IT ISNT EVEN CONCRETE! YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT BRITTLE, ROUGH, MOLD AND FUNGUS FARMS THAT DEGRADE IN NO LESS THAN 20 YEARS CINDER BLOCK.
BRICK, in a technical sense is concrete BUT EVEN BRICK AND MORTAR ARE INFERIOR TO A SIMPLE WELL EXECUTED CONCRETE POUR.
LAZY INCOMPETENT CONTRACTORS DECIDED TO SKIP THE CAST MAKING STAGE AND JUST STARTED GOING TO TOWN WITH SHITTY ASS BRICK AND POROUS ASS MORTER.
WAS THAT ENOUGH?!?!? NOOOOOOOOO.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH. THEY NEEDED TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE THE BLOCK SHITTIER THAN THE BONDING AGENT SO THEY MADE....
30 straight seconds of visceral panting
DOG SHIT POLLEN ABSORBING WATER SOLUABLE FUCK ME IN THE ASS SNEEZE ON IT AND IT CRUMBLES..... ARGH..... CIIIIIIINNNNNNNDEEEEEERRRRRR BLOOOOOOCCCCCCK.
I just can't anymore... I have grown to cherish brick... who made cinder block... why?... why did they do this to me? Why did they make me not only know of but also languish in a world mostly made of... wimper... cinder block...
Damn. I rather like the interwar style of architecture: pretty lines and compelling nuances and decorations. Something to distract myself with as opposed to brutalist architecture.
Unfortunately many brutalistic buildings are far off from its peak and just look like lazily designed gray blobs. High-effort brutalism can look good (or can look inappropriately evil but that’s besides the point); low-effort brutalism always looks cheap.
Yes but I’m currently traveling and have very limited Internet access… I’ll try and remember to do this in a couple weeks when I’m back into good connectivity.
Plus being home will let me pull out my Big Book of Brutalism to reference.
Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that’s a good thing. In my country there’s a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that’s because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say “we don’t have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it”. You know how many homeless we’d have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don’t have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can’t pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.
I completely agree, except with the suggestion that apartment blocks must be brutalist to be space efficient. It wouldn’t be very difficult to make apartment blocks which dont look depressingly gray and blocky. Its just the cheapest thing to do, but in my opinion even (or especially) the lower class deserves to live in homely conditions too.
Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I’ll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I’ll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don’t really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I’ll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that’s as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it’s beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that’s beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.
I think you may be confusing functionalism with brutalism. In the UK, these two styles were combined but that isn’t necessarily true. Brutalist buildings can very much eschew function in order to be more imposing, memorable or unusual.
Functionalism is the style that is all about minimizing the resources used to get the most useful building you possibly can.
Yes, any architectural style can be practical, I’m just saying that the style you’re actually advocating for is functionalism. I’d recommend doing some reading about it. I think you’d be a fan, considering you already seem to be in favour of all its core precepts.
I get where you’re coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn’t cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don’t get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I’m currently homeless and I’d take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there’s some people who’d rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they’re comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
Fair enough, i am fortunate enough to not have to speak from experience on the subject. But when building social housing on a large scale, hiring some halfway decent architects to design some functional and simple, but modern and liveable apartments is only a tiny fraction of the cost.
Think dense housing with a little less uniformity and more quality of life in mind, like room for planting and communal green spaces, perhaps areas that could be used and allocated by the inhabitants instead of pre planned rigidness. More colors, windows, etc.
Touching up a purely functional block design with these all very cheap and minor adjustments could make them a lot more appealing.
Though I of course concede that if the budget is so small that this isnt feasible, the purely functional aspect comes first.
Well the thing is, the budget is that small. Otherwise why would there be a five year waitlist for government housing? You’re talking like a budget that could house everyone but only in boring housing is small. But the current budget, there’s no way it can house everyone in any conditions at all. Every extra apartment we can build is another person off the street or out of the homeless shelters. That’s the scale we’re talking about here. There is no extra, there is no slack, and there’s nothing we could possibly do to stretch the budget enough to create slack. But what we can do is stretch the budget enough to give one more person a home, and I think that’s the most important thing.
