When I look at general western architecture styles, I mostly see imperialism and oppression and spectacle. We emulate Rome who pillaged multiple continents for resources. We emulate the UK who did it more effectively. We build cathedrals to capitalism every day we put up luxury condos or a glass rectangle.
Bolshevism isn't pretty, but there's catharsis in how total the rejection of the status quo is. There's beauty in the statement made by a mass of angry people eating their oppressors. Modernist music isn't pretty, but rebellion against the tonic that had dictated western music for centuries created something entirely antithetical to the institutions which created that music. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused the rich to riot at its premiere because they couldn't perceive the music in what I'd recognise as a beautiful ballet. Modernist art has none of the technical mastery of a classical painter or sculptor, but Duchamp's Fountain is my favourite sculpture because he put a urinal in front of the most pretentious art scholars in the world and said "yeah this is art fuck you". Van Gogh's ugliness was a subjective portrayal of light, Picasso's was seeing all perspectives of an object at once, Mondrian's was reducing a scene to its barest elements of colour, Rousseau painted fantasy jungles he built from botanical gardens. In all of those artists, the beauty is what they're contrasted against. The institutions, the socioeconomic exclusivity, the cultural conservatism and fetishisation of an idealised past, the economic prestige of the executives and bishops and patrons who built these as monuments to their own vanity.
I'll always hold brutalism up as the most beautiful architectural style because it's a urinal presented to the Salon. It insults everything I hate about architecture, a field I otherwise really love, and destroys the property values of everything around it. It wins accolades when fail-son architects making Glass Rectangle With Curve #7 don't. I want there to be at least one counterweight to every gaudy piece of shit building in every city, and over time I want that to change peoples' values so that they don't keep building those shitty things.
edit: Especially for a church. All the beauty of a cathedral has a material root. Literacy was walled off from the poor, access to the bible was restricted to the clergy. All of those stained glass windows and ceiling murals and gilded surfaces are vicious spectacle meant to bedazzle people who couldn't afford one of those candlestands or windows. If you're reducing a church to its barest structure, you're making the people inside of it approach it from a utilitarian way. There is nothing to distract you from the intent of the sermon other than the rhetoric, you're not looking at the only example of fine art in your town that you have access to while thinking about your god, you're not excusing a clergy full of paedophiles over the aesthetics of their presentation and the inherent feeling of gravitas you assign to someone dressed in a cardinal's uniform surrounded by expensive things.
That's the guiding rule of modernism in general. This is hard to listen to, after dozens of times it's still not something I can easily find the music in like I can a folk song. But contrast it with every other double-bass song you've heard in your life. Every other composition outside of modernist styles only portrays a very small part of what that instrument is capable of. You get a narrow cultural window for aesthetic appreciation and the role of a double-bass in western music. In that he plays every sound a double-bass can make. The composition isn't written around the cultural standards you've been taught for what music is, but on a spectrographic analysis of the instrument. Short of sitting down with a double-bass and learning it, that's the only time you'll hear most of those sounds.
If we only perceive things as pretty and use that as our main standard for how good it is, that to me is a form of idealism. It's consuming media without asking questions about the origins and intentions and deeper levels of that media.
Aaaaaaa he started squeaking and all I could think of was the terrible noises I used to make with my violin. Sorry I stopped listening it was making my flesh crawl.
That's the natural reaction to it and is about how I feel when I look up at a brutalist building. 33 Thomas Street is one of my favourite buildings in the world but when you stand under it there is such a feeling of hostility to it. But inside is an evil thing, the NSA tapping a telecommunications junction, and I don't want people to pretend that evil thing doesn't exist or isn't evil. If they go to Wall Street on the same island, first they see a golden bull showing the strength and wealth of the market. Then they see big shiny buildings that make them think "If I work there, I'll have a fantastic life and a powerful job in an office with a view that I can say I work at so women will fuck me". What they don't see is the wage theft that underlies the market or the exploitation behind the commodities or the sociopathic decisions made inside those buildings. The prettiness of a typical New York skyscraper distracts you from its purpose and impact while driving a real estate market that makes it impossible to be poor on that island. The best thing you could put in Manhattan, short of a guillotine in Central Park, is a giant "fuck you" to everything and everyone in Manhattan. That building is such a fuck you that it's one of the most hated buildings in the world. Somewhere out there is probably a calculation of how much it robs surrounding real estate developers and landlords of property value just by existing.
