Brutalism was just a style of that time. It’s not left wing architecture.
Most importantly they were cheap and fast to build, that’s why there are so many of them. Unfortunately most houses didn’t fare that well into the 21st century
This guy has never see the suburbs
Or the most soul crushing 20-30 floor apartment complexes that have the vibes of an anthill
Just another example of depressing left wing architecture. Oh wait, thats a suburb in Cincinnati…
Left wing architecture brought us Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village
Originally (1947) prioritized for WWII vets (and very much just for white people for like a while after it was built), the development today has some of the most sought after rental apartments in the entire city, cause it’s a great place for community
11k apartments from 14th st to 23rd st, 1st ave to ave C
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town–Peter_Cooper_Village
It also gave us Pruitt-Igoe…
I think execution is a lot more important than the architectural style in the success or failure of projects in that era
Capitalist architecture built a Chase bank near me that looks exactly like the Chipotle across the street: A boring gray and black box.
Most buildings corporations have built or retrofitted for the past decade or so look like they were designed by prison architects.
There’s a bunch of new townhomes a little further away that look like exactly like a prison.
Conservatives have a solution. They just don’t want to say what it is.
same for liberals
State owned housing is yet another tendril the state uses to control people. When the powerful control your basic necessities like food and shelter, they basically control whether you live or die. And when they control whether you live or die, they control you completely. Not too different from capitalism, really, except the people dying are dissidents instead of the poor.
Thankfully, humans are actually quite adept at obtaining or constructing their own food and shelter. It’s only the violence of the state that prevents them from doing so. Once we solve that issue there will be little to no hunger or homelessness as there are many possible solutions to these problems.
This actually looks amazing, well designed city blocks with ample public space and green areas. Furthermore a lot of leftist architecture is transit oriented and walkable. New Jersey can learn a lot from this, hell if they had this instead of endless sprawl it would actually be a good state to live in.
Those were not amazing to live in. There were often no shops, no restaurants, no culture, no nothing. And the buildings had extremely thin walls, there was no privacy, you could hear everything the neighbours were doing. It’s possible to reconstruct them to make them quite nice and livable, but they were not designed that way from the beginning. It WAS depressing. The problems were not caused by it being leftist, though. It was the shitty totalitarian regime with central planning and absurdly incompetent leaders.
Also, you know what I care about? The quality of the building and the inside of my apartment. You give me an ugly concrete building and let me deal with what’s inside the walls of my place, no worries! I’d rather have reinforced concrete that will last my lifetime than particle board that won’t last two decades.
That’s in China and hardly anyone actually lives there. I don’t remember the whole story, but it’s kind of a waste.
Look at the bottom. The golden thing is a top of a basic orthodox church. It’s ex USSR.
