From the first wikipedia paragraph, I don't see anything wrong with building things so they'll look cool a) when they're maintained and in use and b) when they're badly maintained and crumbling. I'll take 'Ruinenwerttheorie' buildings over brutalist concrete piles that look disgusting the day they're built and worse as they age.

The 3rd Reich had a lot of problems, but they had some good aesthetics (Huge Boss, etc). To ignore that, and shun a whole realm of aesthetics because it was appreciated by The Devil, is a waste and a poor strategic move; you're abandoning the beautiful elements because they had the misfortune to be mixed into a dark brew. It's an artistic tragedy, and a poor political move, putting you in a similar spot to the 3rd Reich themselves with regards to their ideas about 'degenerate art'.

The height of technology, and we cloak ourselves in ugliness and mediocrity, not daring to build anything beautiful. What a fucking waste. The sorts of small-souled people who build modern western identikit cities don't deserve to go to the moon.

I think the point is that it takes a sort of hubris that's quite typical for autocratic regimes to show off to the rest of the world - and future generations - with gigantomanic architecture.

IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff.

What we have in our oh-so-humble and "advanced" society is the children of corbusier making horrendous buildings that make the people with no choice but to live in them miserable.

Is the parthenon gigantomanic? Is this? https://cdn.lifedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/22-most...

Is this? https://preview.redd.it/hkwpt88wasv41.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...

Or this? https://blog.eurail.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Florence-...

Because I know a city made of buildings like the above is far more conducive to human dignity than a grid of "humble" glass boxes.

Should we all be living in and surrounded by identikit, homogenous apartments? Except for the architects and the rich, of course; they get to have centuries-old country mansions to flee to.

It isn't humble to humiliate people by making them to live in concrete and glass cages.

I don't quite understand how y'all came to the conclusion that I want people to live in ugly glass and concrete blocks :)

I do doubt however that many people today would want to live in genuine old buildings with the outhouse toilet across the yard. It's more likely that they want to live in a modern flat built into the hull of an old building.

Instead of showing off to the rest of the world, we should ensure that people feel oppressed and demoralized by their every day surroundings. That'll show those autocrats!

Brutalism was adopted by the Soviets, who were also pretty oppressive.

I'd rather live in a beautiful building than a concrete square. The idea that people should live in purely functional environments with no room for beauty or art is a purely modernist idea.

I might be a minority opinion but I think brutalist architecture can be beautiful. My local library (https://www.yelp.com/biz/port-washington-public-library-port...) is quite brutalist but is also one of my favorite libraries. Its reading room alone (the library sits up on a hill and the reading room has one wall of all-glass-and-concrete which looks out onto Manhasset Bay) is amazing.

Actually, it seems that it crept back into vogue while I wasn't paying attention!: https://www.gq.com/story/9-brutalist-wonders-of-the-architec...

Taste is individual, but I just don't understand how you could find a heap of concrete slabs to be beautiful. To me, beauty is life-affirming, and brutalism is the physical embodiment of a philosophy that denies life in favour of rigid functional structure. It's the physical representation of kafkaesque bureaucracy.

I’m glad you’re respecting taste, especially when you’re throwing such anthropomorphological argument against it ;)

I’m not sure why there is such a significant aesthetic difference between cutting stones and stacking them (masonry architecture) and filling the exact same form with concrete, especially when the latter is usually far more robust and thus, safer (read: actually life-affirming, by being neither flammable nor easily collapsible, if designed right) and also permitting structural forms that are simply not possible using any other medium

Architecture follows philosophy. Skyscrapers (internationalist style) and large curved glass buildings (modernist style) have the same core philosophy as neoliberalism, for instance. Brutalism came about as an explicit rejection of aesthetics and "higher purpose" to building facades - an idea deeply rooted in materialist philosophy, hence its adaptation by the Soviets. The grandparent comment demonstrates this perfectly: "IMHO a healthy society should be "above" this sort of stuff". Your argument to building materials is also an example of this - while it's true, it is reductionist; living in a concrete jungle is not better than living in a wooden fishing village just because the materials are less flammable.

The philosophy of architecture isn't really a "anthropomorphological argument" when architecture exists for humans, at the behest of humans, and represents human values. The idea that a building is just a box that people exist in is itself a philosophical position, one that is exemplified by brutalism, and one that I and many other people are opposed to.

Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Did you follow the link I posted a few comments up, the "nine brutalist wonders of the architectural world"? Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

> Interesting. Very holistic. Which is to say, not very concrete. Wink.

Very modernist thing to say. I suspect we have very different philosophies, and I have a strong distaste for modernism, materialism and reductionism in general. You can't quantify the things that actually matter in your living environment beyond the bare essentials of survival, so of course the concept is not concrete to you if the only things you value are the things you can measure.

> Explain how those exemplify "just a box that people exist in"

Yes I saw the article. The few that actually were buildings instead of sculptures (barbican, bank of London and South America, geisei library and the cathedral) are hideous. The cathedral is the least ugly because its at least not a raw concrete facade, but as far as cathedrals go it has to be the first I've seen that left me with no sense of awe whatsoever.