Having grown up in a working class family, I find it strange that western hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture. It's an environment that I grew up hoping to escape from. But architectural styles come in and out of fashion, and yesterday's factories and warehouses are being converted into coffee shops and homes that people love and pay a premium for.
In particular, the neighborhood that my parents lived and worked in is now a very expensive and trendy part of town. There's little industry left; in fact a lot of local companies are complaining that there's not enough warehouse space left to rent, because it's all being converted into lofts! Sadly my family sold out way before it became cool :(
I've heard it said that it's the styles that have just recently gone out of fashion that are the least fashionable, whereas the styles that have been out of fashion for longer often make a comeback. This applies to clothes, cars, music, and architecture too.
So one thing I've wondered is: if the industrial style could go from being considered ugly to being loved, is it possible that this could happen to another style of architecture/design that we all currently consider to be an eyesore? And what style would be next?
It makes a lot of sense that Brutalism would be it, and maybe these Singaporeans are just ahead of the curve.
Brutalism's pretty much always been a "love it or hate it" thing; even in its heyday a lot of people hated it. I think it's too divisive to ever solidly come back; it was never really there in the first place.
One guess in London will be young middle class people living in delapidated council houses? It sounds stupid now but what else is cheap in the centre? I was living in one a couple of years ago and they're ironically often more spacious than new=builds. Known several friends do the same. Also, will the centre shift southeast?
I guess the relevant question is whether and which businesses follow the pricy housing shift. Like I can't see finance moving from old street/c wharf, but you find tech up towards Kings Cross and at the Eastern side of Old street? And tech is basically the new finance. But those business moves seem a lot smaller than the amount that young prof.s seem to shift around in a couple of decades.
Edit: Another thought, this is a trend driven partly by destruction of council house stock, oligarchic money laundering, etc etc which has created extremely high prices in the centre. If that bubble pops and Brexit murders UK economy leading to a long period of price reduction, maybe young middle class people will go back to living in Kensington fancy houses/flats.
AFAICT it's not the style that grows loved; some things earn our affection by luck. Plus, locations change as cities grow.
Where I live there's a bit of a controversy now over a chimney. It's not the first chimney to be torn down, not even the first very tall one. Another tall chimney on a similar building in the opposite direction from where I live was torn down with no protests. But this one has come to be a bit of a landmark and people don't like to see it gone, eyesore or not.
I'd love to say that particularly well-planned buildings tend to earn people's affection. But I'm not sure that would be true. I am sure that location and changing technology play roles, though.
What was an cheap land in 1919 may now be centrally located, and the brickwork has a patina quite different from the plain, simple, low-detail surfaces that are often built now. Timber beams and brickwork may have been a cheap way to build, but it isn't now, so the materials have changed in our eyes even as the molecules stayed the same. We're not fond of the cheap things that are used for raised floors and lowered ceilings, and so that warehouse gets a bonus for being Not The Usual Ugly. Etc.
I've seen it argued that hipsters and architects love Brutalism precisely because it is so ugly and hard to love, it shows off sophistication. Case in point from OP:
> “The fact that people find it ugly means that it already has authenticity,” said Jonathan Poh, an architect who has an office on an upper floor.
If there is objectivity to beauty, it would deem brutalism as an example of ugliness.
I grew and studied around brutalist buildings and they are impersonal and humbling in the bad way: like when you visit a gothic church. Particularly because of the visible aesthetic decay of its materials.
So what is called "creative class" in the article promptly becomes "hipsters" in the HN comment section. And yes we already have the first comment calling for killing them.
> I find it strange that western hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture.
It is pretty easy to explain. Unattractive building in low-prestige neighborhoods are cheaper. If you don't care about conventional prestige and comfort you get more bang for the buck. If you want to predict what areas becomes "cool" next, just look at where prices are going down.
Explaining it all due to "fashion" is putting the cart before the horse.
The thing about warehouses is that they have high ceilings and big windows. So people started to associate the outsides of those buildings with the bright and spacious interiors.
>Having grown up in a working class family, I find it strange that western hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture. It's an environment that I grew up hoping to escape from.
For better or worse, a lot of people in that demographic (how many obviously depends on how you word the question) want parts or all of the eastern European social system of decades past. It should come as no surprise they want the architecture associated with it.
