[HN Gopher] Prague's Brutalist Buildings
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Prague's Brutalist Buildings
Author : samizdis
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-10-30 08:26 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.calvertjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.calvertjournal.com)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I visited Czechoslovakia and East a few times when the Wall was
| still up. The biggest impression was how gray and drab everything
| was in the cities. It seemed everything was gray and covered with
| a thin layer of dirt. Very depressing. The countrysides were just
| neglected and decrepit. Also depressing in a different way.
| newby wrote:
| I grew up in Czechoslovakia and I remember vividly how we
| visited Austria shortly after the fall of iron curtain.
| Everything seemed so clean and colorful and well maintained -
| it was shocking. I saw billboards for the first time in my life
| and they seemed incredibly beautiful to me. Until that visit I
| never realized how gray and falling apart was my normal
| environment (I was 13 at the time) - it seemed normal and I
| assumed it was like that everywhere.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, flaking of facades not repaired in decades used to be
| the norm, with some of them even still having shot holes from
| the last days of WWII! And all that covered by soot from all
| the many houses burning poor quality coal.
|
| It took many years after The Fall to put things in order and
| now such a facade is the exception, not the norm.
|
| Still, there is that one house with nicely painted iron fence
| clearly showing WWII bullet holes, from a long forgotten
| firefight.
| ax0l0tl wrote:
| Here is a better view of the National theatre
| https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0813684,14.4138734,3a,75y,13...
| eltados wrote:
| https://archive.md/MpQWy
| stemlord wrote:
| Hey I recognize that metro station
| https://www.discogs.com/master/6164-Convextion-Convextion :D
| Deep6 wrote:
| 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...
| newby wrote:
| 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".
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think it's alright. This architecture mostly gets depressing
| if it gets dominant. One concrete house in an otherwise normal
| neighborhood may actually look quite interesting.
| ericmay wrote:
| I mean yea most people don't want to live in a bunker. Ask
| yourself why everyone talks about and photographs places like
| Nyhaven in Copenhagen and not Boston City Hall.
|
| With enough money and smart uses of glass you can make a house
| that is made of concrete but getting it right is going to be a
| big challenge. A good rule of thumb is to use building
| materials that would be local to the area and climate and then
| go from there.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| > the Barrandov Bridge is one of the most crucial arteries.
| Designed by Karel Filsak, author of the similarly impressive
| Hotel Intercontinental on Parizska Street
|
| That hotel was also impressively filled with asbestos:
|
| https://newsbeezer.com/czechrepubliceng/the-people-around-th...
|
| Asbestos has been known to be a big health hazard since 1900s and
| has been heavily regulated since:
|
| https://www.oracleasbestos.com/what-is-asbestos/asbestos-reg...
|
| I personally can't appreciate or commend a building that was
| knowingly made with such a hazardous material.
| zedr wrote:
| 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
| samizdis wrote:
| I love Belgrade and have stayed there maybe a dozen times in
| the past few years. Usually I stayed in Old Belgrade, in the
| formerly (or perhaps still?) state-run hotel, which is partly
| staffed by students from a hospitality/catering college
| attached to it as they do their training.
|
| A couple of years ago I stayed at an AirBnB apartment in New
| Belgrade. Beautiful apartment, but the building was brutal and
| huge, built in a long sort of zig-zag that went on and on. The
| name of the street nearest to the entrance I was using
| translated as "Anti-fascist struggle street".
|
| Here's a picture of it:
|
| https://belgrade.tips/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/kineski-zid...
|
| And here's the full article (not terribly good) about the
| building, from which I took the picture link.
|
| https://belgrade.tips/index.php/2021/04/27/belgrade-is-adorn...
| paganel wrote:
| 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.
| nzp wrote:
| 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/
| uwagar wrote:
| very cool!
| rapsey wrote:
| Belgrade was not a part of the Soviet Union
| jhgb wrote:
| Uh...that's what he said? Had it been a part of USSR, it
| wouldn't have been _outside_ of it.
