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Below, in the discussion of Architectural philosophies, @Primaprimaprima provides an admirably concrete statement:
If the framing is the issue, perhaps it would help to examine that framing from the ground up, as it were. Is there such a thing as "evil" architecture? Should we recognize this as a thing that exists?
Here are a half-dozen variations on the theme of "prison cell": 1 2 3 4 5 6
Considering the above six images:
would you expect that the ordering of the above images was random? If the ordering was not random, how would you describe the ordering principles?
What details of the environments seem emotionally salient to you? What colors, textures, contrasts, symmetries or asymmetries, rhythms, etc stand out?
This question is a bit awkward to phrase, so bear with me: If we ordered these images by the most prominent mental and emotional effects we expect them to induce on their occupants, would you expect the given order to change? What are the antipodes of the strongest gradient you recognize, and does that gradient require a re-ordering of the images to convey continuously?
Would the ranking change if you ordered them by which "looks cool"? For example, if you were picking prison cell designs for a movie set or a video game level, do you think the ordering would change? Note that we can actually make this question strictly empirical by looking at actual prison cells in actual movies and video games.
Would the ordering change if you ranked them by which you would rather be a prisoner in?
Would the order change if you ranked them by which you would rather actual convicts be housed in?
Suppose a person prefers the given ranking if they were a prisoner, and prefers the reverse ranking for convicts, would you describe this as a morally-neutral preference?
Assuming that the emotional gradient you perceive is relatively positive-to-negative, suppose that a person prefers the max-negative antipode for both themselves and for convicts. Does this show that the max-negative antipode would actually be "good" for convicts? Why or why not?
Elsewhere in the thread, we are provided with a link to this Japanese highschool gymnasium as a positive example of Eisenman's general style of architecture.
If you ordered the various shots of the exterior and interiors of the gymnasium, which do you consider the best, and which the worst? What principles seem most salient to this ordering? What patterns emerge?
If we compare and contrast the gymnasium interiors to our original six cells, what commonalities emerge in environmental detail and in expected mood? Which of the six do these interior shots seem to naturally group with? at which end of the various gradients do they fall?
The gymnasium is, clearly, not a prison. Despite this, are there relevant principles identified in your analysis of the cell variations that you think should carry over to analysis of the gymnasium?
leaving cell interiors unpainted would obviously be cheaper than painting them. Would it be better to leave cell interiors unpainted, similar to the gymnasium interiors? Is the preference to paint or not paint cell interiors morally neutral?
More generally, presuming the design of the Gymnasium is a good one, should similar principles be applied to the design of prisons? It's hard to deny that prisons could certainly look cooler than they do. Perhaps we could even make them look Rad. Presuming that this would not compromise first-order expenses or impose first-order security concerns, would it be a good idea to do this?
Among the gymnasium images, there's a shot of a classroom. Why do you suppose the designer has chosen to make the back wall of the classroom, facing the teacher, smooth and relatively low-detail compared to the front wall of the classroom, facing the students? What would you expect the results of this design choice to be on the intended function of the room?
Do you consider the preceding question to be a reasonable one?
Bonus Round:
Consider hostile architecture. How might we apply principles gleaned from the above questions to this separate branch of architecture and design?
Do you think hostile architecture is morally neutral? Morally positive? Morally negative? Why?
If someone believes that hostile architecture "looks cool", do you think that should be a persuasive argument in its favor?
Do you expect that those who enjoy and support the sort of architecture typified by the nikken sekkei gymnasium also support and enjoy hostile architecture? What about those who oppose it?
Why write so many questions when you clearly already have intended answers for them? Why make another post for the same discussion?
In the end this is meaningless, taste is subjective and I can't do nothing except to say "actually fifth prison cell is good if you give me more shelf space". Yes, majority of people do agree that classical buildings are better looking than modern pragmatic boxes, but they do not think in architectural styles, they mostly think in terms of what is "cool". And I don't see majority of people disagreeing with this gymnasium building being something cool and novel.
Because I want to find the points at which people diverge into disagreement. Starting from the obvious and moving to the obscure seems like a better way to achieve that than smacking each other with contradictions endlessly. Sure, we disagree. why do we disagree, exactly?
