I hate this shit. All of it. If there ever was an architecture designed to squeeze the soul out of you, spit on it, curb-stomp it AND, to add insult to injury, age like milk in absence of proper maintenance, this is it.
The modern glass-and-steel architecture is "only" soulless in comparison.
I find it gorgeous in "wow look at the scale of things that humanity can do, if we set our mind to it". It makes me think of spaceships. The grey provides backdrop for greenery, of which there is a lot in Prague, especially now in fall when trees turn all colors each of them striking (the winter looks the worst here I think). It gives me the same vibe as Nordic minimalism, except it looks lived in, and used, not "fake perfect". It is very much alive.
Meanwhile, my friends laughed at me when I called American suburbs "featureless wasteland" after driving hundred miles through it.
I think this just shows that architecture is art, and opinions differ.
Mm, this makes me miss tramping through the snow to walk into a warm wooden bar, sit down for a beer and a big plate of food. There's something special about that in Prague. I lived a few winters in France (Avignon, and some villages) - but there's a certain magical feeling in Prague when you get off a tram and walk through a silent, snowy street and find yourself in a loud, bright, warm cellar, with good cheer.
To be honest, I am more at peace with brutalist buildings in Ostrava, the city I was born in.
There are more trees around them and the city itself is pretty rugged, a former heavy industry center with corresponding soul, so to say. Even though the "sorela" in Poruba is actually nicer. (Early 1950s style, very specific, sort-of socialist Baroque.)
But Prague used to have, and partly still has, a different soul, so the combination feels inorganic, especially close to the center.
Best quote in the article, on a design from Peter Eisenman (who IMO lived up to his last name):
"A Peter Eisenman building. Note the total lack of plant life. Plant life might accidentally make you feel happy and comfortable, and happiness is a bourgeois illusion. The tiny figures on the left seem to be attempting a picnic on the curve. They are probably cold and windswept—as they should be."
If you are into these sort of things, here's an interesting read: a debate between Eisenman and Alexander where the latter accuses the former of "fucking up the world"
Many of the brutalist buildings, perhaps not those in the USSR, are designed with humans very much in mind. Many of the issues that have been with life in brutalist builds are down to them being frequently used for social housing. Placing a large number of relative poor people, drug users, people with mental health problem and a myriad of other issues in the same place will cause trouble regardless of the building type.
That’s not to say that all brutalist builds are great, far from it, but they are blamed for a number of problems cause by the types of people they’re frequently used to house, not the buildings.
Communist countries were not as socially stratified as the West is now. In a Czechoslovak "panelák" (block of flats), doctors, professors, waiters and diggers lived side by side.
But the extreme growth of vandalism and alienation in this type of living was readily apparent by the 1980s. Lifts reeked of urine, graffiti was on every wall, glass panes were broken and trash receptacles kicked flat.
This wasn't a Communist-only thing either. Try finding an English translation of the heroin story "We Children from Station ZOO", written by a West Berlin junkie Christiane F. She devotes extensive passages at the beginning of the book to the soul crushing Gropiusstadt, which seemed almost constructed to make childhood more complicated and less joyful.
A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand, at least not without good evidence.
There is a much simpler explanation: People who can will eventually move into new (or renovated) construction, because of substantial improvements in quality of life. People who can't are left with the older buildings.
The urban planning and architecture was often pretty good -- kindergartens, schools, shops and entertainment all nearby. In some respects, much better availability of services than some contemporary housing projects.
> A hypothesis like "very bad architecture can damage humans psychologically" should not be dismissed out of hand
That wasn’t really my point either. We need to sort out which builds are damaging to human mental well being and which havevtrouble humans living in them.
My point was just that we can’t just dismis a build style, because some of the builds happened to be filled with trouble people. Some would still have had issues if we had put the in luxery appartments.
One issue with many Czech brutalist buildings is that they are brutally impractical - no heat isolation, mold problems, clogged toilets, not enough natural light, not accessible for the disabled, hard to repurchase, slowly falling apart yet using many custom parts that are no longer available & and the buildings are like 50% made of asbestos by weight.
They might look impressive from sufficient distance, but often not very useful.
Good grief, that first CA article reads like a reactionary "good old genteel days" with a central villain Eisenman.
Modern architecture is a response to scaling demands of modern life.
The CA article is analog of a geek blog lamenting good old genteel days of "Majestic monolithic Simple Client Server structures and interfaces harmoniously coexisting with bandwidth limited sys admins when developers happily were ignorant of most things outside of the function boundary", "but now we have these bare, soulless, micro-services which have turned the sector into glorified janitors maintaining poorly designed architectures ("pigeon shit", "dev-ops").
What has been a challenge, and C. Alexander did not meet this challenge, is how do we maintain a sensitive contextual approach to building (things) at the required scales (huge) with the desired economic characteristics, at the required scale. That's the problem. The meta-physical b.s. that architects engage it is precisely that: b.s. to fill the theoretical hole that has existed in architecture from day 1 (beyond: this here device orders space) which results in dragging in Jung and Derrida and the rest of the jaw boning gangs.
