The former Berkeley Art Museum designed by Mario Ciampi is a gem of the form. The subdivision of space in the interior and the crazy cantilevered balconies are stunning (and guessing a key element of the seismic unsuitability factor). It’s a shame that it’s not usable at this point for that reason. Getting to see The Residents play a free show in that space was unforgettable.
As inorganic as all that concrete is, gotta say though - I find the modern trend of cladding every surface of institutional structures with dangly sheet metal facades to be even more unsettling (a la’ Frank Gehry and his unstable looking armadillo blobjects).
Only it isn’t a nightmare dystopian future in literature, it’s a really nice place to live. Even more sought after:
Than leafy suburban Shepperton where Ballard lived:
But London does have a nightmare dystopian present in housing and it’s not brutalist design or central planning but rather the failure by design of the neoliberal state to provide municipal resources. The old council estates were sold off and were in private hands for about ten minutes before the current predatory situation of vulture funds and offshore REITs took over. And people are then expected to live in hellholes of contemporary flat pack buildings:
A future Ballard was Ill equipped to envisage.
ETA
I don’t think we should build with so much concrete, it’s polluting to manufacture and thermally inefficient for housing. But I also think we need to reconsider turning so much of the built environment into landfill and starting again. These are buildings often not given an opportunity to learn. We can do better than wastefully destroy the concrete and replace it with steel and flatpack which will also be bulldozed in maybe 20 years.
“The new neighbours moving in, I think they’re Brutalists!”
“And why do you say that?”
“A vague sense of stark and looming institutionalism.”
“Oh dear…”
This is very true, although I’d argue that this situation contributes to people paying a premium to live in such an ugly, bleak, fortress-like complex.
Also, most of those listings were for Barbican-adjacent properties (one hopes without views of the eyesore – one of the few benefits of living in a brutalist building is not having to look at it). Interesting to peek inside the ones in the complex, though: brutalism totally erased from the interiors, although the badly laid out floor plans typical of the genre remain.
In the U.S., the future poor will also be expected to live in sub-divided (and, yes, ugly) exurban McMansions. In the urban core, converting commercial and industrial spaces into pleasant and attractive residential spaces is entirely possible, but it’s also very expensive. In the UK and the U.S., that kind of money isn’t applied to affordable housing, so those conversions end up unpleasant, ugly and uninhabitable like those described in the article.
I agree. When it comes to brutalist buildings, the trend seems to be to break up the stark facades with colourful panelling or murals, to expand windows where possible, and to add air shafts and skylights to bring in the human-friendly elements that the original designers thought were superfluous. Of course, the remaining proponents of brutalism complain bitterly about these changes. And British people are all too familiar with what happens when an attempt to make a concrete eyesore look more attractive is done on the cheap.