| paganel wrote:
| That's why I've said "outside of the former Soviet Union",
| inside the former Soviet Union there are cities which can
| compete with Belgrade on the brutalist front, from what I
| was able to see from IG Sankt Petersburg and Kyiv are quite
| interesting on that front. To say nothing of the brutalist
| Soviet bus stations which deserve an architectural
| category/style all for themselves [1]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/s
| ep/02...
| jl6 wrote:
| Fun fact: Ian Fleming's Goldfinger was named after the brutalist
| architect Erno Goldfinger:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erno_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._
| meepmorp wrote:
| 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.
| inb4_cancelled wrote:
| Btw they did the same thing in Jihlava.
| mitchbob wrote:
| Looks like this page is getting the HN hug of death. Archived
| version: https://archive.ph/MpQWy
| Oddskar wrote:
| I fail to see the appeal. Much like most modern architecture this
| style will be applauded by architects, meanwhile they all choose
| to live in much older style architecture because it's more homely
| and non-oppressive.
|
| I guess architects are a bit like hedge-fund managers in that
| regard; they all keep their investments in index funds and not
| hedge funds.
|
| Complete hypocrisy imho.
| soneca wrote:
| Not that I like hedge-fund managers, but isn't the norm for
| them to keep a very large portion of their wealth in their own
| hedge funds? As for the rest of it, it only makes sense to keep
| it in index funds if not diversify in other types of
| investments that are not hedge funds?
| jollybean wrote:
| Those are all over E. Europe and they are a stark, daily,
| reminder, like a 'trigger', of the brutal totalitarianism of the
| past.
|
| It contrasts with everything else so much.
|
| As a Westerner, when you visit, it makes you feel like there was
| a giant foot on the neck of all of the people for generations.
|
| Or like there was a 'Concrete Ice Age' over everything.
|
| We reiterate the stories about the Nazis quite a lot, because 'we
| fought them', but we don't do a good enough job in entertainment
| of providing a visceral exposure to that era, and what it meant
| for so many.
|
| To add salt to the wounds and make an even more complicated
| argument, so many of the most talented people have left these
| countries for W. Europe, thanks to the EU. This actually might be
| net-net beneficial in the economic short run (i.e. market
| clearing for labour), but in the long run it also means a
| hollowing out of the most precious resource of these places, and
| leaving them to be the West Virginia's of the EU. Not quite, but
| almost.
| jollybean wrote:
| Here [1] you see direct evidence of this in the Danish context,
| but it's the same everywhere.
|
| The population of E. Europe is literally in decline [2]
|
| It's not birth rate [3] (it's note hugely different in Europe,
| but errs higher in the East).
|
| The people leaving E. Europe are 'able bodied workers' and 'the
| educated' and 'students leaving to get education and jobs in
| the West' - i.e. E. Europe's absolutely most valuable 'assets'.
|
| E. Europe is clearly being hollowed out in a very material way.
|
| The 'freedom of movement' foundation of the EU is not really a
| humanitarian issue, though it's usually framed popularly as
| such, it's fundamentally a neoliberal policy, i.e. 'worker
| mobility' as European leaders believe this is a fundamental
| advantage of the US.
|
| [1]
| https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202106161...
|
| [2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/eastern-
| europ...
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/612074/fertility-
| rates-i...
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I had the misfortune of being forced into the only good high
| school option in my city, a brutalist structure made in the 60s.
|
| It was so ugly. Every time it rained, the concrete became
| streaked with sludge and gross lines. The few windows weren't
| glass, they were semi opaque plastic to save money. They put in
| extra small windows so they could fit in window AC units, but ran
| out of money, so there was neither AC nor large windows nor even
| screens. The stairwells all had these "artistic" gaps on the
| sides, 4 inches of nothing, so many kids threw shit down those
| and there was no reason for them, they limited the useful width
| of the stairs.
