Prague's Brutalist Buildings

Isn't it incredible that people who had so much hate of their fellow man were allowed to design entire environments for people to spend their lives in? And that we were actually taught about this as a "movement" in school, as if it were just a natural extension of modernism?

??? Of course not. They probably thought they were building happy communities under the glorious sun of communism. Unfortunately they were tragically wrong (on both their buildings and their economical system)

Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.

The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").

What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.

If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!

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p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.

And then we can ask the questions:

Does architecture favor a specific class?

Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.

Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?

Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?

And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?

That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them.

My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.

I am only aware of one brutalist private dwelling in Oslo, there might be more.

Another was planned but that is a long story, and it was not approved in the end.

Most brutalist buildings have some character and they cannot be ignored

I fully understand that the brutalist esthetics is lost for most people.

According to Wikipedia we are now in the postmodern phase of architecture. The example buildings form makes me think that a lot of the world has not made it that far yet.

Buildings being erected over the past 20 years all seem to be rectangular boxes. If they want to be fancy its glass and steel. Extremely generic. Some try to make up for it by having a lobby with a ridiculously high ceiling.

The open space is not used for anything creative or anything at all really. The huge empty space speaks for itself.

I highly prefer the brutalist era. If nothing else, it is less boring.