You could also petition the city for public toilets to be available for homeless people. I mean, every construction site/ public festival I see those aqua blue porta potties. I bet they would rather shit in one of them since no public facility/business will let them in to do that. Everyone poops. Even dogs, pigeons, rabbists, racoons and deer.
You're not wrong but people gotta defecate and frequently have no where to do it. If we cared for our people, with housing in this case, it would benefit literally everyone else too.
The difference is if you build public bathrooms, the pigeons won't use them. If humans are shitting outside to a degree it becomes a problem, the problem isn't the people doing the shitting.
Now, if we could get pigeons to use a bathroom, or even a shitting mat, that would be an achievement.
i think the things on the green bench might be anti-handholding or anti-cuddling things instead. you know, to aid against the display of lewd activity in public (/s)
As someone who's grown up in one of those and now rearing a child in Canada, I'd like to tell you that it was an absolutely incredible place to grow up in. The urban planning is such that there's parks with kid playgrounds sprinkled between the buildings. There's ample trees. There's schools and kindergartens at walking distance where kids would often walk alone to/fro. There's convenient public transit stops. There's density that lets kids make tons of friends and always have someone to play with without "playdates." Parenting in such a social environment is so much easier than what parents face in Toronto, it's not even funny.
E: Oh and the square footage in the average commie block apt is equivalent to a large old-school 2 or 3-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Most are family-sized units.
I still live in one of these, walking my dog is a treat, so many trees, kindergarten, school, pharmacy, groceries, even a pub all within 200 meters.
The part I hate about this place the most is that they made a roundabout in front of the school so parents can drop their kid off by car easier, it's the most americanized aspect, absolutely disgusting, there are literally two bus stops next to this school going in both directions.
That's my Canada goose brain talking. 😆🪿 It's literally the common term used to refer to the total area of a housing unit. Here for example a major real estate firm explains the importance of square footage measurement.
For extra entertainment, this is a handy flowchart of Canadian units of measurement:
It's similar in the US. We use gallons for milk and fuel, liters for mid size beverage (like a liter of water or two liters of soda) and fluid ounces for single servings (12 oz can). Pints are used to measure beer served from a keg into a glass. Medications use mililiters.
Large quantities of weed use Pounds and ounces, smaller quantities use grams. Hard drugs pretty much exclusively use metric. Medication uses metric exclusively while most other commerce uses pounds and ounces. Firewood is sold by the "cord"
FWIW, a lot of the bougie drinks (fancy soda water, juices, pre-mixed cocktails, etc.) now come in 330mL cans, probably because at 11.7 fl oz, it's a form of shrinkflation. And those mini cans of soda are technically 222mL.
Also, do note that a U.S. customary pint is different than an imperial pint. (You get 20% more beer in Britain.)
Yeah. That said, I think on average there's more imperial in the mix in the US than Canada. Canada went through an intentional Metrification process but it didn't go all the way through. In part due to trade with the US. 😅
I would measure my apartment in square meters, but I've realized I would use the phrase "square footage" to refer to the surface area of a living space. Is there an alternative? "Square meterage" doesn't work.
Ah. That makes sense. Let me make you feel better. In some provinces in Canada (or all?) children can't be left alone, without adult supervision until the age of 12. It's illegal and parents get in trouble for it. Even leaving your kid to play in your backyard in the suburb while you're in the shower can become a problem if your bored neighbour calls the authorities. Imagine growing up with that kind of lack of autonomy. Even if there are kids around and even if there's public transit. I still heven't figured out how to workaround that for my kid but I suspect I'm gonna be breaking the law. 😂
It is very generational. Sorry to be part of the helicopter parent generation. However, as an early GenX I was a free-range parent and the local neighbor parents did NOT APPROVE. I had to search for people that had my same heart. It was wonderful to find an adult willing to let me drop our boys off at the movies and then she would pick them up at the end. They figured out how to purchase snacks, find their seats and how to get out the right entrance.
Or if the design is suitable for machines to streamline a lot of building process so you can build them extremely efficiently, then go for it, you can "personalize" it after the building is there to live in.
The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they're built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It's how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.
Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather.
