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SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_09: Hey, and welcome to the podcast.I'm Josh.There's Chuck.Ben's here sitting in for Jerry, which we're all very happy about.Frankly, that's our preference.
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_09: I'm kidding.And this is Stuff You Should Know.
SPEAKER_02: It's been a while since you've bagged on Jerry for no reason.
SPEAKER_09: I know.Things have felt weird.Now I just reset them again.
SPEAKER_02: I'm excited about this one.This is another, if you're listening at home, we would really encourage you to try and follow along by looking up some photographs.Yes.Of some of the things we mentioned, because obviously we're talking about a design style of architecture.Yeah.And those are always better when you can see some of this stuff and do so safely.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, because it's really difficult to describe a building in any really good terms, you know, or any way that you're just like, oh, I don't even need to see the picture of it.I totally got what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02: But we still try.
SPEAKER_09: We definitely still try.And probably of all the architecture there is, brutalist might be the easiest to describe without looking at it.Maybe.
SPEAKER_02: True.But then when you look at brutalist things, there's so much variety within that category.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.And if you hadn't guessed by now, we're talking about brutalism.If you didn't pick up from that exchange we just had or the title of this episode.And brutalist architecture, even if you don't know what it is, you have almost certainly witnessed it.Maybe even been inside a brutalist building because they're very often public buildings, as we'll see.And brutalism is probably the most... reviled, misunderstood, hated architecture of all time.It's just so easy to hate it.And so many people hate it for so many different, sometimes really weird reasons.But there also seems to be a renaissance in appreciating brutalism, which is arriving just in time because brutalist buildings are in really grave danger of being torn down and erased from architectural history all over the world.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.I learned a cool thing today, which I never knew before.And I thought about this when I was in Mexico City, which has a lot of great brutalist architecture.Yeah.Including, I mean, that airport's got to be brutalist, right?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.As a matter of fact, it's got to be.I think it is.I didn't see that.It didn't come up in my research.But yes, Mexico City has a ton of good brutalism.
SPEAKER_02: But when I was there, I noticed some things and I was like, and I saw a couple like sort of that echoed sort of pyramid style brutalism.And I was like, wait a minute.I was like, these look like ancient Mayan temples.And if you look up like an ancient Mayan temple or go visit one, like it's a totally brutalist thing.But I learned that apparently originally these temples were very ornate. I saw I can't remember where I got this, but I said they were as ornate as any neoclassical edifice in Europe.But they've been stripped down over the years from war and looting and just time.And they became brutalist in the end.
SPEAKER_09: Weird.That's fantastic and totally surprising.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so they weren't originally built that way, but when you look at a Mayan temple compared to some of these other office buildings, I'm like, you say this came around in England in the 1950s, and I say it came around long before that.
SPEAKER_09: So you hit upon something, though, that these Mayan temples are brutalist now, but they weren't before because they've been stripped of their decoration or whatever. That is brutalism.It's a type of architecture that from its outset, from the creation of the building, from design onward, it's meant to not have ornamentation.It's the skeleton of the building is the building.That's what brutalism is, or at least in part.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.And if you've ever – and like we said, we'll get into some of the variety within the style.But if you've ever seen a – like a huge concrete, unfinished sort of concrete-looking government building with the same little tiny windows, and it just looks like this – blocky monolith, that is brutalism staring you in the face.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.If you look at a building and suddenly Stalin just comes into your head, you're looking at a brutalist building almost certainly.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, or if you wonder what evil villain's lair that is, it's probably a brutalist building.
SPEAKER_09: Right, exactly.I also had a brutalist epiphany in Mexico City recently.When we were down there, we went to one of the museums, and they were having a brutalism exhibit.And it completely reversed my feelings about brutalism.I walked into that exhibit hating brutalism, and I walked out really appreciating it. And it turns out I didn't actually hate brutalism all this time.I hate ugly buildings, ugly, thoughtless, dumb, boring buildings.And that is not brutalism is not synonymous with that.It's gotten a bad name over the years.And part of it is even the name itself, brutalism.
A lot of people think that the whole term was coined to describe how the building makes you feel when you look at it.It's brutal.It's sharp.It's merciless.It has zero compassion.It's dehumanizing.That's not what the term brutalism means at all.It actually refers to a type of concrete that the French architect and designer Le Corbusier introduced called béton brut.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's en brut.I think the exact English translation is gross cement.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly, but they call it raw concrete.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly, which is to say just a raw, unfinished, poured concrete.There are a lot of houses in our surrounding neighborhoods in Atlanta now that are being built sort of in this style, these huge, big, concrete, blocky houses that are, I think, sort of a mishmash.It definitely echoes brutalism, but most of them still have a polished sort of concrete look to them, and that is not true, true brutalism.