|
| To top it all off, there was asbestos and lead paint everywhere,
| we knew we were exposed to toxins but they had no budget to
| repair it. They actually cut music completely for half of my
| years because it's less important than the other subjects, I
| suppose? Inner city public schools in the USA, very budget
| limited.
|
| Brutalism was, in my aesthetic opinion, one of the downright
| ugliest movements in art history.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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 entire inside of the
| building. This caused the volatilization of several metric tons
| of pigeon shit into large white clouds over several days.
|
| The building had one other interesting feature, which was an old
| style sliding-cage elevator, just big enough for two people. The
| inner gate of the cage was missing, so there was nothing between
| you and the massive concrete floors sliding past as you crossed
| each level. From the 5th level down to the 2nd, each white-
| painted floor featured a giant dark blood stain, in the same
| general area. This started very wide and got thinner at each
| floor, so it was obvious someone had lost a leg or an arm, or
| maybe a head.
| dmitrij wrote:
| This is the start of a horror novel.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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 the city in
| the middle of nowhere, dooming themselves to another 30+ years
| of daily miserable commutes by car. These days, even this is
| unattainable for most due to price boom. Its a strange place,
| folks are smart, work is often good but I wouldn't want to live
| there or raise kids no matter what.
| vvm wrote:
| 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.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| That's because it was socialist modernism - a utopian
| vision that drove support. A sort of more sustainable
| socialist version of the American dream. I live in such a
| neighborhood myself - it's not very glamorous but it's what
| living should be like in the age of environmental collapse.
| jollybean wrote:
| Yes, nations with less wealth, more poverty and lower
| productivity consume fewer resources.
|
| So if the argument is Totalitarian Socialism of the late
| 20th Century kept us poor, and now we're green, well that
| would be an argument.
|
| I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that
| there is anything other than that going on, as those
| formulations for living are otherwise identical to those
| in more capitalist W. Europe.
|
| The architecture itself I don't think lends to any
| argument one way or the other, other than most people who
| have to live with it don't like it.
|
| The 'prison' analogy used by some commentors here is apt,
| the fist time I visited the areas in E. Berlin with those
| types of buildings I literally thought they were
| reformatted prisons.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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).
| m4rtink wrote:
| Brno > Prague IMHO, as Brno actually has a city center where
| people live & which is rather nice. :)
| dralley wrote:
| Brno was a really nice place to visit, as an uncultured
| American :)
|
| It was the first city I've been to that felt _truly_
| oriented around walking and public transportation instead
| of being swarmed by cars. And I really enjoyed the overall
| aesthetic of the city.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Interesting! You might also enjoy Vienna, as that's where
| a lot of inspiration of the old (<1914) buildings comes
| from & its also very pedestrian and public transport
| oriented. :)
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I got Disneyland vibes from central Prague, probably for that
| reason that nobody really lives there. A lot of people say
| it's their favourite place in Central Europe, but the short
| visit I had to the central areas just didn't click for me.
| I'd be interested in seeing more of the normal areas where
| people actually live
| ocschwar wrote:
| > The rest of the city is properly fugly and depressing,
| communism made its mark that won't go away for next few
| centuries.
|
| I have some good news. Naked concrete crumbles. Especially in
| a place like Prague, with acidic coal smoke, lots of rain,
| and a freeze thaw cycle.
| dvdkon wrote:
| 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 Jizni mesto (less artsy than the article's
| examples, but still brutalist) are irredeemably ugly though,
| so if that's your experience of Prague...
| [deleted]
| kvgr wrote:
| 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.
| FatalLogic wrote:
| 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
| noduerme wrote:
| It was blood. The sheer volume of it, the color, not to
| mention the distribution pattern, left pretty much no room
| for doubt. Also, one floor above where it started there was
| no stain at all - but nothing appeared to be repainted.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I like a lot of brutalist buildings. If I could, I would build a
| brutalist building for my home. I have my truly amateur drawings
| ready. Given that I have 0 education as an architect or civil
| engineer it would probably collapse before it was ever finished.
|
| 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.