The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore).
Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they'd look nice.
As someone in a city with tons and tons of commieblocks - the apartments are usually fine, but no, these areas almost always look like shit and are depressing to be around, regardless of the weather.
And this is not one random guy's opinion, no one I know likes these parts of the city and is excited to live there.
I've lived my whole life in and around commie blocks and I do not share your sentiment. My blocks are colorful with massive murals painted on their sides making each unique. The green spaces in between also help a lot, there are nice playgrounds for the kids, outdoor gyms etc. All the commodities I need are very close to my living space. I have not seen a single space in my city that looks like one in the picture even though we do have a lot of commie blocks standing around. Although I must say that the city isn't taking enough care of our buildings. While mine and most others around are holding up fine there's one that looks like it has rotted over the years. It is really starting to ruin the atmosphere but it's just an odd one out and I hope proper steps will be taken in the future to restore it back to it's shape.
You're seeing the commieblocks 35 years after the dissolution of the country that built them, and likely 50-70 years after their construction. Anything that old without proper maintenance looks like shit.
Also these are not painted, where I live we have their walls painted in colours with sometimes shapes and some have big art on them. Also there are usually small parks or grass plots with trees around and playgrounds.
I mean, it's the left-wingers who want to increase the level of education for everybody, and that's one of the things that is shown to slow population growth. It's the insane population pressures that result in the need for building stuff like that.
Also projects are not left wing architecture. They're compromise with shitstain conservatives that will never properly fund a project even if it gets approved.
Population across the world will start decreasing, fertility rates are all lower than they should be to sustain population. I think the main reason it increased so much is the average life span is high these days with all the advances in medical care.
I think you may be mistakenly assuming I'm suggesting we outlaw or limit the right to procreate. There are currently people having children who don't even want to be having them. I'm suggesting governments stop forcing that to happen by allowing people to plan their own families.
e: I'd also like to add that unending population growth is a capitalist problem. Capitalist governments have to expand the work force or else they can't maintain growth for growth's sake. Under a healthier government or anarchy there would be no need to encourage population growth because people who want children would simply have them.
Yeah it’s a little bit cheating to talk about Vienna, but they have been doing a lot of things right. Seems that’s buckling under pressure a bit though. More private buildings, reducing the top tax rate - hopefully doesn’t turn into the failed neoliberal ideology from the 80s.
I’ve only seen it through rose tinted glasses of a tourist, but the city seems lovely. I would quickly consider living there if the opportunity presented itself.
That isn't left wing architecture. It's USSR architecture. Don't make everything bad from that dictatorship a part of the left. The Soviet Union wasn't even real communism. Because communism wouldn't have a regime consisting of oligarchs and a dictator for example. Just because some people abused something for bad, doesn't make the thing itself bad.
But these Stalin blocks were actually built an mass to house all the nomads living in the USSR. Most people didn't have a home, electricity, running water. They used to live in tents. So even though these blocks are ugly and depressing, it made sure people didn't have to live in a tent with -40°C and Stalin was widely praised for that.
I am a loud critic of the USSR but WW2 destroyed an enormous amount of housing in their country and they spent decades struggling to catch up. Even prior to that, they had WW1 and a civil war negatively impact housing and during the interwar industrialization they focused on increasing industrial output with most home building relegated to cheap temporary construction. A number of the economic issues faced by the USSR were unrelated to any specific political or economic system (for example, the vastness of the country added transportation expenses)
Better than live in ugly apartments than freeze in the harsh Russian winters.
Not completely right. The main reason for panel construction wasn't war reconstruction, it was rapid industrialization. The USSR in 1929 had 80+% of peasants working the land with a horse or with their hands. By 1970, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority urban population. This required the construction of housing for over a hundred million people over the span of a few decades.
Compare that to England, France, the USA or Germany, which had a few centuries to develop the cities together with their industry since the industrial revolution.
Now compare the housing in the USSR in 1970 with that of Brazil in 1970. The USSR in 1929 was actually less developed than Brazil.