SPEAKER_09: No, and there's a lot of overlap between modernism and brutalism.They both were going on at the same time.And some people say that brutalism emerged out of modernism.There's a big old, that's a hornet's nest that we're not going to get into.But just using exposed, unfinished concrete is not in and of itself a brutalist building.There's other elements as well that come into it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but I think an interesting thing is brutalism isn't – I mean you know and you see it, but it's something that – I saw this – I think it was a New York Times article that said it has always sort of lacked a really clear, well-articulated set of principles.I saw that.I didn't agree with that.I thought it was very articulated.Right. Oh, well, I think the I think what it means more is it there's there's so much variety within those principles.You can't say it's just this, because depending on what region you are in the world, the brutalist architecture is going to look different, whether it's, you know, Soviet Russia or postwar London or in Brazil, in Latin America, brutalism grew out of the modernist tradition.So stuff there looks quite a bit different than it does in other parts of the world.
SPEAKER_09: It does.I think that they all share in common a core set of principles that is brutalism.That's what I disagree with.I know that there's differences in all that.I didn't agree with that statement.I thought the New York Times got it wrong, wrong, wrong.
SPEAKER_02: I'm with them.I'm down.The paper record.
SPEAKER_09: Well, let's talk about where this came from, huh?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it came out of the post-war architectural rebuilding of so many cities around the world that were completely destroyed into rubble.And in particular, this one couple, Peter and Alison Smithson in England, saw bombed out London. And instead of seeing, you know, a big bombed out mess where like, oh, we have to rebuild it, you know, more ornate and grander than before, they saw an opportunity and were inspired and said, why don't we start using this rubble and build some sort of unfinished looking places?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.So it's almost like they, visually speaking, they used the rubble as the material to build the new buildings.And they didn't actually use that.But visually speaking, they did that.And it was, like you said, an acceptance of the current reality rather than a return to a previous reality, which is radical in and of itself. But that that was the essentially the Smithson's are credited with establishing brutalism as a as a architectural movement.Very frequently, they're a critic named Rainer Bannum. as credited with coining the term brutalism.That's wrong.He popularized it in a review of the Smithsons' work.
The Smithsons used it a couple of years before Bannum did.And a couple of years before that, a Swedish architect named Hans Asplund used it to describe a home that he designed in Uppsala called Via Goth. In 1949.So at least as far back as 1949, the term brutalism was being used.But you kind of dug up and you had said at the outset evidence that brutalism was around before that term was ever used, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think clearly they were inspired, inspired by stuff that came before them, maybe by Mayan temples and things like that.But no one was calling it brutalist, obviously, until then.And and I don't think it was like a bona fide, a bona fide architectural movement until the postwar, you know, sort of rebuilding.
SPEAKER_09: Right.And post-war, because of all the rebuilding that was going on, brutalism was widely adopted across Europe, not just in the West, but also in the Eastern Bloc, because World War II just ravaged that continent.And so a lot of countries had a lot of cities that needed to be rebuilt largely, and not just in Europe, in Japan primarily. Particularly in Okinawa, supposedly 10 to 20 percent of the buildings that were around before World War II were still around after.As much as 90 percent of the buildings were destroyed.So they had a lot of rebuilding to do.And it just so happened at the time, brutalism was this new kind of up and coming phenomenon. frankly, beloved style of architecture.So it happened to be in the right place at the right time to become adopted around the world because all this rebuilding was going on.But the timing isn't the full explanation of the whole thing, is it?
SPEAKER_02: Is it?No, it's not because it was also a time where in the sort of the 50s through the 70s, where the European nations that had colonized the world That stuff started sort of going back the other way.And these countries were even either given their their country back or they were flourishing.So in Latin America, all of a sudden there was sort of a new prosperity going on in Africa.There was, you know, some of them were gaining independence.And so it all timed out with brutalism.So that's why you'll see like brutalism in Africa and brutalism in Latin America and brutalism in Japan.It's really interesting.
SPEAKER_09: The thing is, though, is we said that modernism was in full swing at the same time.So you could say, well, why didn't they just choose modernism instead?And, you know, a lot of them did.A lot of modernist buildings were built in these same cities around the same time.But the reason brutalism truly became so ubiquitous around the world is because it was cheap.It was really cheap to make a brutalist building because they were essentially poured or slab concrete. There was no adornment to them.They were, as we'll see, brutalism takes a single unit very often, like the smallest unit, like say an apartment, and then redoes it over and over and over again. So there's a standardization of the process of the materials.So it just was it was around at the time and it was a very cheap alternative to other much more ornate types of buildings like modernist buildings at the time.
