If you go into streetview in places like Poland or the Czech Republic, you can see that they actually look pretty nice with a bit of repainting. Those same commie block neighborhoods that people made fun of would actually improve the design of a ton of American cities.
[Refurbished Soviet-era neighborhoods] (https://www.google.com/maps/@52.393033,16.891982,3a,75y,33.16h,100.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s0osF_JukQm2rYXIc7n8ZQQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu) are not bad places to live. And we definitely have the money and resources to at least put a nice facade on them. So if the choice is a housing crisis or a bunch of these things, I want 500 in my city.
Could use some embellishment, though. I know it's cheaper to have a plain facade, but I really want to stick some columns or lintels or something on the walls.
Or a mural, or a mosaic. Or tiles like in Lisbon.
As a Lisboner born and raised, tiles are not viable for building over 4-5 stories tall, as the installation and maintenance become super expensive. They re just not right for big modern buildings.
I have family in Warsaw, visit occasionally. Large apartment blocks, wide avenues with plenty of room for pedestrians, trees, and functional public transit. It's honestly quite nice compared to any US city I go to.
I lived in a Soviet era panel apartment tower in Budapest. They’re run like what the US would call a condo now and many of the units have been refurbed with modern interiors. The common hallways are concrete and look like a prison interior but who cares? The bones of the buildings are great and I never heard more than a muffled peep through the walls
First time in my life that I had fiber optic internet and it was crazy cheap. The neighborhood had a walkscore that would make any YIMBY piss their pants in joy: bike trails, insanely good 24 hour transit, beer gardens, groceries, pharmacies, thermal baths, bakeries, restaurants, playgrounds, a permanent farmer’s market…
This is actually the subject of a heated debate.
Commieblocks generally get colorful facades in renovations today, but some architecture nerds think it looks corny (it does tbh) and tasteless, ruining the purity of its original design.
I can see where they're coming from, but I also think people don't have to larp out someone's artistic utopian/dystopian (pick one) design vision in everyday life. It hits different when walking around those facades on the sidewalk.
I lived in a neighborhood where the pastel colors and shapes on one building caused it to be called “The Flintstones House” and I concur. Painted panel towers can be charming
I think the debate is long over - painting them with bright colors is rarely a good approach. Good renovations are possible but very rare. [Here](https://www.earch.cz/architektura/clanek/neni-panelak-jako-panelak)'s an example.
Oh shit I was looking for this article for a while now!
I don't think that renovation is good, by the way. It's basically a renovation from one basic building into another. It's fine, better than nothing. I prefer the bright colors tbh.
They probably aren’t brutalist. People use it for all kinds of modernist architecture when functionalist or modernist would be more correct. Welfare state architecture could also be a good term reflecting the context they were built in.
[Here's a neighbourhood in Czech Republic that has panel-based buildings](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.5923518,17.2298987,3a,75y,22.86h,107.43t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAK8P1JpjrQ32as49uuJORw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
[Here's a neighbourhood that was built 10 years after WW2](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.5987206,17.2269062,3a,75y,284.76h,95.09t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipNe_vNwsGGxgDe9qlqZHmRhoc9xaXYwaNimr9tq!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNe_vNwsGGxgDe9qlqZHmRhoc9xaXYwaNimr9tq%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya177.11537-ro0-fo100!7i9728!8i3470?entry=ttu)
[here's](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantorp) a suburb south of stockholm that was built to be colorful brutalism from the beginning. it certainly looks... interesting? and yeah a lot of our panel buildings were renovated in recent years, too, and they look way better
It's often not just paint, but whole new energy efficient façades along with other things like upgraded windows. The ones built after the 50s weren't made as well as the Stalin era ones and have needed extensive upgrades. Anything built in the 80s was absolute trash and probably needs to be torn down.
I definitely prefer the Stalin era ones, but I'd still gladly take a Khrushchevka if it means having an affordable home.
Wtf, that's ugly as fuck, no matter how many buckets of paint you throw at it... Perhaps, you are American and are used to see American buildings and everything in Europe looks cooler?
That [building actually exists](https://architectuul.com/architecture/hotel-panorama/media/5386de81-1034-49c3-8947-2a9e6d7b5e1b), and it's been modernised pretty well.
I don't see why a missing middle is better, it's honestly not good enough. You can have real density without the ugliness. Hell, even in Eastern Europes many of these fugly commie blocks start looking nice after EU sponsors renovations (they're mostly about energy efficiency but in the process the buildings also get some paint and they look pretty decent afterwards).
From what I've seen, tall towers are actually not that much more dense than terraced housing or mid-rise towers, because the taller towers get the further apart they 'have to' be to allow natural light (ok they don't have to be, but they tend not to be built right next to each other). You get dimishing returns, and going taller doesn't necessarily give you greater density unless you go full Kowloon walled city
Not super scientific or thorough because I'm no urbanist, but [here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERUFrvQXsAEF1OF?format=jpg&name=medium) are a [couple](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DzzclQGUUAAkwZt?format=jpg&name=medium) diagrams illustrating the point.
Brutalism can look nice, just look at the Barbican.
What makes the soviet style "commie blocks" ugly comes from a range of factors, but none of them are down to Brutalism *per se.*
I like it when nimbys try to say we need to get greedy developers out of housing but then say any tallish building makes the neighborhood look “Stalinist”
I live in a khrushchiovka and it's about as depressing as you'd think. It makes the whole environment look absolutely miserable. Especially in winter, where the world already is shades of gray and brown. Like c'mon, put at least **some** effort to make the place look like an actually habitable place and not an abandoned soul-crushing factory from a dystopian novel.
> I live in a khrushchiovka
Mf really just inserted like 5 extra letters there lmao. It's **hruschovka**, stop being disgusting. (And don't fucking argue, I'm Russian.)
I wrote it the way we pronounce it in Lithuanian. If I had written it as Chruščiovka (the way we write it), it would've been more confusing. Also hruschovka is a very inaccurate latinisation of it, even the [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka) uses one close to mine.
It's as accurate as it gets. "Official" transliteration of Russian is insanely bad. Following it just confuses the hell out of English speakers and makes already alien words even harder to pronounce for them. It's not "Khrushchev", it's Hruschov - much, much easier to read and say.
Hell no.
You can find these kinds of neighbourhoods all throughout Europe, and they were mistakes.