Just expropriate the building and turn them into communal living spaces; e.g. the USSR did that after the revolution with all the fancy aristocratic- and capitalist-owned buildings
I've always suspected that ultra-expensive apartments in London might be mostly for money laundering. Like, i give you a ton of cocaine, and i don't give you money for that; Instead, i buy one of your luxury apartments in London for $150m (70 m² apartment btw).
Critiquing the visual appearance of architecture sounds like some Woke Leftist Liberal Arts shit to me.
My parents raised me in a hole under a tree stump and it built my character. Now I'm the assistant manager at three different car dealerships. You lefties with your indoor plumbing and central air will never have this much success
Yes, there is something even more depressing than late soviet (or late Francoist, if you want a right wing equivalent) residential monsters: just look at any first world homeless camp.
Yup. And look at the warehouses all these cars are going from these bullshit suburbs to get to. If you find joy in the architecture of a Home Depot you are a profoundly odd person
I live in WV in a rural area. Houses differ greatly. 2 floor, one floor, trailer, 2 garage, trailer, mcmansion, trailer... all on each street. Then I go to Houston and find this setup. I kept driving past my inlaws cause every damn street and house looks exactly the same.
I mean, those are basically just large apartments at that point, all cookie cutter. But at least the house is decent size and has a yard and you own it.
With an apartment you have no yard, probably no garage, cant make any changes to it, and you hear all your neighbors, and smell them if they smoke, and you dont own shit. Apartments actually benefit the wealthy class, which is why I find it funny lemmings love them so much.
I guarantee 99% of people would want a house on 2 acres thats a 30 minute drive to town than an apartment.
2 acres 30 minute from town is just not a realistic expectation, unless by town you mean a small rural town. even most suburbs are at least 1 hour drive away from downtowns.
apartments are a real solution to a lot of environmental and financial problems, and offer a higher quality of life for particular areas (mostly access to culture and socializing). it is ok not to value those things and prefering a more rural place, but then you should expect to be giving away a lot of the benefits of living in a city.
the (orders of magnitue) higher cost of land in cities over rural areas should tell you that a lot of people actually want to live there, and while access to job opportunities is one of the factors, a lot of it is the cultural benefits of cities.
and regarding aparments benefiting the wealthy class, i have no idea where you are coming from. obviously there is a big cost of living crisis, and city living is not expect from that, but car dependance benefits the wealthy class much more than walkable apartment life, which is why the US has been pushing for suburbs and car dependance for the last 80 years.
What if you buy it? You can buy apartments, you know.
I guarantee 99% of people would want a house on 2 acres thats a 30 minute drive to town than an apartment.
I think that owning a house is also a lot of work, because you're responsible for everything yourself, including construction and maintenance, and i don't like that. There's a proverb: You build the first house for your enemy, the second house for your friend, and the third one for yourself. It says that when you're young and inexperienced, you don't know what to look out for when you build a house. So you might build rooms without proper ventilation, and that makes mold grow. You might build the garage in the wrong dimensions, because you don't know better. You might mess up the room layout or their sizes. When you buy an apartment built by the city, you can have a reasonable expectation that they've built 10000 apartment units before and know what they're doing. With private construction companies, i'm reasonably worried about being ripped off or fucked with. I trust public housing much more than private construction companies.
On top of that if i live in the city, i don't even need a garage, nor a car. It's all very efficient and compact.
I know you can buy apartments, but its a joke to me. If you dont own the land its on, thats as worthless as renting.
I can see your take on liking things already done for you. Im someone who likes doing it the hard way and doing things myself. Maybe when im really old then it'd be fine to let others do things. Ive just always preferred to do anything i can myself, and if I really cant, then ill call a pro, like for gas line work. Electrical, I do myself just fine.
Ive heard many many more complaints about apartments and terrible landlords and awful appliances than I have from a homeowner because you can fix shit yourself.
Also, garages can be for a lot more than just car stuff. Workshop, band space, hangout space, etc.
I guarantee 99% of people would want a house on 2 acres thats a 30 minute drive to town than an apartment.
This is an insane take.
Many people like density.
With an apartment you have no yard, probably no garage, cant make any changes to it, and you hear all your neighbors, and smell them if they smoke, and you dont own shit.
Many apartments have yards.