So that was one reason why it was so widely adopted.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.And with that repeating thing, I mean, it can even just be like, well, like that airport in Mexico City with the circles or or what was the one? The French guy, like his very, the Habitat.
SPEAKER_09: The Unité d'Habitation.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, if you look at that, that's another great example of these, you know, I guess they're windows.What are they?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think they're balconies or like patios.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.It's hard to tell from like a distance, but it's just this repeated thing.And that's, there's obviously a building efficiency problem. when you're not adorning things and we're kind of repeating the same design feature over and over and over.Also, this is a time post-war where people really started moving to the cities a lot more, especially in the eastern block.It's cheap.It was a cheap way to house tons of people.As far as the U.S.goes, that's when the federal government really beefed up and said, all right, we're going to be – We're going to take some steroids here and see what happens.
And so all of a sudden you had a much larger bureaucracy and these they needed, you know, there were more people, more employees.And so you need these big federal government buildings.So you'll see a lot of some of the best brutalist architecture in American cities could be like the city library, like here in Atlanta or or like the the IRS building or something like these big government buildings.Right.
SPEAKER_09: Also, one of the reasons Brutalism was such a great idea for government buildings is because they're so stable and they're so just immovable.And so the designers were like, well, this is going to remind people that the government is stable and you don't have to worry because the government's in control.Just look at the buildings that they operate out of.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, D.C.has a lot of brutalist stuff, right?
SPEAKER_09: Yes, it's a brutalist town.If you want to acquaint yourself with brutalist architecture, just walk around D.C.and look at the federal buildings.They are brutalist through and through.
SPEAKER_02: Should we take a break?
SPEAKER_09: Buddy, I say we take a break, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: All right, because we need to go to Washington, D.C.and apologize.South of Chicago
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SPEAKER_09: Okay, Chuck, I didn't understand.Why do we have to apologize to D.C.?
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.It sounded like you were saying, I know you appreciate brutalism now, but it sounded like you didn't have much love for the D.C.style of brutalism.
SPEAKER_09: No, it's not that.I've always appreciated D.C.because it's just so weird architecturally.Isn't it that nothing can be taller than the Washington Monument?That's why there's no skyscrapers in D.C. ? I think I've heard that monument or the Capitol building, one of the two.Um, so yeah, it's a very low slung city, but that, that also as, um, ready made for brutalist design too, because they're often like low, wide hulking forms as well.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.You're never going to see a brutalist tower.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: That's not true.There are some brutalist towers, but they're very rare.Very, very rare.
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah.I mean, I've seen some skinny-ish apartment buildings and things, but I guess, I don't know.I'm thinking in terms of skyscrapers.
SPEAKER_09: Do they have those?The skyscrapers that we think of when we think of the cities today, those kind of came along and replaced brutalism starting around the 80s.Yeah.So, no, you wouldn't have seen that as brutalist because it just wasn't brutalist.
SPEAKER_02: So it's not all concrete all the time.It's obviously a very big part, that unfinished concrete of brutalism.But you might see a little brick in there every now and then.Probably not going to be like some super colorful thing.You'll probably see some steel, obviously some glass.I have seen, you know, and especially in Brazil and Latin America out of the modernist movement incorporating wood. And I'm a big fan of of like combining like cement and wood and natural things like that.Natural elements with unnatural elements.
SPEAKER_09: Well, that's the new that's the new thing that's brand spanking new.They call it organic brutalism. which is combining like a brutalist space with like organic touches to it.Yeah.Yeah, you'd love that.So even though it's, I don't even know if you can say that it's not all concrete all the time.I think one of the basis of brutalism is that it's got to be concrete, right?Or are you saying like other people have experimented with other stuff and still consider brutalist?
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.I just mean that every square inch of the place isn't concrete.
SPEAKER_09: But it features very, very prominently.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.That's the base.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.One of the things about these reinforced concrete buildings is because they were using just unfinished concrete or unadorned concrete, They figured out interesting ways to kind of play with the concrete so that every building didn't look exactly alike.So you'll often see like vertical ripples going down long, tall columns.That's a type of concrete.There'll be like aggregate, like maybe pebbles that are on the surface of the concrete. There's all sorts of stuff they did, but at the end of the day, it's all reinforced concrete and there's not like drywall over it.There's not like a nice paint job over it.There's no decorations or any kind of like woodwork or anything like that.It's just, right.
The building itself, the point of brutalism is the building itself is allowed to stand on its own. And I saw somewhere that somebody said that if modernism is meant to be honest, then brutalism is brutally honest.Like what you see is what you get with the building.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I like that.
SPEAKER_09: I do too.
