March 12, 2024 • 48 mins
The most reviled, hated, despised, no-good, low down, dirty rotten architectural style of all time is actually just the most misunderstood. Learn about this unfairly treated architectural movement and why it’s awesome. Learn to love brutalism.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Bence
here sitting in for Jerry, which we're all very happy about. Frankly,
that's our preference. And this is stuff I'm kidding, and
(00:22):
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It's been a while since you bagged on Jerry for
no reason.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I know things have felt weird. Now I just reset
them again.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm excited about this one. This is another if you're
listening at home, we would really encourage you to try
and follow along by looking up some photographs of some
of the things we mentioned, because obviously we're talking about
a design style of architecture, and those are always better
when you can see some of this stuff and do
so safely.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, because it's really difficult to describe a building in
any really good terms, you know, or any way that
you're just like, oh, I don't even need to see
the picture of it. I totally got what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But we still try.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
We definitely still try, and probably of all the architecture
there is, brutalist might be the easiest to describe without
looking at it.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Maybe true, But then when you look at brutalist things,
there's so much variety within that category.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah. Yeah, And if you hadn't guessed by now we're
talking about brutalism, if you didn't pick up from that
exchange we just had or the title of this episode
and brutalist architecture, even if you don't know what it is,
you have almost certainly witnessed it, maybe even been inside
a brutalist building, because they're very often public buildings, as
(01:42):
we'll see, And brutalism is probably the most reviled, misunderstood,
hated architecture of all time. It's just so easy to
hate it, and so many people hate it for so
many different, sometimes really weird reasons. But there also seems
to be a renaissance and appreciating brutalism which is arriving
(02:06):
just in time, because brutalist buildings are in really grave
danger being torn down and erased from architectural history all
over the world.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, I learned a cool thing today which I
never knew before. And I thought about this when I
was in Mexico City, which has a lot of great
brutalist architecture. Yeah, including I mean that airport's got to
be brutalist.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Right, Yeah, as a matter of fact, it's got to be.
I think it is. I didn't see that. It didn't
come up in my research, but yes, Mexico City has
a ton of good brutalism.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
But when I was there, I noticed some things and
I was like, and I saw a couple like sort
of that echoed sort of pyramid style brutalism, and I
was like, wait a minute. I was like, these look
like ancient mind temples, and if you look up like
an ancient Mayan temple or it goes visit one like
it's a totally brutalist thing. But I learned that apparently,
(03:06):
originally these temples were very ornate. I saw. I can't
remember where I got this, but I said, they were
as ornate as any neoclassical edifice in Europe. But they've
been stripped down over the years from war and looting
and just time, and they became brutalist in the end.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Huh weird. That's fantastic and totally surprising.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, so they weren't originally built that way. But when
you look at a mine temple compared to like some
of these other you know, like office buildings, I'm like,
you say this was came around in like England in
the nineteen fifties, and I say it came around long
before that.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So you hit upon something though that like these these
mine temples are brutalist now, but they weren't before because
they've been stripped of their decoration or whatever. That is brutalism.
It's a type of architecture that from its outset, from
the creation of the building, from design onward, it's meant
to not have ornamentation. It's the it's the skeleton of
(04:06):
the building, is the building. That's what brutalism is, or
at least in part.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah. And if you've ever and like we said, we'll
get into some of the variety within the style, but
if you've ever seen a like a huge concrete, unfinished
sort of concrete looking government building with the same little
tiny windows and it just looks like this blocky monolith, Yeah,
(04:31):
that is brutalism staring you in the face.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah. If you look at a building and suddenly Stalin
just comes into your head, you're looking at a brutalist
building almost certainly.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah. Or if you wonder what evil villains layer that is,
it's probably a brutalist building.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Right, exactly. I also had a brutalist epiphany in Mexico
City recently. When we were down there. We went to
one of the museums and they were having a brutalism exhibit,
and it completely reversed my feelings about brutalism. I walked
into that exhibit hating brutalism, and I walked out really
(05:08):
appreciating it. And it turns out I didn't actually hate
brutalism all this time. I hate ugly buildings, ugly, thoughtless, dumb,
boring buildings, and that is not Brutalism is not synonymous
with that. It's gotten a bad name over the years,
and part of it is even the name itself brutalism.
A lot of people think that the whole term was
(05:29):
coined to describe like how the building makes you feel
when you look at it. It's brutal, it's sharp, it's merciless,
has zero compassion, it's dehumanizing. That's not what the term
brutalism means at all. It actually refers to a type
of concrete that the French architect and designer the Corbussier
(05:50):
introduced called beton brute.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, beton brute. I think the exact English translation is
gross cement exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
But they call it raw concrete.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, exactly, which is to say, just a raw, unfinished,
poored concrete. There are a lot of houses in our
surrounding neighborhoods in Atlanta now that are being built sort
of in this style, these huge, big concrete, blocky houses
that are I think it's sort of a mishmash. It
definitely echoes brutalism, but most of them still have a
(06:26):
polished sort of concrete look to them, and that is
not true true brutalism.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
No, And it's there's a lot of overlap between modernism
and brutalism. They both were they both were going on
at the same time. And some people say that brutalism
emerged out of modernism. There's a big old that's a
hornousness that we're not going to get into. But just
using exposed unfinished concrete is not in and of itself
(06:55):
a brutalist building. There's other elements as well that come
into Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
But I think an interesting thing is brutalism, isn't I mean,
you know, and you see it, but it's it's something
that I saw this. I think it was a new
York Times article that said it has always sort of
lacked a really clear, well articulated set of principles.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I saw that. I didn't agree with that. I thought
it was very articulated.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh well, I think the I think what it means
more is it there's there's so much variety within those principles.
You can't say it's just this, because depending on what
region you are in the world, the brutalist architecture is
going to look different, whether it's you know, Soviet Russia
or postwar London, or in Brazil and Latin America. Brutalism
(07:42):
grew out of the modernist tradition, so stuff there looks
quite a bit different than it does in other parts
of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It does. I think that they all share in common
a core set of principles that is brutalism. That that's
what I disagree with. I know that there's differences in
all that. I just I just I didn't agree with
that statement that the New York Times got it wrong, wrong, wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I'm with them. I'm down the paper record.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Well, let's talk about where this came from.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Huh yeah, well, I mean, you know, it came out
of the post war architectural rebuilding of so many cities
around the world that were completely destroyed into rubble, and
in particular this one couple, Peter and Allison Smithson in England,
saw bombed out London and instead of seeing you know,
(08:31):
a big bombed out mess where like, oh, we have
to rebuild it, you know, more ornate and grander than before,
they saw an opportunity and were inspired and said, why
don't we start using this rubble and build some sort
of unfinished looking places.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, so it's almost like they visually speaking they used
the rubble as the material to build the new buildings
and they didn't actually use that, but visually speaking they
did that, and it was, like you said, in an
acceptance of the current reality rather than a return to
a previous reality, which is radical in and of itself,
(09:08):
but that was the essentially. The Smithsons are credited with
establishing brutalism as an architectural movement very frequently there. A
critic named Rayner Banham is credited with coining the term
brutalism that's wrong. He popularized it in a review of
(09:28):
the Smithson's work. The Smithson's used it a couple of
years before Bannam did, and a couple of years before that,
a Swedish architect named Hans Asplind used it to describe
a home that he designed an Uppsala called Via goth
in nineteen forty nine. So at least as far back
as nineteen forty nine the term brutalism was being used.
(09:48):
But you kind of dug up and you had said
at the outset evidence that brutalism was around before that
term was ever used.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Right, Yeah, I mean I think clearly they were inspired,
inspired by stuff that came before them, maybe by mind
temples and things like that, but no one was calling
it brutalist obviously until then. And I don't think it
was like a bonafide, a bona fide architectural movement until
the post war, you know, sort of rebuilding.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Right, and post war, because of all the rebuilding that
was going on, brutalism was widely adopted across Europe, not
just in the West but also in the Eastern Bloc
because World War two just ravaged that continent and so
a lot of countries had a lot of cities that
needed to be rebuilt largely, and not just in Europe
(10:38):
in Japan, particularly in Okinawa. Supposedly ten to twenty percent
of the buildings that were around before World War Two
were still around after as much as ninety percent of
the buildings were destroyed, so they had a lot of
rebuilding to do, and it just so happened at the
time brutalism was this new kind of up coming, frankly
(11:02):
beloved style of architecture. So it happened to be in
the right place at the right time to become adopted
around the world because all this rebuilding was going on.
But the timing isn't the full explanation of the whole thing,
is it? Is it?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
No, No, it's not. Because it was also a time
where in the sort of the fifties through the seventies
where the European nations that had colonized the world, that
stuff started sort of going back the other way, and
these countries were even either given their country back or
(11:36):
they were flourishing. So in Latin America all of a
sudden there was sort of a new prosperity going on.
In Africa, there was you know, some of them were
gaining independence, and so it all timed out with brutalism.
So that's why you'll see like brutalism in Africa and
brutalism in Latin America and brutalism in Japan. It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
The thing is, though, is we said that Modernism was
in full swing same time, so you could say, well,
why didn't they just choose modernism instead, And you know,
a lot of them did. A lot of Modernist buildings
were built in these same cities around the same time.