Intellectually I can see the satisfaction in saying "fuck you" with architecture, but my heart says the vibes are bad and are making me feel bad. I guess I'm asking for pleasure? I don't want to look at buildings that hurt my eyes any more than I want to listen to music that hurts my ears. I guess I'm in the "that's an interesting exercise, please keep it away from me" camp.
In that case, where does the development of new ways to feel pleasure from objects come from? If we didn't create new forms of art and new ways of understanding beauty, we'd still be tracing our hands on caves and playing basic percussion beats. That innovation needs to come from some combination of material and social conditions. When I look at a classical painter it's stunning, true mastery of the science of portraying an image, but that's not just some schmuck painting a lady. Behind him is a patronage system that relied on feudal exploitation, the crusades, and colonialism. Behind her is a system of patriarchal chattel slavery where she was sold by her father to her husband for aristocratic power gain. Every stroke of blue pigment, meant to appeal to you in a way that conveys divine authority because of its scarcity in nature, came from ore mined by Afghan slaves. That beauty became commodified and a commodity fetish, and it could have advanced either through oppressive or liberatory means. The beauty became a standard which was rigidly enforced, to the detriment of making new or good art, by a class that excluded normal people from both production and consumption of the beauty. If you made art, your intentions as someone who would have been a radical would be judged by the standards of a wealthy old white man who decorates their house like Donald Trump. If you weren't a wealthy old white man or the middle class white male pet of one, you were totally excluded from making art. As a nerd for this shit I can't name five female composers from before the 19th century. I can't name a black one or an Asian one or a self-made independent one or one that average people got to listen to unless they went to the kind of event that would make the German government play Beethoven.
The liberatory ones have to teach a new standard of beauty that comes from a different place and a different mode of analysis than how traditional art is produced. A guy like Rousseau can't afford to leave France and can't see a tropical plant without becoming a settler-colonist. Being able to access a public resource like a botanical garden, being able to teach himself to paint in a mature way without relying on the oppressive infrastructure of the French art world, and glorifying something that went against the industrialist values of that society all created something that was fundamentally different and at least to some degree hostile to the senses. But it unlocked new ideas for new groups of people who could act on them in ways that don't serve the powerful. I can point at Rousseau and say that's why we should build green spaces in ghettos and fund public art education, ideas the patrons of his contemporaries would reject as they try to enforce their monopoly on beauty. I can point at a jungle scene and say that wild, disorganised, natural foliage is just as beautiful as a manicured aristocratic garden that relies on dozens of indentured servants and was only painted to jerk off the wealthy white man who owned it. If that painting is rejected by a museum, I can question that museum's judgement instead of accepting that the Salon understands art better than I could because they have fancy art titles.
OK, I certainly get wanting to expand ideas of what is beautiful and destroying barriers to people making and accessing beauty, but I think there's an inherent contradiction in wanting to do that with brutalism. As I've understood if from what you've written, the point of brutalism is to unsettle and repel--and it's working for me! I feel unsettled and repelled by it. It doesn't draw me in, I feel no warmth. Granted, it's repellant in a totally different way than the image you linked to in your last response. I perceive both as being ugly for different reasons--overly ornate vs angular severity.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that brutalism isn't very accessible to your average person who will probably be thinking some version of "that is cold and stark, I would prefer not to have that in my environment." Brutalism works as a slap in the face, a fuck you to the status quo--but if you want to draw people in and get them perceiving beauty in new ways, it seems that a slap is going to be working against that desire.
