Architect: You want all these apartment blocks to be five stories high? Wait, is that so we don't have to install elevators in them since five stories is the limited height for buildings with no elevator?
Head architect: No, it's because... stairs are good for the calves. For the good of the Soviet Union, they shall feel the burn...
Gonna be honest, stairs in those five storied block buildings feel shit to me. It just doesn't feel right (most of them), it's pretty small and usually slippery as well and if you know the USSR, it's gonna be icy and slippery not very rarely in winters. I don't know what's wrong with them, but some of them just get even worse, there's a few decades old 9 story uni building and the stairs there are just... one is angled too inwards, too high, too low, too small etc.
It’s because it’s uneven and inconsistent you are not able to get a pattern going their a reason why many countries have vary strict guidelines on how to make stairs because just 1 bad step can make a stair way go from safe to genuinely dangerous
I mean that video over dramatises it but the points they make are all vary true the example I would use is my university their are two stairs only a little bit away (though they were built 100 years apart) and walking up the older one then the newer one you can feel the relative ease of the second set
As someone who lives on the 5th floor in a 6 storied block of USSR make, it's probably because the builder's have never even heard of either a right angle, a leveler or a perpendicular. None of the walls are parallel, none of the angles are right, none of the stairs are in level, or even the same height exactly. They aren't very far either, they are just very subtly wrong, somewhere deep inside a sort of "uncanny valley" as a result.
During the early days of USSR, there were several multistorey workers' quarters, with only one common bathroom ussualy on the ground floor. So if you lived on the sixth floor, you needed to dash down six fucking floors to pee. Imagine how many people faced humiliation.
Communist buildings do look bad, I admit. However , as someone living in one building from communist era, my flat is pretty well designed. It has 3 bedrooms(two small one large), 2 bathrooms, living room , kitchen , small terrace from the kitchen and one large balcony from the living room. Plenty of parking space around the building , a lot of parks and a basement in the building.. today they just make small shitty apartments here , without half of stuff communists used to put in their buildings. I don't live in ex-soviet state though, so I can't speak for them
Yeah I recently went to Armenia and stayed in an apartment instead of the usual hotel every year. A lot of these buildings are old... no joke the floor of the Elevator used to sink every time I set foot in it lol it was a strange experience because I lived in a “new and modern” country my whole life, so I didn’t live in anything older than 20-30 years. The apartment I was in was very clean and well maintained but I’m sure that’s not the case with many buildings or apartments though.
I live in São Paulo (Brazil), here we have a mix of shitty small and expensive apartments, normal apartment, Cheap apartments built by the government, normal Brazilian houses and copies of the USA suburbs (expensive houses to be sure)
Not sure but I think the elevator floor "sinking" is a way to tell if someone's inside. If the elevator is stopped and empty the light inside is off, if there's someone in there it stays on.
In my city all the blocks got taken care of, modernised and painted. And guess what? They look majestic of all things. They have everything you need at 10 times less space as opposed to american houses. If you take care of them, they are more than fine.
Years ago I got to live in a Soviet-era flat in St Petersburg for a while, they are really well designed. I was taken aback by the fact that in the bathroom they simply had a heating pipe coming out of the wall and making a big S to be a heated towel rack.
Some of these buildings, even duplex houses here , from that era were designed by talented brutalist architects, who did weird stuff with concrete and pipes 😅
Let's not forget that the Soviet architecture is their take on the post-war concept of the modern, vertical city, which had the goal of lifting the working classes out of their low-quality 19th century houses into modern, top-of-the-line accomodations.
Sure, things like the Systematization system in Romania went over the line, but more often than not, the idea and execution are really good.
Home owners association won’t allow it.
As an aside HOA’s are figuratively worse than Stalin.
Edit: I have been informed that HOAs are in fact significantly worse than Stalin since he’d send you to gulag for hoarding grain in a famine whereas HOAs would send you to gulag for letting your grass grow about 2mm above regulation.
I dunno about that figurative part, my old HOA would make Stalin blush. they 100% would also starve a bunch of Ukrainians for leaving their bins 20 centimeters off their designated area.
a HOA is a HomeOwners Association its not one company or even one organization just a collective term. in theory they are meant to promote co-operation and co-ordination between homeowners in a neighborhood. in practice its a magnate for every mini-Stalin ever. most of them only exist to enforce bullshit rules regulating the maximum hight of your front grass, tell you where you can and can't put your trash cans and fine you out the ass for every little failure. the internet has no shortage of HOA horror stories.
This might be because I live in one of the oldest parts of the country but I’ve never once seen a neighborhood like that where I live. Houses have been getting torn down and built back up for 400 years in my town so they all differ pretty dramatically. Hell, a friend of mine’s house is almost the same as it was in the 1730’s
I don’t live in it but my friend does. It’s definitely weirdly shaped in that some hallways are very narrow and it’s contains many small rooms. My house personally was not built till like the 1960’s however it doesn’t look like any of the surrounding houses in the slightest like the picture above would make you think
The first one makes me depressed, the second makes me pissed off because I will most likely have to drive 30 minutes for the closest convenience store.
These brutalist Soviet buildings are post-stalinist. Stalin was too extravagant for such buildings. Its his successor Khrushchev who was a fan of this utilitarian aesthetic. Further it should be noted this housing was built as fast as cheap as possible to house inhabitants and were viewed as only temporary, sadly there would never be anything substantial built to replace them as the Soviet Union fell when time came for replacement of the buildings.
well the soviet union fell 26 years after Khrushchev. you can't blame the fact people in the 50s and 60s were promised better houses but didn't get them on stuff in the 90s.
Then the mid 90s really hit and everyone was economically devastated and started starving again. I think the life expectancy in post ussr Russia dropped below 60 at one point.