But the reason brutalism truly became so ubiquitous around the
world is because it was cheap. It was really cheap
to make a brutalist building because they were essentially poured
(12:21):
or slab concrete. There was no adornment to them. There.
They were as we'll see, Brutalism takes a single unit
very often like a like the smallest unit like a
Saint apartment, and then redoes it over and over and
over again. So there's a standardization of the process of
(12:41):
the materials. So it just was. It was around the time,
and it was a very cheap alternative to other much
more ornate types of buildings like modernist buildings at the time,
So that was one reason why it was so widely adopted.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, and with that repeating thing, I mean, it can
even just be like, well, like that airport in Mexico
City with the circles, or what was the one the
French guy like his very the habitat.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
The United Bitasion.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Look, yeah, I mean if you look at that, that's
another great example of these. You know, I guess they're windows.
What are they?
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah? I think they're balconies or like patios.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh okay, it's hard to tell from like a distance,
but it's just this repeated thing, and that's there's obviously
a building efficiency when you're not adorning things and we're
kind of repeating the same design feature over and over
and over. Also, this is a time post war where
people really started moving to the cities a lot more,
especially in the Eastern Block. It's cheap. It was a
(13:48):
cheap way to house tons of people as far as
the US goes. That's when the federal government really beefed
up and said, all right, we're going to be we're
gonna take some steroids here and see what happens. And
so all of a udd and you had a much
larger bureaucracy and these they needed, you know, there were
more people, more employees, and say need of these big
federal government buildings. So you'll see a lot of some
(14:10):
of the best brutalist architecture in American cities could be
like the City Library like here in Atlanta, or like
the IRS building or something like these big government buildings.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Also, one of the reasons brutalism was such a great
idea for government buildings is because they're so stable and
they're so just yeah, immovable, And so the designers were like, well,
it's going to remind people that the government is stable
and you don't have to worry because the government's in control.
Just look at the buildings that they operate out of.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah. DC has a lot of brutalist stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Right, Yes, it's a brutalist town. If you want to
acquaint yourself with brutalist architecture, just walk around d C
and look at the federal buildings. They are brutalists through
and through.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Should we take a break, but I say we take
a break? Yeah, all right, because we need to go
to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And apologize.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Okay, Chuck, I didn't understand. Why do we have to
apologize to DC?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I don't know. It sounded like you were saying, I
know you appreciate brutalism now, but it sounded like you
didn't have much love for the DC style of brutalism.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
No, it's not that I've always appreciated DC because it's
just so weird architecturally, isn't it that nothing can be
taller than the Washington Monument. That's why there's no skyscrapers
in DC. I think I've heard that the Monument or
the Capitol Building one of the two. So yeah, it's
a very low slong city. But that also is ready
(16:06):
made for brutalist design too, because they're often like low, wide,
hulking forms as well.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, you're never going to see a brutalist tower.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
That's not true. There are some brutalist towers, but they're
very rare, very very rare.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Well, yeah, I mean I've seen some skinnyish apartment buildings
and things, but I guess I don't know. I'm thinking
in terms of like skyscrapers.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Well, do they have those the skyscrapers that we think
of when we think of the cities today, those kind
of came along and replaced brutalism and starting around the eighties. Yeah,
so no, you wouldn't have seen that as brutalist because
it's just wasn't brutalist.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So it's not all concrete all the time. It's obviously
a very big part that unfinished concrete of brutalism. But
you might see a little brick in there every now
and then, probably not going to be like some super
colorful thing. You'll probably see some steel, ill obviously some
glass I have seen, you know, and especially in Brazil
(17:05):
and Latin America out of the modernist movement incorporating wood,
and I'm a big fan of of like combining like
cement and wood and natural things like that, natural elements
with unnatural elements.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So that's the new that's the new thing. That's brand
spanking new. They call it organic brutalism, which is combining
like a brutalist space with like organic touches to it. Yeah, yeah,
you'd love that. So even though it's I don't even
know if you can't say that it's not all concrete
all the time. I think one of the basis of
(17:40):
brutalism is that it's got to be concrete, right Or
are you saying like other people have experimented with other
stuff and still consider brutalist.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
No, no, no, I just mean like that every square
inchoa gotch isn't concrete.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
But that it features very, very prominently. One of the
things that, yeah, one of the things about this these
reinforced concrete buildings is because they were using just unfinished
concrete or you know, unadorned concrete, they figured out interesting
ways to kind of play with the concrete so that
every building didn't look exactly alike. So you'll often see
(18:12):
like vertical ripples going down long tall columns that's a
type of concrete. They'll be like aggregate, like maybe pebbles
that are on the surface of the concrete. There's all
sorts of stuff they did. But if at the end
of the day it's all reinforced concrete and there's not
like drywall over it, there's not like a nice paint
(18:34):
job over it, there's no decorations or any kind of
like woodwork or anything like that. It's just right the
building itself. The point of brutalism is the building itself
is allowed to stand on its own. And I saw
somewhere that somebody said that if modernism is meant to
be honest, then brutalism is brutally honest. Like what you
(18:56):
see is what you get with the building.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Oh, I like that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I do too.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
They like you said, there's a uh, there's a sense
of permanence to a brutalist building. And I think that's
another reason why government buildings like them, because, like you mentioned,
they just sort of convey this thing of like, I
know you hate banger taxes, but look at this IRS building.
It's not going anywhere, right, It sends a message, it
says ts.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
There's some other like basic parts of the brutalist concept.
Chuck like that. The buildings tend to be angular, geometric, sculptural, blocky,
top heavy. The windows are very frequently deep set. They're
called fortress like. I don't know if you mentioned that
one before, but it pops up almost everywhere when you're
talking about what brutalism is. Fortress like seems to be
(19:48):
like a very like just a common description. And then
we talked about them being self repeating.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Right yeah, yeah, and that was you know the reason why,
because the efficiencies and the costs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Right. So sometimes some brutalist buildings will take like the
single unit, like say it's an apartment building, and they
will take the they'll design the one apartment building and
they just repeat it over and over and over again,
and then the next row over and over and over again.
And by combining these modular units together, they it forms
the building just through repetition. And so some people call
(20:26):
it a fractal as far as architectural movements go, which
makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, And you know, I appreciate it a lot, and
I always have. But I get why people don't like
a lot of these buildings. And I think that maybe,
like you, previous to Mexico City only had in the
in the brain like sort of one thing, which is God,
that ugly building downtown that I have to go to
(20:51):
get my driver's license or something exactly, and to expose
yourself to more. And you know, we're gonna talk about
some famous buildings, but you know, brutalism had a sort
of a pre hatred going on before it even became
a thing. The people that were I believe that was
La Corbusier's how do you pronounce this building again?
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The unite do pitasion? That's right, I think so my
high school friends can hold up.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
He designed this thing for working class families to house
a lot of people, which was the whole idea, but
no one wanted to live there. None of those people
wanted to live there, so the intelligentsia of Marseille was like,
you know, they appreciated that architecture, and there.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Who moved in, right, they said sold.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I also think it's interesting that they have been used
in a lot of as the one here that I
sent you in Georgia that is so cool looking, of
all places, Noon in Georgia was used, as I believe
in ant Man and the Wasp, as the evil villain's
layer from the outside and clockwork orange, and like just
this associate with evil villains or the bad guys or
(22:04):
the communist Soviet block. It just sort of always had
this reputation of like, you should probably hate this architecture.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Also dystopian too, Like if you ever watch a movie
or look at artwork set in a dystopia, if you
look at the buildings, they are almost always brutalist in
some way should perform often very frankly brutalist, right, Yeah,
And it kind of makes sense because a lot of
times dystopian settings are well they're set in the future,
(22:33):
or that maybe they're post apocalyptic. Yeah, yeah, And it
makes sense that if any kind of buildings is going
to survive a brutalist building would survive far into the
future or would survive in apocalypse, So it makes sense intuitively,
But also I think brutalism gets used in that because
it's so associated with things like dehumanization depersonalization, that the
(22:57):
scales that they're built on are inhuman scales. And that's
ironic because again, most of the brutalist buildings that were
ever built were meant to be public buildings where you
bring a lot of people together to do things like
enjoy a ballet or a show or performance, or to
live together as a community in like a tower or
(23:17):
something like that, and yet they're The irony of it
is that they're viewed as inhuman dehumanizing rather than humanizing,
which is I think what they were after. But it
just over time, it just became associated with the opposite
of that.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, if you have an
evil villain in your movie, you're not going to put
them in a in a quaint cottage.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Well maybe if they're on vacation and it's like a rental.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
One of my favorite examples of brutalism as a bad
guy's place is in Karate Kid three, which I watched
it when it came out, and I clearly hadn't watched
it since because I'd forgotten all about it, and we
watched it on vacation last year, and it is one
of the most wonderfully awful movies I've ever seen. One
(24:06):
of those bad movies that's a lot of fun to watch.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Is that the one with Hillary Swank?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
No? No, that is I think the next karate Kid.
Karate Kid three was the third of the you know,
Daniel and Mister Miagi tail where he battled the bad
guy Terry Silver, who was I think he was a
Vietnam buddy of what's his name?