If you own that apartment, you can make changes to it. Maybe not some drastic changes, but I imagine the real limited there is money rather than architectural.
Many apartments are sound proof. I almost never hear my neighbors.
I don't know if my neighbors smoked. I've never smelled anything.
Apartments actually benefit the wealthy class, which is why I find it funny lemmings love them so much.
Maybe apartments in non US countries are nice? Any I've ever seen in the US are shit. And not cheap ones either. Paper thin walls and trash electrical.
And yes I know you can "buy" apartments but thats kind of a joke. You cant seriously think buying an apartment is like buying a house on a plot of land. You dont own the land your apartment is on and you sure as heck cant add on to it or build a small workshop near it! "Owning" an apartment or a townhouse is a scam.
Again, I just prefer open spaces and not being surrounded by people I dont know and probably won't get along with. You cant pick your neighbors and it takes 1 Karen to ruin your life.
And yes, of course Karen's exist in other communities with houses. I also think homeowner associations should absolutely be illegal and no one should be able to tell anyone what to do with their own house. Ill never live in one.
My apartment isn't bad and blows away houses around here unless I want to spend about 3x what I pay for rent on a mortgage (after a 20% downpayment). Any house cheaper than that is going to be a shitbox. Yeah, I know about equity, but 3x is a huge gap that I instead choose to put towards retirement.
The sound insulation here could be better, but even so most of the noise comes from outside. Garbage trucks, barking dogs, etc. The house I lived in growing up was actually louder. A lot more neighbors' dogs that were left outside at all hours of the night, more lawn equipment (when I was home, instead of during the business day), etc.
If I had hobbies that were loud or took up a bunch of space (particularly outdoor space), then I'd probably have to look into getting a house. But I'm in a good spot and see no reason to change.
What parts of the US have you visited? I've only really spent time in the NYC area. Many apartments in NYC are pretty nice, though I can't judge their electrical quality. When I lived outside the city, I rarely had problems with hearing neighbors.
I don't think most people really want to build a small workshop in their day to day. I did know a guy who got up to some weird shit in his apartment's back yard. Bunch of artists doing weird metal sculpting stuff.
Again, I just prefer open spaces and not being surrounded by people I dont know and probably won’t get along with.
That's fine, man. You don't need to live in a city. But I don't think it's accurate to say most or even "99%" of people feel the same. Many people are happy in denser living spaces.
I had a friend who lived in one of these (but in Canada), he said that when he first moved in they gave him a brochure that had like 5 pre-approved trees in it and he had to pick one. Also one time he was a day or two late cutting the grass (in a fenced-off backyard that you can't even see from the back lane) and one of his next door neighbours reported him and the HOA came round to his house to bother him about it.
Those look very similar in style to the 5-over-1s being built all over the United States. Four floors good, ten floors bad? Or does "left-wing architecture" refer to leaving the trees instead of paving every square inch of outdoor space for parking?
5 or 6 stories are the most you can do with 2x4 construction bought from the local hardware store. They don't want to spend the money on concrete and use the cheapest shit to furnish the apartment they can. There was a pretty bad fire in my state and they made the fire codes stricter on them. Faux luxury.
Seen a lot of appartments built by developers that are similar in a smaller way. I always put it down to cheapest cost and maximum profit. Nothing to do with ideology just expedience or greed.
The thing is, a lot of capitalist countries also used to build these, except they stopped due to outrage from real estate barons and NIMBYs losing value on their buildings.
Housing people efficiently so everyone can have a roof over their head, running warm water and central heating; regardless whether they have money or not
Homes are better than homelessness 100% but those commieblock suburbs can be pretty depressing. And I've lived in a few. Different colours and some evergreen stuff helps a bunch. Even some other marerials, some wood panels etc. But it all ads cost.
These sort of housing projects popped up in many parts of the world and sometimes they definitely were needlessly austere. Better than nothing though. A lot better.
Rows of uniform monotonous rectangles made of concrete. Even a coat of paint and some color would be more pleasing on the eye but I'm not sure you could reasonably paint concrete and get it to last thru Russian winters.
Imagine what "left wing architecture" looks like after we end manufactured scarcity...
