Favorite Architectural Styles?

[mongers]

Dude  on the  left  is wearing a pretty brutal outfit.

I looked up that photo, it was from 1968.  So he's not hipster, he's just square.

He was a management accountant for NASA at JPL, his wife had an affair with a unemployed poet, whom she met whilst doing a creative writing course at Berkeley. 

[Ed Anger]

60's & 70's houses. With shag carpets and wood paneling. And vagina walls.

[Capetan Mihali]

Here's the Government Center in Boston:



I don't know how I feel about Brutalism.   Deco's a sure winner with me, even pretty mediocre Art Deco is always welcome.

[Capetan Mihali]

The Brutalist buildings are nice to look at in B&W pictures, but when you encounter them in person, they are often surrounded by vast expanses of shitty plaza nothingness.  That's definitely the case with the Government Center.  I don't know if that is a problem inherent in the style or not.

Speaking of shitty plazas surrounding the buildings, how about a little appreciation for the International style? 





Plus everybody's favorite Nazi sympathizer, Phillip Johnson, was involved

[Admiral Yi]

So if you take a 1970's poured concrete cube, and decorate it with nonfunctional blocks of poured concrete, it becomes Brutalist?

I agree that the feng shui at that Boston plaza is atrocious.

[Queequeg]

"Bad feng sui" is kind of the point of Brutalism.  It has the word "brutal" in it. 

[Admiral Yi]

It has the word "brutal" in it.

The scales have fallen from my eyes!!

[Razgovory]

"Bad feng sui" is kind of the point of Brutalism.  It has the word "brutal" in it.

Or just bad.

[CountDeMoney]

Here's the Government Center in Boston:

I gotta go snap a photo of the alma mater's old Administrative Building;  it's such an atrocious example of Nixon Administration-era Brutalism, there aren't any good photos on the web for it.

[mongers]

Here's the Government Center in Boston:

I gotta go snap a photo of the alma mater's old Administrative Building;  it's such an atrocious example of Nixon Administration-era Brutalism, there aren't any good photos on the web for it.

Yeah, I've worked in a few buildings like that.

Strangely the only photo I took that my college photography lecturer ever enthused over, was a B&W i printed taken on a crappy plastic camera of the college's 60s concrete sheathed chimney. 

edit:
this one:

[MadImmortalMan]

I quite like traditional Muslim architecture.

How about the mosque-inspired architecture of Tattoine.   



And this big one.

[grumbler]

Redoran is one of my favorites.

[Sheilbh]

So if you take a 1970's poured concrete cube, and decorate it with nonfunctional blocks of poured concrete, it becomes Brutalist?

If you pour concrete there's a strong chance that you'll end up with a Brutalist building. The name comes from beton brut - raw concrete.

The non-functionalism is an attractive feature of Brutalism to me though. It's often decorative, unlike the International Style up there or the Richard Rogers/Norman Foster look. See the famous purposeless pilotis of Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles, or the abstract ventilation shaft on the roof:


It's not form following function, or doing it's job unadorned like the pipes outside the Pompidou. It's closer to the architect as sculptor. It's trying to evoke a mood. Meades made this point in his documentary but it isn't polite architecture that knows its place. It isn't trying to please you or make you feel safe or be beautiful. Brutalism attempts to approach the sublime (it's parent was, after all, the WW2 bunker). It doesn't want beauty, but awe like a monolith, or a mountain-side. See the Soreq nuclear research centre in Israel:
http://www.archdaily.com/398642/ad-classics-soreq-nuclear-research-center-philip-johnson/
I think this is why it's the only modern architectural style that's able to produce churches that feel and look like churches, not just provincial theatres-in-the-round:
http://architizer.com/blog/concrete-church/
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0ar6wJQtbFQ/TghHUI6e8tI/AAAAAAAAMOs/ZSuLFCc6aS0/s1600/blog-walter-forderer-architect-9.jpg
http://www.archdaily.com/92646/ad-classics-neviges-mariendom-gottfried-bohm/

This is the post office in Skopje:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/blase/2202468396/
What other post-war style is that ostentatious and decorative and confident? What other style would ornament a post office? The rest tend to be sadly timid. Form follows function or is displayed with the tedious pride of a couple telling you how they grew the vegetables you're eating on their allotment - at length. The only tolerable decoration is an attractively polished service pipe. Worse they're timid to consensual, pleasing, good taste.

That lack of apology or compromise is why Brutalist buildings get knocked down - the Tricorn Centre, Derwent Tower, proposals to demolish the Prentice Women's Hospital. The Orange County Government Center looks like this:

They plan to knock it down and replace it with this:


I know which of those will be looked back on a century after construction as a memorable, impressive, awful building and which looks parochial, like a fevered dream of Prince Charles neo-Georgian proportions, where even the buildings know their place.

Edit: To return to Meades it does seem odd that we demand our buildings are 'nice' or 'pretty'. We don't demand that of music, film, art or literature anymore and it'd be a retrogressive step if we were to.

[Valmy]

Edit: To return to Meades it does seem odd that we demand our buildings are 'nice' or 'pretty'. We don't demand that of music, film, art or literature anymore and it'd be a retrogressive step if we were to.

In the US this style is mostly associated with monstrous government and office buildings that gloomily and ominously tower over us.  It conjures to me the tedium and boredom of office work and government administration.  There is nothing charming or exalted about it, just 'this is the modern world human scum prepare to have your spirit crushed'.  But I guess that makes sense if it came from WWII bunkers.

There are plenty of buildings around that I love for their terribleness.  The ENS building at UT is a horribly ugly building.



I don't know what the fuck style that is.  1960s horribleness.  It is even uglier on the inside.  But I like it and am totally bummed they are tearing it down.  So many University buildings in the US are pretentious as shit, even some Community Colleges are built to look like they are Ivy League.  This one just says 'this ain't Harvard bitch, you are not entitled to anything, now get to work'.