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I can't remember from the from the first one.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Sure, yeah, yeah, So Terry Silver's place is the ultimate
brutalist bad guy lair, and it is the Ennis House
in Los Angeles that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Is that the Hell House or Hillhouse?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I don't know. I mean it's called the N's House.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Because I've been at some Frank Lloyd Wright houses in
Los Angeles and they're pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, I mean, he's He definitely was not known as
the brutalist architect, but there are a handful of his
designs and if you look at Ennis House, it is
like like super brutalist. And then when I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
I saw the the West Hope House in Tulsa. Frank
(25:17):
Lloyd right, Also, I think, if not purely brutalist, fairly brutalist.
And then like you look at the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim
is sort of brutalist as well.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I don't know if you could call it if you're
a brutalist purist, a purialist. Jeez, if you would count
the Guggenheim, because it's the concrete is much more smooth,
but it's not not brutalist, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
No, And I was mistaken. It's not Hill House. It's
the house on Haunted Hill is what that that Ennis
House stood in for. But it is super brutalist. And
it's funny because you had mentioned that the Mayan architecture
seems brutalist now, but it wasn't originally. It very much echoes. Yeah,
some sort of mezzo American architecture, almost like a mishmash
(26:03):
of it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, for sure, but it's you know, this is sort
of what I was getting at, Like all of these
reasons that people hate brutalism is why we are losing
so many great brutalist buildings in the world. It's not
a hard sell to tear these things down a lot
of times in a city.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
No, And I have to say one other thing, the
hatred of brutalism also is sometimes associated, depending on your
political beliefs, it's associated with the welfare state, because so
many were built as public housing. And so if you were, say,
you know, right leaning, or probably very far to the right,
(26:43):
you hate brutalism for that very reason. And it also
is no coincidence that the era of brutalism ended abruptly
at nineteen eighty, which is the time when Reagan and
Thatcher came to power and the welfare state was like, nope,
no more welfare state, or we're going to cut it
so early that we're certainly not going to invest in
any brutalist architecture any longer. And it became associated not
(27:05):
just with totalitarian governments of the Eastern Bloc here in
the United States, it also became associated on the right
with welfare. And the right doesn't really like welfare very much,
so they don't like brutalist architecture. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah, super like they were looked at as blits a
lot of times.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Well, they became that way too, and that's that's another
reason why that they're they're under such attack. They show
their age pretty pretty poorly.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Right, Yeah, over the years because they're not adorned, because
they have that rough concrete finish, water damage can happen
a lot to cake can be really more evident. I
think that Paul Rudolph, he's a and when you say,
you know famous brutalist architect is you got to be
in the know to kind of know these names.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
It's not like a Frank Lloyd, right, But Paul Rudolph's
Orange County Government Center in Gosha, New York was torn down.
If you look this thing up, it is amazing looking.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah. I became a fan of Paul Rudolph's researching this.
I'd never heard of him before, but he was good.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
That building is unbelievable. But they tore it down. And
it wasn't just because like, oh look at this big
blockie thing, but apparently it leaked from day one. There
was constant mold, there were always water issues. They were
having to closed courtrooms and move them around. And they
just did a cost study and it was like, retrofitting
(28:29):
and making this thing a workable government center isn't even feasible,
so they tore it down.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
So I had a hard time getting to the bottom
of this because I saw plenty of places that it
was torn down. I also saw that it was going
to be torn down, but they decided to do a
retrofit or a rehab of it instead, and that the update,
the refresh of it was so faithless to the original
that it's no longer a brutalist building. I saw it
(28:56):
described as disfigured.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, but either way, Paul Rudolph seems to be I
think arch mag called him the unluckiest architect ever. Arc
mag Is it arc or.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Arch Is it architecture?
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Well, why don't you just call it arc mag? Then
why do you have to add the H and make
me look stupid in front of everybody.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I'm with you, I think it's kind of an awkward name.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, anyway, arc Slash arch Mag called him the unluckiest
architect around because so many of Paul Rudolph's buildings are
just being torn down left and right, and I don't
even know that it's a distinct dislike of Paul Rudolph's work.
I think it's just people are tearing brutalist buildings down,
(29:45):
and his happened to be being torn down at a
faster rate than other architects brutalist buildings.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And I know we're going to get email from someone
who works at that magazine that's like Chuck didn't know
what he's talking about. We call it arc mag right exactly,
Chocha's right mag Other buildings. Architect named Bertrand Goldberg designed
the Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago that was torn down. Yeah,
it was gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, how are you going to look at that and
be like that's an ugly building. It was a a
elevated clover made of concrete. It was. It was gorgeous
for sure, And at the very least, even if you
don't think these buildings are gorgeous, I get that, but
they're they're they're admirable for sure, like they're they're amazing
(30:32):
achievements for sure. I just don't think that they're ugly
across the board. I think there's plenty of amazing brutalist buildings.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Out there, oh totally. It also doesn't help that and
I think you found stuff from Jessica Stewart in My
Modern met and Bigonia BESCO's great name in Arca magazine.
That's a lot easier that they both talked about the
fact that these are basically that they can be kind
of a symbol of human abandonment, as what they said
(30:59):
in Arkham magazine. And if it starts to decay, it's
got these big, open bear concrete walls, so like obviously vandalism,
it's just gonna be. It's a it's a perfect canvas
for something like that. And I think Jessica Stewart's the
one that said they you know, they basically symbolized urban
decay at one point, and economic economic hardship.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right, yeah, that failure of the welfare state. And because
they show their neglects so readily, because they're unadorned, because
they're exposed concrete, they stood as symbols of like, yeah, look,
how look how what a bad idea welfare is? Like
it's just like this building is like a symbol of that.
And by the way I've I've been pronouncing it ersa magazine.
(31:45):
Oh is that not right?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
All right, we should take a break. We're gonna call
these magazines up and get get the record set straight
and then we'll be right back after this.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
So, Chuck, I'm glad you said Paul Rudolph's Orange County
Government Center was in Goshen, New York, because I definitely
would have said, gosh and no joke. And just want
to say one more thing about that it had. It
was made of three buildings. It had eighty seven roofs.
Just wrap your head around that for a second, right exactly,
(32:42):
But that's just just wonderful. Look up some of Paul
Rudolph's work and you're gonna be like, this is super
seventy's awesomeness. Like that guy was talented.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, totally. I think a lot of Frankloyd writes stuff
leaked though as well.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, he was very famous for like some guy he
designed a house for said the roof is leaking on
my desk, and Frank Floyd right, so move the desk
if you ask me, these guys get way too much
of a pass, like, because part of architecture is to
make a building that doesn't leak too In addition to
making it awesome, it's.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Got to function as a as a place to live
in or work in.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Exactly when we were in Mexico City. We went with
our two friends Mitch and Patrick, who are architects and designers,
and I was explaining that to them too, and they're like, yeah,
it's absolutely true. I was expecting pushback or whatever. They're like, no, no,
like they people. People do give famous architects way too
much of a pass, especially former legendary ones. Hopefully I
(33:38):
didn't just get Mitch and Patrick in trouble.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
I don't think. So. Okay, they're out of the they're
out of the club now, right. So if you're as
far as brutalism coming back, it is coming back in
certain ways. They're they're definitely. Even if you don't have
like a let let's say you have like a modern house,
or even not a modern house, you can decorate interior
(34:00):
in a little bit more brutalish style, and you know,
sometimes just a touch or two of that kind of
thing can really give you what you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
I'm not a big fan of that. Our house stuff
Works office used to be I guess new brutalist interior design.
It kind of chucked the boxes. I was never comfortable
there now.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
I mean, isn't every office that's got concrete walls and
exposed air ducts and edison bulbs, aren't they're all sort
of new brutalists.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Right kind of Yeah. And also it seems like little
geometric pattern copper knickknacks on shelves that float that don't
really serve that much of a purpose. They're just decorative.
I don't like that either.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
We had that great mural though, really warmed that that
plays up it did.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I wonder what happened to that because we're not in
that building anymore, but surely they preserve the mural in.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
That question mark table. Where the heck is that thing?
Speaker 1 (34:57):
I don't know in space? I think.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Here though, in the twenty twenties, brutalism as an actual
architectural style is making a bit of a comeback. Like
I said, I've seen quite a few houses in the
neighboring neighborhoods that are Some are just sort of like,
you know, Hi, we're a blocky house, so that's more modern.
But there are a couple that are are true brutalist,
(35:24):
like concrete layers.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
It looks like there was a triumphant brutalist refurbishment here
in Atlanta back in twenty eighteen. The Central Atlanta Library
in downtown was designed by Marcel Brewer. Amazing building, but
apparently that was the last work that Brewer completed before
he died, and I guess some of the design and
(35:49):
some of the actual construction didn't quite jibe, and some
of his original intentions were covered up. Like there was
an elevator that had to be centrally placed. That just
screwed things up quite a bit. And then they came
along and they added more lights, they refurbished the place,
they got rid of that central elevator, they opened it up.
There was a there's like a zigzagging staircase that's amazing.
(36:11):
That's now much more prominent, And in doing so, they
actually made the building closer to Marcel Brewer's original intentions
with his design than it was when it was built
when Marcel Brewer was still alive. So like, that's an
example of the ideal of what's being done with brutalist buildings.
(36:31):
The opposite end is that they're being torn down because
people vote them as like the ugliest building of all time?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Right, should we rattle off some of these famous ones? Yes, well,
architecture architect wise, is it Lewis or Louis? I never know.