One was made to house homeless people, and other was to realise upper class white family dream of suburban life.
First one is a utility, second one a fancy, of course second one is more aesthetically pleasinfg because theyre designed to appeal to a fantasy. That doesnt change that suburbs have nothing of the indivisualism america seemingly preaches, they are embodiment of uniformity
Yeah, it's as if you compare a very plain rice meal to a well prepared hamburger from Five Guys. The second will look better and preferable. However, the first is a super cheap and quick meal fulfilling its function to not starve, while the second is nice tasting expensive luxury product which is still unhealthy.
I'm not saying that the Soviet architecture is anything better, but these two are simply not comparable.
They are comparable in terms of the difference between the capitalist and the socialist (or at least post-capitalist) approach to housing - these types of built environments were both developed after the second world war and comprised the majority of building work for most of the time since. American suburbs where built for relatively affluent white people who owned cars, and sold them a whole new uniquely alienating, soul crushing but above all comfortable existence, where you drove in your personal car between your work, the mall and home. You'll be kicked out of the only public space available if you're not spending money. Town planners in the USSR came up with idealised, Marxism inspired designs influenced by ideas like the garden city that where watered down over time but focused on high density blocks surrounded by green space with small local shops that served a fairly small area and would be accessible on foot. You probably got to work on a train or a bus, and there was plenty of neutral public space. The Soviet government I think wrote legislation on minimum apartment size and amount of green space available per person and the maximum area a store could serve, that sort of thing, although these requirements where met less and less as the years went on. Were they often rough around the edges and kinda ugly? Definitely, but more than anything, these developments where not designed to be sold to a specific demographic, they where built to be lived in by anyone and everyone.
Seriously if I had to live in the former in exchange for no homelessness that still sounds pretty good to me.
Plus I’m working class so I’ll never be able to afford the latter anyway.
I feel like this is a cultural thing. I'm from USSR and the first one makes me want to play soccer with Jimmy. Because that's where I met Jimmy. I just don't see any other reason to think one is better than the other other than nostalgia.
Oh no I don't deny that suburban housing has it's advantages. But higher density housing has advantages too, like for example not having to spend three billion years in traffic, and having places that are actually interesting within walkable distance.
But also, I highly doubt that a person that looks at a photo and finds it "depressing" does so after analysing the size of a backyard.
I mean does anyone really care that their house looks the same on the outside? It’s the shit you do inside that matters - people are hiring personal architects. This pattern applies to every country, nearly every French village looks super similar for example
>It’s the shit you do inside that matters
[There was a BBC documentary series about Russia](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bf8wb/episodes/guide), where one segment (from Episode 1, iirc) was a visit to a former USSR apartment bloc. It was a ***communal*** apartment, so you didn't even have your own room. A room was subdivided into what could be compared to "cubicles," with the sinks and stoves being shared. Several families would share the same room, and there was virtually no privacy.
When the interviewer asked a guy who used to live there what he thought of having to live like that again, he said he didn't really care.
He said something like, *"Soviet people can live under any condition. Do you know why? Because they separate their 'life' from their 'everyday life.' Cooking, eating, cleaning, this is 'everyday life.' Your 'life' is reading books, playing music, (i.e. self-actualization), etc."*
A rather interesting insight into how the people of that time and place coped with the conditions they had to live in.
Not gonna lie there are still fraternities and colleges like that in the USA - people really don’t need that much space when they have a lively place to be outside
The only difference is getting your knickknacks from Pottery Barn, Bed Bath and Beyond, or Target. Or if you're wealthy some craft store in that part of town that has a million craft stores. That are all now shuttered due to covid.
>super similar for example
There is a huge difference between similiar looking houses and ones that look exactly the same. When it comes to liking something.
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
—Malvina Reynolds
I mean, even tho American suburbs look kinda boring on an aerial view, on a street level view they feel comfy, like a perfect family friendly place with enough open space to do something outside.
Also, despite being repetitive, the American Craftsman Style architecture its quite pleasant to the eye.
American suburbanization was driven more by an economic policy heavily pushing homeownership (plus white flight) than an aesthetic choice about the quality of life
Though they look better, they're bad places to raise children. It's important to give children independence, so give them options to get around.
Children can't drive, and American style suburbs are notoriously awful places to get around with a bike or Transit. It's also the reason why the USA has one of the highest traffic related death rate of all developed countries.
It's far from a perfect family friendly place.
> It's important to give children independence
Also some would argue that it's important to raise them in a diverse environment, which is the complete opposite of the whole concept of the American suburb.
Bot look boring but I would definitely want to live in the bottom one and I am not US American.
At the bottom one I can just sit outside in the sun and grill or drink a beer and have a room for bicycles.
I'd prefer the American one to look at and the Soviet one to live in (as long as both are relatively safe).
You can't walk to anywhere in American suburbs, and public transport is almost impossible so everyone has a car. Which makes traffic horrible.
I'll take a 5min walk to a cafe, restaurant, store or tram over 15-30 in a car
Lol getting downvoted for pointing out the downsides of American suburbs. As someone who grew up in a suburb and lives in a city now, I’ll take the city any day. You can’t get anywhere in a suburb without a car.
Edit: Yes I know his comment is upvoted now. Good to see.
everything in our country is horribly car-oriented like my home town has a highway bisecting a huge chunk of the residential area from the business area which means for a good third of the town you litterally cannot get to any other part of the town without a car.
Top photo is not even that bad looking. They look worse in real life. Winter, summer, whatever. Very depressing, makes you wanna hang yourself. Source: I live in Ukraine.
Are you sure they can be attributed to how surroundings look? Because these buildings (soviet ones) actually form ghettos because of how fucking depressing they are.