Vast forest arcology-scapes.
Enough to increase the carrying capacity of earth past 300 trillion humans, with vast space enough to live in lush nature...
But no, we have to keep the polluting rents extraction to keep the little people down, to keep the billionaires on top, even if it means even the billionaires have vastly less than they could in egalitarian emancipatarian abundance. At least they have more than others. That's the most important measure. /s :-/
And pay no attention to the imminence of the bubble popping. ;D
Crazy how detached from reality, compassion, and morality, some are, that they pleep about aesthetics, preferring to keep millions destitute and homeless, to maintain their profiteering gamble.
Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape, something with trees and other plants growing all over the building. Not only is that significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won't last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.
end manufactured scarcity
Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.
significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won’t last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.
This sounds like the kind of argument I hear against spaceships for everybody, that's basically like "We can't have spaceships! Screen doors don't work in space!". Yeah, well, don't build them like that.
[Edit: Also sounds like people complaining about indoor plumbing, not understanding what that meant, imagining poop all over the place inside. No. We have tubes to manage where stuff goes. Ample dry clean space.]
Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape,
:3
A house that is a forest arcology-scape... lol... just one house, going from horizon to horizon, with vast layers big enough to fit giant trees in... just a house? Seems more than a little opulent-overkill.
And, by myself? :3 If I had the resources, I would not do it just for myself.
Also, I did draft a small example (and even 1000 variations) of a largely self-sustaining house, using environmentally friendly materials, that would strengthen over time, and as intended to be lived in would increase in capacity to produce food and energy over time, and I was enslaved to do this design work while at my worst health, under promise I'd be put in it, if I'd only design a house fit for my needs, then, after much blackmail, slavery, and torture, they defrauded me, and built a design that inverted every key design element for my health, turning a healing home into a torture box, and what's worse, it cost them at least twice as much. ... I still don't really know why they did that. Can only presume some kind of sadistic narcissistic Munchhausen-by-proxy. Gets me wondering how much more human potential is being squandered for utterly insane reasons. By this worse-than-Sisyphusian task, I have envied Gregor Samsa. ... And I shall recover enough health, and build it properly, and more, yet.
Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.
You're kidding, right? That's insanely farcical. Not even funny. If we've availed the means to build forest arcologyscapes, you think this makes housing building more scarce and expensive? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that, correct or incorrect. I wonder where your're presuming screen doors. Like... concrete? LOL. Or perhaps unimaginatively in cognitive dissonance presuming aspects of the current economic paradigm would persist along side the deployed ability to construct vast linked forest arcologies...?
Also, just the same as we don't have to increase the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions, nor fill that capacity, and that's just an example to illustrate some of the headroom we have with proper resource management, we don't have to make everything on earth a forest arcologyscape.
Anyhoo, please don't be put off by my reflexively scoffing incredulity, and do elaborate on how "Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive". You might be right. I wouldn't want to be barking up the wrong tree. (Pun not intended, noticed, and did nothing to avoid.)
Don't be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.
Wanting to be approximately decent doesn't overcome physics.
We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.
Don’t be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.
Wanting to be approximately decent doesn’t overcome physics.
We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.
Fun spray of fallacies there.
Starts with Ad-hominem (plausibly/presumably projection), proceeds through a lack of a constructive argument/engagement (ignoring what I said) with false dichotomy, appeal to status quo, appeal to authority, begging the question, circular argument, ... and seems like incurious arrogant naive realism, and lack of an educated mind (as in the expression "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting or rejecting it).
You assert "Leftist housing looks" only one way. ... So anarchist or agrarian housing are not "leftist" in your meaning of "leftist" (like it's only the one type) are not "leftist"? Sounds like circular argument, appeal to definition, begging the question, a cherry picking lie of omission, a false dichotomy, appeal to cynicism, reification (new term to me). and whatever else I missed. Gets me wondering if this is a case of "received opinion" that's not been introspected upon and scrutinised.
Perhaps for a more constructive argument, you could elaborate on what specifics of "physics" you think refute the possibility specific to my thought experiment I invited readers to imagine. Otherwise it looks like handwaving an appeal to authority to close the argument.