I guess I'm trying to kind of make a comparison to fashion shows vs ready to wear. At a fashion show, you'll see extremes of fashion that most people might say looks interesting, but they're not going to wear it. When you go to a store, you'll see ready-to-wear clothes that are influenced by those styles from the runway, but they're toned down a bit to make them more accessible to the average person. Only people who are really at the forefront of fashion are going to want to wear an entire ensemble made up of runway pieces. Most people (to the extent that they follow fashion at all) are going to maybe pair a top that's more fashion-forward with bottoms that are basic, or they'll buy a dress that has a high-fashion element but the overall construction is more familiar. Or take home decor--a decorator's showroom will be full of trendsetting items in the latest colors, but most people are not going to buy a sofa in this year's Pantone color because it's going to look dated soon and they're not going to replace or reupholster the sofa until it wears out. But they might buy some throw pillows in this years "it" color if it goes with the overall look of the room and they like the color.
So what is the ready-to-wear form of brutalism? I guess that's kind of the question I'm trying to ask? Sorry, this makes sense in my head but I'm not sure I've articulated it.
The ready-to-wear form would be like if North Koreans had good tailors. There is plenty of room for expression beyond it, but you need some kind of foundation for that. American fashion is based on the exploitation of children and women in Asia and the mass exploitation of resources in the most profitable way. It takes the female empowerment women are alienated from as a result of a patriarchal system and commodifies it as a disposable and uncomfortable overpriced shoe. It's about erasing all cultural identities except what the market thinks is profitable, then recuperating surviving ideas and reformation efforts so that they reinforce the system. That's such a wholly destructive industry that half my clothes look like shit because I feel bad buying new ones, and even if it makes a pretty shoe that's ultimately just a piece of leather affixed to a piece of wood. You could create that same thing with a medieval artisan working in their living room or a worker co-op that sources materials from ethical worker co-ops.
North Korean fashion, apart from their traditional dress which is really pretty, doesn't look good by any immediate measure. It's a narrow selection of colours and fabrics with anti-fashion aesthetics. But it's based on a different foundation. The design decisions are different, the relationship the producers want to create with the consumers is different, the supply chains are different, it can be adjusted along different parameters that are socially conscious instead of dictated by the demand of people who don't think you deserve healthcare or drinkable water. Everything after that is possible, you can mould the central idea of "what if we had ethically produced clothes with utilitarian value that don't sell masculinity to alienated men and femininity to alienated women at the expense of everything in the world" around any new kind of aesthetic. That as an axiom though requires some sort of radical and fundamental rewrite of the fashion industry. Even if that makes for a less diverse supply of shirts, it's a starting place that breaks from the productive and consumptive drives of the industry in such a radical way that it can't be recuperated. With that ethical production framework and healthier public relationship with fashion in place, you can make shirts that aren't dyed in blood by the time you wear them.
What I was trying to say is that as I understand it, brutalism is meant to be jarring, unsettling, even unpleasant. I can see the purpose to that, as you've explained it. But if something is intentionally jarring, it's unsurprising that many people don't like it. It's doing what it's supposed to do, but only the particularly avant garde are going to enjoy it or want to see it in their environment. I was trying to make an analogy about making it more accessible because beauty that is intentionally repellant is a pretty inaccessible concept-- runway fashion is to brutalism as ready-to-wear is to ???
I guess I'm looking for a post-brutalism style. But the more I think about it, I guess that would grow out of a better social system. If the purpose of brutalism is to expose the ugliness behind the facade, then you wouldn't need that if the system itself was equitable. You'd just have an ugly mask covering beauty then.
Right now it's the transition. We see it as the thing attacking the orthodoxy. With the better social system it's a design framework that can be built on in conditions more favourable to it or made into post-brutalist aesthetics by enabling a better climate for them. It's clean utilitarian design that has an art deco kind of grandiosity to it without using ornamentation. I like the look of it in the same way I like the look of traditional Japanese or English architecture and it's an easy springboard for ecologically-minded architecture using other materials with the same intentions, like mudbrick construction.