And that's the thing. It seems to me that the further you get down the list, the less obvious the answers to the questions get.
Because I'm attempting to approach the discussion from a different angle, and I'm putting enough effort into it that I'd prefer it not be immediately buried deep in a comment tree. Why not do this?
I concede that someone who isn't interested in conversation indeed cannot be conversed with. I do not concede that your statement constitutes an actual answer to the questions above.
I think if you polled people on whether the hallway, stairwell and classroom shots were acceptable for an educational environment, most of them would answer negatively. I think if you posted those pictures on Reddit under a fake headline like "here's the schools Republicans want your kids to attend", you could power New York City for a year off the outrage they'd generate.
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Hey, kudos for rephrasing the can-architecture-be-evil post with such cool discussion questions! I love it when we can focus on concrete examples and delve into them.
If I had to choose one of the prison cells for myself, I would avoid #1 or #6, because bunk beds imply roommates. If I had to choose between those two, though: #6 is in a dilapitated condition, so likely that prison is (as the kids say these days) under-served; #1 is brand-spanking-new, so maybe that prison has more resources, so that's a plus in its favor. However, for sheer architecture, I would prefer #6 to #1 because the beds are the same low height, meaning that my roommate and I will have less conflict when choosing the beds.
Out of your other examples, I would choose #5 because it seems to have the most potential for solo exercise. I understand the point you are making in your order, but the dark reminiscent-of-midieval-dungeon coloring doesn't bother me, I actually find it soothing. (The bright coloring for #1 reminds me of hospitals, though that would depend on the smell.)
If instead I were a prison warden choosing the architecture for the inmates I will oversee, I would prefer the designs of #1, #2, or #6 because the furniture is built-in and looks fairly violence-proof. For comparison, #3 has all that loose furniture that an inmate can pick up and wield as a weapon.
As for "hostile architecture": I got a puppy. She chews on everything. To discourage her from chewing on the furniture, I spray a sour/bitter liquid on it--like hostile architecture, though less permanent (which is a drawback since I need to re-spray it). My spraying is "hostile" to my puppy's desire to chew on the furniture, but it's actually friendly in the sense that it guides her away from a behavior that causes friction with me.
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"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty." Brutalist buildings are like tragic plays. Not every tragic play is good/pleasing, and not every play should be a tragedy, but people should be forced to read hamlet and people should be forced to interact with the occasional brutalist building.
I remember in particular the church my mother took me to in some of my earliest memories-- the famous brutalist church in UW Madison. I loved that church, and think it was a tragedy that it was later reformed. Sure-- it was ominous, and eerie. It doubtlessly inspired guilt, and fear, and terrible awe among its congregants. But those are all things one should feel before the Lord. It was unique, and special, and beautiful, and useful. Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
One of the go-to locations when a horror movie wants to give you a sense of fear and eerieness is an old church in a traditional style. You see this in Resident Evil, Midnight Mass, in the architectural motifs of Harry Potter, etc. But when a movie wants to show alienation and social disunity and emotional coldness, they use brutalism. You see this in A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and the new Dune movie. Horror movies are unlikely to use brutalism to convey a sense of fear and people are unlikely to visit brutalism to feel a sense of awe. The Christian way to feel guilt is to look at the crucifixion and the way to feel fear is to look at the Last Judgment. Which architectural style is a suited home for the body of the God we killed, the spirit of the God that rose again, and the return of the God who raises the dead to life for an eternal judgment? I would say not brutalism, most concretely.
Some medications downregulate sensitivity to particular neurotransmitters in the hopes that doing so causes your body to upregulate production of said neurotransmitters. Similarly, it makes sense to me to try creating buildings that make people feel alienated in an effort to push them towards more community-minded behavior. I can't make any concrete statements about how well it works... but nevertheless, I miss the old St. Paul.
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I’m not sure if the placement of “brutalism” and “concrete” next to each other was intentional, but if so it’s quite clever.
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Then a more utilitarian framing would make sense.
Prison is meant to be a punishment. So yes, a successful prison architect would make the prison as uncomfortable as possible for the occupants, although the poor prison guards would probably have to suck it up or building features would have to be accounted for so as to make their job relatively frictionless.