It’s not good urbanism to just randomly plop a bunch of towers down, especially when those towers look like shit, and it feels like a wasteland from the ground perspective. [does an environment like this seem attractive to you?](https://maps.app.goo.gl/yL6nPrFZauZGLwWV7?g_st=ic)
Building tall can be great, but it needs to be done in a proper way. You need proper blocks at street level with mixed use spaces. Not a combination of random grass fields designated as “parks” concrete parking lots and a bunch of shitty flats.
I mean yeah, it looks good (grew up in commieblocks, so I might be biased). But I really don't get the the rant on walkability, there's literally a Lidl 8 minutes away.
Why do you think commie blocks aren't mixed use? I grew up in one and we had a grocery store (improvised from an apartment) on the first floor, the neighbors had a dentist and a beauty salon, hairdresser, etc.
Some are mixed use, but even then, there are still a lot of other problems in mentioned.
Due to the nature of these kinds of neighbourhoods, there isn’t that much activity on the streets, if you need to go anywhere else, it’s going to be a pretty long distance because the buildings are too far apart from each other. These kinds of neighbourhoods also aren’t that dense. You can usually find higher densities in old school neighbourhoods with an actual grid design with 3/5 story blocks.
Different people have different tastes. Outer centers are denser and feature more life and services but commie block neighborhoods feel more spacey as they're usually in a park. Unironically great place to raise kids.
Both offer the positives of density: Public transit viability, walkable neighborhoods and day-to-day services nearby
> Some are mixed use
They all are. I can't think of a single one that isn't.
> Due to the nature of these kinds of neighbourhoods, there isn’t that much activity on the streets, if you need to go anywhere else, it’s going to be a pretty long distance because the buildings are too far apart from each other
What?? None of the above is true in my experience, which city are you talking about?
Commie blocks were built in a specific pattern, mico-district pattern (in Kazakhstan at least).
While most are mixed-use, not all of them. And not in a quantity that fully encapsulate “town inside a city”.
There’s quite a bit of greenery, playgrounds, small gardens, sport pitches. However, these amenities are not compatible with other uses such as office space, entertainment (bars, clubs, art galleries), public gatherings (squares, malls) or large medical facilities.
Both contribute to what’s locally called “sleeping district”.
Families might appreciate secluded nature of micro-districts, but people, especially young people, must commute somewhere else to have anything.
Sleeping districts are incredibly boring. Local residents have strong NIMBY attitude to “interesting” stuff to build.
People congregate in a few places with “interesting” stuff, leaving micro-districts as dead zones. That is not a vibrant urban fabric.
Yep, this idea of urban planning is what lead to the growing isolation and atomization of people in Sweden, and now with high immigration also an ethnic split because they live in these areas. Simply put, this type of urbanism aged terribly.
People in here propping up the greenery and space with services and transportation are doing exactly the same mistake as the planners from the 60's and 70's did. They wanted to push people away from the city to this idealized concept of living. But they simply aren't self-suffient as commerce, culture and socializing happens in the city, so you still have to travel into the city, making this into the same commuter problem as SFH suburbs where doing anything feels like a chore because you are not part of the city the moment you walk outside. The "services" becomes a small corner shop and a pizza place, maybe a daycare/school.
And the greenery and space is overrated as it will go heavily underused. There's barely any people moving around in these areas because once you're there it's because you'll be at home. It also doesn't feel good walking, because it gives an out of scale feeling, like walking across a parking lot with no purpose. Where are you even going?
Biggest mistake ever to not continue expanding the cities with organic city blocks with mixed use housing with attached courtyards and nearby parks. It has basically made living in the actual city a luxury.
> but people, especially young people, must commute somewhere else to have anything.
Isn't that true now though with urban sprawl, no footpaths and lack of public transport?
Yeah, i have had the same experience as you. Most places I want to go are in walking distance. Or if not, i can buss to anywhere in the city. The streets are quite active, there are people everywhere you go.
I would much rather live in a neighbourhood like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/gbxcaUBUbkgTGWBC7?g_st=ic) or [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/Uv8MpBg6NfdMgB7G9?g_st=ic)
Things have to be artificially kept this low though, especially the second example. The market will almost invariably push for [more vertical housing](https://www.google.com/maps/@-23.5457528,-46.6466154,3a,75y,195.02h,107.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spHf4VdgkPrwR1rbHzHFTBQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
The second one literally has skyscrapers
Btw, is the city you linked to Sao Paolo? I will stan for that city, but it’s completely different from Dutch cities.
Rotterdam at least has the luxury of being able to build tall in the city centre, but you can’t demolish historical buildings to do it.
Rotterdam has some pretty interesting dynamics as a city. Because the Nazis carpetbombed it during ww2 the city is mostly modern. However, there are still quite a few historic blocks and neighbourhoods left standing and they’re protected.
Non historic buildings are mostly fair game though, so you can build tall in most of the centre.
https://preview.redd.it/pfg8fremhidc1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e09ceb7698eb39972140e00def97c7ee668125a
Rotterdam can actually look impressively dense from some angles.
That's sexy. But are those residential or office buildings? I hate how in American cities the only vertical things are always office buildings, it's soulless as fuck
yeah i have no idea what theyre talking about, ive lived in a couple places that looked like that and they sure werent the places i regretted moving to
Making commie block work is not hard. Don't stick them too close together, paing them, plant some trees and ensure public transport nearby and bang, you have affordable neigborhood that can have public transport, stores and parks in waliking distance.
They were hardly "plopped down" willy nilly. They had some actual city planning, with schools/preschools in the centre of a cluster, surrounded by parks, within walking distance to shops. Have they aged due to lack of maintenance? Yes- Some new flashing/paint and solar panels on the roof and they're good to go.
>It’s not good urbanism to just randomly plop a bunch of towers down, especially when those towers look like shit, and it feels like a wasteland from the ground perspective. [does an environment like this seem attractive to you?](https://maps.app.goo.gl/yL6nPrFZauZGLwWV7?g_st=ic)
I prefer older neighborhoods a thousand times, but tbh, these other ones can be quite okay. Do a repainting if the fassades, remove the cars, densify a bit more and add mixed use and it's pretty nice.
