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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Old buildings have gone through a filter. The ugly ones were destroyed with no one caring. The beautiful ones have armies of people fighting to maintain them.

There are beautiful and ugly new buildings. In 1000 years time only the beautiful buildings from this era will have survived and we'll be talking about why the buildings of today are nowhere near as nice.

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The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people, somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid.

Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.

Habitat 67 in Montreal is a Brutalist concrete building (many cubes) that is generally well-liked and has been a desirable place to live for 50 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67#/media/File:Habitat...

It does look fairly discordant and messy, and I'm not sure if I'd like to try navigating the structure, but there is a symmetry and level of detail that goes above and beyond the typical vision of a concrete cube that the word "brutalism" conjurs. From the top it looks really nice with the floor detail and the incorporated plantlife and greenery.

Its perhaps too large of a building for my liking, and it feels a little bit "minecraft" with seemingly unsupported cubic shapes, but it also has a nice focus on human scale details that make it actually interesting to be in and around.

I love brutalism when it includes plantlife. Another example is the Barbican Estate in London. Without plant life though, I agree with the article, brutalism looks too bleak.

The guided tour is excellent. This architect had a real vision around usage and bought one apartment to stop it being refurbished.

> Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time.

Some brutalist buildings must be left standing as a warning for future generations.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

Maybe a few blocks of brutalist buildings would work better than the spikes.

Just fill their insides up with solid concrete, to prevent people from entering them and having their souls sucked out.

I don't want to live in a building that looks like a bunker. At least put some arrow slits in and add a portcullis if you're going to do that.

I adore concrete cubes, and they often look so similar, what luck!

There is an element of survivorship bias, but the rate of building beautiful buildings is not constant. There’s far fewer beautiful buildings built in the last 75 years than in the years preceding it (try walking into a church built after 1960 for example).

The article points to several casual ideologies in architecture which contribute to this.

There are some noteable exceptions - growing up in Germany, it was very easy to distinguish former industrial centers (bombed to pieces, rebuilt quickly using concrete prefab monstrosities during the 50s) from the cities spared due to their tactical irrelevance (either kept in their original style or plastered over in the 60s).

This is evidently untrue. The principles of architectural schools and trends can be objectively evaluated. We also have some historical evidence of lost buildings that show they were not all the ugly ones. And we have many buildings that were not preserved intentionally that are nonetheless beautiful.

Perhaps you meant that inferior or cheaper schools of architecture co-existed with the prestigious architecture of their time. That is less controversial (and is also true today, mercifully.)

The winnowing theory only makes sense to people today, because we have such a massive demolition industry. But when things were built with old construction techniques, taking a lot more time and effort, using stone and brick - you built once and it remained long term. The rate of demolition was probably much lower in the past.

How was it? For every rule, there is an exception: http://www.sosbrutalism.org/

Good to see Dunelm House in Durham listed there - one of my favourite buildings in any style, that has been threatened with demolition for a few years now.

The bridge across the river Wear right next to Dunelm house is an example of building with concrete done right. Use the properties of the material to make a structure that is light and airy, pleasing yet practical.

The soviet bunker that is Dunelm House itself though. Bring on the day of its demolition. Please let me push the plunger and set off the explosives.

This take is naturalizing and ignorant of history, for example, urban renewal.

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