I’m currently close to a placed called Constanta, loacated in Romania near the black sea, for work related reasons. This entire town is basically a giant eyesore. Ugly architecture absolutely everywhere you look, both ‘Modernist’ and Soviet era. Whatever good architecture this place had is gone. However, while I was out on the town a few weeks ago, I saw a few buildings that stood out to me as being particularly hideous: I don’t even know how to describe them except “jumbled, messed up, architectural train wrecks.”
I kinda like them. They’re not gorgeous by any means but they’re certainly not the drab concrete rectangles one typically associates with Eastern European Soviet-era architecture. The contrasting facade materials on the second one accentuate the lines of the upper window bays nicely. And the octagonal columns on both in addition to being very light-efficient bring to mind old European castle towers.
Perhaps you’re just architecturally over-sensitive. Those street views definitely don’t look that awful. There’s nothing you might not find in similar aged buildings in similar areas of cities all over Europe, both west and east.
OB
If you want a comparable example in the west, check out Habitat 67 in Montreal. A modular shitstorm. :eek:
Some of that looks like Brutalist architecture which definitely wasn’t confined to the Soviet block; plenty of examples of it here in the US. I never liked the style, but some examples are highly regarded.
I find them bizarre and upsetting just to look at. No coherency whatsoever, just glaring inconsistencies and looks like they just took stuff, threw it on, and went with whatever stuck. Doesn’t look like they’ve been well maintained at all either.
Not “over-sensitive,” just much more discerning than average.
I suspect if those buildings are from the Soviet era they were the “good” apartments given to party officials or other people the government wanted to reward. I remember a tour guide in Berlin pointing out the old East German era “good” apartment building. It was something like that – not fancy but slightly more architecturally interesting than the ugly concrete boxes the ordinary East Germans lived in.
I don’t think those Street Views look all that bad, either. I think the OP simply doesn’t like modernist architecture.
Good Lord.
The neo-gothic buildings in Moscow called the “Seven Sisters”. Much uglier in person.
The headquarters building for one of the world’s largest companies: WalMart, located in Bentonville, AR
I believe that they have recently announced that they are constructing a new HQ office, but this building has been there long before Sam Walton passed away. Only a select few got window offices.
This should have been a poll.
Yup. I work at a university that won awards in the 1960s for worse design than the ones shown in the OP
I was just in Constanta last month. There are certainly a lot of ugly buildings, but the old casino building more than makes up for it!
I’m generally not a huge fan of brutalism, but I think Habitat 67 looks pretty cool. We have a number of brutalist buildings here in Chicago; universities especially seemed to like that architecture back in the 60s. Both Northwestern and University of Chicago have brutalist-styled libraries.
No, they were regular apartment buildings. The Communist nomenklatura lived in villa-like buildings. Constantza is my native city and I lived in one of those ‘blocks of flats’ (Romanians call them blocks) as a child. Communist leaders were obsessed with demolishing old buildings and erecting new Soviet-style residential areas that reflected our New Progress and the taste of the New Man. You need patience if you want to see what the city looked like before the Communists slaughtered it. Please take a look at this square, situated not far from the Casino building that a participant in this thread has already mentioned:
http://tinypic.com/r/2di0fg2/9
In the center of this little square you can see the statue of Publius Ovidius Naso, a poet who became a city dweller against his will in the year 8 AD (Constantza has a long and complicated history, and it was named Tomis at that time). Anyway, the mosque and buildings around the square were built long before Romania became Communist, but some of these structures are going through a process of modernization, where neoclassical facades are being replaced with steel & glass walls. Of course it’s stupid since the original city architecture continues to vanish, this time in the name of another ‘new’ ideology where money dictates.
Back to the Soviet-style apartment buildings, the positive aspect of erecting those architectural monsters was that there were no homeless people and everyone got to live in an apartment. Ninety percent (or more) were state-owned and citizens were lodgers. As soon as a person got a job, he or she applied for one of these apartments. The size of the apartment one received depended on the size of the family (and the relevance of one’s job). Of course there were more applicants than apartments, but I remember the building rate was really fast. When I was a kid, it seemed the whole country was a construction site.
Today people have gotten used to living in apartment buildings, although many have opted for single houses or villas. Ninety five percent of Romanian people own the house/apartment they live in, but living in an apartment building is more advantageous because maintenance is handled by hired managers, who make sure everything is always in working condition and utilities are brought to a minimum.
If you google ‘residential areas in bucharest’ you will get to see Soviet-style buildings in the capital city, where I live now. But if you google ‘new residential areas in bucharest’, you will notice that the new buildings tend to look smaller (i.e. cozier) and/or less Communist-like. I detest all these Soviet-style buildings that I can still see around, but even they tend to be gradually renovated, and the place is really quiet and enjoyable.
They were slightly better than what I was expecting, and I was expecting something fairly tolerable. They remind me of the Hilton London Metropole.
There is the famous case of the Palace of Culture and Science in the centre of Warsaw – a huge building, in generally-reckoned ugly and flamboyant “Stalinist wedding-cake” architectural style. Built between 1952 and 1955 – officially, “a gift from the Soviet Union to the people of Poland”. With Poland generally reckoned as having been the Soviet Union’s most resentful and fractious satellite nation: the edifice was, to put it mildly, a not greatly appreciated gift. A favourite joke in the Communist era was: “Q: What’s the best view in Warsaw? A: From the top of the Palace of Culture and Science – the only way you can be in Warsaw and not see the damned thing.”
Post-1989, various hotheads have called for the Palace to be demolished: standard general view has seemed to be, “we’re lumbered with it – may as well use it”. I gather that it now functions as an exhibition centre and office complex.
Boston has its own delightful Brutalist architecture:
Ouch, that is pretty ugly in the “uncanny valley” way that totalitarian buildings excel at when they aim for neoclassical or deco but deliver it too clumsily and immensely to make it work. Their Brutalism is much better in that it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Hey! Those Seven Sisters and Palace of Culture and Science look like Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. Is that not how big city buildings are supposed to look? 
For some reason I always found downtown LA to be very “brutalist” when I watched the TV show Columbo. Does it still look like that?