Homes are meant to be places of habitation and comfort (and, although this has become increasingly difficult in the first world, child-rearing). If they are not, then they've failed and the architects shouldn't expect clamor for demand even if housing markets weren't horrendously distorted.
Public spaces, well... hostile architecture is doing a specific job, isn't it? I can't complain that a building is hostile if it was explicitly designed to be hostile to me. It's designed for keeping the plebs out, a job it manages to do by making them uncomfortable.
Good or evil doesn't enter into that calculus for me- it's like arguing the good or evil of a gun. Some people do believe guns are evil, because they kill people, but to me, people kill people.
I do wish out of petty revenge that Eisenmann and all his ilk are consigned to sit on chairs that are designed like torture spikes for all eternity for the buildings they've designed, though. If trying to convince others that things are not all right and being unsettled is the point, I hope they never find a moment's peace, ever.
Even in the utilitarian framing, it's sometimes okay for things to be neutral or unpleasant for most people to make a select group really, really happy. I enjoy brutalist buildings. I would be unhappy in a world where every building was brutalist, but that some buildings are brutalist is just really cool to me. Not independent of their property to be uncomfortable and unsettling, but because of it.
I hate to sort of boil this argument down to "let people enjoy things," but I don't think you actually believe Eisenmann wanted every single building on earth to be ugly and depressing. And in point of fact, I think you'd admit that, at least to eisenmann, his buildings-- even in being depressing-- were still beautiful. Take a look at this design study, for example. It's certainly no Mona Lisa. But even though it devolves into abstract shapes, that perhaps infuriate you with their intentional lack of meaning-- is the palette of colors used not lovely? Are the geometric forms involved wholly without harmony? I'm not asking you to like Eisemann's work. But try to understand the actual mechanisms of what brutalism, as a philosphy, is. Stripping out some of the aesthetic elements that we use to judge beauty of course makes a work unappealing to the people who primarily want to see those particular elements. But it also removes all obscuration from the remaining elements-- it puts the remaining beauty in the sharpest possible relief.
Consider music instead of architecture. People can love plenty of things about music... the harmonies, the melodies, the rhythms, the lyrics, the meaning, the context, the performance... etcetera etcetera etcetera. But liking big band swing shouldn't prevent you from at least recognizing the aesthetic qualities in ecclesiastical monophonic chant. And without making any moral judgements about pop music, I'm still very sure children should be exposed to the occasional string quartet.
See, I'm entirely on board with what you're saying, but that completely breaks down when it's not private architecture.
Many of these structures are built with public funds. I know the plebs don't count and rubbing their faces in the dirt is the point of a lot of things, but this strikes me as a particular kind of evil, to the extent that I can define it.
If Eisenmann is a neurotic who believes not everything is alright and that making people uncomfortable is the point of architecture, he's free to do as he wishes as long as he doesn't ask me to pay for his discomfort. I find this analogous to paying for someone else's S&M sessions.
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A string quartet is not comparable to a brutalist building. While children might find a string quartet boring, I think few if any would find it unpleasant. String quartets generally adhere to traditional norms of harmony and beauty; chamber music is often used to provide pleasant background ambience for social events - a testament to its qualities as inoffensive music without any notably dissonant or anxiety-inducing elements.
Brutalism, in contrast, is, if nothing else, designed to be visually jarring and arresting. It does not fade pleasantly into the harmonious backdrop of life. If you want to compare it to a music genre, compare it to industrial metal or dubstep or something like that. Beautiful to some; but actively (and intentionally) grating to others.
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Do either of these points seem, to you, salient to what I've written above?
Take the six cell images in the OP, and assume that we are specifically designing a prison so that the environment experienced by the prisoner captures the general emotional and psychological feel that each encapsulates. Would it be evil, in your view, to intentionally design a prisoner's environment to maximize "ugly/makes me sad"? If not, do you consider the money and effort we expend making our prisons look more like cells 1-3 rather than 4-6 a needless waste, or perhaps actively counterproductive? Perhaps you believe convicts would also benefit from styles more dour than rococo?