Singapore may have the world's best modern architecture. I used to be a skeptic of modern architecture but I really enjoy builidngs like the Interlace and Marina Bay Sands. One of many things that changed my thoughts when I was living there. Fantastic country and people.
I'm very curious to live there at some point in the next 5 years. What things would you have done differently if you could go back to when you first moved there?
Even though this article contrasts brutalist buildings with the more modern glass-and-steel aesthetic, I think both are products of their time and may age equally badly in the eyes of future generations. On the other hand, the architectural styles of the older, more historical buildings in New York, London, etc. seem to have aged well. In that they look old, but not "brutal". There may come a time when even the modern glass and steel facades will look brutal...
They've aged well because they were deemed worth saving after several decades. Since Penn, Euston stations the interest in saving as much as possible rather than just the best examples has caused some lesser quality old buildings to be kept.
Glass and steel dates to about the same time as brutalist concrete, maybe a few years earlier. International style is still going strong, brutalism came to be a abhored years ago.
Some ideas are just bad, not merely out of fashion, and history recognizes them as such.
The bland glass and steel "international style" aesthetic largely overlaps with and arguably predates the "brutalist" style though, and seems to have attracted rather less of a backlash.
another poster mentioned a recent article on similar buildings in Poland. For me it comes down to, is it perceived as an expression of the government and times for when it was built or was the expression of a people and times when it was built, the latter is much more forgiving.
Brutalism is a uniquely bad-looking part of architectural history - you can look anywhere in the world at any other point in history and you'll never find the same ugliness. My pet theory is that it's a style that was made to look good in black-and-white photographs at the expense of looking good in reality.
Next time you are in Singapore, go check out the Park View building. Make sure to explore the statues outside and go into the ground floor and be amazed.
Those Singaporean buildings look quite good and you can tell that they at least cared enough to build them properly and take care of them. I've seen some buildings built in that era in the UK, while travelling and I always found that they stood out, painfully, most of them eyesores.
On the opposite side of the spectrum to Singapore, as a Hungarian who had the bad luck to be born and grow up in Romania, I hope that one day it will be financially worth it for the country for these buildings to come down and be committed to the graveyard of bad memories. Imagine brutalist architecture built to be exactly the same, shoddily and cheaply, repeating endlessly across the landscape. Buildings where the goal was to stuff as many people in as cheaply as possible, buildings where each of them was built not according to plan but according to what materials were left when every worker and official stole their tiny bit.
For most people in the west, it would be one of the most severe types of punishment imaginable, having to be born, live and die in a depressing, prison-like environment like that.
Something about the stairs of the building in the main photo looks extremely dangerous, like one could easily fall off a side, or if someone were standing at the top of the stairs, they would have a clear shot into the open space if they jumped off.
Honestly those don't look as awful and oppressive as a lot of the european examples. This may be because the sun shines in Singapore from time to time... also they seem to at least have some concessions to form that is not pure function.
But still pretty ugly. I can't grok the mindset that asks for these to be protected, other than as a weird form of contrarianism.
Brutalism is a lot more interesting when you have a vague idea of the background of it => it's a kind of socialist/communist philosophy in architecture, pretty buildings are the enshrinement of social hierarchies into architecture, so build something that is egalitarian by nature - lots of identical units, function over form. Open spaces, honesty in the sense that the architecture shows you how it's really made with exposed concrete etc, not a facade. I guess you could argue that it's the lisp of architecture - no hiding the construction. I guess the point is that it's not mindlessly ugly, it's a statement about priorities and honesty in aesthetics.
[+] [-] quicklime|7 years ago|reply
In particular, the neighborhood that my parents lived and worked in is now a very expensive and trendy part of town. There's little industry left; in fact a lot of local companies are complaining that there's not enough warehouse space left to rent, because it's all being converted into lofts! Sadly my family sold out way before it became cool :(
I've heard it said that it's the styles that have just recently gone out of fashion that are the least fashionable, whereas the styles that have been out of fashion for longer often make a comeback. This applies to clothes, cars, music, and architecture too.
So one thing I've wondered is: if the industrial style could go from being considered ugly to being loved, is it possible that this could happen to another style of architecture/design that we all currently consider to be an eyesore? And what style would be next?
