I don't get why people say these buildings look depressing. They look dope to me. Unite d'habitation is the name of it.
I know nothing about architecture, but there's really nothing about this layout that requires the gray brutalist shapes & aesthetic that people find depressing (including me to some extent). Is there?
Exterior walls need to look like they are covered in piss, or this doesn't work
Part of the aesthetic is tied to the prefab concrete designs, so yes you could paint it. Also there was some color on this building
Honestly I still find it very depressing. After doing some sparse googling it also doesn't seem like concrete buildings are much cheaper? Maybe there's a longevity angle to the prefabs you mention?
But now that you point it out I really think it is the concrete that bothers me. I wish it was less blocky, bigger windows, maybe wood paneling? I'm really not sure.
There's a bunch of similar housing in Germany that (ironically) was constructed by the US military to house its soldiers. It's now all been turned into apartments. The insides are less nice (I know someone who used to live in one) but the outsides are pretty much identical.
Red Vienna's housing architecture gets overlooked too much on Chapo:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/D%C3%B6bling_%28Wien%29_-_Karl-Marx-Hof.JPG (probably the longest residential building in the world, and it's made even better by the fact that it was erected opposite to an extremely posh neighbourhood on the hillside, so the first thing the capitalists see when they quite literally look down on the city is a big chunk of socialism)
https://deacademic.com/pictures/dewiki/71/GuentherZ_2008-03-01_0172_Wien05_Reumannhof.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Heine-Hof_Panorama.jpg/800px-Heine-Hof_Panorama.jpg
Soviet Constructivist is also cool, looks way nicer than brutalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture#/media/File:Melnikov_House_in_MSK_(img2).jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture#/media/File:Moscow,_Mosselprom_Building.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_architecture#/media/File:Krasny_(Red)_Prospekt_11_Novosibirsk_Siberia_Russian_Federation.jpg
For newer examples of Viennese housing, I present to you Wohnpark Alterlaa
I really like the last one there. Nice courtyard.
My boss loves brutalist architecture but I'm scared to talk about it with him in the event I get made.
Oh wow that looks really nice actually, and this is coming from someone who wants to just fuck off into the woods
I used to want to do that, then I realized I will likely never afford that. Also trains.
This is why we need to depopulate rural areas and rewild as much as we can. Imagine a future with vertical farming for everything, dense cities surrounded by trees with only rail lines and bike paths connecting them. If I could take a train and be in the equivalent of a wilderness area in less than 30 minutes I wouldn't be losing my mind like I am now. This is all assuming that we live in a socialist society where the only work is meaningful and there aren't millions of people jerking off in work bathrooms to pass the time. Unless that's your kink.
vertical farming
I hope you mean permaculture. Vertical farming is a kind of accounting scam where you optimize the land usage parameter and conveniently leave out the giant amount of energy required to replace the sun's light indoors for each plant.
There's nothing wrong with rooftop gardens, or window gardening, or infill horticulture. Panels of algae will probably do the job too if you're willing to eat it. But growing plants without the sun only makes sense if they're plants you need to hide.
You could do vertical farming in an open-air structure (if the area has good weather) or one with windows that don't block UV rays if you wanted more climate control. I don't think it makes sense for everything but it could be a part of the urban landscape.
Right, but the claims of "this practice will revolutionize agriculture" are basically converting office space in skyscrapers to hydroponics and stuff. To get enough sunlight to grow, you'd need each story's height to be greater than one of the horizontal dimensions, and even then you wouldn't get optimal sunlight. In other words, you really can't do it in a compact building; you either need an incredibly skinny structure that has a high ratio of building materials to square footage, or to restrict use to roofs and equator-facing walls.
The good news is that with polycultures (which are harder to mechanize and somewhat labor-intensive), rooftop farming, window gardening, and mandated density, you can probably feed a temperate city of 200,000 with just the land within the radius of a bike commute from it (5-10 miles beyond city limits). So the wilderness would be a lot closer than that 30-minute train ride.
Unfortunately, all I can do is fantasize about such a wonderful future.
same, I'm thinking the only way I could maybe do it is if I could get a community of leftist friends to all assist and join in? Residential hydroelectric is kinda really insanely good and rain collection and all that would be the goal, as well as a medium greenhouse for an aquaponic farm, that's about all that's needed, and some land but damn that's expensive
Residential hydroelectric
Like from your rain gutters? Or would you need to have a creek running through your backyard?
Not the woods, but I think Arcosanti is kinda like that.
idk why the outside would matter at all
as long as you've got a cozy place on the inside its all good
I mean, the cozy interior doesn't require the exterior to look like a derelict building slash urinal
The OP post is about the outside
yes but the exterior looking like a derelict urinal-building is cheap, which means more people get to live in houses instead of under a bridge
But we already have enough homes for all of the homeless, this cheap building would just be empty and the homeless would still be under the bridge
That picture you linked is not even an apartment building, though.
It's an industrial building.
Even city planning that followed suit with brutalist architecture would not put dense residential next to dense industrial.
This is my thing about all living spaces, including shit like cars. Who cares about the outside, you spend 99.9% of your time inside not outside looking at the thing.
That's nice, until you look outside your window or go for a walk and are surrounded by aesthetically repulsive monoliths of concrete. The art of design can meaningfully improve lives and make dense living something to be celebrated, but that's not what many brutalist projects inspire given how atrocious they are to look at.
This but unironically. I love how instead of hiding the evil lair vibe of concrete housing they just fully embraced it. It looks hella cool.
it looks cool in the way it's an intellectual curiosity, but it's objectively ugly and if I lived in a whole city made of piss-covered concrete slabs, I would want to die, maybe literally
I figure cities make me sad anyways, so they may as well reveal their true nature
This has unironicaly unleashed a yearning in me I didn't know was there
Fashions change but concrete is forever, once you are dead me and your children will think this is badass
we are talking about aesthetics, and I don't like it. Those open spaces are usually inutilized by the shape of the pillars so you got a building without the lower erm , floor and without any "aesthetic points"
Having been to the one in Marseille, it's mostly used for bike and moped parking.
I argue that Brutalism is inherently marxist, and is necessary for a classless and collectivist society
hmmm...
Kitchen looks to be below the common hallway, might be an issue if there is a fire bad enough to cause an evacuation.
Bedroom could be above Kitchen. Might make it easier for folks working evenings/nights (not having to hear televisions or people hanging out), assuming people spend more time in the living room than in the kitchen.
Honestly if there is a fire, most modern apartment buildings have solid suppression systems. Plus everything is concrete.
Less worried about heat and flames... mostly thinking about smoke. In the off chance there was an explosion from the stove it could drop the hallway floor that is its roof or weaken the floor to the point that people moving around trying to figure out what happened could cause a collapse under their feet. And I'd hope that the vent hood is easy to keep clean over the stove.
I mean, I'd imagine that smarter people than me would have already engineered and/or overbuilt those areas with those points in mind though.
so like do that archecture design but paint the concrete so it doesn’t look like piss?
Unfortunately, the original Unité d'Habitation by Le Corbusier in Marseille has turned into a bourgeois swamp :(.
They ruin everything