It would be evil to make every prisoner live in a prison cell designed to make them sad all the time. But also... Prison is a punishment? And punitive measures can be used to achieve utilitarian and/or moral goals? Not every cell needs to be designed to make its inhabitants sad, but at least some of them probably should.
If the architect you're talking about genuinely felt that everyone should be sad all the time and his buildings were designed to do that, it would be evil. But I doubt that was genuinely his position l, and if it was he would bee the most incompetent supervillain of all time. I scrolled through his art and buildings and found several I unironically enjoyed, even as they reminded me of less than perfectly pleasant things.
Which ones, in your view?
I don't think any of them should be. If someone commits unusually egregious crimes, I'm fine with executing them. If they haven't done something deserving execution, I'm fine scaling their sentence up or down as seems appropriate. I'd even be fine with replacing some of the lighter sentences with prompt, extremely painful corporal punishment, on the theory that for some criminals that might actually get the point across better than a long-delayed incarceration. But in no case would I wish to intentionally make their environment worse and more depressing than the physical practicalities of confinement in a cell require. I could be persuaded otherwise with evidence that prisoners in especially ugly or depressing environments had lower rates of recidivism, but lacking such evidence I see no benefit to inflicting unnecessary misery or indignity for its own sake, and certainly don't see the benefit of being so indirect about it as to bake it into their environment.
In any case, if you were to implement ugly cells for prisoners, who would you expect to be most likely to oppose you: admirers of Eisenman, or his critics?
Talking about specific here is probably past the limits of my knowledge. I'd guess there are probably some small crimes where the optimal punishment is something like, "expedite criminal sentencing and limit appeals, then put someone in a really unpleasant cell for a few days," rather than "put someone in a moderately comfortable cell for six months." Where if the legal system gets something wrong you lose maybe a week or two of time and your countersuit costs taxpayers only a small amount of money, and where if the legal system gets something right you get a pointed reminder to not be a dickhead but don't stay in prison long enough to get institutionalized.
I'm actually in favor of the corporal punishment idea for the same reasons-- you can search my comment history to see my position on floggings.
But in any case, I'm taking a philosophical position here, not trying to recommend specific policy. I believe causing harm can be justified to enable a greater good, but harm should never be a goal in and of itself. I'm completely against the death penalty because in practical terms we have cheaper + more effective alternatives and in moral terms killing someone adds absolutely nothing to the world, while simultaneously depriving them of the chance for personal redemption and salvation.
I don't think architectural preference would matter matter. I sincerely doubt an attempt to actually design prison cells to maximize the things I want to maximize would actually look anything recognizably like "brutalist architecture," except in an incidental sense if I end up being cost-constrained.
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In contrast, and as an antidote, to the hostile brutalism shown here, I recommend the brutalist works of Antoine Predock of Albuquerque, NM, deceased earlier this year. When Ayn Rand praises the subtle lines of modernist buildings for uplifting the human spirit, it’s his buildings I think of. In particular, three public works and a private clinic:
His signature is the pour-holes in the concrete. Once you see them, you can't help but look for them in all of Predock's works.
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Relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/27/spain.arts
If your artistic output is taken as inspiration for torture chambers designed to inflict psychological damage on prisoners of war, then something has gone seriously wrong. Likewise, if your gymnasium is designed to look like a WW2 bomb shelter that's been riddled with shell holes, then something has gone wrong. There is no need to innovate just for the sake of innovation. We knew how to build beautiful buildings or at least normal, utilitarian buildings. If the goal of your building is mounting high calibre flak guns and resisting high explosives, then it should indeed look like a flak tower - huge amounts of unpainted concrete is appropriate. Otherwise, make it look good. Windows! Air and light!
A vanishingly small number of people would design their house in Minecraft to look like Eisenman's constructions. None would win awards for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraftbuilds/top/
The vast majority of people make houses and buildings that evoke a traditional, cozy style. Or they make them look like a familiar object - a Nintendo Switch or a Rubik's Cube, a sword or an angler fish. Or they make monuments: a big pyramid with a gate, a statue, a dystopian underwater city with skyscrapers rising out of the waves. That's the general principle on which buildings and monuments should be designed - anything but random or deliberately malign assortments of shapes that require a PHD to be 'interpreted'.
