Brutalist architecture

But, yeah.

But, related to Minecraft, I've come across this little cosy sandbox game on Itch called Tiny Brutalism, which I guess it's actually potentially been around a little while.

I'm not 100% sure when was this.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

And I think there are buildings that lift the spirits and sometimes it could lift the spirits even if you're not sure if you like it.

It's a bit like Jonathan Meads' comment when he was doing his series on Brutalism on television.

And he said, small may be beautiful, but big is sublime.

I think no conversations about that and about scale are the sort of thing that you get at Good Chris.

It's very similar.

But brutalist architecture has a very particular signature.

So the Casa Wabi was what sent people down that sort of rabbit hole about the architecture in general.

And what's interesting, if she was intentionally signaling Casa Wabi, is that the wall at Casa Wabi has a dividing line between public and private.

That's what the wall does.

It's an artist's sort of sanctuary, and the artists have private area, and then there's public area.

And so if you believe that she was trying to say anything, this dividing line between public and private brutalist architecture, which Casa Wabi is very famous for, Joalwyn was in a film called The Brutalist.

And so that becomes a little bit interesting to me.

Matthias Drilling there, and my thanks to him.

Lastly today, we head to the Brutalist icon that is London's Barbican Centre.

The Barbican Conservatory, a vast greenhouse and botanical garden contained within the complex, is about to undergo a three-year renovation and has been giving out cuttings of its plants to the public for adoption as part of its process of shutting down for the upcoming improvements.

Monocle's Hannah Lucinda Smith spoke to some of the people behind the conservatory, the refurbishment, and the plant adoption scheme to find out more.

[upbeat music] In the heart of the city of London is a garden, a secret garden, in a glass house built onto a corner of the Barbican Centre, the iconic Brutalist estate and cultural hub that was built for city workers and opened in nineteen eighty-two.

The Barbican Conservatory adjoins a concrete tower that houses the pulley system above the theater's stage.

It's an elegant, modernist structure of white frames and glass that scales fifteen meters and covers a footprint of more than two thousand square meters.

In stark contrast, Brutalist architecture, which dominated the mid-20th century, features massive, monolithic structures made of raw, unadorned concrete.

It emphasizes absolute functionality, repetitive geometric patterns, and a complete lack of decorative flourish.

Brutalism is often historically associated with totalitarian regimes, bureaucratic power, and cold industrial efficiency.

Games like Control use brutalist architecture to brilliant effect, creating an environment that feels imposing, clinical, and completely indifferent to human presence.

The architecture itself tells the story of an enigmatic, powerful institution.

there is a there is a a sort of a scary starkness to it like a soul like a soullessness that is still somehow interesting

um well there was um uh one of the other interviews i i saw it was there was a making of control that had like someone it wasn't like remedies official site it might have come from like one of the bonus features on the game or something like that because it was like a five part the whole video was like 20 minutes long but it was like five parts split up amongst those 20 minutes and one of the things was talking about the the the look of the game but the brutalism was intentional because it's it's it matches the theme of the title you know it's control brutalism represents the idea of control and i i'm using the the direct quote of i forget i'm so sorry to the woman there was a woman who was saying it on there and i should have written it down and i i wrote it down for everyone else and i didn't write it down for her because i'm woefully unprepared apparently.

But she was saying how it was, you know, what is it? Brutalism represents the idea of control, concrete, straight lines, rigidity, I guess.

Things like Jesse and the Hiss are in contrast to the brutalist nature of The Oldest House.

So like they made The Oldest House, the setting of the game, look the way it did so that way when all the events that have happened to it, it's in stark contrast to what kind of like the theme of the house is, just concrete straight lines and rigidness.

Oh, I know where you're going with this.

Brutalism.

Yes.

Brutalism.

Context is absolutely vital here if we want to understand it.

Paint the picture for us.

They didn't have the money or the time.

So architects turned to poured concrete.

making it one of the earliest major historic preservation projects in the U.S. By the 1960s, however, they had outgrown the Octagon, so they organized a design competition for a purpose-built headquarters.

The project was ultimately awarded to the Architects Collaborative, and in 1973, the new seven-story, Brutalist-style building was complete.

Sited just beyond the octagon, it was shaped like a boomerang, partly to accommodate the wedge-shaped parcel of land it was on, and partly to signal an embrace of the AIA's first home.

As innovative as some of the precast concrete features of the brutalist building were at the time, much has changed since 1973.

And it was designed

in the style of Brutalism,

which is large concrete blocks, which was very much in style at the time that it was made.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea approved the construction in 1970, and they finally started building the tower in 1972.

from.

So, you know, it's rather interesting to look at other examples, sort of the Brutalist movement.

This is the Holy Spirit Parish, church in Berkeley, California that our western province Dominicans have inherited from the Paulists.

And they're figuring out how to do this, how to handle it.