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”.)
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”.)