Interesting Guardian article, thanks for posting! However, I don't see how it's different from using popular songs in enhanced interrogation. (I am supposing that those rooms were used similarly, which may not be the case.)
The Nikken Sekkei gymnasium evokes the moon craters, for me. I rather like it, but my one beef is that it looks too much like a rock-climbing gym without actually being one. Are the kids allowed to scale up those cratered walls?
When I think of bomb shelters, I think of metro stations in Kyiv (e.g.) because of the grade-school drills of taking shelter there in case of a nuclear attack.
I hear that US kids stopped doing hide-under-your-desk drills back in the 50's, but back in USSR we still did drills in the 80's. Kids-these-days have live-shooter drills, though, which provide much more vivid fodder for imagination.
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This is a funny comparison since my high school gymnasium literally was a a massive concrete structure that was bombed in WW2, which followed its original use as part of an abattoir complex. It was fine, aesthetically, if a bit reverberant, and I don't believe it left any psychic scars on myself or other kids. As a concrete structure built for an actual industrial purpose it was also incredibly, obviously different to that Japanese gymnasium. No one was bothering with sandblasting planks to get 3mm of grain relief in the formwork, I assure you.
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Your modus ponens is my modus tollens. His work may have been used as inspiration for a torture chamber; but Klee was obviously a fantastic artist regardless. So we can conclude that that is no great indictment of him.
Given the content at the links this reads like thick irony.
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Respectfully, there's nothing "obviously fantastic" to me about any of those. "De gustibus nil disputandum" and all, but frankly my (probably typical-minded) prior is that the number of people who would describe those works "obviously fantastic" are a small minority.
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Once again you have proudly and eagerly presented some of the ugliest, least evocative art I’ve ever seen, and expected us to share your judgment of its quality. The first piece is inoffensive, if unremarkable, but the other two are laughable.
No, certainly not. I'm aware that my tastes are unusual. If the works I've shared here aroused curiosity in even just a couple of people then I would be quite happy.
Klee is wonderful. He provokes wonder.
Klee is marvellous. He causes marvels.
Klee is fantastic. He creates fantasies.
Klee is glamorous. He projects glamour.
Klee is enchanting. He weaves enchantment.
Klee is terrific. He begets terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said Klee is nice.
Klee is bad.
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Of course you did expect us to share! That's why you said "obviously fantastic" and "we can conclude".
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That Nikken Sekkei gymnasium was the first example linked to in the OP claim that 'discomforting' architecture was being used in schools. I wouldn't really call it within Eisenman's style, it's much more contemporary than that. It also bears little resemblance to any of the prison cell pictures, which increase in unpleasantness largely with the cheapness and decay of the fixtures, and the dirt and squalor of their upkeep. The gymnasium is very carefully done and very clean, at least in these photos. The materiality and texture of the wooden formwork is trying to emphasise the cavernous qualities of the inner volume. They also realise that these textures perform best under lighting conditions that play light across the surfaces instead of directly onto them. It looks to me to be a little self-conscious though; it's in clear dialogue with Tadao Ando but I don't know if their sidestep into parametricism with the holes as a deviation from him has succeeded. I'd have liked to see them push it a little further and embrace the meteoric affect a bit more, and potentially tie that in with more gradated kinds of permeability (e.g. enabling overwatch of the inner volume from the gantry with a wider range of perforations). I'm not sure how effective the baffles on the roof will be at muting the acoustics either. At the end of the day, though, if I was a teenager playing basketball, I'd vastly prefer to play here than in your replacement-level rec centre. I don't think that'd be an uncommon preference. My own preferences within brutalism lie mainly with the more tropical variations, especially in Brazil with de Rocha, but generally think brutalism needs clever use of either foliage or light to succeed, ideally both.
I wrote praise for Eisenman's berlin holocaust memorial below, but beyond that, I'd hardly consider myself a fan of his more generally. My preferences for American architecture of that period lie much more with Lautner.
Would "generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy" be a better description?
Why are cheapness, decay, dirt, and squalor unpleasant? Where is the emotional effect coming from? As I mentioned to another answer, imagine that these environments have been made this way on purpose, that the corrosion and the dirt had been applied through painstaking labor to achieve this effect on purpose. Would that make it better for the occupants?
