I'm presently looking into building my residence using precast concrete. I love the raw concrete aesthetic,all the benefits from an insurance and maintenance perspective. You folks here are making me doubt the resale value...
You might be in the minority enjoying precast concrete. In good news, you can easily wrap it in a variety of exterior materials when you want to sell.
Everything from thin cut stone (imitating brick or mortared rock foundation) to half-log siding to plain vinyl siding would be am option, though the half or quarter-log siding might be tricky wrt moisture retention up against the concrete- not sure if that would affect the expected lifetime of the wood.
I spent almost a year living in a brutalist building in Prague. It was a concrete slab with an huge central courtyard, like a prison yard. You could not access the courtyard, it was dark and dingy. But it was completely full of pigeons. Maybe a thousand pigeons lived there. The inner balcony at the back of the apartment was caked with about 3" of pigeon shit. One day I woke up and found they were power washing the en…
Sounds like central Prague. Its a strange place (lived there 5 years, moved to better places), what tourists see / are lured at is big pretty medieval centre with rich history. Almost nobody actually lives there, too expensive and impractical. The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries. Most colleagues bought rather houses quite far from th…
Yeah, central Prague - borderline Vinohrady. I loved the people. Old Town is beautiful but a bit depressing because of the tourists; but I grew up in Las Vegas, and I found it similar to that and to New Orleans, where I also lived. Once you live there you never really spend time in the tourist district. Outside the tourist areas it's really cool, punk, underground all night places. (This is true for Vegas, NOLA and Prague, in my opinion. I put them in the same category because people in all three deal with floods of tourists and have great underground local culture).
I spent almost a year living in a brutalist building in Prague. It was a concrete slab with an huge central courtyard, like a prison yard. You could not access the courtyard, it was dark and dingy. But it was completely full of pigeons. Maybe a thousand pigeons lived there. The inner balcony at the back of the apartment was caked with about 3" of pigeon shit. One day I woke up and found they were power washing the en…
Sounds like central Prague. Its a strange place (lived there 5 years, moved to better places), what tourists see / are lured at is big pretty medieval centre with rich history. Almost nobody actually lives there, too expensive and impractical. The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries. Most colleagues bought rather houses quite far from th…
It's partly personal preference and partly which areas you frequent, I guess. I like the 19th/early 20th century apartment buildings, family houses that weren't built in recent homogenous developments are usually nice as well. Places like Jižní město (less artsy than the article's examples, but still brutalist) are irredeemably ugly though, so if that's your experience of Prague...
The photos in the article look very similar to the Czech embassy in Berlin, definitely one of the more interesting buildings in Berlin, especially compared to the more modern, and more bland buildings which are being built today:
I'm presently looking into building my residence using precast concrete. I love the raw concrete aesthetic,all the benefits from an insurance and maintenance perspective. You folks here are making me doubt the resale value...
I think it depends... I really dislike brutalist architecture but I have seen same concrete buildings that I really liked. I remember university library where I used to spend a lot of time reading - it was made from raw concrete but in more modern style: huge windows (basically all glass wall), the concrete was contrasted with wood and some bright colors (orange carpets if I remember correctly) - it was really pleasant to be there, it felt sunny and somehow "natural".
I spent almost a year living in a brutalist building in Prague. It was a concrete slab with an huge central courtyard, like a prison yard. You could not access the courtyard, it was dark and dingy. But it was completely full of pigeons. Maybe a thousand pigeons lived there. The inner balcony at the back of the apartment was caked with about 3" of pigeon shit. One day I woke up and found they were power washing the en…
The stain was probably from spit and dirt. I lived in an apartment with a similar elevator. Nothing happened in 30 years that I know of. Just the dirt was never removed.
If people were spitting on the wall, the stain would be wider at the bottom, not at the top, because more people would pass the lower floors
I spent almost a year living in a brutalist building in Prague. It was a concrete slab with an huge central courtyard, like a prison yard. You could not access the courtyard, it was dark and dingy. But it was completely full of pigeons. Maybe a thousand pigeons lived there. The inner balcony at the back of the apartment was caked with about 3" of pigeon shit. One day I woke up and found they were power washing the en…
Sounds like central Prague. Its a strange place (lived there 5 years, moved to better places), what tourists see / are lured at is big pretty medieval centre with rich history. Almost nobody actually lives there, too expensive and impractical. The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing, communism made its mark that won't go away for next few centuries. Most colleagues bought rather houses quite far from th…
I am a little surprised by what you say. I've been living in Prague for 9 years (moved here, not Czech) and 8 of them I lived in Prague 5 bordering the Old Town, in 2 buildings build in Art Nouveau style, from around 1900. They were renovated, with modern elevators and looked pretty good both inside and outside.The area was very beautiful. Now I live in a communist tower block in Prague 4 and to be honest it's really not so bad. The apartment is OK, kind of small, especially American standards, but what i really like is the way the area was build. For example, in the middle of the area there is a school, a kindergarten and a nursery. And there are plenty of green spaces. This is definitely communist urban planning, but in this case, at it's best.
Archive.org copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20211021141127/https://www.calver... My favourite brutalist building is in Belgrade: the Western City Gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate
I was just about to mention Belgrade, imo it has the best brutalist buildings outside of the former Soviet Union countries, that's (also) why it is on my to-visit-soon list.
Might be helpful for people interested in this, an acquaintance of mine recently started working on a project for an online archive of socialist modernist concrete-based (so not only brutalism in strict sense) architecture (contains photos, info, publications, art projects inspired by the subject, etc.): https://belgradesocialmodernism.com/
A long time resident of Prague. I hate this shit. All of it. If there ever was an architecture designed to squeeze the soul out of you, spit on it, curb-stomp it AND, to add insult to injury, age like milk in absence of proper maintenance, this is it. The modern glass-and-steel architecture is "only" soulless in comparison.
Brutalist architecture is often beautiful, but it certainly wasn't designed for people, but rather as a monuments to the ego of the architect. I visited one of Le Corbusier's "creations" once (this one: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit%C3%A9_radieuse_de_Marseill... ) Soul-crushing is indeed the only thing I could think of while there. [EDIT]: Here's a good article on function vs form: https://www.currentaffairs.org/…
Many of the brutalist buildings, perhaps not those in the USSR, are designed with humans very much in mind. Many of the issues that have been with life in brutalist builds are down to them being frequently used for social housing. Placing a large number of relative poor people, drug users, people with mental health problem and a myriad of other issues in the same place will cause trouble regardless of the building type.
That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.