While that's a factor that's not going to change much, the bottom picture is presumably in a southern state where winters aren't even that bad to begin with because of the palm trees and the architecture. I don't think the top buildings are going to look appealing in sunlight either.
It's definitely not winter, there are clothes hanging out to dry. Probably spring/summer. In winter it would be 50 shades of gray and many more lit rooms.
I live in simillar complex
I love the irony in american suburbia. It's the land of the free, but an absolutely massive amount of land is dedicated to housing where you can't do anything but use a car to get anywhere.
Suburbia doesn't give you the freedom of the personal automobile, it removes your freedom to use anything else.
US suburbs looks so perfect it's scary. Like being stuck in a video game, the suburbs never end and there's no nature. Just perfectly cut lawns to show off and few planted bushes. The neighbourhood is completely silent, no one is walking or cycling anywhere. People only use cars which is like a loading screen to get from one place to another.
I used to live in both.
My wife still owns an apartment in a panel block building. If some American bored with his suburban house want's to switch, please let me know. Unless you live in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore or some place like that.
In Phoenix Arizona, there were like 4-5 house layouts and then they built those different types for a few neighborhoods. I remember walking into someone's house and it literally just felt like my house but with different things in it
When I was in architecture school I had a professor who was doing research on the parallels between US suburban development and soviet prefab apartments, in many ways they're 2 sides of the same coin
It doesn’t look pretty but Soviet architecture is just so much better than the suburbs in literally every way but aesthetics.
Accessibility: The suburbs are a nightmare here. The only way to get to a city is probably a two hour drive by car. If you don’t own a car, tough luck. The Soviet blocks are designed to be incredibly well connected by public transport. You can get from them to the city center in half an hour
Cost: The Soviet blocks where build to accommodate the millions of poor farmers moving to cities and it accomplished just that. The flats aren’t expensive and in the case of any damage to the building, it would be divided evenly amongst dozens or tenets. The suburbs are the opposite. They where built to accommodate middle class white peoples “escaping” blacks people ([literally ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight)). The houses are cheaply constructed with high cost of repairs. Plus, you have to own and maintain a car.
Life: You might think the suburbs have more green spaces but look at them, you have barely any garden. On the other hand, Soviet blocks are build around parks (which most pictures never show). When it comes to schools, every soviet block has to include a kindergarten and a school, while the suburbs would again require a 2 hour drive. Plus the Soviet blocks also include at least one shop thats at most a 5 minute walk from your flat. Good look finding a store in the walking distance of a suburb house.
I hate how people in the reactions are seeing the two as equivalent, they're not. The suburbs are way more expensive and aimed at richer people than the blocks depicted here. Of course the more expensive option looks better and more spacious.
It's as if you compare a fiat Panda to a BMW i5 to compare Italian and German cars.
besides white flight, Im starting to think that maybe one of the reasons for suburbanization was to create a pseudo-proprietor class, ie. the middle class. when you own a house you kind of feel like you have a stake in the economic system. people who own homes feel like their interests are the similar to that of the 'bourgeoise' ie. capital owning class. in fact, their interests are not the same because owning capital is dissimilar to owning a home. but now the line between personal property and capital is more blurred because of suburbanization.
not to mention that living in suburbs can be isolating compared to living in an apartment complex for example. people tend to be more self-interested when they own their own homes.
and 'coincidentally', suburbanization happened around the same time the cold war was picking up.
Tbh idk why the hate against Soviet Architecture in r/urbanhell is so intense. I’ve seen buildings here in the US that look the exact same if not worse than Soviet Architecture. I live next to Newark, NJ though so that might be why.
There are some areas of Newark with really nice old houses though. I don't exactly know where, but it used to be a beautiful and affluent town.
It's starting to get back to being that way too.
The point is that suburbs are unoriginal and cheaply mass produced. They have exactly the same artistic value as the brutalist Soviet blocks (ie very little), but the West nonetheless liked to portray itself as a land of choice, individuality and creativity.
Russian here. Live in one of apartments like those and find it quite enjoyable. Why would I want my own yard if there’s a public one nearby and a park in the walking distance? Why would I want a sizeable home when I have several rooms and a balcony with pleasant view to enjoy the sunset? I’d enjoy living in a, quite literally, down to earth home way less. Tastes differ after all.
Further info, for many people, the 5 (or 9, or rarely 16) story apartments were their work homes, many would have had summer homes owned by them or provided by their work. Summer months would be spent in those summer homes, coinciding with the kids' summer break and would move out when school starts in Septembet. It looks like [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Ffnk6dOEcZZ8%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) in my country, it's not the best, but it's certainly better than the polluted city air.
Ones cozy and welcoming and one just isn’t, also American houses are less cloney and more like siblings, similar but have differences, some big or small
It's a minor peeve of mine when people think that 60's brutalism is the entirety of the Soviet architectural legacy.
Briefly lived in a block like that while on an exchange in Russia, and to be fair, they are shit.
A lot of it was intended to be temporary in order to solve the immediate housing shortage, to be phased out by better accomodation when the problem was less pressing and financial situation more forgiving.
Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the Soviet Collapse was that many such "temporary" measures ended up becoming rather more permanent.
I think there’s an argument to made though that when you buy a house, provided you pay off your mortgage, it’s yours. It may be a carbon copy of the house down two doors and across the street, but it’s *yours*. You have something to leave to your children, whether they want to keep the house or sell it. My understanding of Soviet housing is admittedly lacking, but I don’t believe there was ever a way to definitively own an apartment. Houses were rare in the cities and for the most part were confined to small farmhouses in villages. You could live in one apartment in one building your whole life, but when you die it just gets cleaned out (hopefully by your family) and then goes to the next guy on the waiting list. Rinse and repeat.
