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who doesnt love glass? do u know we could make the floor out of glass too if u need
The Neo-Andean architecture that has sprung up in Bolivia during Evo Morales’ Socialist presidency has also offered a colorful glimpse at something very different to what we think of as “contemporary” without being hidebound.
Imagine waking up in the morning, walking into a 50 meter opening in a towering grey stone cube slathered in streaks of bird shit and acid rain damage, pulling out your phone in the windowless, cold dungeon inside, logging onto the wifi because there's no cell reception inside the massive citadel that is your DMV, and posting to Hexbear.net that brutalism is based.
Imagine pissing on a cinderblock.
Now imagine, you live in that cinderblock.
This is a fantastic article and is spot on about architecture.
Does the article talk about efficiency? I assume a lot of "grand' architecture is made during times of wealth and prosperity, and requires a lot of exploitation to build and energy for upkeep and heating and whatnot, as well as generally being an inefficient use of space. Rectangular spaces are pretty efficient in terms of space used. What use is "grand" architecture if you can only have that kind of building in rare occasions? At least "drab" architecture can be experienced by the masses on a daily basis instead of some sort of attraction. Making efficient use of space that also looks good is basically about how you can create the most interesting looking cubic/rectangular shapes, which it seems like is at least being tried. But yes, "minimalist" designs seem like sort of the current fad all over the place. Sometimes frills and stuff are just tacky tho.
It will never come as long as it's cheaper to build blue plate glass dicktowers and severe monolith boxes than something dense, vibrant, and intentional - not to mentioning something functional and/or livable, and not just producing massive showrooms that celebrate wasted space. Fact is monumental architecture are vanity projects, funded by corpos looking to swing their balls around and make the next feature in Monocle. They're not going to throw money into anything less than something big, cheap, and shiny.
As an aside I won't hear any bullshit about concrete not being aesthetically good or valuable, or that it's exclusively alienating and we're all doomed to some megatower hellscape out of Dredd or Ballard. The Barbican is well trodden ground for a reason, ditto the Alexandra and Ainsworth estate. Smaller scale projects like Carlo Scarpa's Castelvecchio ren is a model for intervention with historical structures, or his cemetary in Treviso for the effectiveness of a quiet but vibrant monumentalism