If you or the authors of that CA piece have clues on how to build n beautiful hospitals like that postcard picture for 7 billion people using the skills and tools available, have at it!
--
p.s. btw, if you grep the CA article for "class", you get 6 hits on 'classical', but 0 on societal class, and class dynamics. A bit of digging on internet, for example, can locate gorgeous modern health-spas in say Switzerland for the uber-rich, which I assure you, very much take "the feelings of the occupant" into account, using very modern forms.
And then we can ask the questions:
Does architecture favor a specific class?
Does modern architecture fail for the super rich? I don't believe that is the case.
Are the environments built for super rich in modern age soul-less?
Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life because we are all now living in cookie cut architectural disney worlds?
And most importantly, will the pigeons shit on neo-classical structures, yes or no?
I think the problem you're describing, how to build big and still have it look as nice as baroque / gothic / art nouveau, was basically solved by things like art deco skyscrapers in the US and the seven sisters in Moscow. And for most housing it's not a big problem anyway, because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries. The stuff that was possible to build then should still be possible now and much cheaper in labor per capita. If you look up how much it cost to build some iconic past structures in today's dollars, it's stunningly cheap and fast.
> Would a modern LEGO approach to creating nuovo "classical" old towns with standard parts somehow magically remove the inherent difficulties of modern life
This kind of faux-classical stuff is glaringly bad to my eyes too. But the reason is simply that we don't have a living school dedicated to making it good. Having such a school is possible; having it serve the poor would be possible, too. I wish it happened.
> because five stories high gives you plenty of density, and that's doable in "pretty" styles as many European cities show.
Lol. Plenty of density is relative. It does give you more than the average density of a West coast city, which is enough to get upvotes here, though, so there is that.
> Your mention of economic constraints also sounds a bit strange to me, because there has been a lot of economic growth in the past couple centuries.
There is an order of magnitude more regulation. Or maybe an order of magnitude more paperwork?
The metaphysical BS is the problem, architects treat buildings like sculptures, novels, and stories; as vehicles to say something as much or more than livable places. I don't know why we have the idea that structures need to be an artistic representation of ideals like sculpture when they are designed to be used primarily by people to live in and customize as they see fit.
It would be like designing hammers that are commentary on the homelessness problem in the world today but are strikingly ineffective to actually hammer nails; its fine if the only result is to be part of a museum exhibit but the architects force us to use the hammers.
The eisenmann snippet of the second page has him try to defend his work because it is supposed to say something, a commentary on modern dislocation. But that's a message designed for people to not escape, and most arcihtecture in that sense is the tyranny of the artist or government trying to immortalize feelings in books which you can only close the cover of by moving away.
While I tend to agree that brutalist is sometimes an excuse for ugly, even you gotta admit that most of the pictures in the article are quite stunning.
I think they are stunning because they are so ugly. Looking at pictures once is one thing and living or working there is another thing. Add the unwanted associations with the totalitarian regime... I have to admit that I am in favor of destroying them and replacing them with something nicer wherever possible. I respect that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; just my $0.02.
The totalitarian association is what makes them so fucked up. The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind. And anyone who celebrated them, even as a cerebral exercise was evil as well. There are certain buildings in Buenos Aires that you know were where people were tortured in cages in the basement; under the dictatorship, this functioned as a type of psychological abuse of the population who have to walk by that place.
The Kremlin is a type of thing like that, even though it existed long before brutalist architecture; its purpose is the same. A boot stamping forever on a human face.
Statistically, I hate totalitarianism more than the next guy, but these buildings don't really embody evil to me, for the most part. They embody the necessary concomitant of evil, power, and broadcast it, which suggests totalitarianism in some cases but not in others. In some of these cases it's appropriate. A bank, for example, wants to project an image of invulnerability; a bridge, likewise, doesn't have to be friendly-looking or inviting, but needs to look like it can ignore traffic, storms, bombs, or whatever else is thrown at it. And for a power station a powerful appearance is obvious. Not all power is a boot to the face.
A lot of these buildings look like they're designed with an aesthetic appropriate to their function, which I think is a good principle for architecture in general.
> The architects themselves had no true intention of making "art" - they were embodying evil, actually broadcasting and embedding evil into everyday life, for no reason other than pure hatred of the basic human needs in everyday life. They hated their own kind.
??? Of course not. They probably thought they were building happy communities under the glorious sun of communism. Unfortunately they were tragically wrong (on both their buildings and their economical system)
One of the main drivers of later Soviet Bloc architecture was relentless uniformization and centralization of industry. By far the fastest way to churn out apartments was to standardize a few typical panels, produce them en masse and cover the entire country in just a few types of buildings.
My Google search results were probably skewed towards architecture by the facts that I am a native of the city where "sorela architecture" is found, that I was actually very recently there for a visit and that I searched for several architectonic terms right before engaging in this discussion.
I don't think that's true for all brutalist architecture, otherwise how could you explain its presence in the UK and other countries where there was no communist regime?