Sorry, I did say if the government built block housing there would be almost no homeless. I was at the time imagining a fantasy world where the government gets its shit together and actually tries to solve the homeless problem. Take this current comment as assuming that the government doesn’t decide to tax the rich appropriately to fund this endeavour.
I am probably talking as not an american, which is why I have a reasonable amount of trust in my government and its ability to build not shitty looking housing. They do that too sometimes, but still.
I actually just tried looking that up, to see if such a word actually exists in English. I found a stack exchange thread asking this same question but no one had a suitable answer. So, yeah, I guess it’s up to you to contribute to society by inventing and popularizing this new word. Enjoy your new destiny.
I was watching this and thinking, almost. How did a country start building like this, for the people and then stop. Then it is all apparent, the Witch got in power.
It appears the growth of these “for the benefit of people” views were replaced with the old ages of the greatest and silent generation, and replaced with the “me, me, me. My money” of the boomer generation.
I can’t help but thinking how things could have been different if we continued on from the old timers. I know ww2 destroyed an economy that was lucky to survive it, that’s in itself is also an interesting thing to think how the world would have been without it.
I think that was the original idea for brutalist buildings, complementing them with plants? I don’t want to look for a source right now though, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ve been looking for a reason why I find them unpleasant and you found it for me. They look like the decaying Nazi bunkers I got to explore on a Danish beach when I was a kid.
Though I also don’t like massive towers of glass. Or rowhomes. Or really cities in general. Give me a nice cave in a swamp any day.
I have a fairly functional form of autism, but I sometimes struggle finding balance in points of interest I get enthusiastic about, and nobody really matches my enthusiasm, even though they try. It often feels like rejection, but this post really puts it in perspective for me. I’m not always reasonable/flexible when I’m like that. Thanks for sharing.
(To give an example related to this post; I wouldn’t assault someone for having a different opinion, but I could definitely debate them with a passion that’s a little out of place and not as reasonable as I’d like to believe it is. “Building with concrete blocks? What is even wrong with you, where you never thought proper construction? What do you mean cheap building costs? People who want to build cheap buildings shouldn’t be allowed to build anyway”.
if even after asking for an explanation your explanation is " try googling it" I’m going to assume you dont want to be understood.
If I’m trolling I’m definitely not doing it consciously. I know “I’m not a troll” is about the most suspicious thing on the internet, especially from a baby account, but sadly I cant be fucked to make a better point
Unfortunately for folks with genuine curiosity, feigning ignorance on information that is perceived to be commonly known or understood is a very common tactic of bad faith actors who attempt to slowly erode a discussion as part of trolling or manipulation. It has put a lot of folks off to the point where they would rather advise to look it up and disengage rather than take a chance it’s another game down the rabbit hole. Reading your dialogue as a third party it illuminates as such even if unintentionally so.
I think I understand? Thanks for claring things up, and sorry if I accidentally distracted from the actual topic (although mentioning the bad faith trolling has probably done that more effectively… but whatever)
A bad faith troll is a troll that makes arguments in bad faith. Read more about bad faith arguments here or you can search the web for “bad faith arguments.”
“Building with concrete blocks? What is even wrong with you, where you never thought proper construction? What do you mean cheap building costs? People who want to build cheap buildings shouldn’t be allowed to build anyway”.
The internet suddenly makes a bit more sense to me
Your point about matching enthusiasm resonates with me. I am fortunate nowadays that many of my friends are neurodivergent, and we seem to enjoy each others’ enthusiasm. We have some shared interests, but I think in a context where I can just listen and learn and not necessarily be expected to be a part of a “regular conversation” (i.e. when the primary mode of conversation is neurodivergent), I really enjoy listening to my friends nerd out about things outside of my own interest, as well as sometimes explaining my things to other people.
