“I can’t find any parking for these office trailers.”
“Hmmm . . . do you have a crane?”
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I bet it looked fine before adding the matchbox on top…
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Education building on University of Northern Iowa. In my opinion the ugliest building on a pretty campus. Doesn’t match anything else really
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Looks like a machine gun emplacement on steroids
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This is a Marcel Breuer design. (Note the resemblance to his famous Pirelli building in New Haven.)
The floors have different designs to indicate their functions. There are four floors of hotel space, above them are two floors of offices, and the top two floors are restaurant, bar and entertaining spaces. The building emerges from a stepped platform, which contains a concourse of dining spaces and the campus bookstore. There is also a lower level below the concourse that has large meeting spaces.
Still ugly.
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Just answering the question from @RhodyDad91 on why the top floors look like an addition. Of course, Breuer also designed the NYC building the Whitney was in before it moved to the Meatpacking District, and that one is also pretty polarizing.
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Is it odd that I’m developing a whole new appreciation for brutalism from this thread? I’m starting to actually see the appeal of some of these (not the high rise prison inspired ones though)
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This response will start off sounding completely off topic, but it does have a point . . . .
When I was in college, a female friend in one of my classes developed a crush on the lecturer. I couldn’t see it, and asked her why, and she talked about his cute round belly, distinguished balding head, and so on. Obviously, I thought she had just finally broken under the strain.
But later when I was starting to teach lecture classes in grad school, we were actually warned about this. Basically, if you stand up in front of a room of people 2 or 3 times a week, week after week, and they are all forced to pay attention to you, eventually a few will develop crushes.
Apparently this is something basic to human beings. The more we pay attention to something, the more we move beyond just the quick glance and start focusing on details, the more likely we are to develop an affection for it. Probably this keeps us from murdering each other for snoring and the like.
Anyway, I think at least my own personal journey with Brutalism has been something like that. I would not exactly say I have an architectural crush on it, but I do think the more I have really looked at these buildings, the more I have found to appreciate in the details.
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He said it about women preaching.
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Long Walk?
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Well played, @fiftyfifty1 ! I wondered whether anyone would pick up on that. The good doctor sometimes nodded off in the making of particular judgments, but his words never lacked for pungency. A good quip, like a good building, can always be repurposed.
Wes CFA Part II - the new art gallery sandwiched between Merriman Hall and Olin Library. Still unadorned classicism with Beaux-Arts inspirations? Same materials (limestone blocks), some of the same geometry but with a modern looking “swooping” roof and a lot of glass at the entrance.
Still no brutalist elements? Seems like Wes doubled down.
Say what you will, it strikes a contrast in juxtaposition to a lot of red brick. I think it will be a cool space for art exhibition that’ll provide a clean and distraction-free backdrop.
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Minimalist modernism, maybe? It’s too light and airy for brutalism.
A friend who was very much into art history and style once recommended to me:”if in doubt, just say ‘eclectic’, always works!”
The thing about brutalism that completely counters the supposedly anti-oppressive narrative is that the buildings are often so physically and psychologically oppressive. Not just the lack of windows and natural light in some of them, even more so all those massive unsupported overhangs and ceilings that are counterintuitive to our natural understanding of statics.
You just can’t help but expect gravity to do its thing and just squash all those little human bugs inside and under. Part of the anti-oppressive narrative completely ignoring humanity and its needs, trying rather to shape humanity to their own.
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A friend lives in a brutalist style apartment block. I’m in awe of how she has transformed the living space, balcony and roof garden into an absolutely beautiful space, all the while explaining how it still fits with the underlying brutalist style. (The stunning view helps, too!).
But the whole building, several storeys, is on stilts, on each end, nothing supporting the first floor ceiling at all in between, the street level entrance is underneath that huge ceiling, which is purposefully built to buckle downwards like a water filled canvas in a gentle curve suggestive of immediate collapse.
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The public high school I attended, built in the early 70’s, is a classic example of Brutalist architecture.
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Agreed. Those big panes of unframed glass, relatively delicate swooping curves, and so on are all very contemporary design elements, not at all Brutalist.
I’m going to say no. Despite the continued use of limestone block, it appears to be missing some of the things that were reading as abstracted classicism to me–the symmetry, and the simplified column and entablature structure.
Like, consider this part of the complex:
And compare it to the famous Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi:
That feels like a connection to me–maybe not to that specific building (although who knows), but to that sort of thing.
In contrast, while just the big cube in the back is sorta on point, that swoopy asymmetric glass thing in front does not read as Classical to me, even abstracted.
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This has been a fun thread. I didn’t see classical elements in the CFA quite so clearly before. That last comparison really makes it easier to see … for me at least.
One element of the complex that felt classical, at least in my experience of it, was walking around and appreciating the deliberate layout, not just of the building sections themselves but also of the designed landscape and tree planting, and the juxtaposition of the natural with the built.
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