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Comment by egjerlow | Hacker News Reader

This is something I have thought about often, living in Norway. Seemed like there must have been some period in the 50s-60s when building the most mind-crushing office buildings / hospitals / apartment blocks was the goal. Maybe the psychological effect of buildings vary over years? I.e. in the 50s-60s boring, 'efficient' buildings were seen as modern and progressive, and thus, gave a morale boost?

Exhibit A: http://borghoytrykk.no/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Vaskhøyblo...

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This also puzzles me often. I live in a Spanish city full of apartment buildings of a variety of periods. Often, one can see beautiful art deco buildings (edit: I meant art nouveau, although art deco is nice as well) from the early 20th century right near horrible blocks from the 60s-70s (50s architecture was not that awful here IMO) that took the place of other beautiful buildings of yore.

http://www.turismo.gal/imaxes/mdaw/mtyy/~edisp/~extract/TURG...

Doing a bit of research, one can uncover true atrocities made in the 60s and 70s... for example, in the 70s, this building (which was fully functional at the time):

https://antiguaprisionprovincialcoruna.files.wordpress.com/2...

Was replaced with this:

http://www.elidealgallego.com/media/idealgallego/images/2015...

And I wonder, what were the people of the 60s and 70s thinking? Did they really think that was a sensible change? Did they really think any of the horrible soulless masses of concrete that they gave us were actually nice? People from that period were not savages, that time gave us the Beatles, some awesome movies, the first more or less useful computers, computer networks... So why, dammit, why did they do this?

I honestly would like to go there for an hour or two and ask people in the streets, to see if there was a collective hallucination or something.

It does seem mad doesn't it. I guess its just the madness of fashion where quality is defined more by novelty and contrast so it does not remain static.

I imagine that at the time, art-deco looked like a man dressed in lace and velvet - an eye-sore of ornamentation and in contrast, the office building was the clean modern lines of a Hugo Boss suit with the authenticity of function. Too many clean lines and you get bored and you swing into something new.

Ironically lace and velvet was back-in fashion for men in the 50's... briefly.

This was a worldwide phenomenon. The ugliest most boring buildings are all from the 60s and 70s in NYC too. Same in Australia I've seen. My high school in TX was built in the 70s and intentionally modeled after a prison: they thought eliminating all windows and keeping students in a contained, dark environment would be best for their learning and development. What were people thinking in the 70s?!

I don't know, but I find it interesting that the 70s, when buildings looked horrible and so did cars (at least American ones), were also the time that produced some of the greatest music, such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Contrast that to today, where we rightfully recognize that 70s architecture was crap and cars look pretty good in general, yet all music made since 2000 is utter crap and there's definitely nothing coming out as seminal as Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side of the Moon.

Are you referring to Westwood High School?

There was a period of modernist architecture up through maybe the mid-70s--including but not limited to Brutalism--that has aged particularly badly for the most part. Even examples that were presumably designed to stand out, like Boston City Hall and the Boston Public Library addition (to the original beautiful Beaux Arts structure) look simply awful today.

I think one problem is that concrete literally ages terribly. The Watergate wasn't supposed to be a dirty, stained, dark gray.

Unsealed concrete does. The problem is that the surface of concrete is still fairly porous without sealing, so it readily stains.

Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I worked in summers in college was more beautiful.

It really is hideous. I grew up in the Boston area, and even as a little kid I distinctly remember thinking, "This has got to be the ugliest building in the world". Then when I got older I thought, "Well, the world is a big place and I haven't seen much of it, so I don't have much of a frame of reference. I'm sure there are uglier buildings somewhere." And then when I got a little older still, it was kind of satisfying to see multiple articles and polls saying that no, it is indeed one of the ugliest buildings in the entire world.

It's not even that I think Brutalism is inherently bad. I think there are some really nice examples, like the AT&T building in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A.... But Boston City Hall is Brutalism at its absolute worst.

I once read a humorous column that described it as an attempt to give any visiting Soviets an inferiority complex by out Soviet-ing Soviet architecture.

There are some decent brutalist buildings on the MIT campus including the MIT Student Center--which has a lot of interesting funky angles and is a rather useful space--and a number of IM Pei buildings (at least I think the latter are considered brutalist). There's also the Christian Science Plaza that I'd go so far as to call quite attractive.

99pi , which loves architecture and looks for the beauty in everything, tried really hard to say something nice about Brutalism and all the got was:

1) it's really hard to design and build well with concrete (you get one shot to build, and you can't elegantly patch mistakes or change your design), so architects love to try for the challenge, and they usually fail.

2) concrete is impossible to maintain; the buildings we hate today weren't as bad when they were new.

3) concrete is a really nice background for outdoor fashion photography.

4) concrete had a humble look and cost-effective nature that embodies the working class spirit.

Theae are true facts, none of which make me want to live or work in a concrete building. Maybe #4 when I am feeling camaraderie with my fellow worker.

I think it was about building a lot, fast, since much was destroyed during the wars. At least that was the case in Germany, I don't know how much was down in Norway.

I live in a house from the 50s, and it shows - you never know what you'll find in the walls (stone, wood, straw, mud..) since they built it with whatever they had. Some cables go diagonal within the walls to save material.

I also thought it was a Lutheran thing. Kinda matches the cold depressing churches the Lutherans build

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