Then too, consider #5. Is it actually dirty or decayed or squalid, or is it only conveying a sense of dirtiness and decay while actually being fairly clean? The latter seems more accurate, does it not?
If you had to rank the photos of the Nikken Sekkei building and its various interior and environments in terms of general goodness, how would you rank them? For me, I'd say Kendo Room > Gymnasium Interior > Pillared underpass > Interior walls > Building Exterior > Hallways >>> Stairwell > Classroom. The classroom in particular is so bad that it is actively offensive that someone built a room like that specifically to put children in. By contrast, some of the shots of the gymnasium interior look legitimately grand, with the strong natural light spilling down the pseudonatural detail of the wall.
The gymnasium interior and the kendo room look reasonably clean in the photos, aided greatly by the polished simplicity of the flooring. The rest of the shots, particularly the classroom, stairwell and hallway shots, look grimy and decaying even though I'm entirely certain they're in perfect condition and clean enough to eat off.
I'm not immune to the appeal here. Some of the shots of the Gymnasium interior actually look quite good. But a lot of the other shots look straightforwardly hideous, and I think that we should consider this a bad thing, for the same reasons that we should prefer our prison cell designs to conform to cell 1 rather than cell 6, and for the same reasons that we should continue to paint our prison cells rather than leaving them bare concrete.
I think it would be morally wrong to choose, for aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones, to inflict the style of the Nikken Sekkei gymnasium on actual prisoners. Would you disagree, or would you argue that prison life would be enriched by such design choices as we see in those photos? And if you agree that it would be wrong to do this to prisoners, why is it better to do it to innocent children?
Combined with the natural color and texture of the concrete, it creates a strong impression of filth, decay and squalor. It's immortalizing trash in stone. Why do that? Of all the textures available, why those?
I'd agree, but then why use the textures in places where they will not be lit to their advantage?
I would certainly prefer that gymnasium interior to the standard white box. But would you rather spend an hour a day in that classroom, rather than a replacement-level classroom? Would you rather trade the hallways and stairwells for their replacement-level equivalents? I would vastly prefer accepting the standard white box gymnasium to not have the rest of that structure inflicted on me. Then too, any gymnasium with a open balcony would be a strict improvement, just for the novel perspective.
If you have time, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the rest of the questions.
I don't think it is generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy, no. It's worth remembering that these two architects are separated by half a century and the pacific ocean, and that gulf encompasses significant aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and technological developments. I don't know a huge amount about Nikken Sekkei other than them being one of those very old mega-firms that built Tokyo tower had their heyday in the 80s, so I can't speak much to a house style or philosophy, but as I mentioned it seems more in dialogue with Ando than Eisenmannian deconstruction, even if both are pursuing a kind of phenomenological minimalism. Japan also has its own aesthetic philosophies against which Japanese architects play and react. Eisenman never struck me as someone with a huge interest in materiality or light, and his work is explicitly antitectonic in places (a result of Derrida-esque attempts to liberate signifier from signified). The gymnasium is thoroughly tectonic and materiality is clearly front of mind, which is why the care is taken to showcase the formwork. Where the gymnasium bears the marks of its construction process, Eisenman's House VI is a house in abstract, the planes of its walls pushed and pulled without caring to represent the construction process, or even to subvert it. The (mild) parametricism is also an aesthetic development contingent on software-led design processes that simply didn't exist in Eisenman's context.
I do agree that there is a sometimes challenging, sometimes productive interplay between what positively evokes nature and what evokes decay, but I don't think it's as straightforward as béton brut surfaces always and necessarily giving a sense of grime, or that grime necessarily is of negative valence. In Tanizaki's essay on Japanese aesthetics, there is a special attention paid to grime:
...
Tanizaki was writing with his tongue in his cheek (much ink is spent on the virtues of wooden toilets), but I do think brutalist structures put decay on an aesthetic knife-edge more than most. I've never seen a brutalist building work when left to impose its monolithic mass on an urban parking lot, but I love how this tension between artifice and nature is completely released in da Rocha's Casa no Butantã. The raw concrete is humanised by surrendering it to the jungle. Appropriately used, decay functions to soften edges, blur boundaries. When homeownership can often feel like a constant, doomed struggle against entropy, a design that reassesses the necessity of this opposition can be incredibly liberating.