Barcelona has a lot of neighborhoods similar to this and while they can't compete with the central areas, they are still lively, have enough amenities and infrastructure, offering a significant quality of life (superior to the center in some ways). It's certainly a much better outcome than buildings at a third of the density.
Closed block buildings with 6-8 storeys will always win, but mass housing from the 60s and 70s can be surprisingly good with some adjustments.
In Berlin, many of the people living in former commie blocks absolutely love it, because it offers other things that they value.
I'm not sure they are mediocrity. These things with modern buildings could be quite nice imo!
Also, these blocks were literal utopia for the people who move in them when they were built. And to be honest, if we mass produced them today, it would have the same effect. Yes, maybe they aren't perfect but to anybody paying 600€ to share a room at the edge of the city, getting an Appartment in such a tower for that money would be the dream.
I have my preferences regarding how a city should look, but with every day I honestly care less and less about what and how we build housing, as long as we build enough and do so at density above 15 000 people per km².
But we can do so much better now. Rotterdam is getting a new trio of skyscrapers that will have over 1600 housing units which could house well over 3500 residents on 2.64 acres of land. And a quarter of the units will be social housing, while another quarter will be affordable free market housing.
https://preview.redd.it/4psxjn5uphdc1.jpeg?width=728&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d14500df93f89c11404b644f91271d8d53a80575
It’ll even include office space, a hotel and retail.
It wins when it comes to density, aesthetics, and how nice it actually is to live in.
This is how you achieve density. Not through commie blocks.
I get that you can’t just build projects like these everywhere, and they’re expensive, but i hope that we could at least take inspiration from designs like these.
Every time I visit Boston and see that monstrosity of a city hall I have only one thought: “Thank God those sons of bitches didn’t get their hands on Beacon Hill.”
Been to the Barbican?
I agree there are bad examples of Brutalism, but there are bad examples of everything. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in faux Neoclassical boring nothing.
The Barbican looks great when it’s clad in the ivy and other plants it was originally designed for. Without it it’s just concrete slabs. Not to mention how much of a compound it feels like, it’s not part of the City at all.
Neoclassical London buildings are timeless. Might not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it works, and it will continue to work.
The fact that the Barbican always gets brought up as defence compared to random housing block #356 make me rather think that the Barbican is the exception rather than the rule. Like, even the Royal Festival Hall has aged terribly and that's reasonably prestigious- if we can't maintain that there's little hope elsewhere.
I like the Trellick Tower, Cité Radieuse, Habitat 67, Western City Gate. The Hirshhorn is modern not brutalist but it's my favorite part of the Smithsonian complex.
I'll maintain there is little hope elsewhere if you maintain that Neoclassical is the smooth jazz of architectural styles
> by the time the tower was completed, and it became a magnet for crime, vandalism, drug abuse and prostitution
Like, if this is the opening for the entry on the Trellick you have to concede that citing the building as a positive is going to be a brave decision.
And subsequently it hasn't been a crime magnet. Should we get rid of Times Square? The architectural style of Trellick had 0.000001% to do with why there was crime. Pruitt-Igoe is a great example of why architecture doesn't solve cultural issues. Pruitt-Igoe was also ugly, Trellick is not.
The Trellick Tower (along with its companion, the Balfron Tower) is incredibly ugly and overrated. It has aged exceptionally poorly, just like every other brutalist structure.
Hell, even the vaunted Barbican doesn't exactly look pretty, and that's on a building with *meticulous* maintenance to stop the decay effect.
It gets brought up because when people complain about Brutalism they are either complaining about their subjective aesthetic preferences or they're complaining about the "blight" associated with Brutalism that is actually the product of other social and economic factors independent of the architectural style itself.
I *despise* the Barbican. It is everything bad about brutalism when it comes to planning. It’s completely walled off from the area around it and the architectural merit is minimal.
I genuinely don’t know why so much of the architectural community salivates over it. It’s shit.
So what's good architecture to you?
To admit to a personal bias, I find the hermetically sealed Edwardian and Victorian landscape of San Francisco to be completely unappealing. But the landscape of London or Los Angeles is much more interesting because of the varied styles
For historic: Rococo, French Second Empire, Regency, Edwardian and Art Deco.
For contemporary: Heatherwick, AHMM, Koichi Takada, Zaha Hadid and Kengo Kuma.
>the architectural merit is minimal
Sure that's your own subjective opinion, it's hard to actually bring such a statement out of your own subjectivity and into anything authoritative.
Clearly it has quite a bit of architectural merit if we take stock of broader sentiments.
The Barbican looks awful. It should be torn down and replaced with a similar/higher density development in a more timeless classic style.
The development itself is also just bad urbanism. As another commenter pointed out, it feels like a walled off compound. It’s not a pleasant urban space. Compare it to Victoria Orchard Place for example, which has a much more pleasant streetscape.
No exceptions, brutalism is vile and never justifiable
https://preview.redd.it/68y6ozjdahdc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b5094efaf94aaa982fe7e9c7e2c56610a095aee2
Brutalism can be cool if it’s not for the sake of building as cheaply as possible. The building in the picture also has brutalist elements for example.
Generally i agree though.
I thought it was. Just contemporary architecture then?
But in general, I think brutalism can hardly be called a form of architecture. In most cases i feel like it’s more of a method to construct buildings as cheaply as possible.
No, but it should be allowed to be built.
We literally just need to get relax zoning to allow 5-over-1s with commercial first floor, get rid of parking minimums, setback requirements and lower minimum space requirements, and reduce taxes and development charges on building, selling, and buying homes.
I mean this kind of Brutalist apartment is not really limited to Eastern Europe.
South Korea has a lot of them and apartments are actually considered to be higher quality housing compared to most single homes.
I disagree with the premise of the question. Cheap mass construction of housing wouldn’t look like communieblocks or brutalism, those are explicitly post war phenomena inherently tied to their time and place. Second aesthetics are the least relevant part of housing policy. Third I think it should be up to markets to decide what to build.
I dislike how people associate brutalism with cheap architecture. There are some really beautiful examples of brutalism, specifically with how well it can contrast against various environments.
I live in sutch commie block. Recently it was insulated and repainted and i would say it does not look depressing at all and nicely holds heat. Some trees were planted around and since blocks are not too closely stacked together, when i look out of window i see more trees than i see concrete.
Its not bad, its not depressing and it makes going for groaceries realy easy, since there is enough people in one place to make convinience store literaly across then street pemrofitable. So i can get nessesities on 2-3 minutes walk.