When I look at general western architecture styles, I mostly see imperialism and oppression and spectacle. We emulate Rome who pillaged multiple continents for resources. We emulate the UK who did it more effectively. We build cathedrals to capitalism every day we put up luxury condos or a glass rectangle.
Bolshevism isn't pretty, but there's catharsis in how total the rejection of the status quo is. There's beauty in the statement made by a mass of angry people eating their oppressors. Modernist music isn't pretty, but rebellion against the tonic that had dictated western music for centuries created something entirely antithetical to the institutions which created that music. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused the rich to riot at its premiere because they couldn't perceive the music in what I'd recognise as a beautiful ballet. Modernist art has none of the technical mastery of a classical painter or sculptor, but Duchamp's Fountain is my favourite sculpture because he put a urinal in front of the most pretentious art scholars in the world and said "yeah this is art fuck you". Van Gogh's ugliness was a subjective portrayal of light, Picasso's was seeing all perspectives of an object at once, Mondrian's was reducing a scene to its barest elements of colour, Rousseau painted fantasy jungles he built from botanical gardens. In all of those artists, the beauty is what they're contrasted against. The institutions, the socioeconomic exclusivity, the cultural conservatism and fetishisation of an idealised past, the economic prestige of the executives and bishops and patrons who built these as monuments to their own vanity.
I'll always hold brutalism up as the most beautiful architectural style because it's a urinal presented to the Salon. It insults everything I hate about architecture, a field I otherwise really love, and destroys the property values of everything around it. It wins accolades when fail-son architects making Glass Rectangle With Curve #7 don't. I want there to be at least one counterweight to every gaudy piece of shit building in every city, and over time I want that to change peoples' values so that they don't keep building those shitty things.
edit: Especially for a church. All the beauty of a cathedral has a material root. Literacy was walled off from the poor, access to the bible was restricted to the clergy. All of those stained glass windows and ceiling murals and gilded surfaces are vicious spectacle meant to bedazzle people who couldn't afford one of those candlestands or windows. If you're reducing a church to its barest structure, you're making the people inside of it approach it from a utilitarian way. There is nothing to distract you from the intent of the sermon other than the rhetoric, you're not looking at the only example of fine art in your town that you have access to while thinking about your god, you're not excusing a clergy full of paedophiles over the aesthetics of their presentation and the inherent feeling of gravitas you assign to someone dressed in a cardinal's uniform surrounded by expensive things.
Well when ya put it that way...
So for you, the beauty comes from the message more than perceiving it as pretty?
That's the guiding rule of modernism in general. This is hard to listen to, after dozens of times it's still not something I can easily find the music in like I can a folk song. But contrast it with every other double-bass song you've heard in your life. Every other composition outside of modernist styles only portrays a very small part of what that instrument is capable of. You get a narrow cultural window for aesthetic appreciation and the role of a double-bass in western music. In that he plays every sound a double-bass can make. The composition isn't written around the cultural standards you've been taught for what music is, but on a spectrographic analysis of the instrument. Short of sitting down with a double-bass and learning it, that's the only time you'll hear most of those sounds.
If we only perceive things as pretty and use that as our main standard for how good it is, that to me is a form of idealism. It's consuming media without asking questions about the origins and intentions and deeper levels of that media.
Aaaaaaa he started squeaking and all I could think of was the terrible noises I used to make with my violin. Sorry I stopped listening it was making my flesh crawl.
That's the natural reaction to it and is about how I feel when I look up at a brutalist building. 33 Thomas Street is one of my favourite buildings in the world but when you stand under it there is such a feeling of hostility to it. But inside is an evil thing, the NSA tapping a telecommunications junction, and I don't want people to pretend that evil thing doesn't exist or isn't evil. If they go to Wall Street on the same island, first they see a golden bull showing the strength and wealth of the market. Then they see big shiny buildings that make them think "If I work there, I'll have a fantastic life and a powerful job in an office with a view that I can say I work at so women will fuck me". What they don't see is the wage theft that underlies the market or the exploitation behind the commodities or the sociopathic decisions made inside those buildings. The prettiness of a typical New York skyscraper distracts you from its purpose and impact while driving a real estate market that makes it impossible to be poor on that island. The best thing you could put in Manhattan, short of a guillotine in Central Park, is a giant "fuck you" to everything and everyone in Manhattan. That building is such a fuck you that it's one of the most hated buildings in the world. Somewhere out there is probably a calculation of how much it robs surrounding real estate developers and landlords of property value just by existing.
