It's just functional. It has a job to do, moving water, and it does it.
When the Panama Canal locks were nearing completion, some artists were sent down to Panama to advise on decoration. There was talk of building stone lions at the locks. The artists came back and reported that the works had been carried out with no regard for decoration, and the best thing to do would be to keep them that way, purely functional. That was done, and the locks, impressive but plain-looking, are still that way.
River control for intermittent floods through populated areas has produced some good solutions. The Guadalupe River goes through San Jose, and floods every few years. The river now runs through a narrow channel deep in a big, wide channel. The big wide channel has walkways and bike paths, which will be underwater during a flood. And now, multiple homeless encampments.
This is great reading for everyone who grew up watching Terminator 2 and was fascinated by the chase scene where the T-1000 terminator bursts through a bridge down into in the LA river.
It's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg
Brutalist concrete building straight out of 1984. Really gets you mentally prepared for the labyrinth, dispassionate and uncaring bureaucracy that awaits you inside.
> The building has been subject to nearly universal public condemnation, and is often called one of the world's ugliest buildings. Calls for the structure to be demolished have been regularly made even before construction was finished.
I highly recommend anyone who visits Boston take some time to walk around it and even inside of it. It really is something to experience, unfortunately for me I experience it every day of my life.
In every case the campus is used to represent the headquarters of some government agency or military facility, or as the setting for some dystopian sci-fi.
I'm interested in both brutalism and dystopian sci-fi, but I don't want to live in a dystopian future, and I don't like being around the brutalist architecture in my city either.
Brutalism is like the worst of modern art in that it's ugly unless you spend a lot of time and effort deliberately altering your preferences, but much worse because you can't escape it because it's architecture, not decoration. Brutalism, like so much of modern architecture, is for and by architects with no consideration given for people who have not spent tens to hundreds of hours learning to perceive striking, visually interesting but ugly buildings as beautiful.
Concrete buildings like this, even when thoughtfully designed, end up looking decrepit and decayed after just a couple of years as the concrete ages and discolours. I see nothing “uplifting” about that building.
You should probably speak to some actual SFU grads about this “uplifting” architecture sometime. Locally, it’s known as a place that exacerbates depression.
If you have to experience it every day, and you don't have any choice in the matter, it's in your interest to put some effort into appreciating it as architecture. Lots of people do think that it's a great work of architecture.
Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things.
I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant.
> Not every experience of art, music, etc. is going to appeal to you at the start. Some things are worth learning about. It's worth cultivating a real sensitivity to brutalism among many other things.
> I know this sounds sanctimonious. OTOH rejecting a controversial piece of creative work in a shrill and clichéd way sounds ignorant and arrogant
The ordinary people of Boston shouldn’t have to “cultivate a sensitivity” to something sitting on their public land, built for their use paid for with their tax dollars. Public architecture should cater to the tastes of the masses—that is the sole legitimate criterion for judging public art and architecture—not the egos and fantasies of the architectural elite.
(It used to house the embassy of Australia among other stuff, which always felt a bit odd. Probably Dublin's second weirdest embassy venue; Japan, whose embassy is in a shopping center above a large Tesco, still wins that one).
Pffft, it barely has anything on the more imposing among Soviet buildings—mostly municipal ones. In fact, the irregularity of structure below the two top floors provide some diversion for the eye.
When I look at brutalism abstracted from its surroundings and signs of everyday life, it really hits me how it resembles Quake maps. I.e. it embraces variety of structure just as much as uniformity of the looks: https://www.format.com/magazine/galleries/design/lego-sculpt...
“Architects and critics considered it to be excellent work, with one poll finding that professional architects describe Boston City Hall as one of the ten proudest achievements of American architecture.”
This is the problem. Ivory tower architecture academics get ahold of taxpayer money and build something the vast majority of the population, who is forced to live with it everyday, despises. Mayor for Life Menino planned on demolishing it, but the financial crisis happened and then he died before getting the chance.
A horrible blunder which shows the limits of giving a tiny elite control of the process. When it’s gone no one will shed a tear except a few professors. In the modern era everything is debated on the internet, and this disaster would have been shouted down before ever happening.
One of my theories is after WWII a lot of fields of study, like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, economics, architecture, etc, went completely sideways into loony coo-coo land. The result were nihilistic/ideological trashfires.