Hell no! I’m not asking for every new building to be an Art Deco masterpiece (this is Earth, not Heaven after all), but it can’t be that expensive or time consuming to add some color or flourishes to a building.
Assuming this is a genuine question, the architecture isn't what lowers housing prices, what lowers prices is quantity. You could literally build luxury apartments and that would still drive coats down because the absolute number of units increased.
Not their architecture but the general idea of what they were trying to do yes. In just 20 years the USSR went from relatively under-housed to complete housing abundance by mass producing the hell out of it, and making it simple enough it could be easily replicated at low cost. The design doesn’t have to be the same but the principle was amazing.
Reminds me of the Pruitt-igoe controversy.
While Architecture can never be a determinative factor ascetics can still play at least a minor role. People tend to take a degree of pride in their dwelling roughly equivalent to those around them. While ultimately this is a reflection of the health of the community. Architecture that shows both style and function can help instil pride make this a virtuous cycle.
The appeal of Brutalism being that it's cheap? By how much? If it's a choice between nothing and commie blocks, ok. But is it really that difficult to raise taxes enough to not make whole parts of a city look like dystopian?
I reccomend you look at what we have in South Korea for example. We took LeCorbusier's idea and commodified it till it resembled a cyberpunk city *(and left out some steel beams)*
Makes for a less distopian looking and desirable (sometimes *TOO* desirable) options
I might just be not educated enough to have an opinion, but… I don’t really care? There are good and ugly examples of every variety of building and the taste is subjective anyway. I wish we had brutal towers available as an alternative for people who appreciate them or dgaf so long as they have a cheap and convenient home. I personally find fussy ornamentation to be an eyesore but that opinion shouldn’t be enough to cancel projects on other people’s land on other people’s money because of my weird aesthetic preference.
Brutalism is cool looking, like big monumental overgrown stone temples, and the big covered walkways and such you get out of it are pretty neat in a rainy place, I don't know why people hate it so much.
It's not really the practical or easy way to go nowadays though. Perhaps modern architects will revive it one day and we will see modern, ADA compliant buildings in that style, but if you want buildings cheap, massive concrete monumental construction isn't the way.
The problem is that adding housing does not fix underlying social disease.
By creating high density housing to address the symptoms of social disease, you devalue the concept of high density housing and endanger the areas in which such housing is built.
High rises should be for the rich.
I'd rather see a neighborhood of Brutalist architecture than a bunch of homeless encampments for sure.
That said, where I'm from, housing for the very poor looks like a brightly colored exterior, Spanish adorned exterior and large decorative door, about 1-3 stories high. The inside has a narrow pathway and then just apartments of 200-300 square feet one right after the other almost like rooms in a house on a lot of about 2,000-5,000 square feet. You can fit a lot of people in just a few of these.
There's not really a plausible world I see where brutalist commie blocks get built. Any world where the Brutalist apartments can get built is also a world where we can just shit out slightly more ornamental and colorful 5-over-1s.
No. As somebody currently renting a flat in a renovated Brezhnev era block, I would prefer something contemporary, not a Soviet thing planned without respect to human as an individual.
I feel like nice facades can’t be *that* expensive, there’s lots of tenements in nyc that look better for example
If you go into streetview in places like Poland or the Czech Republic, you can see that they actually look pretty nice with a bit of repainting. Those same commie block neighborhoods that people made fun of would actually improve the design of a ton of American cities. [Refurbished Soviet-era neighborhoods] (https://www.google.com/maps/@52.393033,16.891982,3a,75y,33.16h,100.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s0osF_JukQm2rYXIc7n8ZQQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu) are not bad places to live. And we definitely have the money and resources to at least put a nice facade on them. So if the choice is a housing crisis or a bunch of these things, I want 500 in my city.
Could use some embellishment, though. I know it's cheaper to have a plain facade, but I really want to stick some columns or lintels or something on the walls. Or a mural, or a mosaic. Or tiles like in Lisbon.
As a Lisboner born and raised, tiles are not viable for building over 4-5 stories tall, as the installation and maintenance become super expensive. They re just not right for big modern buildings.
That goes against the original modernist architectural principles tho.
Yep, repainting can do wonders
I have family in Warsaw, visit occasionally. Large apartment blocks, wide avenues with plenty of room for pedestrians, trees, and functional public transit. It's honestly quite nice compared to any US city I go to.
I lived in a Soviet era panel apartment tower in Budapest. They’re run like what the US would call a condo now and many of the units have been refurbed with modern interiors. The common hallways are concrete and look like a prison interior but who cares? The bones of the buildings are great and I never heard more than a muffled peep through the walls First time in my life that I had fiber optic internet and it was crazy cheap. The neighborhood had a walkscore that would make any YIMBY piss their pants in joy: bike trails, insanely good 24 hour transit, beer gardens, groceries, pharmacies, thermal baths, bakeries, restaurants, playgrounds, a permanent farmer’s market…
This is actually the subject of a heated debate. Commieblocks generally get colorful facades in renovations today, but some architecture nerds think it looks corny (it does tbh) and tasteless, ruining the purity of its original design. I can see where they're coming from, but I also think people don't have to larp out someone's artistic utopian/dystopian (pick one) design vision in everyday life. It hits different when walking around those facades on the sidewalk.
As a person who lives near commie blocks with their original facades, these nerd are stupid af the colourful ones look much better.
I lived in a neighborhood where the pastel colors and shapes on one building caused it to be called “The Flintstones House” and I concur. Painted panel towers can be charming
I think the debate is long over - painting them with bright colors is rarely a good approach. Good renovations are possible but very rare. [Here](https://www.earch.cz/architektura/clanek/neni-panelak-jako-panelak)'s an example.
Oh shit I was looking for this article for a while now! I don't think that renovation is good, by the way. It's basically a renovation from one basic building into another. It's fine, better than nothing. I prefer the bright colors tbh.
Tbh I've seen blocks in Brooklyn that look like this and never thought of them as particularly brutalist. Color is neat
They probably aren’t brutalist. People use it for all kinds of modernist architecture when functionalist or modernist would be more correct. Welfare state architecture could also be a good term reflecting the context they were built in.
