An unusual example: the “Death Star” at UC Davis:
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Erdman Hall (dorm) at Bryn Mawr, designed by Louis Kahn
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A valiant defence is being mounted here for an architectural style whose very name connotes, well, brutality. I know, I know, it’s just the French word for “concrete,” but who can hear it without thinking of the erasure of all ornamentation, all fantasy, all joie de vivre, for the sake of bleakness, grayness, suggestive of unspeakable actions performed by bureaucrats and commissars inside blank and crumbling facades. Ugh.
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I feel as though it’s the styles that get stuck in-between that have the shortest shelf-life:
Amherst
Amherst
Amherst
Wesleyan University
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Ugh, that really is awful and depressing.
I know many find West Point to be lovely, but I personally think it was an early forerunner of brutalist. It’s the epitome of imposing and foreboding. It practically screams “don’t mess with us.”
See? Not pretty.
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I genuinely love brutalism.
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You’re a sick individual 
I’ve seen a lot of ugly the last three or four days !!!
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Someone once famously said, “I learned to love Big Brother.” And in a famous legend King Mithradates dosed himself incrementally with poison until his system could tolerate it in its awful totality.
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That ceiling!! Instantly made me think of the Arms music building at Amherst college, which is an interesting example of a more human-scaled brutalism, that is actually fairly nice and in scale with the landscape. I fear that it might ultimately get torn down and replaced, though, due to it simply not being a large enough building for modern Amherst music.
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Yes, I’m typically not a fan of brutalism (perhaps too influenced by Thomas Wolfe’s critique in my youth), but who can look at some of these buildings and not see fantasy or joie de vivre? granted, more sci fi fantasy than Tolkien fantasy…
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Aww, it has a joey in its pouch!
Sometimes I wonder if brutalism was conceived by the concrete lobby.
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Yikes. I agree, often it is better to proudly be something, even something controversial, as opposed to being a compromise of some sort.
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I think parts of West Point are beautiful up close. But you are right, from that vantage that definitely looks like it could have been the design for the Imperial Academy.
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I genuinely do not always hate it, so that’s something, right?
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We could do a whole subthread on interiors, or even just that ceiling.
Posvar Hall at Pitt really goes all in, even extending it to outside “patio” spaces and using it in all sorts of interior spaces:
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OMG, if those ceilings could talk!
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About some of these fantasias in concrete I would say, as Dr. Johnson once said about something similarly bizarre: “It is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all.”
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