| nzp wrote:
| A common theme with _residential_ (other types don 't have these
| problems, like museums, public office spaces, hospitals, etc.)
| brutalist buildings is that they were built as low-cost social
| housing, and the problems are not with the exterior but with the
| interior, and I think not inherent to this type of architecture.
| Shoddy workmanship, cheapest materials, etc. The contrast between
| how stunning it looks (a matter of taste, granted) from the
| outside and how it's inside is stark -- avantgarde, modern, and
| bespoke, combined with boring, gloomy and depressive apartment
| interiors.
|
| A lot of commenters have mentioned New Belgrade municipality of
| Belgrade, and it is a great example of this. The exterior is very
| often quite well though out -- lots of space, lots of trees and
| parks, playgrounds (looked at from the ground there's hardly any
| of the oppressive concrete feeling often associated with
| brutalism), general living affordances like schools, public
| services integrated into complexes... But on the inside, even
| ignoring long term issues of maintenance stemming from broader
| social issues, things are dysfunctional, ugly and generally of
| poor quality. It's a byproduct of cost cutting commonly
| associated with these types of projects. But just like with
| apartments in Soviet Brezhnevkas and even some Khrushchyovkas,
| when renovated with care and attention the apartments are just
| fine for what they are.
|
| And it's not just a feature of Cold War socialist brutalism. In
| Trieste for example there is a somewhat (in)famous Rozzol Melara
| building[1][2]. As an idea it's great, the complex has everything
| for day to day living, a post office, a supermarket, an
| elementary school, a kindergarden, even a small medical facility,
| all connected with tunnel bridges or roofed passageways (except
| the small chapel) so you're never exposed to the elements when
| going somewhere inside the complex. But it seems as though the
| architects thought about how can we make this cheap but practical
| and then got the practical part completely wrong. For example,
| the passageways and tunnel floors are completely covered with
| anti-slip rubber matting, but the problem is these passageways
| are almost too practical and inviting so people end up using them
| to take their dogs out for walking, and so the result is rubber
| covered with sticky, dried dog piss (sometimes even poop) every 5
| to 10 meters in all directions. You can imagine how this smells,
| encased in concrete and glass during the summer in a moist
| coastal city. The terrace views from higher apartments on the
| side overlooking the city and the sea are beautiful though, so
| you get some satisfaction if you live in one of those.
|
| [1]: https://www.greyscape.com/architects/rozzol-melara-trieste/
| [2]: http://architectuul.com/architecture/rozzol-melara-complex
| leto_ii wrote:
| Between this post and the one about the Yugoslav art movement,
| calvertjournal is really getting the HN hug of death right now.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I've never been to Prague or Czechia for that matter, though
| that's been on my list for many years now. Every time I start
| planning a trip, something happens and I have to cancel it. So my
| current thoughts are based on what I've seen in videos and
| photos, while my experience with the brutalism comes from the
| country where I've spent most of my life - Bulgaria. For a
| million and one reasons, I find brutalism absolutely repugnant.
| Each time I see a brutalist building(even in a picture) I can
| feel the smell of moist plywood and depressing stained brown
| carpets glued to the concrete underneath - I just can't help it.
| However I find a lot of charm in the buildings from the article,
| while I can't find any in those I've seen all my life on daily
| basis. I really can't say why though.
| aclimatt wrote:
| Every time a holier-than-thou architectural magazine waxes poetic
| about the beauty of "poor forgotten brutalism", they make their
| point by showing extremely well-cropped, _always_ black and
| white, high contrast images to make the shadows pop. And then say
| wow isn 't it a shame we're tearing these down?
|
| 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.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| What the buildings look like in color
|
| National Theatre
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Pr...
|
| The Transgas building
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Pr...
|
| Koospol (The CUBE) https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-waymarking-
| images/315ed165-5a22-...
|
| DBK Department Store
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Pr...