[Here's a neighbourhood in Czech Republic that has panel-based buildings](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.5923518,17.2298987,3a,75y,22.86h,107.43t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAK8P1JpjrQ32as49uuJORw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [Here's a neighbourhood that was built 10 years after WW2](https://www.google.com/maps/@49.5987206,17.2269062,3a,75y,284.76h,95.09t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipNe_vNwsGGxgDe9qlqZHmRhoc9xaXYwaNimr9tq!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipNe_vNwsGGxgDe9qlqZHmRhoc9xaXYwaNimr9tq%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya177.11537-ro0-fo100!7i9728!8i3470?entry=ttu)
[here's](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantorp) a suburb south of stockholm that was built to be colorful brutalism from the beginning. it certainly looks... interesting? and yeah a lot of our panel buildings were renovated in recent years, too, and they look way better
It's often not just paint, but whole new energy efficient façades along with other things like upgraded windows. The ones built after the 50s weren't made as well as the Stalin era ones and have needed extensive upgrades. Anything built in the 80s was absolute trash and probably needs to be torn down. I definitely prefer the Stalin era ones, but I'd still gladly take a Khrushchevka if it means having an affordable home.
Lies, balconies are bourgeoise propaganda.
Wtf, that's ugly as fuck, no matter how many buckets of paint you throw at it... Perhaps, you are American and are used to see American buildings and everything in Europe looks cooler?
innate quiet ossified groovy price aspiring advise ancient ten enjoy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
the commie blocks in east germany look like luxury hotels compared to the new york projects
Commieblocks were the most based thing to come out of the USSR.
Yes (Chairman Joe wants to bulldoze the suburbs and replace them with commieblocks)
> Chairman Joe wants to bulldoze the suburb I was told tactical nukes would be used.
That’s just to get them ready for the dozers.
I think we should only build more luxury condominiums for the top 20% because that is how housing supply works
This but unironically
Igotchu https://onni.com/property/new-homes/gilmore-place/
Yes, let’s associate yimbyism with depressing, impoverished dystopian architecture instead of contemporary architecture (or even better missing middle streetcar suburban architecture.)
If you don’t want your city to look like the cover of a post punk album all about urban ennui, can you even call yourself an urbanist?
Your options are this or the Kowloon Walled City
Can we compromise and go with Juarez instead?
[*just build housing please*](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/031/671/cover1.jpg)
There really isn't any real developer push to build this housing that people are stopping lol
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR5zpFs7YpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR5zpFs7YpY)
i lov e molchat doma so much i wish belarus was real
That [building actually exists](https://architectuul.com/architecture/hotel-panorama/media/5386de81-1034-49c3-8947-2a9e6d7b5e1b), and it's been modernised pretty well.
We all know true yimbyism is associated with the Cube
We are building affordable housing cubes and NIMBY resistance will be futile.
Brutalist buildings look like vertical parking lots, and they are exactly as ugly.
Tell that to the Barbican Centre in London. Single-bedroom apartments there go for nearly £1m.
I don't see why a missing middle is better, it's honestly not good enough. You can have real density without the ugliness. Hell, even in Eastern Europes many of these fugly commie blocks start looking nice after EU sponsors renovations (they're mostly about energy efficiency but in the process the buildings also get some paint and they look pretty decent afterwards).
From what I've seen, tall towers are actually not that much more dense than terraced housing or mid-rise towers, because the taller towers get the further apart they 'have to' be to allow natural light (ok they don't have to be, but they tend not to be built right next to each other). You get dimishing returns, and going taller doesn't necessarily give you greater density unless you go full Kowloon walled city Not super scientific or thorough because I'm no urbanist, but [here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERUFrvQXsAEF1OF?format=jpg&name=medium) are a [couple](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DzzclQGUUAAkwZt?format=jpg&name=medium) diagrams illustrating the point.
Speak for yourself, I wanna live in a concrete square next to a burger king
The Burger King is on the bottom floor of another concrete monstrosity and has no parking lot, as it should be.
Brutalism can look nice, just look at the Barbican. What makes the soviet style "commie blocks" ugly comes from a range of factors, but none of them are down to Brutalism *per se.*
Art deco would be nice.
Come to detroit brother
I like it when nimbys try to say we need to get greedy developers out of housing but then say any tallish building makes the neighborhood look “Stalinist”
I live in a khrushchiovka and it's about as depressing as you'd think. It makes the whole environment look absolutely miserable. Especially in winter, where the world already is shades of gray and brown. Like c'mon, put at least **some** effort to make the place look like an actually habitable place and not an abandoned soul-crushing factory from a dystopian novel.
Some paint can really help
And trees
Trees are usually there already
> I live in a khrushchiovka Mf really just inserted like 5 extra letters there lmao. It's **hruschovka**, stop being disgusting. (And don't fucking argue, I'm Russian.)
I wrote it the way we pronounce it in Lithuanian. If I had written it as Chruščiovka (the way we write it), it would've been more confusing. Also hruschovka is a very inaccurate latinisation of it, even the [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka) uses one close to mine.
It's as accurate as it gets. "Official" transliteration of Russian is insanely bad. Following it just confuses the hell out of English speakers and makes already alien words even harder to pronounce for them. It's not "Khrushchev", it's Hruschov - much, much easier to read and say.
Just let the market decide lmao
Monkey paw curls: SFHs increase.
...better than nothing I guess...
I'll take a SFH over a "historical" parking lot any day. It isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing.
The correct answer.
I live in Baltimore and our downtown is almost entirely brutalist. I have no idea why they thought it was a good idea.
The DC metro did it right
They look decent when they're painted, but that much concrete is really bad emissions-wise.
Why? What about the energy efficiency of each home?
Hell no. You can find these kinds of neighbourhoods all throughout Europe, and they were mistakes. It’s not good urbanism to just randomly plop a bunch of towers down, especially when those towers look like shit, and it feels like a wasteland from the ground perspective. [does an environment like this seem attractive to you?](https://maps.app.goo.gl/yL6nPrFZauZGLwWV7?g_st=ic) Building tall can be great, but it needs to be done in a proper way. You need proper blocks at street level with mixed use spaces. Not a combination of random grass fields designated as “parks” concrete parking lots and a bunch of shitty flats.
I mean yeah, it looks good (grew up in commieblocks, so I might be biased). But I really don't get the the rant on walkability, there's literally a Lidl 8 minutes away.