Outside of that framework though, before I had my current friends, I often felt like it was a smarter social strategy to just not talk about my interests at all because tempering my enthusiasm was difficult and seemed to never been enough.
There’s this interesting balance within my MTG group where some guys are happy to devote a fair part of their life to learning all the individual cards by heart. They can go on tangents that are just rows of card names describing a turn (think if the F6 to G8 takes rook babble of chess people). I can’t be fucked, but I still love the hobby, so when we get together its trying to find the middle between all these levels of expertise that works. Overall that went well but there was one guy who flat out told me: “Maby if you would just dedicate a bigger part of your life to the game, we wouldn’t have to bother talking around you so much.” Yeah right. Not everyone makes their hobby into their profession.
That being said, its kinda heartbreaking so many people struggle with just letting their enthusiasm about a certain topic flow. If you’d rather not talk about something because you’re afraid you can’t reel it in, that sucks :(
It looks nicer but nowadays when it is used, it’s often used as decorative layer. Concrete as a load bearing structure has quite a few advantages over normal bricks.
Anon's brother does have a point - concrete blocks and buildings made from them tend to be quite ugly in comparison to buildings made with more traditional building materials like brick, stone, or even wood
There’s nothing to stop you from using concrete as a structural material and covering it with brick. That’s how most single-family houses in Germany work.
Thankfully my interests change so often I am never competent enough to ramble as long as I would like to about them.
I remember my mental spasm about sequels vs prequels, it was months long delirium. I have this kind of intense interest in finding out why something is fun to watch or play. What exactly constitutes for a good experience. What are the objective measures that we can use to decide if something is a work of art or not. Because if art is subjective then why we have famous artists at all and critics that deem some works classic?
Experience; knowledge; understanding. When where and how we acquired these heavily dictate our subjective experience with… well, everything, including media and the art within.
Based on my own observations, the average person follows a very basic pattern and have not bothered to grow as a person beyond this. They want to absorb entertaining content with minimal energy. We all do at our core, but some of us can move beyond it. For those of us that haven’t yet, our media conglomerates are happy to cater with over-saturation such as with Marvel. We can observe the market, but the average person literally doesn’t care. Are they unaware of critical analysis skills? Is there no energy to ponder these things after a 10+h work day? Sometimes both. Perhaps neither.
The Rock was in a lot of famous movies and he has a great public personality. Now he is in low-quality spit-out productions because his face generates money nostalgia in his viewers. I can flip this from movies to video games as well with Nintendo. How delusional people were with Violet / Scarlet and the outrage that Palworld caused. PKMN Violet / Scarlet was one of the worst games I’ve played on the Nintendo Switch (which objectively it isn’t but rather is more like the antithesis of what we’re talking about… I sadly digress). As a game, it’s terrible. But some people are eating up the story and pokemon experience. There was a common denominator amongst this group though, and they didn’t care about the garbage quality of the game because they weren’t experiencing it - they were experiencing their pokemon. Likewise my family praises a lot of movies I… rent for them. I always watch them and they’re typically rehashed ideas featuring famous actor(s). I can barely tolerate the experience - Red Notice? It wasn’t even ironically good where it’s so bad it’s good again, but they love it! They’ll eat it up every time and then enjoy the social experience of talking about it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have famous artists and critics because humans like to take the path of least resistance.
I’m still ultimately unsure what a good objective measurement would be for works of art, but I think it’s something to do with how the piece may expose peoples thoughts and ideas. Perhaps not just as a socially engaging experience, but something that stirs your soul into a tasty broth, ya know? Something that causes an introspective change within. Outer Wilds, How to Read, The Good Place, these are all works of art to me under this premise.
So ya, I also have an intense interest in the subject and I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the matter :) Please, do ramble on~
Edit: It’s a discussion, not a statement of fact ya downvotin’ goobah and goobahs to be~
Add comment