| Radiant wrote:
| I'd agree with you if you were talking about generic
| "commieblock" buildings, but the ones presented in this article
| are pretty original and have a monumental feel to them. Pretty
| sad to see your sentiment upvoted this high on HN.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Concrete requires protection against water intrusion.
| Unfortunately everyone from Prizren to Surfside doesn't want to
| pay.
|
| That doesn't mean it can't look nice. The DC subway is
| brutalist, and very well might be the most beautiful subway
| system in the US.
| sokols wrote:
| You can be sure for Prizren yes, although there are far less
| brutalist buildings there :).
| kfprt wrote:
| Brutalism was just another communist crime, razing old europe
| so they could stamp their manifestations of authoritarianism on
| it.
| ocschwar wrote:
| I love how the most beautiful old quarters in the Baltic states
| are there because the Soviet Union "punished" those cities and
| didn't get Kruschyovas built there.
| mc32 wrote:
| I'm not even sure why exposed concrete architecture took off.
| It's not economical, it looks rudimentary and institutional
| (functional without adornment). But, it costs more, is tougher
| to maintain, and has drawbacks --like massive loads which must
| be accounted for when building them. Raw concrete makes sense
| for dams and hydroelectric projects because you need mass to
| hold water. Otherwise, it's a poor choice and in today's
| climate with carbon footprint considerations, it should be a
| choice of last resort.
| khendron wrote:
| In my experience, brutalist buildings are interesting to look at
| from the outside, but not so great from the inside. Once you've
| gone inside, you might as well be underground.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/uYXymgc9bfbZ9Pu69
| mastax wrote:
| This article has an interesting discussion of the gulf in opinion
| between Architects and society at large:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
|
| Probably overstates the case a little, but interesting
| nonetheless.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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 was actively evil. I wasn't
| surprised when I later learnt that the Communist secret
| police (StB) had extensive wiretapping and surveillance
| facilities there, among others. It was just a perfect fit.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> 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?
| def_true_false wrote:
| Jfc, dude, don't you think you are projecting a bit? The
| article contains photos of, in order, an office building,
| a theatre, another office building, a TV tower, a small
| office building, a bridge, a bank, a metro station, a
| shopping centre. These are not buildings people lived in,
| and in any case these are some of the more beautiful
| buildings of the period. Certainly no worse than the
| average office building of the period (including those in
| the West). Like, seriously, have you ever seen what ugly
| commie architecture looked like? The commie blocks built
| in the 80s when cost cutting was the norm? The ones that
| are hundreds of meters on the longer side?
|
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| You can make stunning pictures of almost anything. I bet you
| could make stunning pictures in concentration camps full of
| starving prisoners if you processed them correctly.
| newby wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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 buildings in Buenos Aires that you
| know were where people were tortured in cages in the
| basement; under the dictatorship, this functioned as a type
| of psychological abuse of the population who have to walk
| by that place.
|
| The Kremlin is a type of thing like that, even though it
| existed long before brutalist architecture; its purpose is
| the same. A boot stamping forever on a human face.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| 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
| janto wrote:
| There were intellectuals that believed in communism in
| non-soviet countries.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| ...So they got architecture degrees and jobs designing
| buildings to spread communism?
| namdnay wrote:
| > 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.
|
| ??? 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)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interestingly, the short-lived "sorela" style
| (SOcialistic REALism) was much less brutal and more
| esthetically pleasing
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=sorela
|
| One of the main drivers of later Soviet Bloc architecture
| was relentless uniformization and centralization of
| industry. By far the fastest way to churn out apartments
| was to standardize a few typical panels, produce them _en
| masse_ and cover the entire country in just a few types
| of buildings.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=sorela+architecture
|
| will net you something more useful for this discussion..
