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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

#151

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…

Yeah, I think it's impossible for a web page or application to really be brutalist. Web pages, and really everything on the computer screen are a rendering of something. They don't have materials or material properties, they only represent or imitate them. So really they can never be honest to the materials. They can only imitate or evoke 'ideas' of brutalism.

https://cran.r-project.org

It’s as close as anything I can think of. All function and little, if any, attempt at style.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#152
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, I always thought that argument as flimsy, since the word brute exists in French and has exactly the same meaning as in English.

Francophone here. There is a difference between "Une brute" (a brute) and, as mentioned, "béton brut" (raw/rough concrete).

Regardless, it's a postrationalisation (or retranslation, perhaps?) by British architects to force some sort of etymological ancestry into the name of the 'movement' they decided to champion.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://twitter.com/KevinBuist/status/980947107489165314

We've all see this meme, it just perpetuates falsehoods about brutalism. However, it pretty much nails (maybe not intentionally) the increasingly common misguided discussion of it.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#154
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…

Consumer products vs professional products. Time the user is willing to invest in learning your interface. USS Enterprise was designer for people who would learn it for several years in star fleet academy. Airbnb is designed to become more clear and obvious than booking.com in two first minutes the user sees it.

The same user that might be routinely using software like Emacs or Ableton Live or Final Cut Pro or 3ds max studio or AutoCad in his professional life.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really get annoyed when terms like "brutalism" are co-opted as yet another buzzword/trend/fad. Along with native and real time .

Realtime native quantum ai makes your payments with blockchain to change industry!

Now that’s how you get investors

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#156

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…

> exposed structures and visible thought processes

If you press F12, it turns any website to a brutalist one

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#157

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…

Brutalist design encompasses both Craigslist and these examples. There are commonalities there, as well as differences.

Also Wikipedia and a certain tech-centric online forum, to an extent.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think they know that, and were riffing off the misspelling ;-) It's about an 800 year old word in French. Wiktionary claims that it was imported to US English primarily by GIs returning from the Vietnam War. I'd assume that it would come more directly from French, in other forms of English.

I recall this being brought up by a guy who had been a helicopter mechanic in the Army... he believed it was a Vietnamese word spelled ‘buku’, and it took me some time to realize he meant beaucoup.

Example in context: “They’re making buku bucks over there.”

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#159

The Humanities building at the University of Wisconsin Madison is a great example of Brutalist design in my opinion. And its beautiful.

I grew up admiring the brutalist inspired buildings at UNM (the style blends nicely with adobe and Pueblo architecture). There are many in Albuquerque. The style also reminds me of late 70s science fiction art depicting spaceships and vast buildings.

Re: Brutalist Design Is the Bad Influence We All Need

#160
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…

Very much this - as a Brit, Brutalism means to me all the eyesore buildings in faded concrete, grey against a grey sky, depressing buildings.

Buildings that dominate areas, make them feel unsafe and unfriendly. Buildings that create dark spaces for petty crime, spaces that smell of urine.

Buildings with no human warmth at all.

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