I think Lewis, but Lewis Khan was usually the first
nam ial here. If people are kind of throwing the
(36:56):
brutalist architect name around.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, and I mean, like you can make a pretty
good case that brutalism. I don't know if it's because
the buildings were meant to take center stage or whatever,
but there aren't. It's just not household names compared to
other movements, you know what I mean. Lewis Khan is
definitely far and away the most famous, but I saw
that he's technically not even a brutalist. He just used
brutalist elements. There are some like we talked about Paul
(37:23):
Rudolph of Vegenza, Sleigh Richter, Marcel Brewer. There's a lot
of other really great I think Erno Goldfinger people you
just have never heard of. These are just random names.
It sounds like that a writer made up. No, they're
actually legit architects. They just aren't. Like this movement didn't
(37:44):
have like star power like some of the other movements did.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, and like we said, like Frank Lloyd Wright has
done a thing or two, but he's not known for that.
I am pay has dabbled in it in New York city.
If you see kIPS Bay Plaza by impay, very much brutalist,
but that's not how you know his name was made.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
No, no, but there are ones there like Nope, I'm
brutalists through and through. The Smithson's obviously were brutalists because
they founded the movement and one of the things they
completed was robin Hood Gardens, which was a housing estate
from nineteen seventy two and it was.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
It's okay, brutal as brutal as brutalism gets it is.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
And part of it was demolished, just part of it right,
and it was actually acquired. Three stories of the building
were acquired by the Victorian Albert Museum to preserve it
because it's just such a fine example of brutalist architecture,
even though to me it's kind of ugly. But London,
because this was the epicenter of the brutalist movement, the
(38:48):
creation of it, it has a lot of good examples
of really good brutalist buildings. What Prince Charles has to
say about them, notwithstanding.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, King Charles, but he Prince when he said that
the Royal National Theater of London was a quote clever
way of building a nuclear power station in the middle
of London without anyone objecting, right, I think it's cool looking.
I like it.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, I was gonna say it's hilarious. But he's a
madman for saying that. I think he came up with
a clever quip and was going to use it at
all costs, because anyone who looks at the Royal National
Theater it isn't like that's an amazing building, is wrong.
I'm sorry. Wrong.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah. It was also at the time, Princess Charles's best
stab at it telling a joke.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Well, he was apparently well known for being a mean
critic in the media about architecture in particular. I didn't
realize that, but that was like one of his greatest
hits from what I can tell. But the thing about
the Royal National Theater, it had really great horizontal and
vertical lines that were harmonious, which can be unusual for
(39:55):
a brutalist building, but even more unusual, it fit the
site that it's it's on. It's not imposed like every
other brutalist building of all time. If there's ever been
a brutalist building that fit the site that Royal National Theater,
is it.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yeah, for sure? For my money. If you want to
have your socks knocked off by a blocky architectural gym,
then you should go to Montreal and look at Safti's
habitat sixty seven. It was built for the nineteen sixty
seven World Spare there in Montreal, and it is super
cool looking. It looks like something a child might build
(40:34):
out of building blocks.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
I've got one. The Peace Center in Hiroshima. I really
feel like every American should go there. It's amazing. The
Japanese in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed
by nuclear bombs, their response was to build this peace
center to preserve what happened for generations to come, so
that it never happened again. They turned peacenik rather than
(41:01):
retributive or vengeance. It's a pretty amazing response if you
think about it. And so it's a pretty amazing center.
And Kenzo Tonge, who was a student of like Corbusier,
started it in nineteen fifty and it's just a long
rectangular structure that seems to be kind of floating on
(41:22):
the horizon. It's just a really amazing place, really amazing museum.
It just has a it's just it gets you in
ways that like I'd never been gotten before.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Just five years after the bomb was dropped too, so
that like how heavy was that still in the air,
you know?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Yeah, and I mean in Hiroshima, like it's I mean,
it's a part of the town. Oh, they preserved a
bank that was just completely wasted, but the frame was
still there. It's preserved. They build a fence around it
and the blocks are still where they landed after the
bomb was dropped, like it they didn't touch it after that,
They just cording it. Often now it's part of this
(42:02):
the museum. Parts of the city, entire parts of the
city have become part of this living outdoor museum. It's
just amazing.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Japan. It's got to happen for me one day.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yes it does. And seriously, go to Hiroshima. It's really something. Yeah,
it's also a really cool town too. In addition to
the whole museum segment on it.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Right, if you go to Tunisia and tunis the hotel
do lack and if you look at the if you
look at that building and you say, man, if you
chopped off the back of that thing, that would be
a sand crawler that the jaw was rolled around in
in Star Wars, then you would probably not be surprised
to know that and supposedly inspired George Lucas. I say
(42:47):
it had to have been, because when you look at
that building, it looks just like that thing, that inverted pyramid.
Four hundred and sixteen rooms over ten floors. It's really something,
and inverted pyramids are sort of a brutalless thing as well.
But it's a great example.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, And I mean it was open in seventy three
and he was there shooting in the like years later,
so it was definitely there in Tuness while he was there,
So I buy that totally. One of the most famous
brutalist buildings in the United States, if not in the world,
is the Geyisol Library you see San Diego. It was
originally called the Central Library, but Ted Geisel, doctor Seuss's widow, Audrey,
(43:25):
donated twenty million dollars in the university said let's just
rename it in honor of you.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
And Ted, well, she said ten million dollars and they
kept the name, and she was like fifteen, right, and
then she said, what do I gotta do to get
our name on the front of that thing?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Right?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
This building is amazing. I mean, and this is again
as an example of how like just sort of the
variety that you can find in a brutalist building when
you look at this compared to the robin Hood Gardens
building in London.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Right, yeah, this one really prominently makes use of glass,
which can be rare for a brutalist building. And yet
when you look at it, you're like, that is a
brutalist building. It's just an amazing, beautiful brutalist building.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, I love it. I can't wait go back to
Mexico City and see some of that stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Also, I would strongly advise anyone not to make a
drinking game out of how often we say brutalist in
this episode, because we said it a lot.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
They already have drinking games of all that stuff on Reddit.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I know, but don't do this one because you would die.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Soone said I counted how many times you said like
in the like episode, and I was like, well, yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
It was kind of the name of the episode.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
How many times did we say lama in the Lama episode?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Well, Plus we had our additional likes because we talk
like regular people.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
One other thing too, Chuck, if you want to see
cool post apocalyptic brutalist architecture used really adeptly an illustration.
Go check out Eternal Dystopia's YouTube videos. Did I send
you that one called Research Center? It's like drone music,
but it's the video is like just this. It's like this,
(45:11):
like a dystopian brutalist building, kind of set in the
haze and sometimes it's raining. I'll send it to you again.
It's really amazing. But the drone music alone is pretty cool.
So check that out.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
You had the drone lately.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
I am because it's not distracting. It helps you. Yeah,
it helps me focus, you know, I like it. Well,
check said he likes it, which means everybody that it's
time for listener maw.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yeah. Oh boy, it's another correction. But Josh, this one
is on me.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Okay, now you're talking.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
I think the first one may have been on us.
But in the Nuclear Boy Scott episode, we said USS
Enterprise was a nuclear submarine. Yeah, it's in fact an
aircraft carrier. But the big one was when we had
our sort of brief debate about military discharge and I
was just wrong, wrong, wrong, because I thought if you
just served all your time, then they just called it
(46:02):
leaving the military.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, you just stopped showing up one day.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
You just stop showing up, or you call it retirement
or whatever. I didn't think it was. I thought any
time you left before your time was up was the
only time it was called the discharge. Sure not. So
we heard from a lot of our current service members
and veterans, but this one's from Scott Oliver. He said, guys,
what Chuck said was not correct. Any way you leave
(46:27):
the service is some form of discharge. And then he
goes over this was the most detailed one. So we're
going to read these discharges. You got the honorable discharge.
It's the highest level, given to those who complete their
service and are discharged or are discharged early for no
faults of their own, like a medical issue. That's what
you want to shoot for.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
General discharge lower level, but given to those who have
like a minor misconduct or a performance issue. I was
going to hazard a comical guess on what that might be,
but I'm not gonna. Okay, there's other than honorable or
the ot H. That's a negative level. So now you've
crossed the rubicon and you're not good anymore. And it's
(47:10):
given to people who have serious misconduct or violations of regulations.
Then there are two more. You've got the bad conduct
discharge or the BCD. This is actually punitive, and that
is if you were convicted by a court martial for
something like desertion or assault or there and then you
know we've got last, don't you. Yeah, dishonorable and that
(47:34):
is a punishment for a serious offense, like committing a felony.
Sorry for being pedantic, guys, you weren't at all, Scott.
But as a veteran, I find myself particularly attuned to
Roney's statements about military matters, and that's every veteran, Scott,
So you're in good company, and we heard from a
lot of service members and all apologies for screwing that up.
