everything to build a house becomes a lot less feasible as transportation time and cost goes up.

It is cheaper to scavenge building material than to start an entire production line to make it again; society is very large and there is no universal taste—why do people still buy antiques? Spolia has, after all, existed for millennia.

Quite right - which has material consequences for how people build and decorate their homes.

[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.

Neoclassical buildings would have a much better reputation if “they” didn’t keep them so humid inside. Hard to feel welcome when dew is condensing out of the air onto your skin at 60 degrees. All neoclassical buildings are like this, by the way, I’ve checked

I was mostly just complaining about my campus. Honestly they keep the older buildings too cold as well, also it isn't as bad.

Ok but on the other hand, which category does most anti-homeless architecture fall into?

Do you just think every building with straight lines and no colonnades is “brutalist”? Anything with concrete? What are you even talking about here, how is not putting benches in a train station “brutalist”?

Obviously a lack of benches isn't architechture at all. Talking about the rows of metal spikes under highways and stuff.

Ok but on the other hand, which category does most anti-homeless architecture fall into?

“okay but <bad thing> is part of <group> so <group> is bad”

except anti-homeless architecture is not brutalist so this makes even less sense.

That's not what I said

[Senkaku]

There can be some absolutely stunning brutalist buildings, it is just a style that is very easy to mess up.

You could swap the word “brutalist” in here for literally any other architectural style. No one’s saying every brutalist building is good and beautiful, just like no one’s saying every Rococo building is good and beautiful. The argument here is fundamentally about whether modernist and postmodern forms of art and design should be condemned by the culture and the academy, which right-wing traditionalists would really like them to be, since repressing contemporary forms of art and architecture would represent an aesthetic triumph for their political project of reactionary regression.

“Brutalism is so ugly haha it should die” is just the architectural corollary to people saying “my kid could do that” and rolling their eyes while looking at a Picasso.

[Senkaku]

Obviously a lack of benches isn't architechture at all. Talking about the rows of metal spikes under highways and stuff.

How is that architecture either, if bench placement in large designed spaces isn’t, and how would it be “brutalist” if you consider it as such?? Are the anti-pigeon spike strips on apartment windowsills “brutalism”? Jesus fucking Christ lol

[Abakhizar]

It can die in a hole, hated by all. Beauty matters.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

“okay but <bad thing> is part of <group> so <group> is bad”

except anti-homeless architecture is not brutalist so this makes even less sense.

That's not what I said

you implied that hostile architecture is brutalist as part of your overall argument that brutalism is bad. what else were you trying to say?

[Nilokeras]

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

You sound vaguely threatened

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

I genuinely don't understand what you're saying here.

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.

Okay Plato, now remind me how mental models have to do with peoples' taste in interior decorating. Are you arguing that someone's just going to start walking like an Egyptian if I hang too many prints of Tutankhamun's funerary mask on my walls?

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.

You're right, you have to actually do the work of looking for and synthesizing knowledge.

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

I fully understand it. I'm far more bemused about how this whole exchange is proving the critics' point about how it will spit out absolute nonsense with complete certainty, and without expert knowledge it's easy to be fooled by that confidence.

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.

I genuinely don't know how you got from my point about millennial interior design choices to this.

[Kubra]

Hating brutalism is usually a good litmus test for having bad opinions about architecture and public spaces, particularly since brutalist public architecture was one of the last movements to actually incorporate any public amenities in the spaces they built. Complaints about its ugliness are usually followed by mushy outpourings about some neoclassical pile built by a guy who hated Jews and bulldozed a minority neighbourhood to build their thing of choice.

Also 'brutalism' is not about being brutal in the sense of being purposefully ugly or offensive, it's merely a translation of the french word for 'raw' - ie the unadorned concrete used in brutalist construction.

I mean iirc wasn't half the point of brutalism to draw attention away from the buildings themselves in order to emphasise the layout and how people actually moved and lived through its internal spaces

[Forsher]

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

You sound vaguely threatened

It reveals your argument to be entirely circular. How do you know economic determinism is a valid argument? Because millennials are fans of minimalists. How do you know millennials are fans of minimalism? Because they practice minimalism. Why do they practice minimalism? Because they can't afford to do anything else. If millennials can't not be anything else, that doesn't demonstrate anything about what they actually think or like... unless you assume a Stockholm syndrome effect where you just start liking whatever you're forced to truck with, but the proof of the Stockholm syndrome's existence is that same premise: millennials are minimalists.

Revealed preference is just generally nonsensical. It only tells you what people are capable of doing... not what they like most, not what they like and not even what they prioritise.

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

I genuinely don't understand what you're saying here.

Be glad of it.

Far from reflecting the social world
of which it is a part, language precedes the world and makes it intelligible
by constructing it according to its own rules of signification. Since for Saus-
sure such rules are inherently arbitrary, in the sense of being social conven-
tions implicitly understood in different ways by differing linguistic commu-
nities,4 the idea of an objective universe existing independently of speech
and universally comprehensible despite one's membership in any particular
language system is an illusion. Reality does not exist "beyond" the reach of
language; it is "always already" constructed in language, which is itself ante-
rior to our knowledge of the world. It follows that literature, as an instance
of linguistic utterance, cannot transparently reflect a world outside itself,
since that "world" is only a linguistic construct, and what it reflects, therefore,
is merely another articulation of language, or discourse.

