this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that's besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that's a good thing. In my country there's a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that's because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say "we don't have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it". You know how many homeless we'd have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don't have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can't pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn't be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I'll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I'll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don't really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I'll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that's as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it's beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that's beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
I get where you're coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn't cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don't get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I'm currently homeless and I'd take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there's some people who'd rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they're comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
Fair enough, i am fortunate enough to not have to speak from experience on the subject. But when building social housing on a large scale, hiring some halfway decent architects to design some functional and simple, but modern and liveable apartments is only a tiny fraction of the cost.
Think dense housing with a little less uniformity and more quality of life in mind, like room for planting and communal green spaces, perhaps areas that could be used and allocated by the inhabitants instead of pre planned rigidness. More colors, windows, etc.
Touching up a purely functional block design with these all very cheap and minor adjustments could make them a lot more appealing.
Though I of course concede that if the budget is so small that this isnt feasible, the purely functional aspect comes first.
Well the thing is, the budget is that small. Otherwise why would there be a five year waitlist for government housing? You're talking like a budget that could house everyone but only in boring housing is small. But the current budget, there's no way it can house everyone in any conditions at all. Every extra apartment we can build is another person off the street or out of the homeless shelters. That's the scale we're talking about here. There is no extra, there is no slack, and there's nothing we could possibly do to stretch the budget enough to create slack. But what we can do is stretch the budget enough to give one more person a home, and I think that's the most important thing.
Sorry, I did say if the government built block housing there would be almost no homeless. I was at the time imagining a fantasy world where the government gets its shit together and actually tries to solve the homeless problem. Take this current comment as assuming that the government doesn't decide to tax the rich appropriately to fund this endeavour.
I am probably talking as not an american, which is why I have a reasonable amount of trust in my government and its ability to build not shitty looking housing. They do that too sometimes, but still.
I am also a not American
I think you may be confusing functionalism with brutalism. In the UK, these two styles were combined but that isn't necessarily true. Brutalist buildings can very much eschew function in order to be more imposing, memorable or unusual.
Functionalism is the style that is all about minimizing the resources used to get the most useful building you possibly can.
Yeah, I know there's impractical brutalist buildings, but those are the big expensive projects, right? The cheap ones are practical as far as I knew
Yes, any architectural style can be practical, I'm just saying that the style you're actually advocating for is functionalism. I'd recommend doing some reading about it. I think you'd be a fan, considering you already seem to be in favour of all its core precepts.
Cheap brutalism can look good.
Can you share examples of good and bad brutality buildings that are cheap? I'm just curious what you like
Yes but I'm currently traveling and have very limited Internet access... I'll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I'm back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
No sweat, I was jw
For good brutalised, look at the Barbican or Habitat 67
That habitat 67 building is crazy looking!