61–70 of 122 posts
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.
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.
While I tend to agree that brutalist is sometimes an excuse for ugly, even you gotta admit that most of the pictures in the article are quite stunning.
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The thing is, quite a lot of those things look better when photoed from a distance and much less so when you actually need to walk around them in your daily life. I used to live next to two rather famous Brutalist buildings. One of them was actually kept in good order and the original architect seemed not to be outright enemy of mankind. It still had a score of problems, but well. The other one was beyond ugly; it wa…
>> seemed not to be outright enemy of mankind 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?
You say you've been to Prague, well, have you ever been to the rest of the country? How about eastern Slovakia? Poland? Compared to some other places, Prague looks like an architectural masterpiece.
It's because that's not what crumbling Soviet-era buildings look like. Sure they're fun to photograph. I've seen these buildings from Prague to Prizren and they are categorically awful, as most others agree. Concrete doesn't aesthetically age well. Preserve one or two for historical importance and raze the rest.
It's fair to open dialogue about the importance of preserving historical buildings even if most people think they're ugly. After all, we've committed countless "mistakes" in the past when taste has changed (Penn Station anyone?).
But the least we can do is start with some honest photography.
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I think they are stunning because they are so ugly. Looking at pictures once is one thing and living or working there is another thing. Add the unwanted associations with the totalitarian regime... I have to admit that I am in favor of destroying them and replacing them with something nicer wherever possible. I respect that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; just my $0.02.
The totalitarian association is what makes them so fucked up. The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind. And anyone who celebrated them, even as a cerebral exercise was evil as well. There are certain bu…
A lot of these buildings look like they're designed with an aesthetic appropriate to their function, which I think is a good principle for architecture in general.
My "favorite" brutalist building in the CR is the department store on old town square in Olomouc. It's so wildly and incredibly out of character with everything else around, it's like a space ship landed across from the orloj and somehow nobody noticed.
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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 ty…
Well, what is the causality there? Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side. But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles…
The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.
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The totalitarian association is what makes them so fucked up. The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind. And anyone who celebrated them, even as a cerebral exercise was evil as well. There are certain bu…
I don't think that's true for all brutalist architecture, otherwise how could you explain its presence in the UK and other countries where there was no communist regime? Here is a good video about it: https://youtu.be/VGwVAxRHxgM
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.
There is a reason aesthetics are always the first to come under attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernő_Goldfinger
Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.