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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

As for "exposed structures", I'd include the prominence of the box model underlying the rendered HTML, emphasized by visible borders and/or distinct backgrounds.

As others are mentioning, the border-heavy http://www.zku-berlin.org (included in the article's examples) qualifies, and so do 1990s-style websites that appear to be authored with tables and don't try to cloak the inner workings of the layout.

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Then again, the label 'brutalist' is fraught with conflated interpretations that to some followed logically, yet in other contexts they appear to be in conflict. From the very beginning, the term sprung out of linguistic confusion between French and English [1], where Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal, then art imitated life as later works seized on this attitude and were intentionally designed to be provocative [2].

So no one knows whether brutalism is concrete-heavy minimalism, or concrete-heavy bizarro-showoffism, but the core of it is the use of a drab but versatile, non-organic material, so one could venture to guess that any website that features excessive use of color and vibrancy, and cloaking the existence of edges between disparate functional blocks would automatically be disqualified on aesthetics alone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12689331 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12688364

Brutalist architecture was a disaster, especially in countries like the UK where poor light and regular rain make grey concrete one of the most depressing and least durable of all possible building materials.

The UK was littered with Brutalist "statement" buildings. Most have been pulled down now, and - with a few high profile exceptions, which have escaped the low-budget ghetto most of the movement settled in - the style is generally considered a mistake.

I have no idea why anyone would want to copy the aesthetic in web design. But then the designs on show don't look Brutalist so much as "edgy" 80s magazine kitsch, which in turn influenced a certain kind of minimal web style which has actually been around since the 90s.

It's true that web design lacks real creativity and diversity, but that's partly because web pages that are trying to sell you something - as opposed to making an artistic statement - are optimised to balance content delivery with behaviour modification with cognitive load. There are only so many ways to do that, and the affordable ones are already in use.

On the other hand I really enjoyed all the Brutalist architecture on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. The imposing concrete buildings made a great contrast to the otherwise entirely natural beauty of the Pioneer Valley.

That's why brutalist architecture works best when it includes large windows and sky lights.

What makes the brutalist buildings in the Pacific Northwest beautiful is that many of them are now covered in vegetation, with mosses or vines muting their harshness.

That said, this so-called "brutalist web design" is bullshit. It's just avant-garde design of the 80s applied to web pages.

There were a whole bunch of such buildings on the UC Berkeley campus, and one was allowed to be covered with vines like that - absolutely gorgeous.

I think there is something aesthetically pure about those big concrete monoliths in a setting like Berkeley, or further north, where you can seem them in dense fog and smell fir trees at the same time. They start to remind you of tall cliffs and cave dwellings, rather than childrens' toys strewn on carpet.

Or another way of putting it - it gets you an aesethetic balance between nature and this austere artificiality.

What are some building I can visit around Portland?

https://twitter.com/KevinBuist/status/980947107489165314

We've all see this meme, it just perpetuates falsehoods about brutalism. However, it pretty much nails (maybe not intentionally) the increasingly common misguided discussion of it.

Very much this - as a Brit, Brutalism means to me all the eyesore buildings in faded concrete, grey against a grey sky, depressing buildings.

Buildings that dominate areas, make them feel unsafe and unfriendly. Buildings that create dark spaces for petty crime, spaces that smell of urine.

Buildings with no human warmth at all.

>Le Corbusier's French descriptor for 'raw concrete' was lost in translation and reinterpreted by English commentators as brutal,

I always thought that argument as flimsy, since the word brute exists in French and has exactly the same meaning as in English.

FWIW I'm recounting his own perspective [1], sourced [2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685595#12689331 [2] https://f50collective.com/2016/09/19/brutalist-architecture/ [3] https://books.google.com/books?id=b-OUxSelykIC&lpg=PA18&ots=...

Francophone here.

There is a difference between "Une brute" (a brute) and, as mentioned, "béton brut" (raw/rough concrete).

In English there's a difference between a raw, rough person and raw, rough concrete, but there's a clear etymological link in using brute/brutal to describe them both.

It's similar to the way 'crude' can be used to refer to a person or oil that hasn't been through a refining process.

Regardless, it's a postrationalisation (or retranslation, perhaps?) by British architects to force some sort of etymological ancestry into the name of the 'movement' they decided to champion.

The only thing I can think of as web-brutalist is table-based layouts with the cell borders exposed.

Ooh, I like that. That's a very useful interpretation! Thanks!

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