4 To take an example cited by Belsey, p. 39, the meanings of "river" and "stream" in English
do not correspond to riviere and fleuve in French. In English, what distinguishes a river from a
stream is their respective size. In French, on the other hand, a fleuve is a body of water that
flows into the sea, while a riviere flows into another riviere or a fleuve. The referents of these
terms change as one passes from one language to another, and what determines the referent
within each language is its place within the linguistic code or rules that govern the production
of meaning.

From "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages" by Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Though in this case you could genuinely just have looked up both hygge and "linguistic turn".

Okay Plato, now remind me how mental models have to do with peoples' taste in interior decorating. Are you arguing that someone's just going to start walking like an Egyptian if I hang too many prints of Tutankhamun's funerary mask on my walls?

No, but you would. That is literally your position.

Mental models as we have been discussing them have nothing to do with peoples' taste in interior decorating because, as the example demonstrates, it belongs to a conversation about exteriors.

Mental models obviously imply to interior decoration because you know what that term means. In terms of your arguments, say you collect silver plate and your home is just full of the stuff. If you invite a millennial into your home and they're not confused by the presence of the silver plate, then the millennial you've invited in has not internalised minimalism. They have, instead, the capacity to imagine interior design outside of the parameters of minimalism so encountering a home so decorated, they have no particular questions about why someone would decorate their home like that. Now, they might ask why you like silver plate so much or how you managed to afford your collection, but even the first question doesn't betray confusion at the concept.

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.

You're right, you have to actually do the work of looking for and synthesizing knowledge.

*internalises Nilokeras' message*

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

I fully understand it. I'm far more bemused about how this whole exchange is proving the critics' point about how it will spit out absolute nonsense with complete certainty, and without expert knowledge it's easy to be fooled by that confidence.

You think "ideal type" is not a real thing?

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.

I genuinely don't know how you got from my point about millennial interior design choices to this.

Well, again, we're not talking about millennial design choices. Not me. Not you. Not Cydathenaeum. You can literally see your own quote "Similarly, you can chart the death of the single family home" introduce this section. What a joke.

[Senkaku]

You're right, you have to actually do the work of looking for and synthesizing knowledge.

*internalises Nilokeras' message*

Using the tools of your age is perfectly normal when looking for and synthesizing knowledge, it’s not— actually, you know what, you wanna have your little epistemology circlejerk somewhere else? Do you have anything interesting to say about architecture criticism, or is are you just going wherever the ChatGPT winds blow you?

What are your aesthetic objections to brutalism and brutalist buildings? What specific buildings can you highlight as examples of the problems you identify? I’d put the same question to anyone else in the thread— how is brutalist architecture “objectively” aesthetically worse than any other style? We’ve established that lack of obvious/traditional ornamentation isn’t to some people’s taste, but how does that establish brutalism as being somehow aesthetically and spiritually damaging to human society? There’s a few Baroque buildings I find ugly and distasteful, but I don’t use my distaste as a basis for arguing that the entire style is a blight on civilization, nor do I simply redefine every building from the 1400s-1900s that I don’t like as “baroque” regardless of its actual design.

[Regnum Alea Spaceflee]

Love it. Just 2 words

[Forsher]

*internalises Nilokeras' message*

Using the tools of your age is perfectly normal when looking for and synthesizing knowledge, it’s not— actually, you know what, you wanna have your little epistemology circlejerk somewhere else? Do you have anything interesting to say about architecture criticism, or is are you just going wherever the ChatGPT winds blow you?

What are your aesthetic objections to brutalism and brutalist buildings? What specific buildings can you highlight as examples of the problems you identify? I’d put the same question to anyone else in the thread— how is brutalist architecture “objectively” aesthetically worse than any other style? We’ve established that lack of obvious/traditional ornamentation isn’t to some people’s taste, but how does that establish brutalism as being somehow aesthetically and spiritually damaging to human society? There’s a few Baroque buildings I find ugly and distasteful, but I don’t use my distaste as a basis for arguing that the entire style is a blight on civilization.

You haven't been paying any attention to this conversation. You haven't read my posts. You haven't even read the specific bits of my posts where I mention ChatGPT. Maybe don't assume you know what I'm saying, yeah? Because you really, really don't.

Until you're ready to actually read what I've said, just go away. Nilokeras, for example, has not once responded to anything I've said about Brutalism.

We’ve established that lack of obvious/traditional ornamentation isn’t to some people’s taste, but how does that establish brutalism as being somehow aesthetically and spiritually damaging to human society?

This is quite simply not a burden that either Nilokeras nor myself are defending nor critiquing because our conversation is wholly and only about why ornamentation does not exist after WWII. Is the answer because of an ideological rejection of ornament (me) or material conditions (Nilokeras)?