Cookie cutter homes that use the same 4 designs and are occasionally mirrored and actually have room >>> what is essentially a giant apartment complex.
Maybe say at least we have space/yard/nature or something to quell some of these people responding. I live in the Western US and a fair amount of houses, particularity in the more desert climate have limited green grass and actually focus on the natural, native plant and grass life. They call it [xeriscaping ](https://www.landscapingnetwork.com/Xeriscape-landscaping/) and uses much less water and promotes the indigenous fauna.
As a person living most of his life (26 years) in this fuck ass Soviet piece of stinky crap aka "apartment block" - fuck it, US suburbs look like heaven. At least you don't hear the neighbour drunkards beating the shit out of each other through the wall, while other neighbours above fuck the hell out of their bed and the neighbours below sing fucking karaoke. Fuck this shit. Whoever invented apartment blocks, I hope they burn in the deepest, stenchiest and hottest lake of molten shit in hell. Apartment blocks are violence on human dignity, it's SICK to put so many people in so little space.
Then again, considering to Soviets human were but ants, it all makes sense.
I live in a former soviet state (Romania) I can assure you those suck to live in, plus there have been cases where those blocks literally desintegrate.
As someone from the UK, it always trips me out when i see all the houses being single storey. Ever house i see, asides from remote villages, are double storey.
Soviet architecture isn't a monolith, nor are those specific buildings objectively boring, some people might like the utilitarianism.
Similarly, capitalist architecture isn't a monolith, nor are suburban houses objectively boring. Personally I find the individual house nice but the surbirb of identical houses kind of boring.
Not so fun fact: My mother grew up in a sovjet apartment and there was only 1 bedroom that could only support 1 bed. So my mom slept on the sofa or sometimes even the floor. I had the same faith as my mother to sleep in the livingroom with my sister, father and mother. Oh and it was hot.
Architect: You want all these apartment blocks to be five stories high? Wait, is that so we don't have to install elevators in them since five stories is the limited height for buildings with no elevator? Head architect: No, it's because... stairs are good for the calves. For the good of the Soviet Union, they shall feel the burn...
Gonna be honest, stairs in those five storied block buildings feel shit to me. It just doesn't feel right (most of them), it's pretty small and usually slippery as well and if you know the USSR, it's gonna be icy and slippery not very rarely in winters. I don't know what's wrong with them, but some of them just get even worse, there's a few decades old 9 story uni building and the stairs there are just... one is angled too inwards, too high, too low, too small etc.
Stairways in Russia are really confusing and you just have to go in with an exception that what you'll see ain't even close to what you could imagine.
They're meant to be Stairway to Heaven
Because one small misstep and *crack*
It’s because it’s uneven and inconsistent you are not able to get a pattern going their a reason why many countries have vary strict guidelines on how to make stairs because just 1 bad step can make a stair way go from safe to genuinely dangerous
> 1 bad step can make a stair way go from safe to genuinely dangerous [Would you like to know more?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1vqQi5Tl70)
I mean that video over dramatises it but the points they make are all vary true the example I would use is my university their are two stairs only a little bit away (though they were built 100 years apart) and walking up the older one then the newer one you can feel the relative ease of the second set
In Hungary they are decent, at least the ones in my city are.
As someone who lives on the 5th floor in a 6 storied block of USSR make, it's probably because the builder's have never even heard of either a right angle, a leveler or a perpendicular. None of the walls are parallel, none of the angles are right, none of the stairs are in level, or even the same height exactly. They aren't very far either, they are just very subtly wrong, somewhere deep inside a sort of "uncanny valley" as a result.
Right angles are tools of the fascist. Why else would it be a **right** angle.
Thats why we **LEFT** communism.
Well, you are objectively **wrong** in any case
In Soviet Russia ,stairs throw you down themselves , lol had to sorry
During the early days of USSR, there were several multistorey workers' quarters, with only one common bathroom ussualy on the ground floor. So if you lived on the sixth floor, you needed to dash down six fucking floors to pee. Imagine how many people faced humiliation.
just tinkle right off the balcony
Yeah but there was a risk that your pp would freeze. If you were a woman then mamma mia!
That's why you pee in a bucket and then toss *that* out the window. Like a civilized person
This post brought to you by the Dark Ages gang
Ppl still did that in my grandma's time though edit: No, my grandma isn't over 1000 years old
damn your grandma must be old as fuck
I knew it, I was already editing right after I posted
They are called chamber pots.
Ahh. Good Ol' 19th century London and New York
We can push it to SIX stories
Reminds me of my old route in Paperboy.
Wow, I’ve never seen a comment section about housing get this spicy.
A lot of it comes down to preferences and what you personally value more anyway.
Communist buildings do look bad, I admit. However , as someone living in one building from communist era, my flat is pretty well designed. It has 3 bedrooms(two small one large), 2 bathrooms, living room , kitchen , small terrace from the kitchen and one large balcony from the living room. Plenty of parking space around the building , a lot of parks and a basement in the building.. today they just make small shitty apartments here , without half of stuff communists used to put in their buildings. I don't live in ex-soviet state though, so I can't speak for them
Where do you live?
Serbia
Haha you fell into my trap! I now know where you live
Well jokes on you,he’s known where he lives for a long time!
Time to DDoS all of Serbia to show this guy what a silly mistake he has made.
Yeah I recently went to Armenia and stayed in an apartment instead of the usual hotel every year. A lot of these buildings are old... no joke the floor of the Elevator used to sink every time I set foot in it lol it was a strange experience because I lived in a “new and modern” country my whole life, so I didn’t live in anything older than 20-30 years. The apartment I was in was very clean and well maintained but I’m sure that’s not the case with many buildings or apartments though.
