The beauty of concrete

Works in Progress ^ | 05/17/2024 | Samuel Hughes

[Deaf Smith]

Do not forget the house sized foundations for the wind turbines.
They will be there forever.

[BipolarBob]

[GSWarrior]

The answer lies within the pages of The Fountainhead.

[Da Coyote]

Gasp, depends upon the definition of “beauty”.
There are a few (very few) concrete structures that do not induce nausea.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

"Beauty" -- ugliest building material ever! It belongs in prestressed floors and bridge abutments.

Here is concrete "Brutalism" at its finest going up in Chicago right now as a grand testament to our greatest and most egotistical president ever...

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One of the earliest reinforced concrete buildings constructed in the United States was the Pacific Coast Borax Company's refinery in Alameda, California, designed by Ernest L. Ransome and built in 1893. It was the first to use ribbed floor construction as well as concrete columns.

It should have stayed a structural material in floors and columns then covered with something beautiful.

[ClearCase_guy]

Brutalist architecture is just amazing. It’s an excellent way to tell the world that you are now living under a Stalinist dictatorship and all the good times are in the past. Boston has a fair amount of the stuff.

[OldHarbor]

Vaillancourt Fountain,San Francisco, designed by Canadian Frog

[Magnum44]

Concrete makes it so much easier to hide the bodies....

[Steely Tom]

I’ve noticed that all those “Brut” poured-concrete buildings that I associate with my youth have not aged well.

Rust stains, cracks, foggy windows, painted-over graffiti, bird droppings, don’t look good on geometric planes at weird angles and big, blocky cantilevered masses.

The classic-style buildings seem to wear the decades and centuries much better. Their dignity doesn’t seem as easily stained, for some reason.

[Dr. Sivana]

Well, it is within a short walk to the similarly brutalizt Regenstein Library, with the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House and some Gothic stuff in between. Not to mention Pick Hall which isn’t even brutalist. Ida Noyes and Harper must be embarrased to share the same neighborhood.

[Kudsman]

Gee. Did any group of people seek to blobize our art? Feel like that was an incremental change that may be blossoming.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Yes, there's no beautiful architecture and construction like Stalinist Soviet housing beauty.

[21twelve]

That obama library looks just like the Soviet buildings yet with some modern flairs. The left doesn’t even try to hide it anymore, do they!

[Steely Tom]

Brutalist architecture is just amazing. It’s an excellent way to tell the world that you are now living under a Stalinist dictatorship and all the good times are in the past. Boston has a fair amount of the stuff.

Your remark reminded me of a great line I heard in the introduction to a documentary about some South American country, maybe Argentina: "Its a country with a great future behind it."

[SaxxonWoods]

“Their dignity doesn’t seem as easily stained, for some reason.”

The old buildings display patina. The newer ones display rust and rot.

[Steely Tom]

That looks like North Korea.

Flying north from Shanghai to Beijing, I saw some of the most enormous apartment blocks I’ve ever seen in my life.
The long buildings were so close together and so numerous, they reminded me of a plowed field, or a radiator.

[billorites]

Compare the Pantheon to the Boston City Hall.

[sauropod]

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[Larry Lucido]

Two clement pourers walk into rebar...