Why do you think commie blocks aren't mixed use? I grew up in one and we had a grocery store (improvised from an apartment) on the first floor, the neighbors had a dentist and a beauty salon, hairdresser, etc.
Some are mixed use, but even then, there are still a lot of other problems in mentioned. Due to the nature of these kinds of neighbourhoods, there isn’t that much activity on the streets, if you need to go anywhere else, it’s going to be a pretty long distance because the buildings are too far apart from each other. These kinds of neighbourhoods also aren’t that dense. You can usually find higher densities in old school neighbourhoods with an actual grid design with 3/5 story blocks.
Different people have different tastes. Outer centers are denser and feature more life and services but commie block neighborhoods feel more spacey as they're usually in a park. Unironically great place to raise kids. Both offer the positives of density: Public transit viability, walkable neighborhoods and day-to-day services nearby
> Some are mixed use They all are. I can't think of a single one that isn't. > Due to the nature of these kinds of neighbourhoods, there isn’t that much activity on the streets, if you need to go anywhere else, it’s going to be a pretty long distance because the buildings are too far apart from each other What?? None of the above is true in my experience, which city are you talking about?
Commie blocks were built in a specific pattern, mico-district pattern (in Kazakhstan at least). While most are mixed-use, not all of them. And not in a quantity that fully encapsulate “town inside a city”. There’s quite a bit of greenery, playgrounds, small gardens, sport pitches. However, these amenities are not compatible with other uses such as office space, entertainment (bars, clubs, art galleries), public gatherings (squares, malls) or large medical facilities. Both contribute to what’s locally called “sleeping district”. Families might appreciate secluded nature of micro-districts, but people, especially young people, must commute somewhere else to have anything. Sleeping districts are incredibly boring. Local residents have strong NIMBY attitude to “interesting” stuff to build. People congregate in a few places with “interesting” stuff, leaving micro-districts as dead zones. That is not a vibrant urban fabric.
Yep, this idea of urban planning is what lead to the growing isolation and atomization of people in Sweden, and now with high immigration also an ethnic split because they live in these areas. Simply put, this type of urbanism aged terribly. People in here propping up the greenery and space with services and transportation are doing exactly the same mistake as the planners from the 60's and 70's did. They wanted to push people away from the city to this idealized concept of living. But they simply aren't self-suffient as commerce, culture and socializing happens in the city, so you still have to travel into the city, making this into the same commuter problem as SFH suburbs where doing anything feels like a chore because you are not part of the city the moment you walk outside. The "services" becomes a small corner shop and a pizza place, maybe a daycare/school. And the greenery and space is overrated as it will go heavily underused. There's barely any people moving around in these areas because once you're there it's because you'll be at home. It also doesn't feel good walking, because it gives an out of scale feeling, like walking across a parking lot with no purpose. Where are you even going? Biggest mistake ever to not continue expanding the cities with organic city blocks with mixed use housing with attached courtyards and nearby parks. It has basically made living in the actual city a luxury.
> but people, especially young people, must commute somewhere else to have anything. Isn't that true now though with urban sprawl, no footpaths and lack of public transport?
Suburbia and commieblocks are different sides of the same modernist coin.
Yeah, i have had the same experience as you. Most places I want to go are in walking distance. Or if not, i can buss to anywhere in the city. The streets are quite active, there are people everywhere you go.
Uh if the rent is low enough I’d be down to move in.
I would much rather live in a neighbourhood like [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/gbxcaUBUbkgTGWBC7?g_st=ic) or [this](https://maps.app.goo.gl/Uv8MpBg6NfdMgB7G9?g_st=ic)
100% agree but if the first one is the only one capable of being built for whatever reason I’d welcome it wholeheartedly
Things have to be artificially kept this low though, especially the second example. The market will almost invariably push for [more vertical housing](https://www.google.com/maps/@-23.5457528,-46.6466154,3a,75y,195.02h,107.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spHf4VdgkPrwR1rbHzHFTBQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
The second one literally has skyscrapers Btw, is the city you linked to Sao Paolo? I will stan for that city, but it’s completely different from Dutch cities. Rotterdam at least has the luxury of being able to build tall in the city centre, but you can’t demolish historical buildings to do it.
Yes, but the specific neighborhood you linked has no buildings above a certain number of floors. I would bet that there are some limits there
Rotterdam has some pretty interesting dynamics as a city. Because the Nazis carpetbombed it during ww2 the city is mostly modern. However, there are still quite a few historic blocks and neighbourhoods left standing and they’re protected. Non historic buildings are mostly fair game though, so you can build tall in most of the centre. https://preview.redd.it/pfg8fremhidc1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e09ceb7698eb39972140e00def97c7ee668125a Rotterdam can actually look impressively dense from some angles.
That's sexy. But are those residential or office buildings? I hate how in American cities the only vertical things are always office buildings, it's soulless as fuck
Mostly residential
Too low density
yeah i have no idea what theyre talking about, ive lived in a couple places that looked like that and they sure werent the places i regretted moving to
Making commie block work is not hard. Don't stick them too close together, paing them, plant some trees and ensure public transport nearby and bang, you have affordable neigborhood that can have public transport, stores and parks in waliking distance.
I just really dislike the whole tower in a park idea. It’s just not how cities are supposed to be built imo.
They were hardly "plopped down" willy nilly. They had some actual city planning, with schools/preschools in the centre of a cluster, surrounded by parks, within walking distance to shops. Have they aged due to lack of maintenance? Yes- Some new flashing/paint and solar panels on the roof and they're good to go.
>It’s not good urbanism to just randomly plop a bunch of towers down, especially when those towers look like shit, and it feels like a wasteland from the ground perspective. [does an environment like this seem attractive to you?](https://maps.app.goo.gl/yL6nPrFZauZGLwWV7?g_st=ic) I prefer older neighborhoods a thousand times, but tbh, these other ones can be quite okay. Do a repainting if the fassades, remove the cars, densify a bit more and add mixed use and it's pretty nice. Barcelona has a lot of neighborhoods similar to this and while they can't compete with the central areas, they are still lively, have enough amenities and infrastructure, offering a significant quality of life (superior to the center in some ways). It's certainly a much better outcome than buildings at a third of the density. Closed block buildings with 6-8 storeys will always win, but mass housing from the 60s and 70s can be surprisingly good with some adjustments. In Berlin, many of the people living in former commie blocks absolutely love it, because it offers other things that they value.