(47:55):
Sometimes when I say things off the dome without researching,
quite often in fact, i'm dead wrong.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Man. Well, you really owned it, Chuck, like somebody with
an honorable discharge.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
It was Scott Scott Oliver. Thanks a lot, Scott. You
weren't pedantic at all. Chuck's right. That was very nicely
put and we appreciate being schooled. And also, Chuck, thank
you for selecting one where you were wronging, not me.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, I guess we were military school.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
If you want to get in touch of this like
Scott did and school us and do it nicely. We
love that kind of thing, you can send it in
an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Bence
here sitting in for Jerry, which we're all very happy about. Frankly,
that's our preference. And this is stuff I'm kidding, and
(00:22):
this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It's been a while since you bagged on Jerry for
no reason.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I know things have felt weird. Now I just reset
them again.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm excited about this one. This is another if you're
listening at home, we would really encourage you to try
and follow along by looking up some photographs of some
of the things we mentioned, because obviously we're talking about
a design style of architecture, and those are always better
when you can see some of this stuff and do
so safely.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, because it's really difficult to describe a building in
any really good terms, you know, or any way that
you're just like, oh, I don't even need to see
the picture of it. I totally got what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But we still try.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
We definitely still try, and probably of all the architecture
there is, brutalist might be the easiest to describe without
looking at it.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Maybe true, But then when you look at brutalist things,
there's so much variety within that category.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah. Yeah, And if you hadn't guessed by now we're
talking about brutalism, if you didn't pick up from that
exchange we just had or the title of this episode
and brutalist architecture, even if you don't know what it is,
you have almost certainly witnessed it, maybe even been inside
a brutalist building, because they're very often public buildings, as
(01:42):
we'll see, And brutalism is probably the most reviled, misunderstood,
hated architecture of all time. It's just so easy to
hate it, and so many people hate it for so
many different, sometimes really weird reasons. But there also seems
to be a renaissance and appreciating brutalism which is arriving
(02:06):
just in time, because brutalist buildings are in really grave
danger being torn down and erased from architectural history all
over the world.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah. Absolutely, I learned a cool thing today which I
never knew before. And I thought about this when I
was in Mexico City, which has a lot of great
brutalist architecture. Yeah, including I mean that airport's got to
be brutalist.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Right, Yeah, as a matter of fact, it's got to be.
I think it is. I didn't see that. It didn't
come up in my research, but yes, Mexico City has
a ton of good brutalism.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
But when I was there, I noticed some things and
I was like, and I saw a couple like sort
of that echoed sort of pyramid style brutalism, and I
was like, wait a minute. I was like, these look
like ancient mind temples, and if you look up like
an ancient Mayan temple or it goes visit one like
it's a totally brutalist thing. But I learned that apparently,
(03:06):
originally these temples were very ornate. I saw. I can't
remember where I got this, but I said, they were
as ornate as any neoclassical edifice in Europe. But they've
been stripped down over the years from war and looting
and just time, and they became brutalist in the end.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Huh weird. That's fantastic and totally surprising.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, so they weren't originally built that way. But when
you look at a mine temple compared to like some
of these other you know, like office buildings, I'm like,
you say this was came around in like England in
the nineteen fifties, and I say it came around long
before that.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So you hit upon something though that like these these
mine temples are brutalist now, but they weren't before because
they've been stripped of their decoration or whatever. That is brutalism.
It's a type of architecture that from its outset, from
the creation of the building, from design onward, it's meant
to not have ornamentation. It's the it's the skeleton of
(04:06):
the building, is the building. That's what brutalism is, or
at least in part.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah. And if you've ever and like we said, we'll
get into some of the variety within the style, but
if you've ever seen a like a huge concrete, unfinished
sort of concrete looking government building with the same little
tiny windows and it just looks like this blocky monolith, Yeah,
(04:31):
that is brutalism staring you in the face.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah. If you look at a building and suddenly Stalin
just comes into your head, you're looking at a brutalist
building almost certainly.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah. Or if you wonder what evil villains layer that is,
it's probably a brutalist building.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Right, exactly. I also had a brutalist epiphany in Mexico
City recently. When we were down there. We went to
one of the museums and they were having a brutalism exhibit,
and it completely reversed my feelings about brutalism. I walked
into that exhibit hating brutalism, and I walked out really
(05:08):
appreciating it. And it turns out I didn't actually hate
brutalism all this time. I hate ugly buildings, ugly, thoughtless, dumb,
boring buildings, and that is not Brutalism is not synonymous
with that. It's gotten a bad name over the years,
and part of it is even the name itself brutalism.
A lot of people think that the whole term was
(05:29):
coined to describe like how the building makes you feel
when you look at it. It's brutal, it's sharp, it's merciless,
has zero compassion, it's dehumanizing. That's not what the term
brutalism means at all. It actually refers to a type
of concrete that the French architect and designer the Corbussier
(05:50):
introduced called beton brute.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, beton brute. I think the exact English translation is
gross cement exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
But they call it raw concrete.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yeah, exactly, which is to say, just a raw, unfinished,
poored concrete. There are a lot of houses in our
surrounding neighborhoods in Atlanta now that are being built sort
of in this style, these huge, big concrete, blocky houses
that are I think it's sort of a mishmash. It
definitely echoes brutalism, but most of them still have a
(06:26):
polished sort of concrete look to them, and that is
not true true brutalism.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
No, And it's there's a lot of overlap between modernism
and brutalism. They both were they both were going on
at the same time. And some people say that brutalism
emerged out of modernism. There's a big old that's a
hornousness that we're not going to get into. But just
using exposed unfinished concrete is not in and of itself
(06:55):
a brutalist building. There's other elements as well that come
into Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
But I think an interesting thing is brutalism, isn't I mean,
you know, and you see it, but it's it's something
that I saw this. I think it was a new
York Times article that said it has always sort of
lacked a really clear, well articulated set of principles.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I saw that. I didn't agree with that. I thought
it was very articulated.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh well, I think the I think what it means
more is it there's there's so much variety within those principles.
You can't say it's just this, because depending on what
region you are in the world, the brutalist architecture is
going to look different, whether it's you know, Soviet Russia
or postwar London, or in Brazil and Latin America. Brutalism
(07:42):
grew out of the modernist tradition, so stuff there looks
quite a bit different than it does in other parts
of the world.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It does. I think that they all share in common
a core set of principles that is brutalism. That that's
what I disagree with. I know that there's differences in
all that. I just I just I didn't agree with
that statement that the New York Times got it wrong, wrong, wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I'm with them. I'm down the paper record.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Well, let's talk about where this came from.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Huh yeah, well, I mean, you know, it came out
of the post war architectural rebuilding of so many cities
around the world that were completely destroyed into rubble, and
in particular this one couple, Peter and Allison Smithson in England,
saw bombed out London and instead of seeing you know,
(08:31):
a big bombed out mess where like, oh, we have
to rebuild it, you know, more ornate and grander than before,
they saw an opportunity and were inspired and said, why
don't we start using this rubble and build some sort
of unfinished looking places.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yeah, so it's almost like they visually speaking they used
the rubble as the material to build the new buildings
and they didn't actually use that, but visually speaking they
did that, and it was, like you said, in an
acceptance of the current reality rather than a return to
a previous reality, which is radical in and of itself,
(09:08):
but that was the essentially. The Smithsons are credited with
establishing brutalism as an architectural movement very frequently there. A
critic named Rayner Banham is credited with coining the term
brutalism that's wrong. He popularized it in a review of
(09:28):
the Smithson's work. The Smithson's used it a couple of
years before Bannam did, and a couple of years before that,
a Swedish architect named Hans Asplind used it to describe
a home that he designed an Uppsala called Via goth
in nineteen forty nine. So at least as far back
as nineteen forty nine the term brutalism was being used.
(09:48):
But you kind of dug up and you had said
at the outset evidence that brutalism was around before that
term was ever used.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Right, Yeah, I mean I think clearly they were inspired,
inspired by stuff that came before them, maybe by mind
temples and things like that, but no one was calling
it brutalist obviously until then. And I don't think it
was like a bonafide, a bona fide architectural movement until
the post war, you know, sort of rebuilding.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Right, and post war, because of all the rebuilding that
was going on, brutalism was widely adopted across Europe, not
just in the West but also in the Eastern Bloc
because World War two just ravaged that continent and so
a lot of countries had a lot of cities that
needed to be rebuilt largely, and not just in Europe
(10:38):
in Japan, particularly in Okinawa. Supposedly ten to twenty percent
of the buildings that were around before World War Two
were still around after as much as ninety percent of
the buildings were destroyed, so they had a lot of
rebuilding to do, and it just so happened at the
time brutalism was this new kind of up coming, frankly
(11:02):
beloved style of architecture. So it happened to be in
the right place at the right time to become adopted
around the world because all this rebuilding was going on.
But the timing isn't the full explanation of the whole thing,
is it? Is it?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
No, No, it's not. Because it was also a time
where in the sort of the fifties through the seventies
where the European nations that had colonized the world, that
stuff started sort of going back the other way, and
these countries were even either given their country back or
(11:36):
they were flourishing. So in Latin America all of a
sudden there was sort of a new prosperity going on.
In Africa, there was you know, some of them were
gaining independence, and so it all timed out with brutalism.
So that's why you'll see like brutalism in Africa and
brutalism in Latin America and brutalism in Japan. It's really interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
The thing is, though, is we said that Modernism was
in full swing same time, so you could say, well,
why didn't they just choose modernism instead, And you know,
a lot of them did. A lot of Modernist buildings
were built in these same cities around the same time.
But the reason brutalism truly became so ubiquitous around the
world is because it was cheap. It was really cheap
to make a brutalist building because they were essentially poured
(12:21):
or slab concrete. There was no adornment to them. There.
