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.
Brutalism produced disasters and masterpieces like any other artistic trend. Let's do what we've been doing for thousands of years and keep the masterpieces and a few of the disasters to show the range of the style and move on. Badly designed, built, or photographed buildings exists regardless of their style. You don't have to go too far (in the US at least) to find examples of awful neoclassicism for instance.
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.
Concrete = fast and cheap for post WW2 reconstruction. Which built up excess of labour / expertise in concrete construction that also spread abroad with post war emmigration. It's still the only economical choice for many regions. Not everyone has access to cheap, renewable lumber.
Concrete is useful. Large imposing structures poured in lace like a slurry wall doesn’t make sense. As a component of the structure yes, but not as used in typical unfinished concrete of that style. Steel and glass is cheaper, easier to maintain and has more flexible design. Plus it doesn’t look dystopian.
If memory serve, it wasn't at the time. There wasn't sufficient industrial capacity for steel + glass post war to address scale of ongoing construction demands. Building form work out of wood and pouring concrete from local aggregate was cheaper in terms of labour, materials and logistics. It became self reinforcing with economies of scale as concrete supply chains popped up regionally. Which is building science in a nutshell, do what makes most economic sense at the time. Usually limited by transportation costs. Ergo cladding eventually replaced by cheap light weight building envelop systems due to increase in global trade and sourcing from Asia.
IMO applying dystopian to Brutalism is an label applied after the fact due to various cultural factors. The style itself was continuation of modernism. Of course modernism since inception has been a friction point between academia and popular sentiment. I do think many architects did delude / post rationalize concrete aesthetics to a degree, in no small response to fact that they had to work with it out of economic neccessity. Architecture school is very good at brainwashing students who entered due to love of classical aesthetics into embracing modern aethetics, because there just aren't much opportunites to build outside of dominant building systems of the era. So designers learned to love and celebrate concrete.
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.
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.
Brutalism was popular in France too, withmany extremely popular proponents (Le Corbusier to name one). Many big projects in the 50-60-70-80s were built in a brutalist style. Most have aged terribly though mostly IMHO due to poor maintennce.
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.