I’m not sure concrete ever “softens in appearance”. In my experience it just gets darker and, at least in the British climate, develops horrid stains and grows mini stalactites of leached salts under overhangs.
Contrast that to traditional building materials which generally improve and mellow with age. Traditional buildings, as a rule, look better as they get older and as you get closer to them. Brutalist buildings, the reverse is true.
Depends on how old. They share something with castles in that some of them would look better partially in ruins. And that’s not a put down of them or just a wish that some of them would fall over: I think it’s true.
Huh. My city has a mixture of elaborate Beau Art (?) buildings - churches, court houses, and also some spectacular Gothic buildings from decades ago, mixed with concrete and brick horrors. The latter are deteriorating, chunks of material regularly fall off, and the sidewalks are sometimes roped off. The police station and new court house are plug ugly.
There was an eerie depiction of a brutalist building, blue, lit up at night, on the inner sleeve of the Who album of ‘Tommy’ I used to stare at with fascinated horror. It’s been long lost, but it really creeped me out.
I’m rather fond of Cleveland State University’s Rhode’s Tower. That could just be because I’m used to seeing it.
Often appropriated to “…and it is FABULOUS!” :dubious:
I agree. To me the exposed concrete of Brutalist buildings looks harsh and cold, while brick and limestone look warmer and softer.
Stone is steak. Concrete is hamburger.
Bad architecture reminds me of the Mike Nesmith quote "“In order to dig things that are pretty, that takes no special talent. What it really takes talent to do is to dig something ugly.”
What offends me about bad architecture is that architecture is the most public form of art. If I don’t like a type of music or painting I can easily avoid it, but if there is an ugly building on my block, I have to look at it every time I walk by. Thus don’t be ugly should be the first rule of architecture.
The people I really blame more than the architects are the people who hire them. If someone proposed building a brutalist building, they should have been kicked in the balls and thrown out bodily. Instead some cretin paid these people to deface our cities.
Faner Hall at Southern Illinois Univeristy takes the cake.
It’s over 900 feet long. It’s maze-like and full of dead end hallways. And you literally cannot walk more than a 1/4 length of the building without having to go outside and choosing the correct entrance.
http://mypage.siu.edu/lahiri/images/faner.jpg
The concrete sunblockers angled over the windows in the second picture – They’re supposedly backwards. They block winter light, and funnel in summer light to all those facultly offices.
You used the term in post 20 when you said “These are serious buildings, with serious business going on inside them. There is no room for humanity here.”
Is it too much to say what you mean by this very connotative word?
I agree-concrete seems to get covered with black mold-very nattractive and worse, people try to paint it-that only makes it worse.
I was just teasing you - concrete blocky buildings are sort of the opposite of humanity. Humanity is soft and squishy and ambiguous; brutalism is the opposite of that.
One building I find ugly is the Orlando Public Library. They seem to have purposely set it up so that the texture of wood used in the forms shows in the concrete. I think they did this intentionally, but it looks bad and makes the building looks like a barn, except that many barns are more attractive.
http://adventureswithben.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_1164.jpg
I have no problem with a factory that looks like factory, but I don’t think most people want to live in a factory.
My wife works in that building and it is far nicer on the inside than the outside. Inside, it looks like nine stories of basements, Even if you have a window office, they used tinted glass so it isn’t all that bright. It also isn’t the best use of the space. Since it curves, you lose a bit of square footage, and you have a large concrete expanse that they’ve broken up with flying saucers and weird elevated grassy areas that nobody actually seems to use. Picture
That being said, the HUD building is far nicer looking that the Health and Human Services building.
Thanks for the link, I was trying to find this article myself, having read it a few months ago, but I’d forgotten it was by Dalrymple.
I also appreciate I made French Toast for You’s efforts to put Brutalism into context and explain the theories behind it. It still doesn’t change my dislike of the style but it’s always useful to learn more about it.
Other art forms go through minimalist schools. Think of Philip Glass’s music, or Dogme 95 film-making. Eventually, in any creative field, someone is going to have the idea, “Let’s strip off all the ornamentation and see what we can do with what’s left.”
FBI headquarters, on the other hand, fits the bill.
This is where I disagree with you. Brutalism is very human. Everywhere in nature there are organic flowing shapes and squishy and ambiguous structures, but it takes a human to conceive of a straight line or a giant block or a platonic ideal.
Concrete blocky buildings are product of a design school that is completely comfortable with its humanity and doesn’t try to dress it up with “I don’t think people will be comfortable knowing that they’re in a building so lets add some stuff so they can imagine they’re in a forest or a meadow or by a lake while they’re in the building”. It says, “this is product of human artifice: deal with it”.
See, to me it just looks oppressive. I don’t know how better to describe it. It reminds me of the type of architecture in Warsaw Pact countries circa the 60s-the 80s or so. Functional, but no life to them. I like clean lines, I like modern art, all that. But, architecturally, this is very soulless to me. It looks more like a prison (that’s the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago) than somewhere I’d want to visit.
Tom,
I haven’t watched any Dogme 95 movies but I do like Philip Glass. Like many, I like the aesthetics of the AK-47 (http://www.acquris.se/images/kalashnikov_ak-47_3.jpg , http://photos.imageevent.com/smglee/cltactical/huge/AK47-002.jpg ).
Note that the AK-47 was made by a mechanic who ony cared about function and economy. Brutalism, at least many of the examples given here, seems to go out of its way to be brutish. Thus, it isn’t raw and a result of stripping away ornamentation but rather of being garishly unaesthetic: much the same as a hipster will go out of his way to perfect an incongruous look aimed at making other people think:“I don’t care what other people think”. If you want to be straight to the point, just be straight to the point and don’t try to have a particular style or message or aesthetic. In other words: Be like Mike (Kalashnikov).
I guess if you want a properly raw, non-pretentious, straight to the point architect, you have hire a structural engineer or an office manager.
The National Theatre in London also bears the imprints of the wooden formwork in its concrete. That’s actually one of the details that makes it one of the few brutalist buildings I actually quite like - from certain angles anyway.