"We can build a world" amuses me, for the open positivity opening, and the limitation of just "world", because much of the suppressed technology that avails such vast construction overlaps with the technology that avails all space to us (not limiting us to just a world). Though the amusement is short lived with the rest of that sentence falling to the false dichotomy, and the dismissive presumptive strawman for the ending portion of that false dichotomy.
I look forward to your elaboration on the physics aspect of your counter-argument. Or better yet, your entertaining the idea in curiosity, engaging in the thought experiment, leaving the incurious cynical presumption behind, getting constructive in a "how can we" rather than a "stupid cant".
[Edit: PS, just for a fun extension to this, bouncing off a piece of an llm's dubious analysis, that I looked at after hastily churning out ^,
capitalist/neoliberal housing also relies on specific materials and technologies, yet its limitations are rarely framed as "physics" but as market failures or policy choices. Funny how ‘physics’ only becomes an insurmountable obstacle when discussing leftist or egalitarian housing. When luxury skyscrapers or McMansions are built, we call it ‘innovation’ or ‘market demand’—not an immutable law of nature. Why the double standard?
reminds of a fun idea asserted emphatically as an invitation to entertain in the recentmost episode of derp with kurp that "if communism didn't exist, capitalism would have to invent it" (paraphrased from memory ~ works better in original context/video/wording). ~ (albeit apparently using the newspeakified definition of "communism", obviously not as originally coined by anarchists at least 5 years before Marx usurped it and handed it over to the tankies, authoritarians, totalitarians, fascists etc to wield as a means to abuse us by).]
The weird thing is that I don't mind that architecture. Gray buildings? OK. That's fine.
Of course very old buildings have their own issues. They all do. And so do many new buildings... But looking at this picture, I just wonder what is supposed to be so bad... Shit, I mean, go to modern suburbia or gated communities and tell me you like the look of the cookie cutter homes that will fall apart in twenty years.
Yeah, I know. But these are exclusive to America and the underdeveloped world, and we're not defending that. It also has similarities with it. Europe has good housing (Though unaffordable) that isn't suburbia, but modern day commie blocks aren't exactly affordable in Russia either.
I loved to hate these buildings, but behind those grey boxes there was planning. Lots of nurseries, kindergarten, schools, playground, pharmacies, shops, and parks in-between, and public transportation. Whereas modern construction is all for maximizing profit, "luxury residence" everywhere, putting the most of sq meters in every plot, and f.ck the rest.
Also: the size layout of the flats is really good, not like the 39.5sqm random polygons of a modern buildding.
No, we don't have to agree to that. The abolition of homelessness didn't make people miserable, guaranteed housing made people thrive.
We're talking of a country that in 1929 was a preindustrial feudal backwater nation with 85% of the workforce being peasants who, with a bit of luck, worked their landlord's land with a horse, and without luck they worked it with their bodies. These people lived in poverty conditions without running water, electricity or more heating than a simple fireplace.
By 1970, even after suffering catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Nazism they heroically defeated, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority of the workforce in cities. People, for the first time, enjoyed access to commodities such as running clean water, central heating and electricity. This was literally a revolution for most. This housing was guaranteed, most people accessed it through their work union, and its rent costed a meager 3% of monthly income on average.
The USSR didn't have the 200 year long process of industrialization that the UK, Germany, France or the USA enjoyed. They literally had to build new, modern housing for a hundred million people in a few decades. The only way possible to do this was with industialized panel construction. Since unemployment was abolished and jobs were guaranteed, everyone was employed in the country. It was literally impossible to build more housing.
This housing was not only guaranteed, it was also designed in walkable neighborhoods with easy access by foot to public transit, basic services such as childcare, shopping and medical attention, and there was a wide variety of cultural centres, sports facilities and other public activities. The socialist country created social people.
I know this, I used to live in a Stalin era house in Moscow. But Stalin's Russia had a big problem with housing, only Khrucshev fixed it. All of these things may come as a shocker to an American, but they're quite common in Europe. And it wasn't that easy to get a house, you had to wait in line for half your life and the system didn't work with a bit of corruption, like centralized systems always do. Comparing the USSR to western countries is especially bad, because western countries had no regard towards workers, and if we look at the same timeframe we could say they advanced their housing capabilities equally.