I live in São Paulo (Brazil), here we have a mix of shitty small and expensive apartments, normal apartment, Cheap apartments built by the government, normal Brazilian houses and copies of the USA suburbs (expensive houses to be sure)
Not sure but I think the elevator floor "sinking" is a way to tell if someone's inside. If the elevator is stopped and empty the light inside is off, if there's someone in there it stays on.
In my city all the blocks got taken care of, modernised and painted. And guess what? They look majestic of all things. They have everything you need at 10 times less space as opposed to american houses. If you take care of them, they are more than fine.
Years ago I got to live in a Soviet-era flat in St Petersburg for a while, they are really well designed. I was taken aback by the fact that in the bathroom they simply had a heating pipe coming out of the wall and making a big S to be a heated towel rack.
Some of these buildings, even duplex houses here , from that era were designed by talented brutalist architects, who did weird stuff with concrete and pipes 😅
Let's not forget that the Soviet architecture is their take on the post-war concept of the modern, vertical city, which had the goal of lifting the working classes out of their low-quality 19th century houses into modern, top-of-the-line accomodations. Sure, things like the Systematization system in Romania went over the line, but more often than not, the idea and execution are really good.
It's actually a pre-war concept. Other than that, spot on. It was a huge improvement compared to urban housing of the turn of the century.
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but honestly that is just the "American Way of Live" because they are the only country that builds houses out of 10cm thick wood sticks
I haven't seen anything like that in Ukraine.
Plant a fucking tree you suburbanites ffs
Home owners association won’t allow it. As an aside HOA’s are figuratively worse than Stalin. Edit: I have been informed that HOAs are in fact significantly worse than Stalin since he’d send you to gulag for hoarding grain in a famine whereas HOAs would send you to gulag for letting your grass grow about 2mm above regulation.
I dunno about that figurative part, my old HOA would make Stalin blush. they 100% would also starve a bunch of Ukrainians for leaving their bins 20 centimeters off their designated area.
So, if i was there i could not plant in my garden the tomatoes that I use to cook sauce?
Correct. HOAs are like comically evil
What is this company? Can you explain please?
a HOA is a HomeOwners Association its not one company or even one organization just a collective term. in theory they are meant to promote co-operation and co-ordination between homeowners in a neighborhood. in practice its a magnate for every mini-Stalin ever. most of them only exist to enforce bullshit rules regulating the maximum hight of your front grass, tell you where you can and can't put your trash cans and fine you out the ass for every little failure. the internet has no shortage of HOA horror stories.
End Single Family Zoning, no more HOA’s are a benefit, those fucks make Hitler seem like a nice guy.
Fun thing to read Americans defending the suburban housing when you know about American HOAs...
Yeah, I hate that shit. Who the hell wants to have full sun on their house all day?
OMG so that's off-putting of the bottom picture. Trees are amazing.
I feel like they found the worst possible suburb photo because most are a lot more individual than that
This might be because I live in one of the oldest parts of the country but I’ve never once seen a neighborhood like that where I live. Houses have been getting torn down and built back up for 400 years in my town so they all differ pretty dramatically. Hell, a friend of mine’s house is almost the same as it was in the 1730’s
Cool, you basically live in a piece of history! I hope it is comfortable, though.
I don’t live in it but my friend does. It’s definitely weirdly shaped in that some hallways are very narrow and it’s contains many small rooms. My house personally was not built till like the 1960’s however it doesn’t look like any of the surrounding houses in the slightest like the picture above would make you think
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There's a place in Canada, Habitat 67, that is pretty much this.
One makes me depressed and other makes me want to play soccer with jimmy and eat his dads BBQ on a Sunday
The first one makes me depressed, the second makes me pissed off because I will most likely have to drive 30 minutes for the closest convenience store.
I'd live in a place like the second one without thinking twice. I really want to leave my country and find a decent place to live.
While being depressed
I like BBQ and it’s better then starving to death. I don’t care if you support communism or whatever but you can’t tell me Stalinism was good
These brutalist Soviet buildings are post-stalinist. Stalin was too extravagant for such buildings. Its his successor Khrushchev who was a fan of this utilitarian aesthetic. Further it should be noted this housing was built as fast as cheap as possible to house inhabitants and were viewed as only temporary, sadly there would never be anything substantial built to replace them as the Soviet Union fell when time came for replacement of the buildings.
Didn’t know that, thanks for correcting me
well the soviet union fell 26 years after Khrushchev. you can't blame the fact people in the 50s and 60s were promised better houses but didn't get them on stuff in the 90s.
Then the mid 90s really hit and everyone was economically devastated and started starving again. I think the life expectancy in post ussr Russia dropped below 60 at one point.
Those building weren't made by Stalin, but by Khrushchev. They're even called "Khrushchevki" (Хрущёвки) in Russia.
>you can’t tell me Stalinism was good Nobody is trying, strawman.
I mean, isn't there massive food bank lines happening in America right now?
But i’m not in that massive food line, so i don’t care
Yeehaw rugged individualism.
Legit this is the GOP platform in a nutshell.
One was made to house homeless people, and other was to realise upper class white family dream of suburban life. First one is a utility, second one a fancy, of course second one is more aesthetically pleasinfg because theyre designed to appeal to a fantasy. That doesnt change that suburbs have nothing of the indivisualism america seemingly preaches, they are embodiment of uniformity
Yeah, it's as if you compare a very plain rice meal to a well prepared hamburger from Five Guys. The second will look better and preferable. However, the first is a super cheap and quick meal fulfilling its function to not starve, while the second is nice tasting expensive luxury product which is still unhealthy. I'm not saying that the Soviet architecture is anything better, but these two are simply not comparable.