They were as we'll see, Brutalism takes a single unit
very often like a like the smallest unit like a
Saint apartment, and then redoes it over and over and
over again. So there's a standardization of the process of
(12:41):
the materials. So it just was. It was around the time,
and it was a very cheap alternative to other much
more ornate types of buildings like modernist buildings at the time,
So that was one reason why it was so widely adopted.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, and with that repeating thing, I mean, it can
even just be like, well, like that airport in Mexico
City with the circles, or what was the one the
French guy like his very the habitat.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
The United Bitasion.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Look, yeah, I mean if you look at that, that's
another great example of these. You know, I guess they're windows.
What are they?
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah? I think they're balconies or like patios.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Oh okay, it's hard to tell from like a distance,
but it's just this repeated thing, and that's there's obviously
a building efficiency when you're not adorning things and we're
kind of repeating the same design feature over and over
and over. Also, this is a time post war where
people really started moving to the cities a lot more,
especially in the Eastern Block. It's cheap. It was a
(13:48):
cheap way to house tons of people as far as
the US goes. That's when the federal government really beefed
up and said, all right, we're going to be we're
gonna take some steroids here and see what happens. And
so all of a udd and you had a much
larger bureaucracy and these they needed, you know, there were
more people, more employees, and say need of these big
federal government buildings. So you'll see a lot of some
(14:10):
of the best brutalist architecture in American cities could be
like the City Library like here in Atlanta, or like
the IRS building or something like these big government buildings.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Also, one of the reasons brutalism was such a great
idea for government buildings is because they're so stable and
they're so just yeah, immovable, And so the designers were like, well,
it's going to remind people that the government is stable
and you don't have to worry because the government's in control.
Just look at the buildings that they operate out of.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah. DC has a lot of brutalist stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Right, Yes, it's a brutalist town. If you want to
acquaint yourself with brutalist architecture, just walk around d C
and look at the federal buildings. They are brutalists through
and through.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Should we take a break, but I say we take
a break? Yeah, all right, because we need to go
to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And apologize.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Okay, Chuck, I didn't understand. Why do we have to
apologize to DC?
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I don't know. It sounded like you were saying, I
know you appreciate brutalism now, but it sounded like you
didn't have much love for the DC style of brutalism.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
No, it's not that I've always appreciated DC because it's
just so weird architecturally, isn't it that nothing can be
taller than the Washington Monument. That's why there's no skyscrapers
in DC. I think I've heard that the Monument or
the Capitol Building one of the two. So yeah, it's
a very low slong city. But that also is ready
(16:06):
made for brutalist design too, because they're often like low, wide,
hulking forms as well.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, you're never going to see a brutalist tower.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
That's not true. There are some brutalist towers, but they're
very rare, very very rare.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Well, yeah, I mean I've seen some skinnyish apartment buildings
and things, but I guess I don't know. I'm thinking
in terms of like skyscrapers.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Well, do they have those the skyscrapers that we think
of when we think of the cities today, those kind
of came along and replaced brutalism and starting around the eighties. Yeah,
so no, you wouldn't have seen that as brutalist because
it's just wasn't brutalist.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
So it's not all concrete all the time. It's obviously
a very big part that unfinished concrete of brutalism. But
you might see a little brick in there every now
and then, probably not going to be like some super
colorful thing. You'll probably see some steel, ill obviously some
glass I have seen, you know, and especially in Brazil
(17:05):
and Latin America out of the modernist movement incorporating wood,
and I'm a big fan of of like combining like
cement and wood and natural things like that, natural elements
with unnatural elements.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
So that's the new that's the new thing. That's brand
spanking new. They call it organic brutalism, which is combining
like a brutalist space with like organic touches to it. Yeah, yeah,
you'd love that. So even though it's I don't even
know if you can't say that it's not all concrete
all the time. I think one of the basis of
(17:40):
brutalism is that it's got to be concrete, right Or
are you saying like other people have experimented with other
stuff and still consider brutalist.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
No, no, no, I just mean like that every square
inchoa gotch isn't concrete.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
But that it features very, very prominently. One of the
things that, yeah, one of the things about this these
reinforced concrete buildings is because they were using just unfinished
concrete or you know, unadorned concrete, they figured out interesting
ways to kind of play with the concrete so that
every building didn't look exactly alike. So you'll often see
(18:12):
like vertical ripples going down long tall columns that's a
type of concrete. They'll be like aggregate, like maybe pebbles
that are on the surface of the concrete. There's all
sorts of stuff they did. But if at the end
of the day it's all reinforced concrete and there's not
like drywall over it, there's not like a nice paint
(18:34):
job over it, there's no decorations or any kind of
like woodwork or anything like that. It's just right the
building itself. The point of brutalism is the building itself
is allowed to stand on its own. And I saw
somewhere that somebody said that if modernism is meant to
be honest, then brutalism is brutally honest. Like what you
(18:56):
see is what you get with the building.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Oh, I like that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I do too.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
They like you said, there's a uh, there's a sense
of permanence to a brutalist building. And I think that's
another reason why government buildings like them, because, like you mentioned,
they just sort of convey this thing of like, I
know you hate banger taxes, but look at this IRS building.
It's not going anywhere, right, It sends a message, it
says ts.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
There's some other like basic parts of the brutalist concept.
Chuck like that. The buildings tend to be angular, geometric, sculptural, blocky,
top heavy. The windows are very frequently deep set. They're
called fortress like. I don't know if you mentioned that
one before, but it pops up almost everywhere when you're
talking about what brutalism is. Fortress like seems to be
(19:48):
like a very like just a common description. And then
we talked about them being self repeating.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Right yeah, yeah, and that was you know the reason why,
because the efficiencies and the costs.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Right. So sometimes some brutalist buildings will take like the
single unit, like say it's an apartment building, and they
will take the they'll design the one apartment building and
they just repeat it over and over and over again,
and then the next row over and over and over again.
And by combining these modular units together, they it forms
the building just through repetition. And so some people call
(20:26):
it a fractal as far as architectural movements go, which
makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, And you know, I appreciate it a lot, and
I always have. But I get why people don't like
a lot of these buildings. And I think that maybe,
like you, previous to Mexico City only had in the
in the brain like sort of one thing, which is God,
that ugly building downtown that I have to go to
(20:51):
get my driver's license or something exactly, and to expose
yourself to more. And you know, we're gonna talk about
some famous buildings, but you know, brutalism had a sort
of a pre hatred going on before it even became
a thing. The people that were I believe that was
La Corbusier's how do you pronounce this building again?
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The unite do pitasion? That's right, I think so my
high school friends can hold up.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
He designed this thing for working class families to house
a lot of people, which was the whole idea, but
no one wanted to live there. None of those people
wanted to live there, so the intelligentsia of Marseille was like,
you know, they appreciated that architecture, and there.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Who moved in, right, they said sold.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
I also think it's interesting that they have been used
in a lot of as the one here that I
sent you in Georgia that is so cool looking, of
all places, Noon in Georgia was used, as I believe
in ant Man and the Wasp, as the evil villain's
layer from the outside and clockwork orange, and like just
this associate with evil villains or the bad guys or
(22:04):
the communist Soviet block. It just sort of always had
this reputation of like, you should probably hate this architecture.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Also dystopian too, Like if you ever watch a movie
or look at artwork set in a dystopia, if you
look at the buildings, they are almost always brutalist in
some way should perform often very frankly brutalist, right, Yeah,
And it kind of makes sense because a lot of
times dystopian settings are well they're set in the future,
(22:33):
or that maybe they're post apocalyptic. Yeah, yeah, And it
makes sense that if any kind of buildings is going
to survive a brutalist building would survive far into the
future or would survive in apocalypse, So it makes sense intuitively,
But also I think brutalism gets used in that because
it's so associated with things like dehumanization depersonalization, that the
(22:57):
scales that they're built on are inhuman scales. And that's
ironic because again, most of the brutalist buildings that were
ever built were meant to be public buildings where you
bring a lot of people together to do things like
enjoy a ballet or a show or performance, or to
live together as a community in like a tower or
(23:17):
something like that, and yet they're The irony of it
is that they're viewed as inhuman dehumanizing rather than humanizing,
which is I think what they were after. But it
just over time, it just became associated with the opposite
of that.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, for sure. And you know, if you have an
evil villain in your movie, you're not going to put
them in a in a quaint cottage.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Well maybe if they're on vacation and it's like a rental.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
One of my favorite examples of brutalism as a bad
guy's place is in Karate Kid three, which I watched
it when it came out, and I clearly hadn't watched
it since because I'd forgotten all about it, and we
watched it on vacation last year, and it is one
of the most wonderfully awful movies I've ever seen. One
(24:06):
of those bad movies that's a lot of fun to watch.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Is that the one with Hillary Swank?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
No? No, that is I think the next karate Kid.
Karate Kid three was the third of the you know,
Daniel and Mister Miagi tail where he battled the bad
guy Terry Silver, who was I think he was a
Vietnam buddy of what's his name?
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I can't remember from the from the first one.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Sure, yeah, yeah, So Terry Silver's place is the ultimate
brutalist bad guy lair, and it is the Ennis House
in Los Angeles that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Is that the Hell House or Hillhouse?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I don't know. I mean it's called the N's House.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Because I've been at some Frank Lloyd Wright houses in
Los Angeles and they're pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, I mean, he's He definitely was not known as
the brutalist architect, but there are a handful of his
designs and if you look at Ennis House, it is
like like super brutalist. And then when I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
I saw the the West Hope House in Tulsa. Frank
(25:17):
Lloyd right, Also, I think, if not purely brutalist, fairly brutalist.