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=sorela is a music group.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| My Google search results were probably skewed towards
| architecture by the facts that I am a native of the city
| where "sorela architecture" is found, that I was actually
| very recently there for a visit and that I searched for
| several architectonic terms right before engaging in this
| discussion.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Statistically, I hate totalitarianism _more_ than the
| next guy, but these buildings don 't really embody evil
| to me, for the most part. They embody the necessary
| concomitant of evil, power, and broadcast it, which
| suggests totalitarianism in some cases but not in others.
| In some of these cases it's appropriate. A bank, for
| example, wants to project an image of invulnerability; a
| bridge, likewise, doesn't have to be friendly-looking or
| inviting, but needs to look like it can ignore traffic,
| storms, bombs, or whatever else is thrown at it. And for
| a power station a powerful appearance is obvious. Not all
| power is a boot to the face.
|
| 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.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| All the pictures in the article are in B&W. Maybe if humans
| had grayscale vision brutalist architecture would be more
| tolerable.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is an intriguing idea.
| sonofhans wrote:
| This is a stunning photograph, too. I'm glad I don't live
| there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_litt
| le_gir...
| soneca wrote:
| Volcanoes and deserts also generate stunning pictures.
| ocschwar wrote:
| I love coffee table books as much as the next guy. And I love
| running around Doom levels.
|
| LIving in a brutalist building still sucks.
| jollybean wrote:
| They are stunning _photos_ , yes.
|
| So I guess this should be a discussion about how we can
| romanticize and contextualize anything with art.
| glogla wrote:
| > A long time resident of Prague.
|
| Same here.
|
| I love it.
|
| I find it gorgeous in "wow look at the scale of things that
| humanity can do, if we set our mind to it". It makes me think
| of spaceships. The grey provides backdrop for greenery, of
| which there is a lot in Prague, especially now in fall when
| trees turn all colors each of them striking (the winter looks
| the worst here I think). It gives me the same vibe as Nordic
| minimalism, except it looks lived in, and used, not "fake
| perfect". It is very much alive.
|
| Meanwhile, my friends laughed at me when I called American
| suburbs "featureless wasteland" after driving hundred miles
| through it.
|
| I think this just shows that architecture is art, and opinions
| differ.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| To be honest, I am more at peace with brutalist buildings in
| Ostrava, the city I was born in.
|
| There are more trees around them and the city itself is
| pretty rugged, a former heavy industry center with
| corresponding soul, so to say. Even though the "sorela" in
| Poruba is actually nicer. (Early 1950s style, very specific,
| sort-of socialist Baroque.)
|
| But Prague used to have, and partly still has, a different
| soul, so the combination feels inorganic, especially close to
| the center.
| noduerme wrote:
| Mm, this makes me miss tramping through the snow to walk into
| a warm wooden bar, sit down for a beer and a big plate of
| food. There's something special about that in Prague. I lived
| a few winters in France (Avignon, and some villages) - but
| there's a certain magical feeling in Prague when you get off
| a tram and walk through a silent, snowy street and find
| yourself in a loud, bright, warm cellar, with good cheer.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| There is a reason aesthetics are always the first to come under
| attack.
| bollu wrote:
| What reason is that?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I can't help wishing you would flesh this out a bit, because
| it's true that it seems to be the case, but the reason isn't
| clear to me.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| Aesthetics are disalienating.
|
| Separating humans from simple beasts of burden, toiling
| away in suffering, hoping only to be well-fed, and survive
| another day -- but no more.
|
| Aesthetics are a respite.
|
| Without, man becomes alienated from his humanity.
| Demoralized from losing a powerful moralizing force.
|
| My interpretation of Marx, Engels, Hegel, et al.
|
| In a certain vein, the U.S. lacks the same richness for it,
| compared to much older Western European countries (who
| haven't had theirs, their history, their culture, their
| identity, the very things that enliven their soul,
| destroyed by oppressive regimes. E.g. Stalinist communism).
|
| Why do the French constantly raise hell when things are
| going poorly? Because it's in their history, it's their
| aesthetic that they cling tight to; for otherwise, they
| would be swallowed up by the world, and swept away.
|
| One could even postulate that this is why our nation (the
| U.S.) has had such a rough adolescence, and hasn't yet made
| any truly novel attempts at Making Things Better (TM).
