kodos96:
I think I must be the last person left on earth who actually likes brutalist architecture.
Do you just "like" these things in the abstract so as to signal your artistic tastes, or would you actually enjoy living your life surrounded by such an ambient?
I must note that both your examples look strangely empty of people. You know, actual humans who might perceive this space as a tolerable place to spend their time in.
The term seems to have become something of a whipping boy, but I think most people who use it derisively have never actually seen any good examples, and are just thinking of the big rectangular government buildings.
Not as far as I'm concerned. I've seen some of the most successful brutalist buildings, and with at least one of those, I even have a slight sentimental connection.
The only examples where you'll see actual flesh-and-blood humans willing to spend their time around such places are the brutalist buildings dumped right in the middle of dense traditional nice spaces, like university campuses, where it's simply impossible not to have crowds swirling around.
Do you just "like" these things in the abstract so as to signal your artistic tastes
I'm totally not an architecture aficionado - I'd be hard pressed to name 3 different styles of architecture, even harder pressed to identify them. I'm only familiar with brutalism because I happen to be surrounded by it. So there's no signaling going on whatsoever - I'm not a part of that scene at all.
would you actually enjoy living your life surrounded by such an ambient?
I actually am living my life surrounded by such, and although I wouldn't go so far as ...
EDIT: This post is pretty flawed, but please read the comments anyway: I'm hoping to rework it into something that catches the idea better.
You can view a lot of value differences along a pro-nice/anti-nice spectrum.
Pro-nice people (I'm one) gravitate to obviously pleasant, lovely, happy experiences. We like kittens and puppies and rainbows. We like transparently "happy" music and transparently "beautiful" works of art and literature. (If you like Romantic poetry and science fiction, but not contemporary novels, you might be pro-nice.) We prefer the positive social emotions, like sympathy, encouragement, and teamwork. We may choose intellectual interests based on the fact that they make our brains feel good. We tend to be drawn towards proposals for making the world wonderful.
Pro-nice people aren't quite the same thing as optimists. An optimist tends to anticipate that things will turn out well, or look on the bright side. But pro-nice people may well hold pessimistic ideas or have melancholy temperaments. Pro-nice is a preference for the positive. A typical pro-nice attitude is "Humanity may be destructive and cruel, but the one time when we're at our best is when we're doing science. Science is lovely. I think I'll be a scientist."
Anti-nice people have a preference for the difficult. They find pro-nice preferences saccharine. They like artistic expressions that have a challenging or negative "mood." They prefer the negative social emotions, like antagonism, sarcasm, and cynicism. They dislike things that have obvious appeal, or things that everyone finds pleasant. As far as social issues go, they take a keen interest in potential catastrophes and what must be done to avert them; they generally aren't drawn to proposals to "make the world a better place."
Again, anti-nice people aren't necessarily pessimists or unhappy people. Anti-nice people prefer to direct their attention to the challenging, the problematic, the worst-case scenario. To an anti-nice person, there's nothing interesting to work on when everything is going smoothly; just liking things or agreeing with people or being contented is rather dull.
I suspect that a lot of conflict can be summarized by the clash between pro-nice and anti-nice personality types.
Are you pro-nice or anti-nice? Have you experienced difficulty communicating with the other type?