Such a great point. Supposedly, when the USC Village in Los Angeles was being constructed (which if you're not familiar, is a massive development similar in style to the first building shown), they had to opt for brick panels because there literally were not enough bricklayers in Los Angeles to complete it in the target timeframe!

Could use different audio mixing in future videos, but I’m looking forward to their career

@@justanothercommercial but do you really need background music all the way through??

Appreciate the feedback-this is helpful and didn't come up from my test viewers. On my end in my editor, vocals were about double the loudness of music, but I can look to bump that up in the future. Appreciate the feedback once again!

You're touching on the wonderfully difficult subject of architectural honesty! I think your point is well made, the difficulty so much these days is that materially, things just are not what they appear. I think at the extreme, some modern facades have so many layers that the exterior expression cannot be directly connected to the materiality of the interior (or should not be, for physical properties). Even when comparing the historic buildings on the USC campus, steel frames are found behind brick walls of buildings built in the 20s. Is therefore thinking it them to be brick buildings dishonest? I don't necessarily think so, but I find it more fun to pose these questions rather than look for deterministic answers! 😏

A designer friend of mine is especially interested in the architectural development of South Korea, and from what he's shared with me, you're spot on. Countries that have undertaken (or are undertaking) rapid economic and built-environment development are curious, as often, design becomes subject to pragmatic needs. That, or design is used to prop up a picture of some society of the future (perhaps the case with Brasília). I don't envy the planners and architects who have to handle such rapid development while trying to design with elegance!

In literature people talk about the death of the author. That is to say that the meaning of a text is not derived from the author's intent, but rather the reader's interpretation. Perhaps the same idea can be applied to architecture.

@@TheAnimatedFish That's a good idea. Reading the OP's comment, though, I think the intent and the interpretation of Brutalism (in particular) are the same. The fact that Brutalism is objectively ugly seems to be the point.

Brutalism and "modern" architecture gets a bad rap, and not one that it necessarily deserves. 1. Post industrial revolution, the human population has grown exponentially, which didn't used to be the case. Beyond expense, it's just not practical to spend the better part of a decade on a building anymore. 2. Historical buildings are subject to survivor bias. People generally already tore down the ugly ones. The "everything in the past was nicer" narrative is just not true. There were always buildings that were ugly, or needed to be put up cheaply. They just don't tend to stand the test of time. And when they do it's out of nostalgia. 3. Almost all architectural styles that people call "modern" (almost anything post art deco) aren't designed the way older buildings were designed. "Modern" spaces are designed from the inside out, and are designed to be more pleasant for the people inside rather than the people walking by them. For example, a lot of Mies van der Rohe's buildings are pretty unremarkable on the outside, but the interior spaces are gorgeous. A lot of brutalist buildings work the same way, where they're either bland or confusing on the outside, but you have a sensible layout and lots of open space on the inside. Judging buildings just on the experience of passing by them is pretty dumb.

Love the discussion here! On these notes, I find the current flocking to Brutalism, with whole Instagram accounts dedicated to it, quite intriguing! Maybe it has fully settled into being an aesthetic mode? (Perhaps ironically, given it stems from an absence of such thinking...) In our architecturally post-postmodern world, what is striking to me is that bad design can look either mode of design-architecturally ornamented with lovely, albeit often copy-pasted details, or these sorts of massive, stark buildings that seem lifeless. Much is consistent in the underlying design technology. The design challenge then becomes finding dwellers' preferences and aesthetically designing towards them, while bringing in the designer's expertise regarding history, context, etc. This is to say, the designer should constantly be looking up to see the people their building will impact! I imagine iconic architecture may be difficult to design with this thinking, simply as there is a lack of patterns to gauge dwellers' interests when trying to make a 'splash.'

​@@TheAnimatedFish I like that. Near me there's a square with a paved path going around it and grass in the middle. But the quickest way from point A to point B is diagonally, so there's now a muddy path cut out into the grass. Whatever the architect wanted, however they imagined the place being used, that's not how people use it. Meanwhile Dark, counterintuitive, hard to navigate corridors in brutalist council blocks are perfect for dealing drugs, whatever the original intention was.