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 to say I'm "enjoying living my life", I think that has more to do with my brain chemistry than with the architecture, which is one of the few things I see every day that brings a smile to my face.
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.
They were just photographed that way. In real life they're both extremely vibrant places. Geisel is always full, despite the fact that on a campus with broadband in every dorm room and downloadable e-reserves, there's not much of a real reason to go to the library... yet people do... tons of them.
And the Salk Institute.... Kahn designed it to be much more impressive from the inside than the outside. The buildings are kind of boring from the outside, but then you go in and realize that he's painstakingly laid out every single exterior and interior wall for the specific purpose of ensuring that every single office, every single lab, every single lab bench, has its own private, unobstructed ocean view. How's that for a "tolerable place to spend your time"?
brutalist buildings dumped right in the middle of dense traditional nice spaces, like university campuses
But that's how it's supposed to be done. Brutalist buildings have always reminded me of modernism meets feudalism... they look like sci-fi versions of castles. But you don't put a bunch of castles right next to each other - you build a castle and then you have a bunch of smaller woodframed buildings surrounding it (you know, for the peasants ;)
kodos96:
They were just photographed that way. In real life they're both extremely vibrant places. Geisel is always full, despite the fact that on a campus with broadband in every dorm room and downloadable e-reserves, there's not much of a real reason to go to the library... yet people do... tons of them.
Well, even though they'll rarely admit it explicitly for fear of sounding desperate, humans are social animals and they yearn to have at least some contact with fellow humans. So if you let them choose between being alone (unless they're extraordinaril...
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?