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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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