SPEAKER_02: Um, they, like you said, there's a, uh, there's a sense of permanence to a brutalist building.And I think that's another reason why government buildings like them.Cause like you mentioned, they just sort of convey this, uh, thing of like, I know you hate paying your taxes, but look at this IRS building.It's not going anywhere.Right.It sends a message.It says TS.
SPEAKER_09: There's some other like basic parts of the brutalist concept, Chuck, like the buildings tend to be angular, geometric, sculptural, blocky, top heavy.The windows are very frequently deep set.They're called fortress-like.I don't know if you mentioned that one before, but it pops up almost everywhere when you're talking about what brutalism is.Fortress-like seems to be like a very, like just a common description of, And then we talked about them being self-repeating, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.And that was a big reason why, because the efficiencies and the costs.
SPEAKER_09: Right.So sometimes some brutalist buildings will take like the single unit, like say it's an apartment building, and they will take the, they'll design the one apartment building and they just repeat it over and over and over again.And then the next row over and over and over again.And by combining these modular units together, it forms the building just through repetition.And so some people call it a fractal as far as architectural movements go, which makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I appreciate it a lot, and I always have, but I get why people don't like a lot of these buildings.And I think that maybe like you, previous to Mexico City, only had in the brain sort of one thing, which is, God, that ugly building downtown that I have to go to get my driver's license or something.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly.
SPEAKER_02: And to expose yourself to more, and we're going to talk about some famous buildings, but You know, Brutalism had a sort of a pre-hatred going on before it even became a thing.Right.The people that were, I believe it was Le Corbusier's, how do you pronounce this building again?
SPEAKER_09: The Unité d'Appetition.
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
SPEAKER_09: I think.If my high school French can hold up.
SPEAKER_02: He designed this thing for working class families to house a lot of people, which was the whole idea.But no one wanted to live there.None of those people wanted to live there.So the intelligentsia of Marseille was like, you know, they appreciated that architecture and they're who moved in.
SPEAKER_09: Right.They said sold.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I also think it's interesting that they have been used in a lot of – as the one here that I sent you in Georgia that is so cool looking and of all places, noon in Georgia.Yeah.Was used as, I believe, in Ant-Man and the Wasp as the evil villain's lair from the outside.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it works.
SPEAKER_02: And Clockwork Orange and like just this association with evil villains or the – bad guys or the communist Soviet bloc.It just sort of always had this reputation of like, you should probably hate this architecture.
SPEAKER_09: Also dystopian too.Like if you ever watch a movie or look at artwork set in a dystopia, if you look at the buildings, they are almost always brutalist in some way, shape or form, often very frankly brutalist, right?And it kind of makes sense because a lot of times dystopian settings are, well, they're set in the future and, Or maybe they're post-apocalyptic.And it makes sense that if any kind of building is going to survive, a brutalist building would survive far into the future or would survive an apocalypse.So it makes sense intuitively, but also I think brutalism gets used in that because it's so associated with things like dehumanization, depersonalization, that the scales that they're built on are inhuman scales. And that's ironic because, again, most of the brutalist buildings that were ever built were meant to be public buildings where you bring a lot of people together to do things like enjoy a ballet or a show or a performance or to live together as a community in like a tower or something like that.And yet the irony of it is that they're viewed as buildings. Inhuman dehumanizing rather than humanizing, which is, I think, what they were after.But it just over time, it just became associated with the opposite of that.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure.And, you know, if you have an evil villain in your movie, you're not going to put them in a in a quaint cottage.
SPEAKER_09: Well, maybe if they're on vacation and it's like a rental apartment.
SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite examples of brutalism as a bad guy's place is in Karate Kid 3, which I watched it when it came out, and I clearly hadn't watched it since because I'd forgotten all about it.And we watched it on vacation last year, and it is... One of the most wonderfully awful movies I've ever seen.One of those bad movies that's a lot of fun to watch.
SPEAKER_09: Is that the one with Hillary Swank?
SPEAKER_02: No, no.That is, I think, the next Karate Kid.Karate Kid 3 was the third of the, you know, Daniel and Mr. Miyagi tale.Oh, wow.Okay.Where he battled the bad guy, Terry Silver, who was, I think he was a Vietnam buddy of, what's his name?I can't remember from the first Karate Kid.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, the sensei from the first one?Sure.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.So Terry Silver's Place is the ultimate brutalist bad guy lair, and it is the Ennis House in Los Angeles that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
SPEAKER_09: Is that the Hell House or Hill House?
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.I mean, it's called the Ennis House.