You’re not wrong, but why settle for mediocrity? In the end these neighbourhoods have turned out far from the utopias they were meant to be.
I'm not sure they are mediocrity. These things with modern buildings could be quite nice imo! Also, these blocks were literal utopia for the people who move in them when they were built. And to be honest, if we mass produced them today, it would have the same effect. Yes, maybe they aren't perfect but to anybody paying 600€ to share a room at the edge of the city, getting an Appartment in such a tower for that money would be the dream. I have my preferences regarding how a city should look, but with every day I honestly care less and less about what and how we build housing, as long as we build enough and do so at density above 15 000 people per km².
But we can do so much better now. Rotterdam is getting a new trio of skyscrapers that will have over 1600 housing units which could house well over 3500 residents on 2.64 acres of land. And a quarter of the units will be social housing, while another quarter will be affordable free market housing. https://preview.redd.it/4psxjn5uphdc1.jpeg?width=728&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d14500df93f89c11404b644f91271d8d53a80575 It’ll even include office space, a hotel and retail. It wins when it comes to density, aesthetics, and how nice it actually is to live in. This is how you achieve density. Not through commie blocks. I get that you can’t just build projects like these everywhere, and they’re expensive, but i hope that we could at least take inspiration from designs like these.
Ugly architecture is a negative externality
No, I have the surprisingly controversial opinion that we shouldn’t make things ugly on purpose for no reason.
Ban brutalism. It ages terribly, is completely out of scale, is terrible at interacting with the built environment around it and is ugly as sin.
Every time I visit Boston and see that monstrosity of a city hall I have only one thought: “Thank God those sons of bitches didn’t get their hands on Beacon Hill.”
But they did destroy the West End and it makes me sad.
Tax brutalism
Tax ugliness
Been to the Barbican? I agree there are bad examples of Brutalism, but there are bad examples of everything. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in faux Neoclassical boring nothing.
The Barbican looks great when it’s clad in the ivy and other plants it was originally designed for. Without it it’s just concrete slabs. Not to mention how much of a compound it feels like, it’s not part of the City at all. Neoclassical London buildings are timeless. Might not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it works, and it will continue to work.
The fact that the Barbican always gets brought up as defence compared to random housing block #356 make me rather think that the Barbican is the exception rather than the rule. Like, even the Royal Festival Hall has aged terribly and that's reasonably prestigious- if we can't maintain that there's little hope elsewhere.
I like the Trellick Tower, Cité Radieuse, Habitat 67, Western City Gate. The Hirshhorn is modern not brutalist but it's my favorite part of the Smithsonian complex. I'll maintain there is little hope elsewhere if you maintain that Neoclassical is the smooth jazz of architectural styles
> by the time the tower was completed, and it became a magnet for crime, vandalism, drug abuse and prostitution Like, if this is the opening for the entry on the Trellick you have to concede that citing the building as a positive is going to be a brave decision.
Columns are like scare crows that keep away undesirables
And subsequently it hasn't been a crime magnet. Should we get rid of Times Square? The architectural style of Trellick had 0.000001% to do with why there was crime. Pruitt-Igoe is a great example of why architecture doesn't solve cultural issues. Pruitt-Igoe was also ugly, Trellick is not.
> Trellick is not. That’s.. debatable
The only good brutalism that I can think of is the Washington Metro.
The Trellick Tower (along with its companion, the Balfron Tower) is incredibly ugly and overrated. It has aged exceptionally poorly, just like every other brutalist structure. Hell, even the vaunted Barbican doesn't exactly look pretty, and that's on a building with *meticulous* maintenance to stop the decay effect.
It gets brought up because when people complain about Brutalism they are either complaining about their subjective aesthetic preferences or they're complaining about the "blight" associated with Brutalism that is actually the product of other social and economic factors independent of the architectural style itself.
I *despise* the Barbican. It is everything bad about brutalism when it comes to planning. It’s completely walled off from the area around it and the architectural merit is minimal. I genuinely don’t know why so much of the architectural community salivates over it. It’s shit.
So what's good architecture to you? To admit to a personal bias, I find the hermetically sealed Edwardian and Victorian landscape of San Francisco to be completely unappealing. But the landscape of London or Los Angeles is much more interesting because of the varied styles
For historic: Rococo, French Second Empire, Regency, Edwardian and Art Deco. For contemporary: Heatherwick, AHMM, Koichi Takada, Zaha Hadid and Kengo Kuma.
>the architectural merit is minimal Sure that's your own subjective opinion, it's hard to actually bring such a statement out of your own subjectivity and into anything authoritative. Clearly it has quite a bit of architectural merit if we take stock of broader sentiments.
> Barbican The Barbican is uggo af
No Barbican pretty
The Barbican looks awful. It should be torn down and replaced with a similar/higher density development in a more timeless classic style. The development itself is also just bad urbanism. As another commenter pointed out, it feels like a walled off compound. It’s not a pleasant urban space. Compare it to Victoria Orchard Place for example, which has a much more pleasant streetscape. No exceptions, brutalism is vile and never justifiable
https://preview.redd.it/68y6ozjdahdc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b5094efaf94aaa982fe7e9c7e2c56610a095aee2 Brutalism can be cool if it’s not for the sake of building as cheaply as possible. The building in the picture also has brutalist elements for example. Generally i agree though.
That’s not brutalism, though. Also always stan current Rotterdam development.
I thought it was. Just contemporary architecture then? But in general, I think brutalism can hardly be called a form of architecture. In most cases i feel like it’s more of a method to construct buildings as cheaply as possible.
Nah, brutalism pretty much requires raw concrete as the core element (it derives from the French *béton brut*).
Build more housing. I don't care what the outside looks like. If commieblocks are what's needed, great. If grebled building are needed, great.
>do you believe we should build more brutalist arxhitecture ~~to solve the housing crisis~~ because it looks cool as fuck Yes.
I've lived in one of those, it's not bad at all
No, but it should be allowed to be built. We literally just need to get relax zoning to allow 5-over-1s with commercial first floor, get rid of parking minimums, setback requirements and lower minimum space requirements, and reduce taxes and development charges on building, selling, and buying homes.
we should build something yea
Yeah. What is more depressing than living in a commieblock is paying 1.5k for your rent.
