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Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

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Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#61

Post by joqje09309 »

smacktoward wrote: post #16

I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is: honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois and a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes The pro…

I think you hit it with "unconventional layouts" bit.

They're not neatly segregated along, with navigators aligned across the top or stacked on the left.

Visual artifacts are all over, controls are all over.

It's "brutalist" relative to the norm

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#62

Post by testvox »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #59
niftich wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, the label 'brutalist' is fraught with conflated interpretations that to some followed logically, yet in other contexts they appear to be in conflict. From the very beginning, the term sprung out of linguistic confusion between French and English [1], where Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, then art imitated life…

Brutalist architecture was a disaster, especially in countries like the UK where poor light and regular rain make grey concrete one of the most depressing and least durable of all possible building materials. The UK was littered with Brutalist "statement" buildings. Most have been pulled down now, and - with a few high profile exceptions, which have escaped the low-budget ghetto most of the movement settled in - the…

On the other hand I really enjoyed all the Brutalist architecture on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The imposing concrete buildings made a great contrast to the otherwise entirely natural beauty of the Pioneer Valley.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#64

Post by joqje09309 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #4

And yet for all its supposed innovation, web brutalistism still looks overly pretentious as it revels in its 'aesthetic' of psuedo-Swiss minimalism. I'm sick of the garbage that designers these days pass off as 'form'. It ruins computing. Sci-fi showed us the future was large screens full of data and smart humans doing meaningful shit with it... but reality is we pay beaucorp bucks to waste 98% of a 4K, 9-megapixel d…

There's something odd about being sick of humans alive today doing their thing (designers), and thinking of sci-fi full of fictional humans, with fake ui's made by ... designers alive today... as somehow the "right way"

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#65

Post by tomc1985 »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #60
tomc1985 wrote: post #4

And yet for all its supposed innovation, web brutalistism still looks overly pretentious as it revels in its 'aesthetic' of psuedo-Swiss minimalism. I'm sick of the garbage that designers these days pass off as 'form'. It ruins computing. Sci-fi showed us the future was large screens full of data and smart humans doing meaningful shit with it... but reality is we pay beaucorp bucks to waste 98% of a 4K, 9-megapixel d…

Beaucorp! What a great new word. One of the world-spanning megacorporations from William Gibson but decorated in a Beaux-Arts style.

It's an old word, afaik. Means 'mega' in this context. Also I mispelled it :D

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#67

Post by agumonkey »

ianbicking wrote: post #23
smacktoward wrote: post #16

I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is: honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois and a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes The pro…

The ZK/U site (in one of the thumbnails) is one of the better examples, I thought: http://www.zku-berlin.org/

windows 2 is about to sue

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#69

Post by saint_fiasco »

smacktoward wrote: post #16

I'm confused. I don't see what makes most of the examples cited here "Brutalist" in any meaningful fashion. Brutalism is, of course, a fuzzy (and contentious) label to begin with. But the article cites two interpretations of the term that we could use to evaluate how Brutalist a given design is: honest, unpretentious and anti-bourgeois and a sense of roughness, exposed structures and visible thought processes The pro…

The second definition might be a site like 4chan, where signing a post via tripcodes makes the cryptographic signature visible to users, and people quote other posts by referring to the post number, possibly even the same as the post id in the database.
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