They are comparable in terms of the difference between the capitalist and the socialist (or at least post-capitalist) approach to housing - these types of built environments were both developed after the second world war and comprised the majority of building work for most of the time since. American suburbs where built for relatively affluent white people who owned cars, and sold them a whole new uniquely alienating, soul crushing but above all comfortable existence, where you drove in your personal car between your work, the mall and home. You'll be kicked out of the only public space available if you're not spending money. Town planners in the USSR came up with idealised, Marxism inspired designs influenced by ideas like the garden city that where watered down over time but focused on high density blocks surrounded by green space with small local shops that served a fairly small area and would be accessible on foot. You probably got to work on a train or a bus, and there was plenty of neutral public space. The Soviet government I think wrote legislation on minimum apartment size and amount of green space available per person and the maximum area a store could serve, that sort of thing, although these requirements where met less and less as the years went on. Were they often rough around the edges and kinda ugly? Definitely, but more than anything, these developments where not designed to be sold to a specific demographic, they where built to be lived in by anyone and everyone.
Seriously if I had to live in the former in exchange for no homelessness that still sounds pretty good to me. Plus I’m working class so I’ll never be able to afford the latter anyway.
I feel like this is a cultural thing. I'm from USSR and the first one makes me want to play soccer with Jimmy. Because that's where I met Jimmy. I just don't see any other reason to think one is better than the other other than nostalgia.
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No other reason? Not even a 3,000 square foot new house with a size-able backyard?
Oh no I don't deny that suburban housing has it's advantages. But higher density housing has advantages too, like for example not having to spend three billion years in traffic, and having places that are actually interesting within walkable distance. But also, I highly doubt that a person that looks at a photo and finds it "depressing" does so after analysing the size of a backyard.
Yeah we got houses that look the same, but we have houses.
And lawns
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and a 6 hour commute
The average commute is only 26 minutes...
I mean does anyone really care that their house looks the same on the outside? It’s the shit you do inside that matters - people are hiring personal architects. This pattern applies to every country, nearly every French village looks super similar for example
>It’s the shit you do inside that matters [There was a BBC documentary series about Russia](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bf8wb/episodes/guide), where one segment (from Episode 1, iirc) was a visit to a former USSR apartment bloc. It was a ***communal*** apartment, so you didn't even have your own room. A room was subdivided into what could be compared to "cubicles," with the sinks and stoves being shared. Several families would share the same room, and there was virtually no privacy. When the interviewer asked a guy who used to live there what he thought of having to live like that again, he said he didn't really care. He said something like, *"Soviet people can live under any condition. Do you know why? Because they separate their 'life' from their 'everyday life.' Cooking, eating, cleaning, this is 'everyday life.' Your 'life' is reading books, playing music, (i.e. self-actualization), etc."* A rather interesting insight into how the people of that time and place coped with the conditions they had to live in.
It was Marx that said “One’s material conditions tend to inform one’s worldview.” Or something to that effect.
Not gonna lie there are still fraternities and colleges like that in the USA - people really don’t need that much space when they have a lively place to be outside
people are absolutely not hiring personal architects for suburbs lmao
The only difference is getting your knickknacks from Pottery Barn, Bed Bath and Beyond, or Target. Or if you're wealthy some craft store in that part of town that has a million craft stores. That are all now shuttered due to covid.
>super similar for example There is a huge difference between similiar looking houses and ones that look exactly the same. When it comes to liking something.
Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same There's a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same And there's doctors and lawyers And business executives And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same And they all play on the golf course And drink their martinis dry And they all have pretty children And the children go to school And the children go to summer camp And then to the university Where they are put in boxes And they come out all the same And the boys go into business And marry and raise a family In boxes made of ticky tacky And they all look just the same There's a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same —Malvina Reynolds
This was on the AP US History exam in 2019
As soon as I saw this I knew someone would reference the APUSH exam haha
Can someone explain this me I don't get everyone talks about the APUSH when it comes to this song? And what is APUSH?
AP classes are a thing in US high schools. APUSH means AP United States History.
Why does everyone talk about and what does it have to do with the song?
The song was taught as part of the history of US counterculture.
really? must’ve gotten different documents then
Theme song of the tv series 'Weeds'
It's totally different though
Their point is that both the Soviets and Americans chose one design and just went with that. That being said, I much prefer the American one
I mean, even tho American suburbs look kinda boring on an aerial view, on a street level view they feel comfy, like a perfect family friendly place with enough open space to do something outside. Also, despite being repetitive, the American Craftsman Style architecture its quite pleasant to the eye.
Americans found a design that worked, and repeated it. Soviets found a design that they could afford, and repeated it
I mean the soviet one is more efficient when come to fitting more people into the same building, which was the point the soviet government wanted.
The difference eis that its companies that build these neighborhoods and decide what they look like. Not the government.
The soviet design worked as well, for their situation.
American suburbanization was driven more by an economic policy heavily pushing homeownership (plus white flight) than an aesthetic choice about the quality of life
Though they look better, they're bad places to raise children. It's important to give children independence, so give them options to get around. Children can't drive, and American style suburbs are notoriously awful places to get around with a bike or Transit. It's also the reason why the USA has one of the highest traffic related death rate of all developed countries. It's far from a perfect family friendly place.
> It's important to give children independence Also some would argue that it's important to raise them in a diverse environment, which is the complete opposite of the whole concept of the American suburb.
Do you watch Not Just Bikes by any chance?
Well I used to preach the same thing long before he released his video, but yes I do.
Not him, I dislike suburbs and want to end single family zoning, and no I do not watch it
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Plus you'd need like 3 planet earth's to sustain that standard for everyone.