SPEAKER_09: I've got to look that up because I've been at some Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Los Angeles, and they're pretty awesome.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, he definitely was not known as a brutalist architect, but there are a handful of his designs.And if you look at Ennis' house, it is like super brutalist.And then when I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I saw the West Hope house in Tulsa.
SPEAKER_08: Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02: Frank Lloyd Wright.Also, I think if not purely brutalist, fairly brutalist.And then like you look at the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim is sort of brutalist as well.Right.I don't know if you could call it if you're a brutalist purist, a purist.Jeez.If you would count the Guggenheim because it's the concrete is much more smooth, but it's not not brutalist, you know.
SPEAKER_09: No.And I was mistaken.It's not Hill House.It's the house on Haunted Hill is what that Ennis house stood in for.But it is super brutalist.And it's funny because you had mentioned that the Mayan architecture seems brutalist now, but it wasn't originally.It very much echoes some sort of Mesoamerican architecture, almost like a mishmash of it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure.But it's, you know, this is sort of what I was getting at.Like all of these reasons that people hate brutalism is why we are losing so many great brutalist buildings in the world.It's not a hard sell to tear these things down a lot of times in a city.
SPEAKER_09: No, and I have to say one other thing.The hatred of brutalism also is sometimes associated, depending on your political beliefs, it's associated with the welfare state because so many were built as public housing. And so if you are, say, right-leaning or probably very far to the right, you hate brutalism for that very reason.And it also is no coincidence that the era of brutalism ended abruptly at 1980, which is the time when Reagan and Thatcher came to power.And the welfare state was like, nope, no more welfare state or we're going to cut it. so thoroughly that we're certainly not going to invest in any brutalist architecture any longer.And it became associated not just with totalitarian governments of the Eastern Bloc here in the United States.It also became associated on the right with welfare, and the right doesn't really like welfare very much, so they don't like brutalist architecture.Isn't that interesting?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, super.Like they were looked at as blights a lot of times.
SPEAKER_09: Well, they became that way too.And that's another reason why that they're under such attack.They show their age pretty poorly, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, over the years, because they're not adorned, because they have that rough concrete finish, water damage can happen a lot.Decay can be really more evident.I think that Paul Rudolph, he's a, and when you say, you know, famous, brutalist architect, it's, you got to be in the know to kind of know these names.
SPEAKER_09: Right.
SPEAKER_02: It's not like a Frank Lloyd Wright, but Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, was torn down.If you look this thing up, it is amazing looking.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I became a fan of Paul Rudolph's just researching this.I'd never heard of him before, but he was good.
SPEAKER_02: That building is unbelievable, but they tore it down.And it wasn't just because like, oh, look at this big blocky thing.But apparently it leaked from day one.There was constant mold.There were always water issues.They were having to close courtrooms and move them around.And they just, you know, did a cost study.And it was like retrofitting and making this thing a workable government center isn't even feasible.So they tore it down.
SPEAKER_09: So I had a hard time getting to the bottom of this because I saw plenty of places that it was torn down.I also saw that it was going to be torn down, but they decided to do a retrofit or a rehab of it instead.And that the update, the refresh of it was so faithless to the original that it's no longer a brutalist building.I saw it described as disfigured.
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, but either way, Paul Rudolph seems to be, I think Arch Mag called him the unluckiest architect ever.Arch Mag?Is it Ark or Arch?Is it Architecture?Well, why don't you just call it ARC Mag then?Why do you have to add the H and make me look stupid in front of everybody?
SPEAKER_02: I'm with you.I think it's kind of an awkward name.
SPEAKER_09: Well, anyway, ARC slash ArchMag called him the unluckiest architect around because so many of Paul Rudolph's buildings are just being torn down left and right.And I don't even know that it's a distinct dislike of Paul Rudolph's work.I think it's just people are tearing brutalist buildings down and his happened to be being torn down at a faster rate than other architects' brutalist buildings.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And I know we're going to get email from someone who works at that magazine that's like, Chuck doesn't know what he's talking about.We call it ArchMag.Right, exactly.Josh is right.ArchMag.Other buildings, an architect named Bertrand Goldberg designed the Prentiss Women's Hospital in Chicago that was torn down.Yeah.It was gorgeous.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: How are you going to look at that and be like, that's an ugly building?It was a mess. Elevated clover made of concrete.It was gorgeous for sure.And at the very least, even if you don't think these buildings are gorgeous, I get that.But they're admirable for sure.Like they're amazing achievements for sure.I just don't think that they're ugly across the board.I think there's plenty of amazing, brutalist buildings out there.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, totally.It also doesn't help that, and I think you found stuff from Jessica Stewart in My Modern Met and Begonia Beskos, great name, in ARCA magazine.That's a lot easier. They both talked about the fact that these are basically – they can be kind of a symbol of human abandonment is what they said in ARCA magazine.And if it starts to decay, it's got these big open bare concrete walls.So like obviously vandalism is just going to be – it's a perfect canvas for something like that.And I think Jessica Stewart is the one that said they basically symbolized urban decay at one point and economic hardship.
