Mmmm resource utilization-effective monolithic architecture
Can’t be brutalist if there’s no concrete!
I swear there were like 3 guys in the 60s or something that loved brutalism so much that they spent the next few years going to major cities to convince mayors to build the ugliest, most ghastly buildings that would remain as eyesores for decades to come.
Beats black box urbanism. (But I might be misremembering the name of the style lol.)
Where I live there was a period in the 80s where people got obsessed with ‘roughcast’ and decided to start covering their houses with sharp rocks. I’d be scared of falling against them while drunk and tearing my face open.
Well the right hotel looks pretty decent, although seeing just bare concrete makes me want to indulge in suspicously cheap vodka and intoxicate myself for my entire life + depression.
It has it’s weird charm, like looking back to the awful past of the USSR. These are a great reminder for us eastern europeans to never ever let another communist regime to power.
Maybe I would love the brutalism’s uniqueness but this stigma is coming strong with me unfortunately.
It’s kinda okay, but some cheap white (or any other color!) paint would absolutely be an improvement in my eyes. I’ve yet to see an example (and at this point I don’t think there is any), where paint over otherwise okay brutalist architecture would improve things. Bare Concrete is just an ugly and unfinished look.
TIL my aesthetic is brutalism
If you’re basing that off the Pic, that is not brutalism. Brutalism is awesome though, like a modern day architecture terrible from the 20th century totalitarians. Unpopular opinion, but I’ve always thought the Chinese did it best
Nah, went off on the “bigger and uglier”.
And surely the Chinese did it fine, but Yugoslav Brutalism is just something else ;)
Yeah, when there is some real design work, rather than just big concrete block, brutalism can look very cool. However most places seemed to want to just go with dismal box as an aesthetic.
Nah I love big box brutalism. Gimme gimme gimme all those long, labyrinthine, resource-conscious angular concrete buildings. Just looking at my campus’s inexplicably brutalist administrations office was my favorite part of university
There is a middle ground. Living in a concrete block city probably isn’t the best for your mental health.
Show me an office tower that is not built with wrought iron and concrete. The thing people don’t like about Brutalism is its honesty. If a layer of chinzy art deco spray painted Styrofoam is the difference between making it through the day and cracking up, you’ve got bigger problems.
This also heavily undersells how beautiful a clever concrete structure can be. I’ll take eye-popping geometries of stone over flat texture-less mirror-window walls any day.
Needs less metal and more concrete.
