Concrete is a wonderfully plastic material that can easily be molded into interesting designs and shapes with **color**
. Why don’t architects take advantage of this amazingly substance? Why the stark straight lines? Why this dreadful putty color?
Those buildings are from a school of architecture called "brutalism." Wikipedia mentions that the architectural philosophy is associated with totalitarianism, and socialist utopianism (surprise!). If you search on "worst communist buildings," it's all you'll find. It was a popular architectural style in the '60s and 70s.
A very enlightening book on the philosophy behind modern architecture is, "Living Machings: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology," by E. Michael Jones. Walter Gropius, like other modern icons, such as Kinsey and Keynes, was a degenerate. The idea behind the modern apartment building was to facilitate sexual promiscuity, destroy the family, and promote socialism. If anyone has ever lived in a college dorm...