> airportification of our cities
I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it further?
I Googled this phrase and your comment right at the top, so can you explain it further?
Yes, it is an extension of Bauhaus, with exposed fixtures and minimalist, functional designs. Yes, in the hands of a hack, this yields ugliness. Buildings like Habitat 67 in Montreal, Vancouver BC's central library, and UC San Diego's Giesel Library are works of art.
To say there was no thought of form or beauty is patently a calumny.
Strip-mall architecture is the fast food of architecture. Quick, cheap, and, at best, lacking in nutritional value.
None of the brutalist buildings I've actually been in suffered from confusing floorplans or lack of storage. The tendency is more for big, striking open spaces and wide walkways.
In the Pacific Northwest there's a recent trend to build a lot of ugly boxy townhomes and small apartment buildings in a neo-brutalist style. One notable features of these buildings is big, smooth rectangular panels in their outer cladding. They often look like the builder just got a bunch of OSB sheets, painted them dark brown and tacked them up as siding. Add thoughtless placement of conduit and vents and the interaction between window locations and the lazy siding, and you have a sloppy mess of unintentional asymmetry and unevenness.
If you are going to have your conduit hanging out as an architectural feature, you have to treat it like an architectural feature and think about how its placement and routing impacts visual balance and rhythm as well as the functional issues of delivering power, water, and ventilation. It's not just a license to nail something up and omit the trim.