I think with your prison cell examples the worst are actually where this tension is amplified, rather than released. I'd certainly find a mess of shit and viscera unpleasant on a dirt cave floor, but would find it significantly more disturbing on broken white tile under fluorescent lights. This is just to illustrate that these qualities, and their humaneness, aren't simple variables to dial up and down, but interplay with each other in context.
Back to the gymnasium, and it wasn't I that picked it as a particular exemplar of anything, I agree that many of the circulation spaces are not particularly inspiring, and the classroom probably the most egregious. But I can see to some extent what they are aiming for, and it is something rather different from what Eisenman pursued. I think it's possible for a design to work in some contexts and not others, and with a design that's on such a knife's edge as this (and I consider it flawed in a few ways), it'd be somewhat miraculous to transport it to a prison typology with the intended effect intact. The one saving grace, if you could call it that, is that the baseline for these environments is already dire. A fancy private school is going to have a slightly different attitude to upkeep as well.
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Some hostile alien race has clearly colonized Earth. I feel the sudden urge to pick up a crowbar and break out to repair the dimentional wormhole.
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I just wanted to post this Japanese highschool gymnasium as an example of Alexander's general style of architecture. The readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
A valuable addition. You have my thanks!
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Not doing your series of questions justice, but briefly, the prison cells are awful because they are made so carelessly and cheaply and not looked after. The gymnasium is made with immense care and thought and resources so I find the idea of spending time in it kind of special, even though I don't love it and think it would be better if it used more natural materials and didn't feel so impersonal.
I think a building like the gymnasium has to be well maintained to even recognisably be itself, whereas one could almost say the opposite for the prison images: they're designed to be unloved. For that reason, yeah, it would be good if the gymnasium design principles were used for prison design.
It's an ugly concrete box. Worse, it's probably not even cost-efficient
All these things can be true! And no, it's definitely not cost efficient.
It's deeply perverse to invest immense care and thought into making something ugly.
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Suppose #2 were brand-new, and what you saw was exactly as the designer intended it, to the point of intentionally and carefully corroding the steel where the toilet meets the sink with meticulously-collected and -applied urine. Would that make it better?
It seems to me that the series displays cleanliness, simplicity, and order on one end, and filth, complexity and chaos on the other. What's notable to me is how the design of the gym intentionally recapitulates similar impressions of filth, complexity and chaos, particularly in the cement castings, and particularly in the classroom, hallway and stairwell shots. If I had to slot the gymnasium shots into the cell sequence, it would be somewhere around #5.
I'm an artist. Intentionally designed filth, complexity and chaos are a basic part of my day-to-day job, because I need to use these things to induce particular emotions in my audience. What I'm perplexed by is why someone would use these techniques in a public space that people are, to a considerable degree, compelled to interact with.
...Out of curiosity, which of the gymnasium shots do you find most pleasing, and which least? For me, the kendo room and the gymnasium itself are head and shoulders better than the rest of the shots, spaces designed for competition and struggle. Does it seem that way to you also?
It might be interesting as art or as a theatre set but very cruel as a prison. Deliberately unpleasant instead of carelessly so.
Agree with your preferences re the gymnasium rooms. Those ones seem most in harmony with their purpose. The classroom is a downer.
Regards your choice of vocabulary – filth, complexity and chaos – I must say I am surprised. This style of architecture strikes me as favouring very simple lines rather than complex ones (which I'd associate more with e.g. gothic architecture). I also don't find them to be especially filthy – in fact, I think they have to be kept in good nick to be palatable. The Barbican Centre would be dystopian for example if not carefully looked after but it's actually really nice to wander around because they mop a lot!
I do admit there is something Lovecraftian about looking on large expanses of concrete, when they are inhuman in their scale. But it's possible to design with this element of 'disharmony' or 'discomfort' while spending a lot of effort on making the building functional and comfortable when it comes to using it on a day to day basis (seating, bathrooms, walking lines etc).
In fact this combo is especially pleasing.
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