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Comment by expathacker | Hacker News Reader

What's more interesting to me, is why HN is so attracted to Brutalism? Is it a sense of minimalist aesthetic, an expectation of structural integrity, the economics of minimalism, a detachment from previous architectural genres, or perhaps an affinity for the writings of Ayn Rand (whose characters espouse the virtues of Brutalism, and whose book, "The Fountainhead" was about a brutalist architect).

I spend a lot of time exploring and studying music in former Yugoslav countries, and while I find the Brutalism fascinating in it's relationship to Soviet/Yugoslav poverty & austerity, beauty is not a word I would ever use positively in the same sentence.

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The following is strictly my opinion.

Misplaced romanticism. AFAIK historically Americans didn't park their poor people or immigrant workers into these huge brutalist apartment complexes like in Europe, or if they did it is somehow a new phenomenon.

And I can assure you it's the same in western Europe. Not a lot of people value that architectural style given what it represents: a lot of political and social failure that carries so much shame and embarrassment we are trying to remove any trace of it.

>What's more interesting to me, is why HN is so attracted to Brutalism?

It's just a term that got into fame (from a brutalist web design trend and manifesto) recently (a few years ago), and as thus it's in our mid-term memories from our web surfing, so folks on HN periodically rediscover it and post links about it here.

No special attraction to Brutalism.

Bulgarian here, Randian types around here prefer interbellum modernist architecture to the full blown Brutalism.

As for the more extreme postwar architecture, it feels quite homey to me. Although I like it best when it's subverted by the inhabitants, humans living and leaving their mark, think flowers growing in a concrete crack.

I can think of three main reasons for this.

(A) It's a form or contrarianism, in that it's an negation of mainstream preference, hence unusual. Even better, this negation of mainstream preference isn't really threatening anybody, hence good way of attracting mainstream attention.

(B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically quite false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't like.) So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and self-consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An example of such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].

(C) Cities with a lot of brutalist architecture, prevalent in the former Soviet block, use it to market themselves are tourist destinations. This ties in with (A), for why would you go and visit a city unless it had something unusual to offer, something Instagrammable, something to talk about when you are back?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hatherley

I think brutalism is more generally associated with authoritarianism, including use in modern government buildings. I think free people choose to incorporate aesthetics into their buildings where bureaucrats prefer utilitarian functional designs because they don't have to live with them or attempt to justify the value of aesthetics.

The aggressively dehumanizing aesthetic does seem to express the... brutality of the more fascistic interpretations of collectivism quite well. These buildings all seem to come from a dystopian future.

the design reflects the mentality of the designer. Brutalism is totally utilitarian and reflects the perspective of occupant as unit on a spreadsheet. It's the ultimate expression of "you are a number, not a person".

FBI HQ , Boston city hall, are two good examples.

> (B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically quite false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't like.) So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and self-consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An example of such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].

Huh, quite an interesting take. On the contrary, I associate an appreciation of brutalism with those who post staunch free-market capitalist comments.

I have many taken architectural tours in Bucaresti, Plovdiv, Sofia, Skopje, Moldova, Tbilisi, Beograd, Kiev, and Moscow. Unanimously, the tour-guides presented these buildings with disdain for their aesthetics and association with authoritarianism. All of the tour-guides were definitely left/liberal-leaning, some to the point of dreadlocks and Che Guevara hats. (Thanks for the links, by the way, I had never heard of Own Hatherly before!).

   presented these buildings with disdain

That could be explained a difference in background (growing up in the west vs in the Soviet zone of influence): It's much easier to have a rosy view of communism/socialism if you have no experience of living in a communism/socialism yourself (or your parents).

As far as I'm aware, Own Hatherley is a high-ranking cadre in UK communist parties, although I have lost track which, since they have a tendency to split and splinter. As far as I'm aware, publishers like Verso Books and Zero Books were outlets of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), although that no longer exists. I don't know which of the SWP-descendants is now in control of those publishers.

> disdain for their aesthetics and association with authoritarianism [under Communism]

> Che Guevara hats

There's some real semiotic collapse going on here. What does it mean to wear a Che Guevara hat? In the west you might see it alongside people trying to unironically revive the hammer and sickle. But there are plenty of people who lived in eastern Europe under Communism who would regard that symbol as just as symbolic of authoritarianism as the swastika.

> On the contrary, I associate an appreciation of brutalism with those who post staunch free-market capitalist comments.

I find that surprising. I associate them with architectural symbols of neoliberalism, namely modernist architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture). Libertarians, I associate with the weird branch of modernist architecture that builds everything out of glass and trees and matt white surfaces and everywhere looks like Dubai. Perhaps a subset of contemporary architecture? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_architecture)

If you look at how much a condo in Montreal's habitat 67 is selling for now, they're certainly not for the common "worker". North of $900k.

True. But that's because it's the only example of the style and people like it (even many people who generally dislike Brutalism think habitat 67 is nice). The original idea was that it was going to be a prototype for future housing projects but that never happened.

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