Go I hate riding the DC Metro everyday. Maybe it's brutalism at its best, but it's simply a poor design for a metro system. Contrast with something like Hong Kong's MTR [1]: brightly lit, different colored walls so you can visually distinguish stations, and a glass wall between passengers and trains to prevent falls/suicides. DC Metro may be grand, but it's just not smart.

As for the rest of DC's brutalist architecture, this piece sums up a lot of my feelings: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-u...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/MTR_Nort...

On the other hand, compared to the NYC subway, the DC metro is like stepping into the future. (Roomy! Quiet! Escalators! Handicap-accessible! It's a modern marvel, I say.) I'd take the brutalism of the DC metro over NYC any day.

To be fair, the DC metro was built more than 70 years after the New York subway.

There are much older subways (London, Paris and Madrid come to mind) that are as large and have managed to stay modern, albeit with slightly fewer stations (but longer networks).

The NYC is subway is old, but it's not like they haven't had any time to work on it. From what I've read, it's mostly attributable to mismanagement at the MTA — misdirected funds, union squabbles, lack of political will, lack of imagination, outright corruption.

NYC is admittedly extremely time-consuming (and therefore expensive) to dig, but all the things that could have modernized the subway and made more it convenient and accessible wouldn't require digging more tunnels.

The other systemic problems — lack of modern signaling, lack of parallel tunnels — are harder and more expensive to solve, especially without disrupting commuters.

ummh... have you ever been on any of those subways?

Paris is a marvel for its density and well-planned routes. But some of the lines are more like underground light rail compared to e.g. the Lexington line, which on its own carries like 1/3 of the passengers of Paris or London.

The London Tube trains I've been on felt like a subway for midgets compared to the 10-foot wide BMT trains. They stop running at night. One of the only times I've missed a flight was due to a London Tube delay.

The new Chinese subways really put the US to shame, quiet, double glass doors, video screens everywhere, cell phones work everywhere, very cheap, very dense and very crowded.

The NY subway is pretty reliable and fast. Apps like Moovit and Citymapper make it pretty easy to get where you want as quickly as possible. Train Time coverage and wifi coverage could be better, the latter is improving. It could be nicer but all I can say is if you think the New York subway is bad now, you should have tried it in the 70s.

Edit: I'd add that an Oyster-type payment system would be nice. Also, a couple of MTA alumni have led systems in London, Hong Kong, Toronto, other cities, so NY is probably not at the very bottom in best practices. Bottom line is you can get anywhere quickly and reliably at all hours, if not always in luxurious style, and you don't need a car to live here. So I'll take it, until your driverless taxi can deal with NY traffic and get there faster.

Paris has well-planned routes? Not at all! Take line 12 for example, a crooked, slow line with stations sometimes a single block apart.

There are no escalators or elevators except for a few stations, and the trains rattle and shake as much as NYC. Not to mention the narrow trains running on standard gauge, created like that on purpose so the federal government wouldn't take it over and run their own trains.

Line 14 is the only one which would qualify as a modern transportation system.

anywhere you go in Paris, you're a few minutes walk from a métro station...NYC subway mostly goes down main transportation axes, there are pretty big deserts where you have a very long walk or take a bus to the subway, even in Manhattan but especially in outer boroughs.

> Paris is a marvel for its density and well-planned routes. But some of the lines are more like underground light rail compared to e.g. the Lexington line, which on its own carries like 1/3 of the passengers of Paris or London.

So maybe that indicates that more, smaller lines are the way to go? Passengers don't care how many passengers each line carries, they care about being able to make their journeys.

> The London Tube trains I've been on felt like a subway for midgets compared to the 10-foot wide BMT trains.

You get used to it. They're small but again that's not inherently a problem. (Being overcrowded is a problem - I don't know how NY or DC compare on this front)

> They stop running at night.

