Hah, interesting. I like the second "horrid" photo much more than the first one. It's much more aesthetically pleasing to me personally, though the first example seems like more creative thought went into it.

Maybe that's why I'm not an architect though.

I liked the second one as well. I think that may be because it's a grey scale photo. The reality would be a bleak grey/beige windowless monstrosity which would look more like an industrial site

Wow you guys are breaking my heart! The "works" one is Mies Van Der Rohe. Notice how it actually "works" as in "functions" as a building.

OK you have to admit this really nifty. It's a watertower!!

https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1353/829390995_36add7f54d_b.jp...

Hey, didn't expect to see South Africa on here. Is this the tower close to Grand Central Airport in Midrand?

Another great (to me at least) looking brutalist building in Johannesburg is UJ (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Universi...)

I think that second link looks awesome. How well the design serves the building purpose, I don't know, but purely from an aesthetic perspective, I think it looks great.

I honestly had to come back and check the URLs because when I opened both of these in new tabs I thought I'd opened them in the wrong order. Just goes to show how objective taste is and why every time there's a shift in GUI styles there always seems to be violent opposition to it.

The first picture with both building next to each other just made me realize how MUCH MORE I prefer the glass building.

For those curious, the second image is apparently the Curtis Lecture Halls at York University.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vikpahwa/13117856815

http://maps.info.yorku.ca/2010/06/curtis-lecture-halls/

Reminds me a bit of where I worked in Italy:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.415912,11.9193071,3a,37.7y,3...

Edit: The company was great, but I hated being in an anonymous office park. Sad to see that kind of thing built with how much beautiful architecture there is over there.

The first one looks like Baby's First Architectural Mistake; the second one looks like Where Life Goes to Die.

The first isn't really brutalist is it? It's full of curves!

Brutalism is defined by concrete, not by the absence of curves.

Undisguised concrete. All modern architecture on a large scale is defined by concrete (though apparently that's changing), but the difference is in how much it is on display.