And then like you look at the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim
is sort of brutalist as well.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I don't know if you could call it if you're
a brutalist purist, a purialist. Jeez, if you would count
the Guggenheim, because it's the concrete is much more smooth,
but it's not not brutalist, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
No, And I was mistaken. It's not Hill House. It's
the house on Haunted Hill is what that that Ennis
House stood in for. But it is super brutalist. And
it's funny because you had mentioned that the Mayan architecture
seems brutalist now, but it wasn't originally. It very much echoes. Yeah,
some sort of mezzo American architecture, almost like a mishmash
(26:03):
of it.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, for sure, but it's you know, this is sort
of what I was getting at, Like all of these
reasons that people hate brutalism is why we are losing
so many great brutalist buildings in the world. It's not
a hard sell to tear these things down a lot
of times in a city.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
No, And I have to say one other thing, the
hatred of brutalism also is sometimes associated, depending on your
political beliefs, it's associated with the welfare state, because so
many were built as public housing. And so if you were, say,
you know, right leaning, or probably very far to the right,
(26:43):
you hate brutalism for that very reason. And it also
is no coincidence that the era of brutalism ended abruptly
at nineteen eighty, which is the time when Reagan and
Thatcher came to power and the welfare state was like, nope,
no more welfare state, or we're going to cut it
so early that we're certainly not going to invest in
any brutalist architecture any longer. And it became associated not
(27:05):
just with totalitarian governments of the Eastern Bloc here in
the United States, it also became associated on the right
with welfare. And the right doesn't really like welfare very much,
so they don't like brutalist architecture. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah, super like they were looked at as blits a
lot of times.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Well, they became that way too, and that's that's another
reason why that they're they're under such attack. They show
their age pretty pretty poorly.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Right, Yeah, over the years because they're not adorned, because
they have that rough concrete finish, water damage can happen
a lot to cake can be really more evident. I
think that Paul Rudolph, he's a and when you say,
you know famous brutalist architect is you got to be
in the know to kind of know these names.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
It's not like a Frank Lloyd, right, But Paul Rudolph's
Orange County Government Center in Gosha, New York was torn down.
If you look this thing up, it is amazing looking.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah. I became a fan of Paul Rudolph's researching this.
I'd never heard of him before, but he was good.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
That building is unbelievable. But they tore it down. And
it wasn't just because like, oh look at this big
blockie thing, but apparently it leaked from day one. There
was constant mold, there were always water issues. They were
having to closed courtrooms and move them around. And they
just did a cost study and it was like, retrofitting
(28:29):
and making this thing a workable government center isn't even feasible,
so they tore it down.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
So I had a hard time getting to the bottom
of this because I saw plenty of places that it
was torn down. I also saw that it was going
to be torn down, but they decided to do a
retrofit or a rehab of it instead, and that the update,
the refresh of it was so faithless to the original
that it's no longer a brutalist building. I saw it
(28:56):
described as disfigured.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, but either way, Paul Rudolph seems to be I
think arch mag called him the unluckiest architect ever. Arc
mag Is it arc or.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Arch Is it architecture?
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Well, why don't you just call it arc mag? Then
why do you have to add the H and make
me look stupid in front of everybody.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I'm with you, I think it's kind of an awkward name.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, anyway, arc Slash arch Mag called him the unluckiest
architect around because so many of Paul Rudolph's buildings are
just being torn down left and right, and I don't
even know that it's a distinct dislike of Paul Rudolph's work.
I think it's just people are tearing brutalist buildings down,
(29:45):
and his happened to be being torn down at a
faster rate than other architects brutalist buildings.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
And I know we're going to get email from someone
who works at that magazine that's like Chuck didn't know
what he's talking about. We call it arc mag right exactly,
Chocha's right mag Other buildings. Architect named Bertrand Goldberg designed
the Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago that was torn down. Yeah,
it was gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, how are you going to look at that and
be like that's an ugly building. It was a a
elevated clover made of concrete. It was. It was gorgeous
for sure, And at the very least, even if you
don't think these buildings are gorgeous, I get that, but
they're they're they're admirable for sure, like they're they're amazing
(30:32):
achievements for sure. I just don't think that they're ugly
across the board. I think there's plenty of amazing brutalist buildings.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Out there, oh totally. It also doesn't help that and
I think you found stuff from Jessica Stewart in My
Modern met and Bigonia BESCO's great name in Arca magazine.
That's a lot easier that they both talked about the
fact that these are basically that they can be kind
of a symbol of human abandonment, as what they said
(30:59):
in Arkham magazine. And if it starts to decay, it's
got these big, open bear concrete walls, so like obviously vandalism,
it's just gonna be. It's a it's a perfect canvas
for something like that. And I think Jessica Stewart's the
one that said they you know, they basically symbolized urban
decay at one point, and economic economic hardship.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right, yeah, that failure of the welfare state. And because
they show their neglects so readily, because they're unadorned, because
they're exposed concrete, they stood as symbols of like, yeah, look,
how look how what a bad idea welfare is? Like
it's just like this building is like a symbol of that.
And by the way I've I've been pronouncing it ersa magazine.
(31:45):
Oh is that not right?
Speaker 2 (31:49):
All right, we should take a break. We're gonna call
these magazines up and get get the record set straight
and then we'll be right back after this.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
So, Chuck, I'm glad you said Paul Rudolph's Orange County
Government Center was in Goshen, New York, because I definitely
would have said, gosh and no joke. And just want
to say one more thing about that it had. It
was made of three buildings. It had eighty seven roofs.
Just wrap your head around that for a second, right exactly,
(32:42):
But that's just just wonderful. Look up some of Paul
Rudolph's work and you're gonna be like, this is super
seventy's awesomeness. Like that guy was talented.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, totally. I think a lot of Frankloyd writes stuff
leaked though as well.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, he was very famous for like some guy he
designed a house for said the roof is leaking on
my desk, and Frank Floyd right, so move the desk
if you ask me, these guys get way too much
of a pass, like, because part of architecture is to
make a building that doesn't leak too In addition to
making it awesome, it's.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Got to function as a as a place to live
in or work in.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Exactly when we were in Mexico City. We went with
our two friends Mitch and Patrick, who are architects and designers,
and I was explaining that to them too, and they're like, yeah,
it's absolutely true. I was expecting pushback or whatever. They're like, no, no,
like they people. People do give famous architects way too
much of a pass, especially former legendary ones. Hopefully I
(33:38):
didn't just get Mitch and Patrick in trouble.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
I don't think. So. Okay, they're out of the they're
out of the club now, right. So if you're as
far as brutalism coming back, it is coming back in
certain ways. They're they're definitely. Even if you don't have
like a let let's say you have like a modern house,
or even not a modern house, you can decorate interior
(34:00):
in a little bit more brutalish style, and you know,
sometimes just a touch or two of that kind of
thing can really give you what you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
I'm not a big fan of that. Our house stuff
Works office used to be I guess new brutalist interior design.
It kind of chucked the boxes. I was never comfortable
there now.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
I mean, isn't every office that's got concrete walls and
exposed air ducts and edison bulbs, aren't they're all sort
of new brutalists.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Right kind of Yeah. And also it seems like little
geometric pattern copper knickknacks on shelves that float that don't
really serve that much of a purpose. They're just decorative.
I don't like that either.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
We had that great mural though, really warmed that that
plays up it did.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
I wonder what happened to that because we're not in
that building anymore, but surely they preserve the mural in.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
That question mark table. Where the heck is that thing?
Speaker 1 (34:57):
I don't know in space? I think.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Here though, in the twenty twenties, brutalism as an actual
architectural style is making a bit of a comeback. Like
I said, I've seen quite a few houses in the
neighboring neighborhoods that are Some are just sort of like,
you know, Hi, we're a blocky house, so that's more modern.
But there are a couple that are are true brutalist,
(35:24):
like concrete layers.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
It looks like there was a triumphant brutalist refurbishment here
in Atlanta back in twenty eighteen. The Central Atlanta Library
in downtown was designed by Marcel Brewer. Amazing building, but
apparently that was the last work that Brewer completed before
he died, and I guess some of the design and
(35:49):
some of the actual construction didn't quite jibe, and some
of his original intentions were covered up. Like there was
an elevator that had to be centrally placed. That just
screwed things up quite a bit. And then they came
along and they added more lights, they refurbished the place,
they got rid of that central elevator, they opened it up.
There was a there's like a zigzagging staircase that's amazing.
(36:11):
That's now much more prominent, And in doing so, they
actually made the building closer to Marcel Brewer's original intentions
with his design than it was when it was built
when Marcel Brewer was still alive. So like, that's an
example of the ideal of what's being done with brutalist buildings.
(36:31):
The opposite end is that they're being torn down because
people vote them as like the ugliest building of all time?
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Right, should we rattle off some of these famous ones? Yes, well,
architecture architect wise, is it Lewis or Louis? I never know.
