Some brutalist architecture may be preserved, as a warning for future generations about the danger of mixing politics, ideology and architecture.
I am the founder of the architectural uprising non-profit in Norway. The primary goal of architecture is in my view to increase peoples quality of life and to ensure social, economic and environmentally sustainability for future generations. Both the Southbank center and the Barbican center in London fails in my view. Innovation in architecture is a good thing. Now lets face the fact that most brutalists experiments over the last 80 years has failed miserably. Intensions in architecture is good. But not this buildings intentions of eradicating history and ignoring peoples feelings.
> danger of mixing politics, ideology and architecture.
Like there's architecture that doesn't mix politics and/ideology? I sense conservatism in your comment which is a perspective/ideology (which i share btw). Ultimately I feel that taste drives a lot of these takes, not ideology or politics.
I've enjoyed the public areas of the barbican many many times - my only complain (its been many years I haven't been) is it doesn't have a lot of people sharing that space. You'll see that as argument that many people dont share my taste or the actual ideology/politics that led to that style is rejected by the public. I say: the barbican sits in the middle of one of the most depopulated (as in residents not office workers) of London. The areas around it are among the most expensive real estate in London. We all know how many European capitals and London in particular have become a piggy bank for the wealthy so I'd argue most people just cant afford to experience the barbican as well and as often for being pushed out
Have you been to the barbican? I haven’t been in an apartment myself, but I have been in the outdoor areas multiple times.
It’s very cool, and feels very well designed. It’s also consistently in demand as a place to live. So I’m not sure why you think it hasn’t increased the residents’ quality of life.
I've visited a flat/appartment in one of the Barbican towers. It was comfy, pleasant. The lifts and hallways were well maintained, well lit, generous dimensions (compared with many London apartment blocks I've seen). It felt like a "good" tower block, rather than a "bad" one.
The arts complex is amazing (slightly confusing, but very functional and fairly pleasant to be inside). The outside spaces create a buzzy calm.
I used to work next door to the Barbican and occasionally visit the site on my lunch breaks.
The old decaying concrete, monolithic construction, dark alleys, stagnant algae-filled lakes, dirty windows around a tropical plant space, pretentious art installations - it was all quite interesting to my morbid curiosity. But I always left the Barbican feeling lonely and bleak.
I cannot imagine the misery of living in that environment and having it seep into your soul.
I moved out of London, and live in the countryside now. There is something transcendent about being surrounded by natural beauty, and being far, far away from urban over-development.
Your two opening paragraphs seem opposed to one another.
> Some brutalist architecture may be preserved, as a warning for future generations about the danger of mixing politics, ideology and architecture.
> I am the founder of the architectural uprising non-profit in Norway. The primary goal of architecture is in my view to increase peoples quality of life and to ensure social, economic and environmentally sustainability for future generations.
Can you expand on the "dangers" expressed in the buildings, and how your foundation attempts to mitigate those dangers?
Also:
> Now lets face the fact that most brutalists experiments over the last 80 years has failed miserably.
Yeah, there are a lot of failures, but you've picked on two structures which are broadly successful which is diminishing your point somewhat.
If music is so valuable to us humans, then why can't humanity make a site like wikipedia for free music? There is a new generation growing up used to streaming services costing 10 bucks a month.
Wikipedia covers music very well. It often doesn't include the music itself, but there's a ton of great writing and history about music.
And many artists still publish CDs, vinyl records, and other physical artifacts just like they have for ~most of our collective lifetimes. If you want new generations to experience that kind of thing, then buy some of it for them to experience.
(Or, you know: If that seems like too much work or too much money, then a streaming subscription is only about 10 bucks a month. I spent a lot more than that on music when I was a kid.)
I want a small wrapper around slumber so it can take the same command line arguments and options as curl. I now there are several attempts at making a graphical UI for curl, but slumber has a very nice and simple cli.
Upvote for making a great city planning game. This could teach the young generation the importance of good city planning for the economy, the environment and the well-being of people. The architectural uprising is just as much about city planning as beautiful architecture. Human friendly towns is good for business, saves the municipalities money and increases quality of life. Ideally people should be paid to live in cities. Disclaimer, I am the chairman of the Norwegian architectural uprising.
Looking at the political situation around the world, I think learning should not stop at a certain age. I'm pretty sure even the "older" generation can learn from this. People that grew up with SimCity are now in their forties and fifties, and some never quit gaming at all.
> Ideally people should be paid to live in cities.
Just make it actually cheaper than the suburbs and you'll have more people.
...who in turn will create demand driving prices up.
I'm 100% with you on this, as I spent close to an hour in traffic yesterday driving into the city during the afternoon rush hour, but transport is so much cheaper than real estate, that plenty of people are actually stuck outside big cities.
Not many know that the inventor of the YAML specification built a fully working pendulum clock as a teenager. With Lego bricks. YAML is a good standard for simple settings files. For more complex data structures, use JSON.
Imagine talking to a "glasshole" for the first time. The "glasshole" is being able to do facial recognition while talking to you, and see a ton if info about you before you've been able to introduce yourself. What could possibly go wrong?
I worked for the Norwegian standard organization at the time. After seing with my own eyes how Microsoft was able to get OOXML approved, I quit doing standards. The OOXML standard is a joke. Three different ways to store basically the exact same thing. Like dates.
Indeed. “The bad standard is the result of negligence rather than malice” is a total nonsequitur. It in no way excuses pushing a bad standard on everybody to say, “they didn’t mean to make it bad.” It was still bad in obvious ways, and they still did power moves and underhanded things to get it signed off over legitimate technical objections. The reasons it was bad are irrelevant to the fact that it was bad and they promoted it.
So, no. None of your examples are equivalent to OOXML. The implementations were first opened up and then standardized.
OOXML was the other way around: Microsoft had a standard and tried to enshrine into a standard and force others to waste time and resources to be compatible.
What if then? Should they have just bodied the thing for the love of the game? So that people uncaring for their wellbeing then wouldn't have appreciated it as a sacrifice anyhow?
Quite often I find that if people stopped holding fundamentally broken dynamics together and just let the thing fail and fail hard, the overall long term outcome would be better off. Much to the opposite of your suggestion.
It's just that turns out, things being properly bodied or properly broken take coordinated action. People deciding one by one, one way or the other, is what actually enables and sustains pathological dynamics like this.
But then how does one single out any specific decision? Well, nohow, not with any rigor for sure.
Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP.
Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough.
The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use.
With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction.
Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.