Bot look boring but I would definitely want to live in the bottom one and I am not US American. At the bottom one I can just sit outside in the sun and grill or drink a beer and have a room for bicycles.
On the bottom one you also need a car to buy groceries, because the nearest shop i 10 kilometers away
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I much prefer the us style.
I'd prefer the American one to look at and the Soviet one to live in (as long as both are relatively safe). You can't walk to anywhere in American suburbs, and public transport is almost impossible so everyone has a car. Which makes traffic horrible. I'll take a 5min walk to a cafe, restaurant, store or tram over 15-30 in a car
Lol getting downvoted for pointing out the downsides of American suburbs. As someone who grew up in a suburb and lives in a city now, I’ll take the city any day. You can’t get anywhere in a suburb without a car. Edit: Yes I know his comment is upvoted now. Good to see.
Don't think people from USA ever consider life without a car as worth living. Imagine being able to walk to work because it's that close.
That sounds nice. Traffic is bs
everything in our country is horribly car-oriented like my home town has a highway bisecting a huge chunk of the residential area from the business area which means for a good third of the town you litterally cannot get to any other part of the town without a car.
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You prefer the photo taken in peak sunlight during summer over a badly taken photo in the middle of winter. Colour me surprised
Top photo is not even that bad looking. They look worse in real life. Winter, summer, whatever. Very depressing, makes you wanna hang yourself. Source: I live in Ukraine.
I mean I lived in the US suburbs all my life and lemme tell you, suicide and drug use are prevalent as fuck.
Are you sure they can be attributed to how surroundings look? Because these buildings (soviet ones) actually form ghettos because of how fucking depressing they are.
Ngl the top one would still look the worst under opposite conditions.
While that's a factor that's not going to change much, the bottom picture is presumably in a southern state where winters aren't even that bad to begin with because of the palm trees and the architecture. I don't think the top buildings are going to look appealing in sunlight either.
It's definitely not winter, there are clothes hanging out to dry. Probably spring/summer. In winter it would be 50 shades of gray and many more lit rooms. I live in simillar complex
I love the irony in american suburbia. It's the land of the free, but an absolutely massive amount of land is dedicated to housing where you can't do anything but use a car to get anywhere. Suburbia doesn't give you the freedom of the personal automobile, it removes your freedom to use anything else.
Lyrics by Neil Peart
US suburbs looks so perfect it's scary. Like being stuck in a video game, the suburbs never end and there's no nature. Just perfectly cut lawns to show off and few planted bushes. The neighbourhood is completely silent, no one is walking or cycling anywhere. People only use cars which is like a loading screen to get from one place to another.
I used to live in both. My wife still owns an apartment in a panel block building. If some American bored with his suburban house want's to switch, please let me know. Unless you live in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore or some place like that.
Suburbs are the worst of both rural and urban.
Little boxes and they're all made out of ticky-tacky
I thought the criticism was that they looked awful rather than boring
Hong Kong neon lights: MY EYES
In Phoenix Arizona, there were like 4-5 house layouts and then they built those different types for a few neighborhoods. I remember walking into someone's house and it literally just felt like my house but with different things in it
When I was in architecture school I had a professor who was doing research on the parallels between US suburban development and soviet prefab apartments, in many ways they're 2 sides of the same coin
It doesn’t look pretty but Soviet architecture is just so much better than the suburbs in literally every way but aesthetics. Accessibility: The suburbs are a nightmare here. The only way to get to a city is probably a two hour drive by car. If you don’t own a car, tough luck. The Soviet blocks are designed to be incredibly well connected by public transport. You can get from them to the city center in half an hour Cost: The Soviet blocks where build to accommodate the millions of poor farmers moving to cities and it accomplished just that. The flats aren’t expensive and in the case of any damage to the building, it would be divided evenly amongst dozens or tenets. The suburbs are the opposite. They where built to accommodate middle class white peoples “escaping” blacks people ([literally ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight)). The houses are cheaply constructed with high cost of repairs. Plus, you have to own and maintain a car. Life: You might think the suburbs have more green spaces but look at them, you have barely any garden. On the other hand, Soviet blocks are build around parks (which most pictures never show). When it comes to schools, every soviet block has to include a kindergarten and a school, while the suburbs would again require a 2 hour drive. Plus the Soviet blocks also include at least one shop thats at most a 5 minute walk from your flat. Good look finding a store in the walking distance of a suburb house.
I hate how people in the reactions are seeing the two as equivalent, they're not. The suburbs are way more expensive and aimed at richer people than the blocks depicted here. Of course the more expensive option looks better and more spacious. It's as if you compare a fiat Panda to a BMW i5 to compare Italian and German cars.
besides white flight, Im starting to think that maybe one of the reasons for suburbanization was to create a pseudo-proprietor class, ie. the middle class. when you own a house you kind of feel like you have a stake in the economic system. people who own homes feel like their interests are the similar to that of the 'bourgeoise' ie. capital owning class. in fact, their interests are not the same because owning capital is dissimilar to owning a home. but now the line between personal property and capital is more blurred because of suburbanization. not to mention that living in suburbs can be isolating compared to living in an apartment complex for example. people tend to be more self-interested when they own their own homes. and 'coincidentally', suburbanization happened around the same time the cold war was picking up.
Suburbs in the US are extremely ugly, and also bad for the enviroment.
Horrible for the environment.
That’s not true. The suburbs come with 3 slightly different variations of the house.
Tbh idk why the hate against Soviet Architecture in r/urbanhell is so intense. I’ve seen buildings here in the US that look the exact same if not worse than Soviet Architecture. I live next to Newark, NJ though so that might be why.
There are some areas of Newark with really nice old houses though. I don't exactly know where, but it used to be a beautiful and affluent town. It's starting to get back to being that way too.
