• mindbleach
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    3 months ago

    People do brutalism dirty because idiots did brutalism wrong.

    It’s not supposed to be fuck-ugly concrete for its own sake. It’s about not disguising how something was made. The origin of the term and of the aesthetic is a pretty normal brick house with an i-beam over a large window. You look at it and immediately know what’s going on, structurally.

    Concrete became the shorthand because it shows nothing but how it was made. It doesn’t need paint, so it doesn’t get painted. But if there’s bare concrete sticking out and rusting then some idiot forgot that paint has function. And if it’s just a big dumb cube, congratulations, you made a building that would be ugly no matter what your philosophy was. Your structure was poured into place and all you can imagine are right angles?