|
| All are demoralized, with no true moralizing factors
| besides one's kin (but those are always unstable sources of
| moralization, and liable to one day disappear -- compared
| to the more concrete nature of culture).
|
| If you kill a man's family and friends, what can bring him
| out of this abyss? Having lost his only moralizing force,
| that which enlivens the soul, what is there truly left for
| him to do, but become an animal toiling away until he one
| day dies?
|
| Attacks on culture are rampant eveywhere, but the U.S. has
| not yet cemented theirs in the ground -- so there's not
| much at all of a culture to attack.
|
| Truly exciting times: to think what happens in the next
| hundred years will serve as a foundation for the future.
|
| There will still be strife; but what type of culture will
| mature?
| RNCTX wrote:
| There are two stories that come to mind, and I agree with
| your assessment.
|
| 1. In 2007 during the height of the financial market
| crash CNBC had a helicopter hovering over the northern VA
| house of a finance guy from one of the banks / insurers
| who was going belly up that had killed himself. The
| striking thing to me was how poor, aesthetically, the
| house was. Typical DC burbs McMansion trash. Plastic
| (vinyl) patio railing that was leaning here and there as
| it began to fail, landscaping that was obviously
| maintained by someone who had no concept of the original
| landscape design (bushes were either over or under
| trimmed). Windows that didn't match, but were rather
| selected from a catalog of pre-made designs haphazardly
| to fit a pre-drawn opening. Of course he killed himself
| when the money was taken, he had nothing of real value...
| if his living arrangements were any indication he spent
| all his money on worthless shit.
|
| 2. The story about the all glass Apple HQ injuring its
| employees because they couldn't subconsciously tell where
| the walls were as they walked around the building. They
| would incessantly walk into glass walls and break their
| noses, bruise their chins, etc. I wanna say I heard later
| that Apple silently had the building modified. If the
| ideology that built such an office building had to
| describe itself in a sentence, it would have to be
| "turning the collective eyes of the employees into the
| eye of Sauron, only without the dark lord's self
| awareness."
| pmontra wrote:
| I didn't know about the glass walls at Apple HQ. A little
| googling returns several news stories. This is the best
| one I found so far: https://www.newsweek.com/apple-
| employees-call-911-walk-glass...
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| This is just my take on it, but I've always viewed art that
| is beautiful as something that points to transcendence
| beyond the piece itself, it breaks the closed loop and
| points to some higher ideal.
|
| Anti-human art and architecture, of which Brutalism is one
| example in my book, is revolutionary in that it attempts to
| sever the connection between humanity and higher ideals /
| planes of existence, creating closed loops of despair and
| grayness.
|
| In Japan (where I have the most cultural experience outside
| of the US), there is a phrase "inki-kusai" which is similar
| to our word "inky" - it calls to mind dark, moldy places
| filled with litter and insects. I think it's one reason
| that solar reverence has been so prevalent in their
| history, sunlight and fresh air serve as disinfectants.
| ur-whale wrote:
| 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: htt
| ps://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/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
|
| Best quote in the article, on a design from Peter Eisenman (who
| IMO lived up to his last name):
|
| "A Peter Eisenman building. Note the total lack of plant life.
| Plant life might accidentally make you feel happy and
| comfortable, and happiness is a bourgeois illusion. The tiny
| figures on the left seem to be attempting a picnic on the
| curve. They are probably cold and windswept--as they should
| be."
|
| If you are into these sort of things, here's an interesting
| read: a debate between Eisenman and Alexander where the latter
| accuses the former of "fucking up the world"
|
| https://www.ahenryrose.com/resources/alexander-eisenman-the-...
| m4rtink wrote:
| One issue with many Czech brutalist buildings is that they
| are _brutally impractical_ - no heat isolation, mold
| problems, clogged toilets, not enough natural light, not
| accessible for the disabled, hard to repurchase, slowly
| falling apart yet using many custom parts that are no longer
| available & and the buildings are like 50% made of asbestos
| by weight.
|
| They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but
| often not very useful.
| eternalban wrote:
| Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary
| "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman.
|
| 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!
|
| --
|
| 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?