Most of them have recovered like psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology. Economics and architecture really haven't.
> Almost everyone now understands that the Corbusian legacy was entirely malign, even if they have never heard of the man himself. And the question is often asked how his grim concrete megalomania ever came to hold such sway in the first place. Step inside a Western school of architecture to pose this question, and you might get a shock. You are likely to find that the so-called “fathers” of the International Style in general, and Le Corbusier in particular (he of the tabula rasa concept of urban renewal in which everywhere “must” be “totally rebuilt” using only concrete), are still revered as the philosopher kings of architecture.
That is, perhaps, uglier than the J Edgar Hoover building[0] (headquarters of the FBI) in Washington, DC, and my previous gold standard for Brutalist hideosity. My condolences on having to go there.
I feel like the true ugliness in that particular building is less about the material, more about how it looks unpleasantly like it started as a normal cuboid and then grew lopsided cysts to produce its current shape.
is the red brick construction in front of it [1] part of the original design? i could appreciate it if it were a purely brutalist concrete design, but it's the mishmash of bare concrete and brick in weird shapes that makes this truly ugly.
It seems particularly bad in its surroundings, the barren concrete plaza that it looms over. The whole effect as you cross in front is of a projection of Stalinist state power.
The underground Flood Control Dam #3 is a staggering engineering feat that must be seen to be believed. It was constructed in year 783 of the Great Underground Empire to harness the mighty destructive power of the Frigid River. This work was supported by a grant of 37 million zorkmids from the Central Bureaucracy and the local omnipotent tyrant of the era, Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive. This impressive structure is composed of 370,000 cubic feet of concrete, is 256 feet tall at the center, and 193 feet wide at the top. The huge reservoir created behind the dam has a volume of 1.7 billion cubic feet (an ancient document, perhaps in error, records that the volume of the reservoir is 37 billion cubic feet), an area of 12 million square feet, and a shore line of 36 thousand feet (an alternate dam guide book found in 1067 GUE states that the shore line is only 35 thousand feet).
It frustrates me that so many people hate brutalist architecture. I definitely wouldn't want every building to be brutalist but I'm glad that some are.
I also much prefer brutalism to soulless glass and concrete skyscrapers or nondescript office buildings. At least brutalist buildings look like something.
I've noticed, in London at least, that there is a new appreciation of the style among hipster millennial types. You can buy maps of 'Brutal London' with all the great examples marked (Goldfinger's tower blocks, Guys hospital, etc). The Barbican Centre has made that part of its cachet.
I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with the style - I was traveling north on a streetcar on Spadina avenue in Toronto, back in 2005, and I caught a glimpse of the John P Robarts library, and it really did change my outlook. I grew up in Plymouth, which was blighted with poor examples of the style imposed on the town after heavy war damage. Much of the hatred of brutalism stems from the contemptuous attitude these planners and architects displayed to the pre-existing urban fabric.
I felt like the only one until about 5 years ago however, then suddenly there was this revival.
Now I'm more into medieval cathedrals, but it's worth noting that 'sophisticated' tastes were against them for centuries (hence the pejorative term Gothic). I don't think anything can be beautiful without irritating somebody ...
I would agree with you: there are interesting and appropriate uses of brutalist design. The issue I have is that many brutalist structures are "soulless glass and concrete," with inverse proportions!
Human beings are physical creatures and our physical environment can communicate messages that are more powerful than if you just read them in a book. I find that brutalist buildings often communicate a visceral sense of power, profundity, inhuman scale, etc.
A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth necessitated the building's inhuman size.
Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the forces of chaos.
In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that is very large.
Brutalist structures are hideously ugly and oppressive to the human spirit. Why anyone thinks architects and advocates for the dehumanizingly ugly should be allowed to use public spaces for these projects is a mystery to me. We have to share these spaces, and for people to say things like "sometimes you should feel insignificant" and then impose it on the rest of us in building form is objectionable.
I honestly don’t think I will ever recover from Boston City Hall and not see it in every brutalist building I see. It was that traumatizing to even stand near it. If the Empire from Star Wars and Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time had a baby it would be that building.