As of a few months ago there's now limited service on friday/saturday nights. But yeah, all-night running is absolutely something NY has over other subways. How much of a priority that should be is a judgement call of course - it's achieved by four-tracking the lines, so if you didn't need all-night running you could have ~twice as many lines (build the same number of tunnels, but spread them across the city better) for the same price.

> One of the only times I've missed a flight was due to a London Tube delay.

Anecdote != data - how do the statistics on late running compare?

Here's some data, comparison left as an exercise ...

https://osc.state.ny.us/audits/allaudits/093016/14s23.pdf http://www.straphangers.org/statesub14/

https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/london-underground-perfor...

Tube reliability was a bit of a crisis at one time during reorgs but seems to have improved

http://urbs.london/strikes-are-a-commuting-disaster-but-what...

Fun fact: The Lexington avenue line carries as many passengers in a day as the entire DC Metro

> The London Tube trains I've been on felt like a subway for midgets compared to the 10-foot wide BMT trains.

Indeed, taking luggage on the tube during rush hour is a truly painful experience.

Taking luggage on any mass transit system during rush hour is likely to be a painful experience...

Yes, that's correct, but taking luggage on the Tube during off hours is just regular painful.

The D.C. Metro is equally badly managed, if not worse. The only reason it's better in some ways,[1] is because it started with a 70-year technology advantage.

[1] And it's worse in many ways too, such as the lack of express tracks.

WRT NYC, isn't there also that it's one of the very few (if not the only) 24/7 metro system?

London's Night Tube is a very recent thing (August 2016) and only covers a few lines, Madrid Metro closes at 0130 and reopens at 0600, Paris Metro closes at 0115 and reopens at 0530 (with exceptions: 5 lines are open all night on new year's eve and 2 festivals, and since 2007 it closes at 0215 on fridays, saturdays and holiday eves)

Honestly, do you use it on a regular basis?

I think DC-style brutalistic buildings could look fantastic... if they were covered in vegetation. That'd be so cool.

I am also a huge fan of Logan's Run

Is that an issue with the architecture of the DC Metro, or just the design of its "accessories?" Glass walls to prevent people from falling into the tracks weren't a thing when most subways were constructed in America.

It's possible to retrofit the DC Metro to keep its (arguably) beautiful ceilings [0], while still making it safe and navigable for commuters.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/WMATA_Me...

The glass partitions were put in sometime after 2000, but the heavy emphasis on color-schemes I remember from the early 1990s.

I also ride WMATA Metro every day. I understand that the architect wanted no lights to be actually visible, hidden behind ceiling ledges and in alcoves, diffusing light. Apparently he's in his eighties now and is outraged that they're spoiling his vision by placing direct, bright lights.

That reminds me way too much of my undergrad alma mater, Cleveland State University. Back when I went it was almost entirely made up of drab (maybe Soviet inspired?) concrete block buildings like this from the 60s-70s. We called it "concrete state university". It reflected the depressed look of the rest of early 2000s downtown Cleveland pretty well. A majority commuter school at the time, little attention was paid to campus life.

On the plus side, the campus and the whole area actually looks a lot nicer now. Also, after it's all said and done I have to say I actually got a pretty decent education too (at the very least it was a great deal for the small state school tuition price). Maybe aesthetics aren't everything.

There is nothing wrong with the design of the DC Metro. It's problems are 100% issues of mismanagement.

> DC Metro may be grand, but it's just not smart.

As a subway system, no not smart, but (if the rumors are true) the stops were also designed to serve as fallout shelters. In that regard, perhaps it is smartly designed.

You'll feel even better knowing that most of those buildings are owned by REITs and that the government actually leases them.

In addition to the Metro, another structure that I recognize as wonderful brutalism is the Hirshhorn museum. More than just visually unique, the space works well for exhibits as you work your way around the donut (one way or the other) with large interior windows (but also windowless exterior space). It's very different from anything else on the Mall, and also from much of the other typically rectangular brutalist (waffle) buildings in DC (exceptions for Watergate and the lovely Canadian embassy). From within the surrounding garden it feels at home, a smooth, geometric, vaguely alien singleton resting behind the hedges as any other sculpture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirshhorn_Museum_and_Sculpture...