[Senkaku]

Using the tools of your age is perfectly normal when looking for and synthesizing knowledge, it’s not— actually, you know what, you wanna have your little epistemology circlejerk somewhere else? Do you have anything interesting to say about architecture criticism, or is are you just going wherever the ChatGPT winds blow you?

What are your aesthetic objections to brutalism and brutalist buildings? What specific buildings can you highlight as examples of the problems you identify? I’d put the same question to anyone else in the thread— how is brutalist architecture “objectively” aesthetically worse than any other style? We’ve established that lack of obvious/traditional ornamentation isn’t to some people’s taste, but how does that establish brutalism as being somehow aesthetically and spiritually damaging to human society? There’s a few Baroque buildings I find ugly and distasteful, but I don’t use my distaste as a basis for arguing that the entire style is a blight on civilization.

You haven't been paying any attention to this conversation. You haven't read my posts. Maybe don't assume you know what I'm saying, yeah? Because you really, really don't.

Well, since I have read your posts, then you’re either one of the great misunderstood geniuses of our time, or just another random poster who can’t manage to clearly communicate a single byte of whatever their intended message is. I know which seems like the simpler explanation to me!

[Forsher]

You haven't been paying any attention to this conversation. You haven't read my posts. Maybe don't assume you know what I'm saying, yeah? Because you really, really don't.

Well, since I have read your posts, then you’re either one of the great misunderstood geniuses of our time, or just another random poster who can’t manage to clearly communicate a single byte of whatever their intended message is. I know which seems like the simpler explanation to me!

No, you really haven't read my posts. Your replies to the sections of them have betrayed a complete ignorance of the context of the discussion, you've misinterpreted completely uncomplicated description of ChatGPT and, finally, you attempted to synthesise my views on Brutalism... having not actually once quoted me when I've been talking about Brutalism.

There's this neat thing you can do down the bottom of the thread where you sort by poster... I suggest you do it. I know what I've said is perfectly clear.

While you're at it, find Page and Huskar's posts in this thread. You're not going to like what you see, at all.

[Teletubieland]

Its ugly, its depressing, and every last example of it should be torn down, smashed and destroyed.

[Senkaku]

Hating brutalism is usually a good litmus test for having bad opinions about architecture and public spaces, particularly since brutalist public architecture was one of the last movements to actually incorporate any public amenities in the spaces they built. Complaints about its ugliness are usually followed by mushy outpourings about some neoclassical pile built by a guy who hated Jews and bulldozed a minority neighbourhood to build their thing of choice.

Also 'brutalism' is not about being brutal in the sense of being purposefully ugly or offensive, it's merely a translation of the french word for 'raw' - ie the unadorned concrete used in brutalist construction.

Bad opinions like not wanting to live in the most dreary, totalitarian-esque structures imaginable?

And sure, lump everyone who dislikes it in with anti-Semites while you're at it.

You might call Notre Dame or the Colosseum or the Pyramids or Chichen Itza “dreary totalitarian structures” while you’re at it— imposing state-supported monuments, let’s just get rid of them! Don’t you think there might be a reason why humans have a drive to come together to create monumental structures, and valid reasons for enjoying them beyond reveling in the oppression of the masses? I suppose joyful proletarian architecture will consist purely of modest suburban homes and low-rise offices, but done communistly— what, 15-30% more murals on back alley walls?

[Forsher]

Bad opinions like not wanting to live in the most dreary, totalitarian-esque structures imaginable?

And sure, lump everyone who dislikes it in with anti-Semites while you're at it.

You might call Notre Dame or the Colosseum or the Pyramids or Chichen Itza “dreary totalitarian structures” while you’re at it— imposing state-supported monuments, let’s just get rid of them! Don’t you think there might be a reason why humans have a drive to come together to create monumental structures, and valid reasons for enjoying them beyond reveling in the oppression of the masses? I suppose joyful proletarian architecture will consist purely of modest suburban homes and low-rise offices, but done communistly— what, 15-30% more murals on back alley walls?

It seems I owe Ifreann an apology... his interpretation of the word "totalitarian" is not as absolutely insane and disconnected from how everyone else understands it as I believed. Oh well. You live and learn.

[Senkaku]

You might call Notre Dame or the Colosseum or the Pyramids or Chichen Itza “dreary totalitarian structures” while you’re at it— imposing state-supported monuments, let’s just get rid of them! Don’t you think there might be a reason why humans have a drive to come together to create monumental structures, and valid reasons for enjoying them beyond reveling in the oppression of the masses? I suppose joyful proletarian architecture will consist purely of modest suburban homes and low-rise offices, but done communistly— what, 15-30% more murals on back alley walls?

It seems I owe Ifreann an apology... his interpretation of the word "totalitarian" is not as absolutely insane and disconnected from how everyone else understands it as I believed. Oh well. You live and learn.

The Colosseum is literally a vast masonry & concrete structure built by an absolutist military autocracy for the purpose of slaughtering humans and animals en masse as public spectacle and entertainment. If it’s a treasured masterpiece of classical architecture that we should be thankful was preserved from being completely quarried, but the Boston City Hall is “dreary totalitarianism” given form, then I think we can maybe admit that brutalism’s harshest and broadest critics have verged slightly into hyperbole.