I also disliked brutalist from spending too much time in Ontario University campuses which just did a boring job of brutalist. Then i visited the barbican in London and fell in love. There are very good examples of brutalist out there
Right? It's architectural prosody and super interesting to see how design can effect the very mood of the environment. I love cyberpunk and find brutalist architecture to be one of the primary styles in the genre that really helps to build the setting. There's a sense of impressive oppression that emanates from well executed brutalist buildings and sometimes mystery like in the case of 33 Thomas Street [0].
The size and striking appearance give a sense of safety, nobility, and a feeling that the structure's purpose exists beyond what people think of it. There isn't the delusion that such a large structure can do anything but permanently change the landscape around it, and no appeal to some lost Great Tradition of Architecture. Brutalist architecture has dignity in its old age; rust streaks, plant growth, and other signs of aging feel like a graceful admission that nothing lasts forever, instead of an inevitable abandonment of the structure.
The LA river drainway lets you appreciate the power of the river even when its not completely flooded. Towards the end, where the bed must become dirt, you see the far future of the entire drainway, where it's not a decrepit building, but just rock that has returned to nature.
I've yet to see an old concrete building that's aged with dignity, rather than aging with 'what's with those big drippy stains, doesn't anybody wash around here?'.
Some people enjoy the emotions Brutalism evokes in the same way that others enjoy watching horror movies even though horror/fear aren't usually considered positive emotions.
People hate brutalism because it is aesthetic violence. It assaults you with its ugliness. It accosts innocent passers by with the architect’s ideology. Nondescript is far preferable.
Reminds me of an anecdate from South America: "This is not like Europe, if you see a river in a city on the map, it is not a river, it is a sewage storm drain."
True, Kafkaesque would imply something like you get on the elevator to floor 5 and the 5th floor is labeled 6. You take the stairs down two flights to floor 5, skipping floor R. You go to the door labeled for the office you want and they tell you the office you seek is actually in a different building, which they do not know the address to, and you must now wait for the elevator which has stopped running until an hour from now because reasons and the stairs do not let you back to ground level.
I also likes the misuse of “distempered dogs”. I actually like “incorrect” words being used - it makes writing far more friendly and sometimes allows me to feel invalidly superior. Intentionally misabusing words is a personal hobby, copied from the best speaker of English that I know.
Some brutalist buildings do instil the same sense of cold, surreal, and inhuman qualities Kafka does with his writing. Insurmountable oppression.
Also, Kafkas protagonists are often stripped of any sense of intimacy. Laid bare, much like the naked concrete and straight lines seen in brutalist architecture.
So I do see where OP could be coming from. Then again, LA is not able to drown me in dread the same way a dreary Soviet administration building does.
Does Pyramid of Tirana, Albania qualify as Kafkaesque? I was there half a decade ago. Fascinating building especially with it's dilapidated state at the time.
Edit: Looks like they have recently struck a deal to turn it into a "tech center" - seems like brutalism + tech overlap in this case.
Edit 2: Changed to Pyramid of Tirana instead of Enver Hoxha's Pyramid
Americans tend to call artificial structures with names usually associated with more natural structures: they have a lot of “parks” in their cities, which usually end up being just a concrete avenue with a few trees in it (still infinite progress from concrete avenues with no trees at all). I’m always so sad to visit US cities as European
Also a European, but I really don't understand you. I don't know what you think park means in a urban context, to me a park is a man-made green area. Anyway, even when you go to a forest in Europe you likely have no idea of how much managed they are, it's exactly like farming, just on a different time scale. There is really almost nothing that is not somehow man-made on this side of the pond.
In our country, we would call it a drainage channel or something like that. We expect rivers to at least look a bit natural, even if most of them are heavily regulated anyway.
When the Panama Canal locks were nearing completion, some artists were sent down to Panama to advise on decoration. There was talk of building stone lions at the locks. The artists came back and reported that the works had been carried out with no regard for decoration, and the best thing to do would be to keep them that way, purely functional. That was done, and the locks, impressive but plain-looking, are still that way.
River control for intermittent floods through populated areas has produced some good solutions. The Guadalupe River goes through San Jose, and floods every few years. The river now runs through a narrow channel deep in a big, wide channel. The big wide channel has walkways and bike paths, which will be underwater during a flood. And now, multiple homeless encampments.
Tapei has a similar setup on a much larger scale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(California)