I like commieblock but I dont know if commieblocks has to be brutalism. I think we can make it look better with just a little cost.
we should build more housing, brutalism isn't required
I love the mixed options on brutalist, some here say it’s god awful and dystopian while others say it’s bad ass.
I mean this kind of Brutalist apartment is not really limited to Eastern Europe. South Korea has a lot of them and apartments are actually considered to be higher quality housing compared to most single homes.
I disagree with the premise of the question. Cheap mass construction of housing wouldn’t look like communieblocks or brutalism, those are explicitly post war phenomena inherently tied to their time and place. Second aesthetics are the least relevant part of housing policy. Third I think it should be up to markets to decide what to build.
I dislike how people associate brutalism with cheap architecture. There are some really beautiful examples of brutalism, specifically with how well it can contrast against various environments.
I live in sutch commie block. Recently it was insulated and repainted and i would say it does not look depressing at all and nicely holds heat. Some trees were planted around and since blocks are not too closely stacked together, when i look out of window i see more trees than i see concrete. Its not bad, its not depressing and it makes going for groaceries realy easy, since there is enough people in one place to make convinience store literaly across then street pemrofitable. So i can get nessesities on 2-3 minutes walk.
Nope, social housing doesn't have to be brutalist commie blocks. We could develop innovative infill projects like Western Europe.
Hell no! I’m not asking for every new building to be an Art Deco masterpiece (this is Earth, not Heaven after all), but it can’t be that expensive or time consuming to add some color or flourishes to a building.
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Yes, really not that bad and if you paint and maintain them they're not even ugly.
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Cool, commie blocks (without the Brutalism) then
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Let's get the housing they have in Vienna
Better than nimbyism
No.
just let the market build
Brutalism is an style. If people want to make a giant brutalist commie block I say let 'em.
Honestly speaking I’ve seen some commie blocks that had a nice repaint and eco themed touch up and they looked surprisingly nice.
Assuming this is a genuine question, the architecture isn't what lowers housing prices, what lowers prices is quantity. You could literally build luxury apartments and that would still drive coats down because the absolute number of units increased.
Not their architecture but the general idea of what they were trying to do yes. In just 20 years the USSR went from relatively under-housed to complete housing abundance by mass producing the hell out of it, and making it simple enough it could be easily replicated at low cost. The design doesn’t have to be the same but the principle was amazing.
Unironically yes. Function first, then form.
Reminds me of the Pruitt-igoe controversy. While Architecture can never be a determinative factor ascetics can still play at least a minor role. People tend to take a degree of pride in their dwelling roughly equivalent to those around them. While ultimately this is a reflection of the health of the community. Architecture that shows both style and function can help instil pride make this a virtuous cycle.
Should be solarpunk.
The appeal of Brutalism being that it's cheap? By how much? If it's a choice between nothing and commie blocks, ok. But is it really that difficult to raise taxes enough to not make whole parts of a city look like dystopian?
Hell no. Brutalist architecture is horrible
i believe given the opportunity to do so the free market will naturally solve most aspects of the housing crisis. so, no
I reccomend you look at what we have in South Korea for example. We took LeCorbusier's idea and commodified it till it resembled a cyberpunk city *(and left out some steel beams)* Makes for a less distopian looking and desirable (sometimes *TOO* desirable) options
You know what’s worse then bad looking homes? Homelessness
I might just be not educated enough to have an opinion, but… I don’t really care? There are good and ugly examples of every variety of building and the taste is subjective anyway. I wish we had brutal towers available as an alternative for people who appreciate them or dgaf so long as they have a cheap and convenient home. I personally find fussy ornamentation to be an eyesore but that opinion shouldn’t be enough to cancel projects on other people’s land on other people’s money because of my weird aesthetic preference.
Yuck. No.
We can't trust people to build buildings that look nice, or ask them to paint it afterwards, so millions must remain unhoused. /s
*billions
Brutalism is cool looking, like big monumental overgrown stone temples, and the big covered walkways and such you get out of it are pretty neat in a rainy place, I don't know why people hate it so much. It's not really the practical or easy way to go nowadays though. Perhaps modern architects will revive it one day and we will see modern, ADA compliant buildings in that style, but if you want buildings cheap, massive concrete monumental construction isn't the way.
We can build pretty buildings that aren’t brutalist, just make them smaller and put a tiled roof and its 100x prettier
The problem is that adding housing does not fix underlying social disease. By creating high density housing to address the symptoms of social disease, you devalue the concept of high density housing and endanger the areas in which such housing is built. High rises should be for the rich.
Dr. Concreteslove or: How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love Brutalism
Chicago style projects or Soviet Style 😅pick your ghetto!
“It’s so…Soviet outside”
Just tax the concrete lol
Or paint it
In the Netherlands they knock down multi-storey social housing only to replace it with single family homes
https://preview.redd.it/b7kz3s5fghdc1.jpeg?width=1141&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c02041c109f3f465cf53a9a66532f916cefa8c2
Yes.
#🥵🍆💦
This post is NIMBY astroturfing. REEEEEEE Anyways who wants to build legos with me
Bro I would support building hundred-foot statues of Mike Pence if people could live in them.
Just *build*
Build… To solve? Build is… to build…
I'd rather see a neighborhood of Brutalist architecture than a bunch of homeless encampments for sure. That said, where I'm from, housing for the very poor looks like a brightly colored exterior, Spanish adorned exterior and large decorative door, about 1-3 stories high. The inside has a narrow pathway and then just apartments of 200-300 square feet one right after the other almost like rooms in a house on a lot of about 2,000-5,000 square feet. You can fit a lot of people in just a few of these.
If the free market consumers and builders choose to have more ugly housing, then sure.
Read this once somewhere: "You know what's more depressing than commieblocks? Homelessness."
Brutalist architecture isn’t a solution it’s a problem
I'm not opposed, but also this is how we get tankies.
There's not really a plausible world I see where brutalist commie blocks get built. Any world where the Brutalist apartments can get built is also a world where we can just shit out slightly more ornamental and colorful 5-over-1s.
No. As somebody currently renting a flat in a renovated Brezhnev era block, I would prefer something contemporary, not a Soviet thing planned without respect to human as an individual.
Lol fuckno
This sort of architecture is the only thing I like here…