Intellectually I can see the satisfaction in saying "fuck you" with architecture, but my heart says the vibes are bad and are making me feel bad. I guess I'm asking for pleasure? I don't want to look at buildings that hurt my eyes any more than I want to listen to music that hurts my ears. I guess I'm in the "that's an interesting exercise, please keep it away from me" camp.
In that case, where does the development of new ways to feel pleasure from objects come from? If we didn't create new forms of art and new ways of understanding beauty, we'd still be tracing our hands on caves and playing basic percussion beats. That innovation needs to come from some combination of material and social conditions. When I look at a classical painter it's stunning, true mastery of the science of portraying an image, but that's not just some schmuck painting a lady. Behind him is a patronage system that relied on feudal exploitation, the crusades, and colonialism. Behind her is a system of patriarchal chattel slavery where she was sold by her father to her husband for aristocratic power gain. Every stroke of blue pigment, meant to appeal to you in a way that conveys divine authority because of its scarcity in nature, came from ore mined by Afghan slaves. That beauty became commodified and a commodity fetish, and it could have advanced either through oppressive or liberatory means. The beauty became a standard which was rigidly enforced, to the detriment of making new or good art, by a class that excluded normal people from both production and consumption of the beauty. If you made art, your intentions as someone who would have been a radical would be judged by the standards of a wealthy old white man who decorates their house like Donald Trump. If you weren't a wealthy old white man or the middle class white male pet of one, you were totally excluded from making art. As a nerd for this shit I can't name five female composers from before the 19th century. I can't name a black one or an Asian one or a self-made independent one or one that average people got to listen to unless they went to the kind of event that would make the German government play Beethoven.
The liberatory ones have to teach a new standard of beauty that comes from a different place and a different mode of analysis than how traditional art is produced. A guy like Rousseau can't afford to leave France and can't see a tropical plant without becoming a settler-colonist. Being able to access a public resource like a botanical garden, being able to teach himself to paint in a mature way without relying on the oppressive infrastructure of the French art world, and glorifying something that went against the industrialist values of that society all created something that was fundamentally different and at least to some degree hostile to the senses. But it unlocked new ideas for new groups of people who could act on them in ways that don't serve the powerful. I can point at Rousseau and say that's why we should build green spaces in ghettos and fund public art education, ideas the patrons of his contemporaries would reject as they try to enforce their monopoly on beauty. I can point at a jungle scene and say that wild, disorganised, natural foliage is just as beautiful as a manicured aristocratic garden that relies on dozens of indentured servants and was only painted to jerk off the wealthy white man who owned it. If that painting is rejected by a museum, I can question that museum's judgement instead of accepting that the Salon understands art better than I could because they have fancy art titles.
OK, I certainly get wanting to expand ideas of what is beautiful and destroying barriers to people making and accessing beauty, but I think there's an inherent contradiction in wanting to do that with brutalism. As I've understood if from what you've written, the point of brutalism is to unsettle and repel--and it's working for me! I feel unsettled and repelled by it. It doesn't draw me in, I feel no warmth. Granted, it's repellant in a totally different way than the image you linked to in your last response. I perceive both as being ugly for different reasons--overly ornate vs angular severity.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that brutalism isn't very accessible to your average person who will probably be thinking some version of "that is cold and stark, I would prefer not to have that in my environment." Brutalism works as a slap in the face, a fuck you to the status quo--but if you want to draw people in and get them perceiving beauty in new ways, it seems that a slap is going to be working against that desire.