As for brutalism coming back, I haven't seen much new construction. I suspect when it does make its resurgence it will be with some recognition of how it was received in the past and how those structures are regarded today.

> perhaps by the fact that it's no longer the style associated with government intervention

The speculation of the article is actually the opposite - that in the era of Bernie Sanders, when young people hear "socialism" and think of a functioning European welfare state rather than an oppressive European dictatorship, the connotations of large-scale government intervention have become a positive.

The funny thing about that is, that even for Europeans the term sounds negative, at least for Germans. We do not think that we live inside socialism. For us socialism is what Eastern Germany had and it is a bad idea (TM), too. We would use terms like social democratic or social market economy. Maybe it is different in other European countries, though.

In Western Europe socialism doesn't seem to uniformly create a negative reaction. After all Francois Hollande, President of the French Republic is a member of the Socialist Party.

If you go further east in Europe though both Brutalism and Socialism are scorned.

Perhaps when young Americans talk about socialism they don't really mean socialism in the Marxist sense, but rather a mixed economy somewhere in between the USA and France?

Interesting.

I'm referring to the US associations; I think that's the cultural zeitgeist that the New York Times is more familiar with :-P

Sort of the backlash to the right wing calling both European Social Democrats and American moves to expand the welfare state "socialist" as a term of abuse.

I honestly don't think Bernie would have had a chance at getting the kind of traction he got if the US right hadn't basically massively overplayed its hand by trying to tell a generation that grew up after the end of the cold war that Obama was a socialist.

It led to a very strong, very noticeable shift in perception where a much wider group of Americans in discussions would start asking questions about socialism instead of shooting down any mention of it with insults.

He probably wouldn't have chosen to call himself a socialist if the American right hadn't watered down the term so much.

The currently governing party in France is literally called the socialist party, no?

Socialist party on France is not really socialist nor communist: it is a capitalist party with "social-democrat" focus, i.e. quality public schools, quality and universal medical coverage for citizens, etc. In fact, even the conservative-liberal French party is in favor of universal medical coverage. That is pretty much the same in other European countries, like e.g. Spain (close to France), where I live.

My point is that if the party calls itself the socialist party then clearly there isn't a big problem with the term "socialist".

In "western Europe" the negative word for "socialist" is "communist", as most western-European "socialism" became social-democracy (i.e. "capitalist liberal-progressist" without Marxist commitment at all) after WWII.

In Germany Honecker invented the term "real existierender Sozialismus" [0] (actually existing socialism) and except in some extremist circles definitely has a negative meaning today. In my head it is stored next to sentences like "Niemand hat die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten." ("Nobody has the intention of building a wall").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism

Ironically, as a welfare-state-loving young (?) European, just looking at the pictures of horrible desert-of-concrete DC government buildings linked elsewhere in this thread (not the subway, which I really loved when visiting) fills me with unexpected libertarian rage. That FBI building is like materialized propaganda for joining the NRA and forming a militia. Submarine architecture, to make a point against the customer?

Amazing how it expresses sheer human grandeur at the same time it reduces the human to insignificance, isn't it? I always feel like I'm in some kind of weird cross between a cathedral and the diggings of some giant alien worm.

> It was very much an aesthetic choice, intentionally designed to be provocative.

Sometimes, perhaps. Soviet brutalism was inspired by anemic budgets rather than the aesthetic. In fact I would speculate this is a driving factor more than anything--concrete is easy to work with and is cheap.

The aesthetic certainly gives the movement its name, though.

It was also popular for its apparent low maintenance.

Only now we are at the point where 60 year old concrete buildings need to be cleaned and it costs a fortune to do so because they were never designed for it