Ask Lemmy

Let me introduce you to Tirana, Albania which has done exactly as you suggest! They elected a former painter as mayor in 2000, and the rest is history. So many of the brutalist buildings in the city are now covered with bright colors, murals, patterns, and more. You can check out some before and after images here: https://blog.ted.com/9-views-of-tirana-albania-with-its-bright-multicolored-building/

Brutality architecture, done well, already looks amazing!

That said, yes, their tendency towards large unbroken planes of material make them prime candidates for murals, and you see a lot of that in places like Chicago that had a big Brutalist phase.

It's been done quite a bit throughout Eastern Europe. Here are some examples from Poland:

Certainly a nicer colour scheme than dirty soul-crushing grey.

Some graffiti is, I think, traditional at this point and a good mural can do wonders to humanize it. I have a feeling that patterns are not actually going to improve it though. The problem is often the form rather than what the material looks like. You could paint it to look like a row of thatched cottages but that would to me be even more depressing.

You are also then committed to repainting it regularly or it's going to quickly look even worse than when you started.

Not sure if this counts as brutalist, but the post made me think of this example from Portland

Now I just want to see big buildings painted with WWI dazzle camo.

It can't quite get brutalist buildings to look as good as non-brutalist buildings, but yeah painting them is a great move that really improves the vibe.

The Bierpinsel in Berlin has been painted in a few different ways, and looked great in all of them. Do an image search for it, you’ll see what I mean

Run neon tubes along every edge.

Does this count?
https://media.hotnews.ro/media_server1/image-2021-05-22-24813020-0-cea-mai-mare-pictura-murala-din-romania.jpg

Brutalism gets a bad rap because people mimic the naive effect without understanding motive. It's about not disguising how a simple thing was made. The first by-name brutalist structure was a house with one window topped by a solid steel I-beam. What fools saw was raw construction with no ornamentation. But what mattered was function without shame.

There is no reason the concrete walls in a stairwell have to be formed from flat least-effort boxes. You can put pretty patterns in the forms! You can sculpt and mass-produce whole reliefs! What makes it brutalism is not covering up the fact it's a big slab of concrete. Don't even hide the holes where you had to shove the slab out of the form. If you don't like where they sit, in the pattern or the relief - make a better form. You can figure out how to integrate a few little circles and still be pretty.

The best examples in modernity might be "street furniture." Curbs, signposts, telephone poles. Hard-wearing civic necessities that are obviously made of one piece of one material and maybe painted a solid color. But you know there's a difference between ugly streets and pretty streets. It's never because the pretty street covered up how everything was built. There's no wooden slats over the sidewalk, pretending it's a boardwalk. No terra-cotta pots around an in-ground bush. No faux cobblestone paint-job on the asphalt. Signposts are still a steel tube or a punched rail of sheet-metal; they're just treated or painted often enough not to be half rust and all ugly.

So yeah, gaudy up those flat walls. Just not with any nonsense facade that makes them look like five-over-one gentrification rectangles.

I feel like I remember reading about a city that basically encouraged graffiti, and would rotate through local artists every few months or so. Seems like a great way to give the place some character