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and
| still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art
| nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco
| skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And
| for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because
| five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's
| doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
|
| Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit
| strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic
| growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was
| possible to build then should still be possible now and
| much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much
| it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's
| dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast.
|
| > _Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo
| "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically
| remove the inherent difficulties of modern life_
|
| This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my
| eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a
| living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a
| school is possible; having it serve the poor would be
| possible, too. I wish it happened.
| def_true_false wrote:
| _> because five stories high gives you plenty of density,
| and that 's doable in "pretty" styles as many European
| cities show._
|
| Lol. Plenty of density is relative. It does give you more
| than the average density of a West coast city, which is
| enough to get upvotes here, though, so there is that.
|
| _> Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a
| bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of
| economic growth in the past couple centuries._
|
| There is an order of magnitude more regulation. Or maybe
| an order of magnitude more paperwork?
| Noos wrote:
| The metaphysical BS is the problem, architects treat
| buildings like sculptures, novels, and stories; as vehicles
| to say something as much or more than livable places. I
| don't know why we have the idea that structures need to be
| an artistic representation of ideals like sculpture when
| they are designed to be used primarily by people to live in
| and customize as they see fit.
|
| It would be like designing hammers that are commentary on
| the homelessness problem in the world today but are
| strikingly ineffective to actually hammer nails; its fine
| if the only result is to be part of a museum exhibit but
| the architects force us to use the hammers.
|
| The eisenmann snippet of the second page has him try to
| defend his work because it is supposed to say something, a
| commentary on modern dislocation. But that's a message
| designed for people to not escape, and most arcihtecture in
| that sense is the tyranny of the artist or government
| trying to immortalize feelings in books which you can only
| close the cover of by moving away.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, what is the causality there?
|
| Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the
| West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelak" (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 kicked flat.
|
| This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an
| English translation of the heroin story "We Children from
| Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F.
| She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book
| to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost
| constructed to make childhood more complicated and less
| joyful.
|
| A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans
| psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at
| least not without good evidence.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage
| humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of
| hand
|
| 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.
| def_true_false wrote:
| There is a much simpler explanation: People who can will
| eventually move into new (or renovated) construction,
| because of substantial improvements in quality of life.
| People who can't are left with the older buildings.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| These two links made a very interesting reading material.
| Thank you!
| [deleted]
| greyman wrote:
| I'd like to remark that the black&white photography somehow
| accentuate this "brutalist" feeling. It doesn't look as bad in
| reality. (I am also from Czechoslovakia).
| newby wrote:
| Well... I am glad that nowadays they often paint "panelaky"
| with some vivid colors. When I think about cold and gray winter
| days surrounded by huge blocks of cold and gray concrete - it
| is like personification of depression for me. And now there is
| usually lawn and some trees but I remember when we moved into
| one of then new communist housing projects (how would you
| translate "sidliste"?) when I was a kid - there was nothing
| nice to look at, just mud and concrete.
| kvgr wrote:
| I would be happy if they painted them in less vivid colors.
| Say you have 4 big panel buildings. Each has its owners
| association. Each one sets different color from different
| color pallet. You end up with heaven 1 blue, 1 army
| green/shitbrown, 1 bright green/yellow and 1 red buildings
| next to each other. The structure is massive and if you put
| different colors that dont match it is horrible pain for
| brain.
| busyant wrote:
| It just hit me that I associate brutalist architecture with
| Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, in particular the marina scene
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtRGeyznv7k&t=27s). I'm not even
| sure if that's brutalist architecture in the background, but
| brutalist architecture has a dystopian vibe that goes hand in
| hand with the film.
| m4rtink wrote:
| That was filmed in Thamesmead:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thamesmead
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov2btkixcAc
|
| The architecture there should be apparently
| Cubist/Brutalist/Modernist.
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