I think Lewis, but Lewis Khan was usually the first
nam ial here. If people are kind of throwing the
(36:56):
brutalist architect name around.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, and I mean, like you can make a pretty
good case that brutalism. I don't know if it's because
the buildings were meant to take center stage or whatever,
but there aren't. It's just not household names compared to
other movements, you know what I mean. Lewis Khan is
definitely far and away the most famous, but I saw
that he's technically not even a brutalist. He just used
brutalist elements. There are some like we talked about Paul
(37:23):
Rudolph of Vegenza, Sleigh Richter, Marcel Brewer. There's a lot
of other really great I think Erno Goldfinger people you
just have never heard of. These are just random names.
It sounds like that a writer made up. No, they're
actually legit architects. They just aren't. Like this movement didn't
(37:44):
have like star power like some of the other movements did.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, and like we said, like Frank Lloyd Wright has
done a thing or two, but he's not known for that.
I am pay has dabbled in it in New York city.
If you see kIPS Bay Plaza by impay, very much brutalist,
but that's not how you know his name was made.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
No, no, but there are ones there like Nope, I'm
brutalists through and through. The Smithson's obviously were brutalists because
they founded the movement and one of the things they
completed was robin Hood Gardens, which was a housing estate
from nineteen seventy two and it was.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
It's okay, brutal as brutal as brutalism gets it is.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
And part of it was demolished, just part of it right,
and it was actually acquired. Three stories of the building
were acquired by the Victorian Albert Museum to preserve it
because it's just such a fine example of brutalist architecture,
even though to me it's kind of ugly. But London,
because this was the epicenter of the brutalist movement, the
(38:48):
creation of it, it has a lot of good examples
of really good brutalist buildings. What Prince Charles has to
say about them, notwithstanding.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, King Charles, but he Prince when he said that
the Royal National Theater of London was a quote clever
way of building a nuclear power station in the middle
of London without anyone objecting, right, I think it's cool looking.
I like it.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, I was gonna say it's hilarious. But he's a
madman for saying that. I think he came up with
a clever quip and was going to use it at
all costs, because anyone who looks at the Royal National
Theater it isn't like that's an amazing building, is wrong.
I'm sorry. Wrong.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah. It was also at the time, Princess Charles's best
stab at it telling a joke.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Well, he was apparently well known for being a mean
critic in the media about architecture in particular. I didn't
realize that, but that was like one of his greatest
hits from what I can tell. But the thing about
the Royal National Theater, it had really great horizontal and
vertical lines that were harmonious, which can be unusual for
(39:55):
a brutalist building, but even more unusual, it fit the
site that it's it's on. It's not imposed like every
other brutalist building of all time. If there's ever been
a brutalist building that fit the site that Royal National Theater,
is it.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yeah, for sure? For my money. If you want to
have your socks knocked off by a blocky architectural gym,
then you should go to Montreal and look at Safti's
habitat sixty seven. It was built for the nineteen sixty
seven World Spare there in Montreal, and it is super
cool looking. It looks like something a child might build
(40:34):
out of building blocks.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
I've got one. The Peace Center in Hiroshima. I really
feel like every American should go there. It's amazing. The
Japanese in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed
by nuclear bombs, their response was to build this peace
center to preserve what happened for generations to come, so
that it never happened again. They turned peacenik rather than
(41:01):
retributive or vengeance. It's a pretty amazing response if you
think about it. And so it's a pretty amazing center.
And Kenzo Tonge, who was a student of like Corbusier,
started it in nineteen fifty and it's just a long
rectangular structure that seems to be kind of floating on
(41:22):
the horizon. It's just a really amazing place, really amazing museum.
It just has a it's just it gets you in
ways that like I'd never been gotten before.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Just five years after the bomb was dropped too, so
that like how heavy was that still in the air,
you know?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Yeah, and I mean in Hiroshima, like it's I mean,
it's a part of the town. Oh, they preserved a
bank that was just completely wasted, but the frame was
still there. It's preserved. They build a fence around it
and the blocks are still where they landed after the
bomb was dropped, like it they didn't touch it after that,
They just cording it. Often now it's part of this
(42:02):
the museum. Parts of the city, entire parts of the
city have become part of this living outdoor museum. It's
just amazing.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Japan. It's got to happen for me one day.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yes it does. And seriously, go to Hiroshima. It's really something. Yeah,
it's also a really cool town too. In addition to
the whole museum segment on it.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Right, if you go to Tunisia and tunis the hotel
do lack and if you look at the if you
look at that building and you say, man, if you
chopped off the back of that thing, that would be
a sand crawler that the jaw was rolled around in
in Star Wars, then you would probably not be surprised
to know that and supposedly inspired George Lucas. I say
(42:47):
it had to have been, because when you look at
that building, it looks just like that thing, that inverted pyramid.
Four hundred and sixteen rooms over ten floors. It's really something,
and inverted pyramids are sort of a brutalless thing as well.
But it's a great example.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, And I mean it was open in seventy three
and he was there shooting in the like years later,
so it was definitely there in Tuness while he was there,
So I buy that totally. One of the most famous
brutalist buildings in the United States, if not in the world,
is the Geyisol Library you see San Diego. It was
originally called the Central Library, but Ted Geisel, doctor Seuss's widow, Audrey,
(43:25):
donated twenty million dollars in the university said let's just
rename it in honor of you.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
And Ted, well, she said ten million dollars and they
kept the name, and she was like fifteen, right, and
then she said, what do I gotta do to get
our name on the front of that thing?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Right?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
This building is amazing. I mean, and this is again
as an example of how like just sort of the
variety that you can find in a brutalist building when
you look at this compared to the robin Hood Gardens
building in London.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Right, yeah, this one really prominently makes use of glass,
which can be rare for a brutalist building. And yet
when you look at it, you're like, that is a
brutalist building. It's just an amazing, beautiful brutalist building.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, I love it. I can't wait go back to
Mexico City and see some of that stuff for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Also, I would strongly advise anyone not to make a
drinking game out of how often we say brutalist in
this episode, because we said it a lot.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
They already have drinking games of all that stuff on Reddit.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
I know, but don't do this one because you would die.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Soone said I counted how many times you said like
in the like episode, and I was like, well, yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
It was kind of the name of the episode.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
How many times did we say lama in the Lama episode?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Right?
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Well, Plus we had our additional likes because we talk
like regular people.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
One other thing too, Chuck, if you want to see
cool post apocalyptic brutalist architecture used really adeptly an illustration.
Go check out Eternal Dystopia's YouTube videos. Did I send
you that one called Research Center? It's like drone music,
but it's the video is like just this. It's like this,
(45:11):
like a dystopian brutalist building, kind of set in the
haze and sometimes it's raining. I'll send it to you again.
It's really amazing. But the drone music alone is pretty cool.
So check that out.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
You had the drone lately.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
I am because it's not distracting. It helps you. Yeah,
it helps me focus, you know, I like it. Well,
check said he likes it, which means everybody that it's
time for listener maw.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yeah. Oh boy, it's another correction. But Josh, this one
is on me.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Okay, now you're talking.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
I think the first one may have been on us.
But in the Nuclear Boy Scott episode, we said USS
Enterprise was a nuclear submarine. Yeah, it's in fact an
aircraft carrier. But the big one was when we had
our sort of brief debate about military discharge and I
was just wrong, wrong, wrong, because I thought if you
just served all your time, then they just called it
(46:02):
leaving the military.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, you just stopped showing up one day.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
You just stop showing up, or you call it retirement
or whatever. I didn't think it was. I thought any
time you left before your time was up was the
only time it was called the discharge. Sure not. So
we heard from a lot of our current service members
and veterans, but this one's from Scott Oliver. He said, guys,
what Chuck said was not correct. Any way you leave
(46:27):
the service is some form of discharge. And then he
goes over this was the most detailed one. So we're
going to read these discharges. You got the honorable discharge.
It's the highest level, given to those who complete their
service and are discharged or are discharged early for no
faults of their own, like a medical issue. That's what
you want to shoot for.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
General discharge lower level, but given to those who have
like a minor misconduct or a performance issue. I was
going to hazard a comical guess on what that might be,
but I'm not gonna. Okay, there's other than honorable or
the ot H. That's a negative level. So now you've
crossed the rubicon and you're not good anymore. And it's
(47:10):
given to people who have serious misconduct or violations of regulations.
Then there are two more. You've got the bad conduct
discharge or the BCD. This is actually punitive, and that
is if you were convicted by a court martial for
something like desertion or assault or there and then you
know we've got last, don't you. Yeah, dishonorable and that
(47:34):
is a punishment for a serious offense, like committing a felony.
Sorry for being pedantic, guys, you weren't at all, Scott.
But as a veteran, I find myself particularly attuned to
Roney's statements about military matters, and that's every veteran, Scott,
So you're in good company, and we heard from a
lot of service members and all apologies for screwing that up.
(47:55):
Sometimes when I say things off the dome without researching,
quite often in fact, i'm dead wrong.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Man. Well, you really owned it, Chuck, like somebody with
an honorable discharge.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
It was Scott Scott Oliver. Thanks a lot, Scott. You
weren't pedantic at all. Chuck's right. That was very nicely
put and we appreciate being schooled. And also, Chuck, thank
you for selecting one where you were wronging, not me.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, I guess we were military school.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
If you want to get in touch of this like
Scott did and school us and do it nicely. We
love that kind of thing, you can send it in
an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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