I guess I'm trying to kind of make a comparison to fashion shows vs ready to wear. At a fashion show, you'll see extremes of fashion that most people might say looks interesting, but they're not going to wear it. When you go to a store, you'll see ready-to-wear clothes that are influenced by those styles from the runway, but they're toned down a bit to make them more accessible to the average person. Only people who are really at the forefront of fashion are going to want to wear an entire ensemble made up of runway pieces. Most people (to the extent that they follow fashion at all) are going to maybe pair a top that's more fashion-forward with bottoms that are basic, or they'll buy a dress that has a high-fashion element but the overall construction is more familiar. Or take home decor--a decorator's showroom will be full of trendsetting items in the latest colors, but most people are not going to buy a sofa in this year's Pantone color because it's going to look dated soon and they're not going to replace or reupholster the sofa until it wears out. But they might buy some throw pillows in this years "it" color if it goes with the overall look of the room and they like the color.
So what is the ready-to-wear form of brutalism? I guess that's kind of the question I'm trying to ask? Sorry, this makes sense in my head but I'm not sure I've articulated it.
The ready-to-wear form would be like if North Koreans had good tailors. There is plenty of room for expression beyond it, but you need some kind of foundation for that. American fashion is based on the exploitation of children and women in Asia and the mass exploitation of resources in the most profitable way. It takes the female empowerment women are alienated from as a result of a patriarchal system and commodifies it as a disposable and uncomfortable overpriced shoe. It's about erasing all cultural identities except what the market thinks is profitable, then recuperating surviving ideas and reformation efforts so that they reinforce the system. That's such a wholly destructive industry that half my clothes look like shit because I feel bad buying new ones, and even if it makes a pretty shoe that's ultimately just a piece of leather affixed to a piece of wood. You could create that same thing with a medieval artisan working in their living room or a worker co-op that sources materials from ethical worker co-ops.
North Korean fashion, apart from their traditional dress which is really pretty, doesn't look good by any immediate measure. It's a narrow selection of colours and fabrics with anti-fashion aesthetics. But it's based on a different foundation. The design decisions are different, the relationship the producers want to create with the consumers is different, the supply chains are different, it can be adjusted along different parameters that are socially conscious instead of dictated by the demand of people who don't think you deserve healthcare or drinkable water. Everything after that is possible, you can mould the central idea of "what if we had ethically produced clothes with utilitarian value that don't sell masculinity to alienated men and femininity to alienated women at the expense of everything in the world" around any new kind of aesthetic. That as an axiom though requires some sort of radical and fundamental rewrite of the fashion industry. Even if that makes for a less diverse supply of shirts, it's a starting place that breaks from the productive and consumptive drives of the industry in such a radical way that it can't be recuperated. With that ethical production framework and healthier public relationship with fashion in place, you can make shirts that aren't dyed in blood by the time you wear them.
OK, yeah, I didn't express myself well.
What I was trying to say is that as I understand it, brutalism is meant to be jarring, unsettling, even unpleasant. I can see the purpose to that, as you've explained it. But if something is intentionally jarring, it's unsurprising that many people don't like it. It's doing what it's supposed to do, but only the particularly avant garde are going to enjoy it or want to see it in their environment. I was trying to make an analogy about making it more accessible because beauty that is intentionally repellant is a pretty inaccessible concept-- runway fashion is to brutalism as ready-to-wear is to ???
I guess I'm looking for a post-brutalism style. But the more I think about it, I guess that would grow out of a better social system. If the purpose of brutalism is to expose the ugliness behind the facade, then you wouldn't need that if the system itself was equitable. You'd just have an ugly mask covering beauty then.
Right now it's the transition. We see it as the thing attacking the orthodoxy. With the better social system it's a design framework that can be built on in conditions more favourable to it or made into post-brutalist aesthetics by enabling a better climate for them. It's clean utilitarian design that has an art deco kind of grandiosity to it without using ornamentation. I like the look of it in the same way I like the look of traditional Japanese or English architecture and it's an easy springboard for ecologically-minded architecture using other materials with the same intentions, like mudbrick construction.
deleted by creator
Damn. That was the best anyone has ever explained that to me before. Thank you