1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core.
2.
> Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.
Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer
Every “adult” generation always hates 50-100 year old architecture, because that was what was slightly old and starting to show its age when they were kids.
Gen-X/Millenials associate brutalism with non-renovated stuffy classrooms, empty downtown office buildings, and dirty public plazas.
Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and everyone remembers the original intent of the style and falls in love with it again.
Seriously, people in the 60’s thought Victorian homes were a blight on San Francisco.
Were they torn down or became low income because they were built in the Victorian style or was it perhaps because they were older buildings that needed a lot of renovation so it was cheaper to tear them down and build new or sell them off at lower prices?
> Then a bunch get torn down (usually the lowest effort versions) and people adaptively re-use the best ones and everyone remembers the original intent of the style and falls in love with it again.
Then why hasn't that happened with brutalism? It was hated in the '90s, '00s, and '10s, and it's still hated now. And why is the "international style" so much better regarded despite being the same age?
International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.
And the brutalism point confuses me, since plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
> International Style had its biggest impact in the US on NYC and just look down park ave to see those buildings getting torn down. Union Carbide being a great example.
My point is you saw a lot less of people complaining about how ugly the style was.
> plenty of brutalist buildings have been and will be torn down, but I doubt Harvard is going to get rid of it’s Le Corbisier and I bet in 60 years people will talk about how lucky they are to have the only built example of his work in the Western Hemisphere.
Bet most people will still think it's ugly, even in 60 years.
It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is uniquely terrible, and the ascendant architects of the 1960s simply had horrific taste.
If anything, architecture seems to have been almost entirely captured by the avant-garde; people more interested in “new and different” than “classic and beautiful”.
I don’t think modern audiences are suddenly falling in love with brutalist architecture; even the best examples look like dystopian-future prisons or mental hospitals.
>It seems more likely that brutalist architecture is uniquely terrible
Interesting, it seems to me that brutalist architecture is actually pretty appealing aesthetically.
I might go so far as to say that objective beauty and taste simply does not exist and anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.
> anyone claiming that it does hasn't thought about it very hard yet.
Or maybe you haven't given enough thought to what "beauty" might mean such that it could be objective. Not everyone means by "beauty" "that which I find appealing". Some mean "the will's response to truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals
A wonderful example of this is given in _All Hallows Eve_ by Charles Williams:
> "Over here," Jonathan said, and took his friend round to the other side of the room. A second easel was standing back to back with the first, also holding a canvas, but this uncovered. Richard set himself to look at it.
> It was of a part of London after a raid—he thought, of the City proper, for a shape on the right reminded him dimly of St. Paul's. At the back were a few houses, but the rest of the painting was of a wide stretch of desolation. The time was late dawn; the sky was clear; the light came, it seemed at first, from the yet unrisen sun behind the single group of houses. The light was the most outstanding thing in the painting; presently, as Richard looked, it seemed to stand out from the painting, and almost to dominate the room itself. At least it so governed the painting that all other details and elements were contained within it. They floated in that imaginary light as the earth does in the sun's. The colours were so heightened that they were almost at odds. Richard saw again what the critics meant when they said that Jonathan Drayton's paintings "were shrill" or "shrieked", but he saw also that what prevented this was a certain massiveness. The usual slight distinction between shape and hue seemed wholly to have vanished. Colour was more intensely image than it can usually manage to be, even in that art. A beam of wood painted amber was more than that; it was light which had become amber in order to become wood. All that massiveness of colour was led, by delicate gradations almost like the vibrations of light itself, towards the hidden sun; the eye encountered the gradations in their outward passage and moved inwards towards their source. It was then that the style of the painting came fully into its own. The spectator became convinced that the source, of that light was not only in that hidden sun; as, localized, it certainly was. "Here lies the east; does not the day break here?" The day did, but the light did not. The eye, nearing that particular day, realized that it was leaving the whole fullness of the light behind. It was everywhere in the painting—concealed in houses and in their projected shadows, lying in ambush in the cathedral, opening in the rubble, vivid in the vividness of the sky. It would everywhere have burst through, had it not chosen rather to be shaped into forms, and to restrain and change its greatness in the colours of those lesser limits. It was universal, and lived.
You could go so far to claim that, but it’s exactly that point of view that produced so much objectively ugly, human-unfriendly architecture.
Relativists replace the moral imperative of “good for everyone” with “interesting to people like me”, and think they’ve stumbled onto a more sophisticated or accurate view of the world, instead of just vapid sophistry.
I really implore you to seek out the articles where people promoting modernism used nearly identical language to you when describing Victorian buildings.
It’s hard to see the air when it’s the environment we’ve lived in our entire lives.
I won’t get into the debate of if it’s possible to have an objective “good” or “bad” but when it comes to architecture that is almost always subjective.
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> I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are.
If don't have the money to build, then you bid over whatever is on the market; whatever some developer and architect duo thought would differentiate themselves ten or twenty years ago. People prioritize commute, distance to family, distacne to the grocery, school zones, number of bedrooms and space, kitchen/bath vintage, and price way, way before what a home actually looks like on the outside. No one really wants to live in a McMansion, but outward appearance is so far down on the priorities that it doesn't matter.
But I would disagree with one aspect: part of it is that they like it. We don't have fine taste anymore and we don't have a desire to impress in a classical way. It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.
> It used to be you would recite a Latin phrase at dinner and everyone would be impressed. Those days are gone.
Because anyone can do that, it's not impressive. You don't need to have studied Latin to know a Latin phrase. We have google translate and the entire internet. It's no longer an "exotic" thing. Hell, I see people still do things like that, with Latin or some other relevant language. It's weird to think that's impressive.
I think you missed my point by taking the example too literally. I'm saying that being well-educated (in a classical sense -- deeply knowing Latin, Greek, Philosophy, Mythology, etc) used to be considered impressive. It would dictate your value, socially, to a large extent.
That has transitioned to being good-looking, along with the amount of your wealth and how you spend it. Education and intellectual endeavors are no longer in the mix.
Yea I think people just don't understand "what they like" here. It's like if you grew up on fast food like I did. It's also mind-boggling to me when people travel to Europe or Macinac Island and they come back home and gush about it, but can't get over some sort of mental blocker they have that you could actually live like that here too in the US if we stopped building for cars and started building for people.
Although I do think it's an influential factor, I don't think money is the primary issue. If anything having more money and making more money gives you access to "finer" things and more experience. It's much more complicated than that. It reminds me of the anecdote about Tik Tok (which should be banned IMO) that shows funny videos and 'dumb' content to Americans and shows chess championships and educational materials to the Chinese. That's what we're dealing with here at a societal level.
It's really not -- at least not in the finer things, which is what we're talking about.
Yes, you can enjoy pistachio ice cream; feel free. But the Louvre doesn't choose what it puts on its walls randomly. The curators don't shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I mean, it is relative."
1. When I was younger I though brutalist concrete buildings were ugly, now (even if they still are) i find they are usually the most interesting thing in a city core.
2. > Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.
Agreed. I can't believe how cheap and ugly so many of the "rich people" houses are. It seems to be a competition for who can have the most different rooflines, and for uses of stone veneer