Leave it to Amerikkka to ruin brutalism. If the Soviet Union had built this and stuck a statue of Stalin on top of it, y’all would be big fans of it. It just looks evil because the Evil Empire built it. (And because of over a century of “evil empire” aesthetics in fiction being directly taken from actual Soviet brutalism, communism doesn’t have an evil empire aesthetic, Western fiction’s evil empires have a communist aesthetic, but that’s a whole nother struggle session.) Although I will admit, there are ways to do brutalism right and ways to do it wrong, and… there’s a reason I tend to like how the Soviets often did it, but hate a lot of Western attempts. Brutalism’s one of those things that capitalists just can’t ever get right the way communists can, I guess. (Admittedly, not everything the Soviets ever built looked amazing, but overall they have a way better track record at doing brutalism right than any Western nation.)
Yep. There’s neat brutalist architecture that does interesting stuff with combinations of flat concrete boxes and cubes and almost industrial bits of glass and metal, and then there’s just making a windowless featureless concrete box, and this is a lot more of the second than the first.
Even Soviet “commieblocks”, the quintessential example of “badly done brutalism that does nothing cool and looks terrible” in the Western cultural consciousness, have windows. (Well, I think they look good, but I know most Western liberal types disagree and so do a lot of communists. But at least most of us agree they look a hell of a lot better than tents and sleeping bags lining streets and filling parks. And they definitely look better than a lot of the apartment buildings we see in capitalist countries. I walk past buildings every day that look way worse than “commieblocks”.)
Leave it to Amerikkka to ruin brutalism. If the Soviet Union had built this and stuck a statue of Stalin on top of it, y’all would be big fans of it. It just looks evil because the Evil Empire built it. (And because of over a century of “evil empire” aesthetics in fiction being directly taken from actual Soviet brutalism, communism doesn’t have an evil empire aesthetic, Western fiction’s evil empires have a communist aesthetic, but that’s a whole nother struggle session.) Although I will admit, there are ways to do brutalism right and ways to do it wrong, and… there’s a reason I tend to like how the Soviets often did it, but hate a lot of Western attempts. Brutalism’s one of those things that capitalists just can’t ever get right the way communists can, I guess. (Admittedly, not everything the Soviets ever built looked amazing, but overall they have a way better track record at doing brutalism right than any Western nation.)
It’s not brutalism, it’s just clad in granite panels.
Precisely my point. They were probably going for brutalism, but they certainly didn’t do it correctly.
The lack of windows on most of the structure is really bizarre, must be miserable to work there
Yep. There’s neat brutalist architecture that does interesting stuff with combinations of flat concrete boxes and cubes and almost industrial bits of glass and metal, and then there’s just making a windowless featureless concrete box, and this is a lot more of the second than the first.
Even Soviet “commieblocks”, the quintessential example of “badly done brutalism that does nothing cool and looks terrible” in the Western cultural consciousness, have windows. (Well, I think they look good, but I know most Western liberal types disagree and so do a lot of communists. But at least most of us agree they look a hell of a lot better than tents and sleeping bags lining streets and filling parks. And they definitely look better than a lot of the apartment buildings we see in capitalist countries. I walk past buildings every day that look way worse than “commieblocks”.)