The thing is, quite a lot of those things look better when photoed from a distance and much less so when you actually need to walk around them in your daily life.
I used to live next to two rather famous Brutalist buildings. One of them was actually kept in good order and the original architect seemed not to be outright enemy of mankind. It still had a score of problems, but well.
The other one was beyond ugly; it was actively evil. I wasn't surprised when I later learnt that the Communist secret police (StB) had extensive wiretapping and surveillance facilities there, among others. It was just a perfect fit.
Isn't it incredible that people who had so much hate of their fellow man were allowed to design entire environments for people to spend their lives in? And that we were actually taught about this as a "movement" in school, as if it were just a natural extension of modernism?
Jfc, dude, don't you think you are projecting a bit? The article contains photos of, in order, an office building, a theatre, another office building, a TV tower, a small office building, a bridge, a bank, a metro station, a shopping centre. These are not buildings people lived in, and in any case these are some of the more beautiful buildings of the period. Certainly no worse than the average office building of the period (including those in the West). Like, seriously, have you ever seen what ugly commie architecture looked like? The commie blocks built in the 80s when cost cutting was the norm? The ones that are hundreds of meters on the longer side?
You say you've been to Prague, well, have you ever been to the rest of the country? How about eastern Slovakia? Poland? Compared to some other places, Prague looks like an architectural masterpiece.
I wasn't speaking strictly about Prague, much of which is beautiful. I'm talking about the misanthropy of Brutalist architecture in general. Some of the worst examples are in Western Europe.
You can make stunning pictures of almost anything. I bet you could make stunning pictures in concentration camps full of starving prisoners if you processed them correctly.
This is just my take on it, but I've always viewed art that is beautiful as something that points to transcendence beyond the piece itself, it breaks the closed loop and points to some higher ideal.
Anti-human art and architecture, of which Brutalism is one example in my book, is revolutionary in that it attempts to sever the connection between humanity and higher ideals / planes of existence, creating closed loops of despair and grayness.
In Japan (where I have the most cultural experience outside of the US), there is a phrase "inki-kusai" which is similar to our word "inky" - it calls to mind dark, moldy places filled with litter and insects. I think it's one reason that solar reverence has been so prevalent in their history, sunlight and fresh air serve as disinfectants.
Separating humans from simple beasts of burden, toiling away in suffering, hoping only to be well-fed, and survive another day -- but no more.
Aesthetics are a respite.
Without, man becomes alienated from his humanity. Demoralized from losing a powerful moralizing force.
My interpretation of Marx, Engels, Hegel, et al.
In a certain vein, the U.S. lacks the same richness for it, compared to much older Western European countries (who haven't had theirs, their history, their culture, their identity, the very things that enliven their soul, destroyed by oppressive regimes. E.g. Stalinist communism).
Why do the French constantly raise hell when things are going poorly? Because it's in their history, it's their aesthetic that they cling tight to; for otherwise, they would be swallowed up by the world, and swept away.
One could even postulate that this is why our nation (the U.S.) has had such a rough adolescence, and hasn't yet made any truly novel attempts at Making Things Better (TM).
All are demoralized, with no true moralizing factors besides one's kin (but those are always unstable sources of moralization, and liable to one day disappear -- compared to the more concrete nature of culture).
If you kill a man's family and friends, what can bring him out of this abyss? Having lost his only moralizing force, that which enlivens the soul, what is there truly left for him to do, but become an animal toiling away until he one day dies?
Attacks on culture are rampant eveywhere, but the U.S. has not yet cemented theirs in the ground -- so there's not much at all of a culture to attack.
Truly exciting times: to think what happens in the next hundred years will serve as a foundation for the future.
There will still be strife; but what type of culture will mature?
There are two stories that come to mind, and I agree with your assessment.
1. In 2007 during the height of the financial market crash CNBC had a helicopter hovering over the northern VA house of a finance guy from one of the banks / insurers who was going belly up that had killed himself. The striking thing to me was how poor, aesthetically, the house was. Typical DC burbs McMansion trash. Plastic (vinyl) patio railing that was leaning here and there as it began to fail, landscaping that was obviously maintained by someone who had no concept of the original landscape design (bushes were either over or under trimmed). Windows that didn't match, but were rather selected from a catalog of pre-made designs haphazardly to fit a pre-drawn opening. Of course he killed himself when the money was taken, he had nothing of real value... if his living arrangements were any indication he spent all his money on worthless shit.
2. The story about the all glass Apple HQ injuring its employees because they couldn't subconsciously tell where the walls were as they walked around the building. They would incessantly walk into glass walls and break their noses, bruise their chins, etc. I wanna say I heard later that Apple silently had the building modified. If the ideology that built such an office building had to describe itself in a sentence, it would have to be "turning the collective eyes of the employees into the eye of Sauron, only without the dark lord's self awareness."
I hate this shit. All of it. If there ever was an architecture designed to squeeze the soul out of you, spit on it, curb-stomp it AND, to add insult to injury, age like milk in absence of proper maintenance, this is it.
The modern glass-and-steel architecture is "only" soulless in comparison.