SPEAKER_09: Right.Yeah.That failure of the welfare state.Um, and because they show their neglect so readily because they're unadorned, um, because they're exposed concrete, they stood as symbols of like, yeah, look how, look how, what a bad idea welfare is.Like it's just like this building is like a symbol of that.And by the way, I've, I've been pronouncing it Airsa magazine.Is that not right?
SPEAKER_02: All right.I think we should take a break.We're going to call these magazines up and get the record set straight.And we'll be right back after this.So.
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SPEAKER_09: So Chuck, I'm glad you said Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center was in Goshen, New York, because I definitely would have said Goshen, no joke. And just want to say one more thing about that.It was made of three buildings.It had 87 roofs.Just wrap your head around that for a second.I wonder why it leaked.Right, exactly.But that's just wonderful.Look up some of Paul Rudolph's work and you're going to be like, this is super 70s awesomeness.Like that guy was talented.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, totally.I think a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright stuff leaked, though, as well.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, he was very famous for, like, some guy he designed a house for said, the roof is leaking on my desk.And Frank Lloyd Wright said, move the desk.And if you ask me, these guys get way too much of a pass, like, because part of architecture is to make a building that doesn't leak, too, in addition to making it awesome.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: It's got to function as a place to live in or work in.
SPEAKER_09: Exactly.When we were in Mexico City, we went with our two friends, Mitch and Patrick, who are architects and designers.And I was explaining that to them too.And they're like, yeah, it's absolutely true.I was expecting pushback or whatever.They're like, no, no.People do give famous architects way too much of a pass, especially former legendary ones.Hopefully I didn't just get Mitch and Patrick in trouble.I don't think so.
SPEAKER_02: They're out of the club now. Right.So if you're as far as brutalism coming back, it is coming back in certain ways there.They're definitely even if you don't have like a let's say you have like a modern house or even not a modern house, you can decorate your interior in a little more brutal style.And, you know, sometimes just a touch or two of that kind of thing can really give you what you're looking for.
SPEAKER_09: I'm not a big fan of that.Our HowStuffWorks office used to be, I guess, new brutalist interior design.It kind of checked the boxes.I was never comfortable there.
SPEAKER_02: Now, I mean, isn't every office that's got concrete walls and exposed air ducts and
SPEAKER_09: Right.
SPEAKER_02: Edison bulbs, they're all sort of new brutalists, right?
SPEAKER_09: Kind of, yeah.And also it seems like little geometric pattern copper knickknacks on shelves that float that don't really serve that much of a purpose.They're just decorative.I don't like that either.
SPEAKER_02: We had that great mural, though, really warm that place up.
SPEAKER_09: It did.I wonder what happened to that because we're not in that building anymore, but surely they preserved the mural.
SPEAKER_02: And that question mark table, where the heck is that thing?
SPEAKER_09: I don't know.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, my Lord.
SPEAKER_09: In space, I think.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Here, though, in the 2020s, brutalism as an actual architectural style is making a bit of a comeback.Like I said, I've seen quite a few houses in the neighboring neighborhoods that are some are just sort of like, you know, hi, we're a blocky house.So that's more modern.But there are a couple that are true brutalist, like concrete layers, it looks like.
SPEAKER_09: There was a triumphant Brutalist refurbishment here in Atlanta back in 2018.The Central Atlanta Library in downtown was designed by Marcel Brewer.Amazing building.But apparently that was the last – the last work that Brewer completed before he died.And I guess some of the design and some of the actual construction didn't quite jibe.And some of his original intentions were covered up.Like there was an elevator that had to be centrally placed that just screwed things up quite a bit. And then they came along and they added more lights.They refurbished the place.
They got rid of that central elevator.They opened it up.There's like a zigzagging staircase that's amazing that's now much more prominent.And in doing so, they actually made the building closer to marcel brewer's original intentions with his design than it was when it was built when marcel brewer was still alive so like that's an example of like the the ideal of what's being done with brutalist buildings the opposite end is that they're being torn down because people vote them as like the ugliest building of all time right should we should we rattle off some of these famous ones
SPEAKER_02: Well, architecture, architect-wise, is it Lewis or Louie?I never know.I think Lewis.Lewis Kahn, K-A-H-N, is usually the first name you'll hear if people are kind of throwing the brutalist architect name around.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.And I mean, like you can make a pretty good case that brutalism, I don't know if it's because the buildings were meant to take center stage or whatever, but that there aren't, it's just not household names compared to other, other movements.You know what I mean?Lewis Kahn is definitely far and away the most famous, but I saw that he's technically not even a brutalist.He just used brutalist elements. There are some like we talked about Paul Rudolph, Wigenza Slay, Richter, Marcel Brewer.There's a lot of other really great, I think, Erno Goldfinger.People you just have never heard of.These are just random names.It sounds like that a writer made up.