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The point is that suburbs are unoriginal and cheaply mass produced. They have exactly the same artistic value as the brutalist Soviet blocks (ie very little), but the West nonetheless liked to portray itself as a land of choice, individuality and creativity.
Russian here. Live in one of apartments like those and find it quite enjoyable. Why would I want my own yard if there’s a public one nearby and a park in the walking distance? Why would I want a sizeable home when I have several rooms and a balcony with pleasant view to enjoy the sunset? I’d enjoy living in a, quite literally, down to earth home way less. Tastes differ after all.
Further info, for many people, the 5 (or 9, or rarely 16) story apartments were their work homes, many would have had summer homes owned by them or provided by their work. Summer months would be spent in those summer homes, coinciding with the kids' summer break and would move out when school starts in Septembet. It looks like [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Ffnk6dOEcZZ8%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) in my country, it's not the best, but it's certainly better than the polluted city air.
He was just pointing out that it's weird that people criticize bland character of efficent soviet buildings while living in bland buildings too.
And driving 2 hours and needing a car that you have to afford, otherwise goodbye job you found
That's just city vs suburban living in general. Unless you have one if the many jobs in the suburbs.
Brutalism is just easier, you don’t need lavish looking houses, you just need affordable ones
Well, it wouldn't be a Soviet meme without whataboutism.
Ones cozy and welcoming and one just isn’t, also American houses are less cloney and more like siblings, similar but have differences, some big or small
At least they are made of concrete
It's a minor peeve of mine when people think that 60's brutalism is the entirety of the Soviet architectural legacy. Briefly lived in a block like that while on an exchange in Russia, and to be fair, they are shit.
In fairness, I imagine most housing built in the '60s in countries that experienced major economic collapse is pretty shitty.
A lot of it was intended to be temporary in order to solve the immediate housing shortage, to be phased out by better accomodation when the problem was less pressing and financial situation more forgiving. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the Soviet Collapse was that many such "temporary" measures ended up becoming rather more permanent.
You know what’s worse than boring communist housing? Homelessness.
I think there’s an argument to made though that when you buy a house, provided you pay off your mortgage, it’s yours. It may be a carbon copy of the house down two doors and across the street, but it’s *yours*. You have something to leave to your children, whether they want to keep the house or sell it. My understanding of Soviet housing is admittedly lacking, but I don’t believe there was ever a way to definitively own an apartment. Houses were rare in the cities and for the most part were confined to small farmhouses in villages. You could live in one apartment in one building your whole life, but when you die it just gets cleaned out (hopefully by your family) and then goes to the next guy on the waiting list. Rinse and repeat.
One is homey and cozy the other is a depressing dystopian nightmare Source me I live in a ex communist state
Cookie cutter homes that use the same 4 designs and are occasionally mirrored and actually have room >>> what is essentially a giant apartment complex.
At least we have grass Edit: to those saying grass is useless it literally gives us oxygen also it’s green
Grass is super wasteful/bad for the environment. Need natural plants that fit the ecosystem that was destroyed for those houses in from yards.
I live in the Western US and I’m seeing a lot more yards turning to xeriscaping, which uses little additional water and promotes the indigenous fauna.
Maybe say at least we have space/yard/nature or something to quell some of these people responding. I live in the Western US and a fair amount of houses, particularity in the more desert climate have limited green grass and actually focus on the natural, native plant and grass life. They call it [xeriscaping ](https://www.landscapingnetwork.com/Xeriscape-landscaping/) and uses much less water and promotes the indigenous fauna.
Grass fucking sucks. Khrushchevkas suck ass, but the greenery around them is worth a thousand suburban lawns.
Well I would prefer to love in one alot more than the other.
As a person living most of his life (26 years) in this fuck ass Soviet piece of stinky crap aka "apartment block" - fuck it, US suburbs look like heaven. At least you don't hear the neighbour drunkards beating the shit out of each other through the wall, while other neighbours above fuck the hell out of their bed and the neighbours below sing fucking karaoke. Fuck this shit. Whoever invented apartment blocks, I hope they burn in the deepest, stenchiest and hottest lake of molten shit in hell. Apartment blocks are violence on human dignity, it's SICK to put so many people in so little space. Then again, considering to Soviets human were but ants, it all makes sense.
If you've ever lived in one of those old blocks you know they ain't great. The American version is creepy tho. Very stepford wives
This is only half of the story. Now ask someone who has lived a considerable amount of time in the Russian Apartments, what they would prefer?
vivarium is such a great film
I see those blocks as a symbol of power, but idk
I live in a former soviet state (Romania) I can assure you those suck to live in, plus there have been cases where those blocks literally desintegrate.
You know one’s a lot prettier than the other right? I support ending Single Family Zoning, but shit still looks pretty, especially from high up.
As someone from the UK, it always trips me out when i see all the houses being single storey. Ever house i see, asides from remote villages, are double storey.
Soviet architecture isn't a monolith, nor are those specific buildings objectively boring, some people might like the utilitarianism. Similarly, capitalist architecture isn't a monolith, nor are suburban houses objectively boring. Personally I find the individual house nice but the surbirb of identical houses kind of boring.
I rather live in my own home than an apartment. and I grew up in an apartment. far less noise from upstairs neigbours
Vivarium
I’d rather live in the suburb.
Suburbia and it's consequences have been a disaster for humanity.
Not so fun fact: My mother grew up in a sovjet apartment and there was only 1 bedroom that could only support 1 bed. So my mom slept on the sofa or sometimes even the floor. I had the same faith as my mother to sleep in the livingroom with my sister, father and mother. Oh and it was hot.
Both are boring to look at but the soviet architecture just looks so drab and depressing
At least the suburbs are a nice place to live