I actually just tried looking that up, to see if such a word actually exists in English. I found a stack exchange thread asking this same question but no one had a suitable answer. So, yeah, I guess it’s up to you to contribute to society by inventing and popularizing this new word. Enjoy your new destiny.
Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that’s besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn’t be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I’ll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I’ll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don’t really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I’ll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that’s as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it’s beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that’s beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
I get where you’re coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn’t cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don’t get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I’m currently homeless and I’d take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there’s some people who’d rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they’re comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
Fair enough, i am fortunate enough to not have to speak from experience on the subject. But when building social housing on a large scale, hiring some halfway decent architects to design some functional and simple, but modern and liveable apartments is only a tiny fraction of the cost.
Think dense housing with a little less uniformity and more quality of life in mind, like room for planting and communal green spaces, perhaps areas that could be used and allocated by the inhabitants instead of pre planned rigidness. More colors, windows, etc.
Touching up a purely functional block design with these all very cheap and minor adjustments could make them a lot more appealing.
Though I of course concede that if the budget is so small that this isnt feasible, the purely functional aspect comes first.
I think you may be confusing functionalism with brutalism. In the UK, these two styles were combined but that isn’t necessarily true. Brutalist buildings can very much eschew function in order to be more imposing, memorable or unusual.
Functionalism is the style that is all about minimizing the resources used to get the most useful building you possibly can.
Yes, any architectural style can be practical, I’m just saying that the style you’re actually advocating for is functionalism. I’d recommend doing some reading about it. I think you’d be a fan, considering you already seem to be in favour of all its core precepts.
Yes but I’m currently traveling and have very limited Internet access… I’ll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I’m back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
Damn. I rather like the interwar style of architecture: pretty lines and compelling nuances and decorations. Something to distract myself with as opposed to brutalist architecture.
I think that was the original idea for brutalist buildings, complementing them with plants? I don’t want to look for a source right now though, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ve been looking for a reason why I find them unpleasant and you found it for me. They look like the decaying Nazi bunkers I got to explore on a Danish beach when I was a kid.
Though I also don’t like massive towers of glass. Or rowhomes. Or really cities in general. Give me a nice cave in a swamp any day.
I was watching this and thinking, almost. How did a country start building like this, for the people and then stop. Then it is all apparent, the Witch got in power.
It appears the growth of these “for the benefit of people” views were replaced with the old ages of the greatest and silent generation, and replaced with the “me, me, me. My money” of the boomer generation.
I can’t help but thinking how things could have been different if we continued on from the old timers. I know ww2 destroyed an economy that was lucky to survive it, that’s in itself is also an interesting thing to think how the world would have been without it.
To be fair, brutalist buildings are fugly
I dunno, I think they’re kinda … neat, I guess? Like, yeah, they’re technically pretty ugly, but somehow in a way that makes them interesting.
Trying…and failing, to think of a good portmanteau of interesting and ugly.
Edit: intugly? Ugteresting?
“Striking” is usually the word. It can be used for bad looks as well as good.
Well, as with all my attempts to shine…this has crashed and burned. And not even gloriously…
Hey, there’s no reason to not come up with new words. You could bring the world the next ‘yeet’ or ‘bussy’.
Just imagine the possibilities!
Naw…my heart’s not in it any more…
I actually just tried looking that up, to see if such a word actually exists in English. I found a stack exchange thread asking this same question but no one had a suitable answer. So, yeah, I guess it’s up to you to contribute to society by inventing and popularizing this new word. Enjoy your new destiny.
puts big boy pants on, and refills coffe My time to shine!
Ugleresting.
Interesgly?
KAKT.
No rounded letters. Sounds gross but kinda like cracked.
KAKT.
That would make the cybertruck a brutalist car.
https://judithneilsonprojects.com.au/project/indigoslam
I guess this is technically the opposite of what you are trying to convey, but your comment reminded me of a song I haven’t thought about in a decade
https://theendlessbummer.bandcamp.com/track/boring-but-beautiful
To you.
The peak of brutality architecture beats any other type in my eyes. It’s beautiful in a way no other building or style compares.
Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that’s besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn’t be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I’ll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I’ll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don’t really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I’ll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that’s as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it’s beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that’s beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
I get where you’re coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn’t cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don’t get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I’m currently homeless and I’d take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there’s some people who’d rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they’re comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
Fair enough, i am fortunate enough to not have to speak from experience on the subject. But when building social housing on a large scale, hiring some halfway decent architects to design some functional and simple, but modern and liveable apartments is only a tiny fraction of the cost.
Think dense housing with a little less uniformity and more quality of life in mind, like room for planting and communal green spaces, perhaps areas that could be used and allocated by the inhabitants instead of pre planned rigidness. More colors, windows, etc.
Touching up a purely functional block design with these all very cheap and minor adjustments could make them a lot more appealing.
Though I of course concede that if the budget is so small that this isnt feasible, the purely functional aspect comes first.
I think you may be confusing functionalism with brutalism. In the UK, these two styles were combined but that isn’t necessarily true. Brutalist buildings can very much eschew function in order to be more imposing, memorable or unusual.
Functionalism is the style that is all about minimizing the resources used to get the most useful building you possibly can.
Yeah, I know there’s impractical brutalist buildings, but those are the big expensive projects, right? The cheap ones are practical as far as I knew
Yes, any architectural style can be practical, I’m just saying that the style you’re actually advocating for is functionalism. I’d recommend doing some reading about it. I think you’d be a fan, considering you already seem to be in favour of all its core precepts.
Cheap brutalism can look good.
Can you share examples of good and bad brutality buildings that are cheap? I’m just curious what you like
Yes but I’m currently traveling and have very limited Internet access… I’ll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I’m back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
No sweat, I was jw
For good brutalised, look at the Barbican or Habitat 67
That habitat 67 building is crazy looking!
They look depressing and I hate being around them. A city should be a nice place to live, not a playground for architects’ experiments
I love being around them. Visiting Tokyo right now and there are so many gorgeous concrete buildings.
The last thing I’d want is to live in a city that was so stuck in the past that all buildings look 100 years old.
Give me buildings from the 2020s not the 1920s. Give me sleek and light concrete, metal and glass.
Death to brick and wrought iron.
Huh…my preferences are literally the opposite of yours. History FTW!
Damn. I rather like the interwar style of architecture: pretty lines and compelling nuances and decorations. Something to distract myself with as opposed to brutalist architecture.
Brutalism is beautiful in its simplicity and honesty. Combine that with some green and it’s a 10/10 to me.
Give me a verdant bunker any day.
A city should be a place for people to live, not some artsy space for real-estate developers to inflate living costs.
Have your artsy architecture projects, but also have functional buildings too please
I like it.
I think the greenery in these pictures is doing quite a bit of lifting. Brutalist buildings without plants are less fun to look at
I think that was the original idea for brutalist buildings, complementing them with plants? I don’t want to look for a source right now though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Any building without plants is less fun to look at
Brutalism without greenery does not work well in general. I love the post apocalyptic vibes of a concrete building overgrown by plants.
These look like defensive structures from a war movie with some plants on them
I’ve been looking for a reason why I find them unpleasant and you found it for me. They look like the decaying Nazi bunkers I got to explore on a Danish beach when I was a kid.
Though I also don’t like massive towers of glass. Or rowhomes. Or really cities in general. Give me a nice cave in a swamp any day.
This reminds me of a very short but very good documentary
The Barbican: A Middle Class Council Estate
I was watching this and thinking, almost. How did a country start building like this, for the people and then stop. Then it is all apparent, the Witch got in power.
It appears the growth of these “for the benefit of people” views were replaced with the old ages of the greatest and silent generation, and replaced with the “me, me, me. My money” of the boomer generation.
I can’t help but thinking how things could have been different if we continued on from the old timers. I know ww2 destroyed an economy that was lucky to survive it, that’s in itself is also an interesting thing to think how the world would have been without it.
Not British and haven’t watched the video you linked, so I’m guessing… Thatcher?
Yea. He didn’t actually mention her just said the conservatives got in power and sold the country.
I like them…
It’s the perfect architecture for any of the non-squishy government organizations like the FBI or the Department of Urban Works.
You, oh lowly peasant should be intimidated in the halls of governance, for you don’t belong here.
Idk man, they’ve kind of grown on me