No, they're actually legit architects.They just aren't like this movement didn't have like star power like some of the other movements did.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.And like we said, like Frank Lloyd Wright had has done a thing or two, but he's not known for that.I.M.Paye has dabbled in it in New York City.If you see Kip's Bay Plaza by I.M.Paye, very much brutalist.But that's not how, you know, his name was made.
SPEAKER_09: No, no.But there are ones that are like, nope, I'm a brutalist through and through.The Smithsons obviously were brutalists because they founded the movement.And one of the things they completed was Robin Hood Gardens, which was a housing estate from 1972.And it was – it's okay.Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: As brutal as brutalism gets.
SPEAKER_09: It is.And part of it was demolished.Just part of it, right?And it was actually acquired.Three stories of the building were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum to preserve it because it's such a fine example of brutalist architecture.That's awesome.To me, it's kind of ugly.But London, because this was the epicenter of the brutalist movement, the creation of it, it has a lot of good... examples of really good brutalist buildings, what Prince Charles has to say about them notwithstanding.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, King Charles, but he was Prince when he said that the Royal National Theatre of London was a, quote, clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting.Right.I think it's cool looking.I like it.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I was going to say it's hilarious, but he's a madman for saying that.I think he came up with a clever quip and was going to use it at all costs because anyone who looks at the Royal National Theatre, it isn't like that's an amazing building is wrong.I'm sorry.Wrong.Wrong.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was also at the time Princess Charles' best stab at telling a joke.
SPEAKER_09: Well, he was apparently well known for being a mean critic in the media about architecture in particular.I didn't realize that, but that was like one of his greatest hits from what I can tell.But the thing about the Royal National Theater, it had really great horizontal and vertical lines that were harmonious. which can be unusual for a brutalist building, but even more unusual, it fit the site that it sits on.It's not imposed like every other brutalist building of all time.If there's ever been a brutalist building that fit the site, that Royal National Theater is it.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for sure.For my money, if you want to have your socks knocked off by a blocky architectural gym, then you should go to Montreal and look at Safdie's Habitat 67.It was built for the 1967 World's Fair there in Montreal, and it is super cool looking.It looks like something a child might build out of building blocks.
SPEAKER_09: I've got one, the peace center in Hiroshima.I really feel like every American should go there.It's amazing.The Japanese in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed by nuclear bombs, their response was to build this peace center to preserve what happened for generations to come so that it never happened again.They turned peacenik rather than retributive or vengeance. It's a pretty amazing response if you think about it.And so it's a pretty amazing center.And Kenzo Tange, who was a student of Le Corbusier, started it in 1950.And it's just a long rectangular structure that seems to be kind of floating on the horizon.It's just a really amazing place.
Really amazing museum.It just has a, it's just, it gets you in ways that like I'd never been gotten before.
SPEAKER_02: Just five years after the bomb was dropped too.So that like, how heavy was that still in the air, you know?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.And I mean, in Hiroshima, like it's, I mean, it's a part of the town.Oh, sure.They preserved a bank that was just completely wasted, but the frame was still there.It's preserved.They build a fence around it and the blocks are still where they landed after the bomb was dropped.Like they didn't touch it after that.They just... cordoned it off, and now it's part of this museum.Parts of the city, entire parts of the city have become part of this living outdoor museum.
It's just amazing.
SPEAKER_02: Japan, it's got to happen for me one day.
SPEAKER_09: Yes, it does.Seriously, go to Hiroshima.It's really something.It's also a really cool town, too, in addition to the whole museum segment of it.
SPEAKER_02: Right.If you go to Tunisia in Tunis, the Hotel Dulac, and if you look at that building and you say, man, if you chopped off the back of that thing, that would be a sand crawler that the Jawas rode around in in Star Wars.Right. then you would probably not be surprised to know that and supposedly inspired George Lucas.I say it had to have been because when you look at that building, it looks just like that thing, that inverted pyramid, 416 rooms over 10 floors.It's really something.And inverted pyramids are sort of a brutalist thing as well.But it's a great example.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and I mean, it was opened in 73, and he was there shooting years later.So it was definitely there in Tunis while he was there.So I buy that.
SPEAKER_02: Totally.
