Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 19 - January 26, 2025
quality that the greatest brutalist buildings manif...
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did not seek to represent geological formations.
It sought to create buildings that matched such formations, even challenged them.
yar...
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having ransacked all other dressing-up boxes, architects have gradually turned to brutalism for inspiration.
This is the very epitome of unreflective short-termism and a not-particularly-convincing justification for sanctioned vandalism.
Janko Konstantinov, whose post-office complex presages the wild and delirious spomenik memorials to the National Liberation War (ie World War II).
pusillanimous
There are as many ideas in a single Gordon building as there are in the entire careers of most architects.
destroyed. The survivors are now widely valued, and lost ones are mourned.
We have learned nothing.
Places are once again being architecturally cleansed in favour of timidity and insipidity.
You don’t buy a car and never get it serviced.
Todt, built motorways and arranged their surrounds in order to achieve minimal damage to the landscape.
Friedrich Tamms,
arguably, the first brutalist.
forms he used were seldom functional.
employ the imagery...
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coastal fortifications built – by slave labour
similarities between these structures and brutalist architecture had been brushed under the carpet.
Canada’s most extreme examples of brutalism are in Quebec City,
The effect is both fragmented and monolithic: a labyrinth made by termites with an eye for right angles.
Kingsley Amis’s observation that “more will mean worse”.
brutalism’s coffin was its rapid espousal by Harold Wilson’s Labour government, causing half-witted protest-kids to identify it with repressive authority.
this temple to radiation on the dunes a few miles south of Tel Aviv is impressive.
Cold War’s architectural mode, on both sides of the Iron Curtain – Mutually Assured Construction.
vast machine that seems to be missing vital parts.
Tange hangs cantilevers at oblique angles and creates buildings that look as if they are in the process of collapsing.
Jørn Utzon
Sydney Opera House.
essays in brutalism were failures, tentat...
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tragic lack of insensitivity and an excess of rationality no doubt militate...
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John Vanbrugh’s buildings were widely lambasted
described as “a quarry”.
estate of seven London towers,
demonstrates brutalism’s debt to expressionism,
is restless, angular, red brick, complicated.
less rational architecture
they had understood the prevailing change of mood.
One is obviously led to think of clumsy robots sodomising each other.
Zapotec and the Inca: massive, bold, cyclopean, devoted to 45° slopes. Where building ends and natural formations begin is often moot.
Just think of the pilotis! The brises soleil! The portes-cochère!
tallest blank wall in the world?
the building is supposed to house telecommunications equipment and servers.
What’s inside? With no windows, it’s an intriguing game to play.
artificial hills of housing that look futuristic and elegant, even today.
least it all makes you think, linger, consider.
It’s in the shape of our old friend the ziggurat
Mad but bold.
The most uncompromising modern Madrid landmark though is the Torres Blancas (in real life, grey, not white).