It makes a lot of sense that Brutalism would be it, and maybe these Singaporeans are just ahead of the curve.
[+] [-] rsynnott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimablue|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Another thought, this is a trend driven partly by destruction of council house stock, oligarchic money laundering, etc etc which has created extremely high prices in the centre. If that bubble pops and Brexit murders UK economy leading to a long period of price reduction, maybe young middle class people will go back to living in Kensington fancy houses/flats.
[+] [-] Arnt|7 years ago|reply
Where I live there's a bit of a controversy now over a chimney. It's not the first chimney to be torn down, not even the first very tall one. Another tall chimney on a similar building in the opposite direction from where I live was torn down with no protests. But this one has come to be a bit of a landmark and people don't like to see it gone, eyesore or not.
I'd love to say that particularly well-planned buildings tend to earn people's affection. But I'm not sure that would be true. I am sure that location and changing technology play roles, though.
What was an cheap land in 1919 may now be centrally located, and the brickwork has a patina quite different from the plain, simple, low-detail surfaces that are often built now. Timber beams and brickwork may have been a cheap way to build, but it isn't now, so the materials have changed in our eyes even as the molecules stayed the same. We're not fond of the cheap things that are used for raised floors and lowered ceilings, and so that warehouse gets a bonus for being Not The Usual Ugly. Etc.
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
That's because in post industrial neighbourhoods, the first people to move in are artists, which need lots of cheap space.
The artists then make the neighbourhood trendy and attract buyers looking for lofts.
Of course the lofts condos are just an imitation of the style of 'housing' that the artist pioneers live in.[1]
[1] Those lofts are definitely not glamorous. (poor insulation, drafty windows, improvised bathroom plumbing, plastic core for walls, etc...
[+] [-] gwern|7 years ago|reply
> “The fact that people find it ugly means that it already has authenticity,” said Jonathan Poh, an architect who has an office on an upper floor.
First against the wall, IMO.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] conanbatt|7 years ago|reply
I grew and studied around brutalist buildings and they are impersonal and humbling in the bad way: like when you visit a gothic church. Particularly because of the visible aesthetic decay of its materials.
I love hating brutalism though.
[+] [-] goto11|7 years ago|reply
> I find it strange that western hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture.
It is pretty easy to explain. Unattractive building in low-prestige neighborhoods are cheaper. If you don't care about conventional prestige and comfort you get more bang for the buck. If you want to predict what areas becomes "cool" next, just look at where prices are going down.
Explaining it all due to "fashion" is putting the cart before the horse.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GavinB|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|7 years ago|reply
Also offices for tech companies.
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|7 years ago|reply
For better or worse, a lot of people in that demographic (how many obviously depends on how you word the question) want parts or all of the eastern European social system of decades past. It should come as no surprise they want the architecture associated with it.
[+] [-] spacegod|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Antonio123123|7 years ago|reply
To me it looks like an old beach resort.
[+] [-] alexpetralia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hliyan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobylane|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
Some ideas are just bad, not merely out of fashion, and history recognizes them as such.
[+] [-] steve19|7 years ago|reply
They will continue designing in a style that wins awards and professional recognition, while the public are stuck with them for decades.
[+] [-] dickeytk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrogradeorbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|7 years ago|reply
Though I have heard that some of the companies there have trouble retaining staff due to rumours of haunting!
[+] [-] netsharc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beezischillin|7 years ago|reply
On the opposite side of the spectrum to Singapore, as a Hungarian who had the bad luck to be born and grow up in Romania, I hope that one day it will be financially worth it for the country for these buildings to come down and be committed to the graveyard of bad memories. Imagine brutalist architecture built to be exactly the same, shoddily and cheaply, repeating endlessly across the landscape. Buildings where the goal was to stuff as many people in as cheaply as possible, buildings where each of them was built not according to plan but according to what materials were left when every worker and official stole their tiny bit.
For most people in the west, it would be one of the most severe types of punishment imaginable, having to be born, live and die in a depressing, prison-like environment like that.
[+] [-] wilkskyes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Nursie|7 years ago|reply
But still pretty ugly. I can't grok the mindset that asks for these to be protected, other than as a weird form of contrarianism.
[+] [-] zimablue|7 years ago|reply