SPEAKER_09: One of the most famous brutalist buildings in the United States, if not the world, is the Geisel Library at UC San Diego.It was originally called the Central Library, but Ted Geisel, Dr. Seuss's widow, Audrey, donated $20 million, and the university said, let's just rename it in honor of you and Ted.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Well, she said $10 million and they kept the name and she was like 15.And then she said, what do I got to do to get our name on the front of that thing?
SPEAKER_09: Right.
SPEAKER_02: This building is amazing.I mean, and this is, again, is an example of how like just sort of the variety that you can find in a Brutalist building when you look at this compared to the Robin Hood Gardens building in London.
SPEAKER_09: Right.Yeah.This one really prominently makes use of glass, which can be rare for a Brutalist building.
SPEAKER_02: Super cool.
SPEAKER_09: And yet when you look at it, you're like, that is a Brutalist building.It's just an amazing, beautiful Brutalist building.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love it.Can't wait to go back to Mexico City and see some of that stuff.
SPEAKER_09: For sure.Also, I would strongly advise anyone not to make a drinking game out of how often we say brutalist in this episode because we said it a lot.
SPEAKER_02: They already have drinking games.I saw that stuff on Reddit.
SPEAKER_09: I know, but don't do this one because you would die.
SPEAKER_02: Someone said, I counted how many times you got said like in the like episode.
SPEAKER_09: And I was like, well, yeah.It was kind of the name of the episode.
SPEAKER_02: How many times did we say llama in the llama episode?Right? Well, plus we had our additional likes because we talk like regular people.
SPEAKER_09: One other thing too, Chuck.If you want to see cool post-apocalyptic brutalist architecture used really adeptly in illustration, go check out Eternal Dystopia's YouTube videos. Did I send you that one called Research Center?It's like drone music, but the video is like just this, it's like a dystopian brutalist building kind of set in the haze and sometimes it's raining.I'll send it to you again.It's really amazing.But the drone music alone is pretty cool.So check that out.
SPEAKER_02: You're into the drone lately.
SPEAKER_09: I am because it's not distracting.It helps me focus, you know.I like it.Well, Chuck said he likes it, which means, everybody, that it's time for Listener Mail.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh boy, it's another correction, but Josh, this one is on me.Okay, now you're talking.I think the first one may have been on us, but in the Nuclear Boy Scott episode, we said the USS Enterprise was a nuclear submarine.It's in fact an aircraft carrier.But the big one was when we had our sort of brief debate about military discharge, and I was just wrong, wrong, wrong, because I thought if you just served all your time, then they just called it leaving the military.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, you just stopped showing up one day.
SPEAKER_02: You just stopped showing up.Or you call it retirement or whatever.I didn't think it was.I thought any time you left before your time was up was the only time it was called a discharge.Sure.Not so.We heard from a lot of our current service members and veterans.But this one's from Scott Oliver.He said... Guys, what Chuck said was not correct.
Any way you leave the service is some form of discharge.And then he goes over, this was the most detailed one, so we're going to read these discharges.You got the honorable discharge.It's the highest level given to those who complete their service and are discharged or are discharged early for no fault of their own, like a medical issue.That's the one you want to shoot for.
SPEAKER_09: Sure.
SPEAKER_02: General discharge, lower level, but given to those who have a minor misconduct or a performance issue.I was going to hazard a comical guess on what that might be, but I'm not going to.
SPEAKER_09: Okay.
SPEAKER_02: There's other than honorable, or the OTH.That's a negative level, so now you've crossed the Rubicon.Okay.And you're not good anymore.And it's given to people who have serious misconduct or violations of regulations.Okay. Then there are two more.You've got the bad conduct discharge or the BCD.This is actually punitive.And that is if you were convicted by a court martial for something like desertion or assault or theft.
And then, you know, we've got last, don't you?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: And that is a punishment for a serious offense by committing a felony.Sorry for being pedantic, guys.You weren't at all, Scott.But as a veteran, I find myself particularly attuned to erroneous statements about military matters.Sure.And that's every veteran, Scott.So you're in good company.And we heard from a lot of service members.And all apologies for screwing that up sometimes when I say things off the dome without researching quite often.In fact, I'm dead wrong.
SPEAKER_09: Man, well, you really owned it, Chuck, like somebody with an honorable discharge.Oh, thank you.That was Scott? Scott Oliver.Thanks a lot, Scott.You weren't pedantic at all, Chuck's right.That was very nicely put, and we appreciate being schooled.And also, Chuck, thank you for selecting one where you were wrong and not me.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I guess we were military schooled.
SPEAKER_09: If you want to get in touch with us like Scott did and school us and do it nicely, we love that kind of thing.You can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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