I don't get the individuality aspect. Do you mean the uniform aesthetic? You can still personalize inside, you know, the place you usually see where you live. I live in a beautiful altbau building in Germany and I couldn't care less, like fuck do I care about the outside of the house, inside I cannot drew one hole into the wall without it becoming a day long project.
You cannot really express individuality with housing, unless you are building a house from scratch, which few of us do. We can hardly afford to rent anything, it's not exactly pick and choose?
I'd argue insulation and soundproofing are bigger issues than individuality and making people miserable.
I feel like Vienna did it better. And in European cities that didn't get bombed to shit in ww2 these houses look out of place and terrible. These houses weren't build for the benefit of people, but for the benefit of production, like in good old capitalism. They often disregarded the enviroment and historic parts of the city
systematic government slop that destroy individuality and make people miserable.
I was under the impression they were centrally planned, modern brutalist buildings that didn't meet all expectations as 2was typical of modernist project of the time (c.f. le corbusier's projects).
Not some darstardly unliveable conspiricy.
Why did they leave so much room for light and green space?
Many of them were colorful in Soviet times, but the capitalist regimes don't care for maintenance. As they say, "what communism built, capitalism cannot even paint".
if the us were a socialist/communist country, land ownership would be abolished and housing would be free and nationalized/collectivized which means a lot of people would be living comfortably in shelter. seriously!
My parents had been indoctrinated into the belief that son of a removed was the only thing preventing people to kill each other. And I was just 11, so I had not been able to build anything similar to a worldview.
So my mum thought the war would return and she would be bombed as she was when she was a kid.
Yeah, except for the unlucky guys who got in one of those aluminose concrete which started falling during the 80s. Some of them went down, with some fatal casualties. Most had to be basically rebuilt from the inside to replace the defective beams.
somebody still has to build them, so somebody would still have to work for them.
i think, however, the amount of hours worked that are needed to build a house might be drastically reduced if they had more uniformous form. However, whether people actually like that is a difficult question, because people are so different.
Why is ensuring housing authoritarian? Isn't the cheapest most depressing architecture authoritarian? No one says it had to be depressing and lack deicent design... unless the dictator mandates it. No true left wing design would look this bleak and forced.
If you've come to look at a given architectural style (or any object for that matter) in its abstracted, ahistorical form, then you may not find much value nor truth to what it actually signifies. You must instead look at the material conditions that led to its creation.
First of all brutalist architecture emerged in the USSR after the end of WW2 after the economy and the entire infrastructure of the country were entirely wiped out. Simplified construction techniques using concrete were revolutionary in the sense that they were efficient and easy to streamline on a national scale for millions of people on the one hand, while being cost effective on the other hand. Whilst the rate of homelessness was not decreasing (if not increasing) in capitalist economies, socialist countries were at the vanguard of providing free housing for everyone.
In short, brutalist architecture was shaped by the material conditions of the post-war era and developed further as the economy progressed in later decades. This is simply because policies and social and cultural phenomena are not the mere product of ideas and thoights as much as the material conditions which are the basis for every human movement.
Secondly, the term "brutalist" does not give credit to what the Soviets and other socialist countries have achieved in the architectural fields. Most pictures that are publicized on the Internet picture either abandoned and unmaintained buildings or pictures that are taken in the gloomiest period of winter, since this id what is believed to fit the narrative or the "aesthetics" of socialist architecture.
Lastly, in reality there isn't really an artistic style that dictates what leftist architecture should look like. If you search through pictures of Soviet architecture or even DPRK or PRC architecture for something recent, you will find that they vary so much in colors and shapes, because it all depends on the architect's individual and distinct taste. Rather, what distinguishes leftist (or your so-called "authoritarian") architecture is that it serves the needs of the proletariat, contrary to capitalist societies that boast about their individualism.
Generally left wing is 'making things better for people would be nice'
And is mostly bitterly divided between 'cool, so let's get started!' And 'we must form a committee and personality cult to do capitalist accellerationism, only then can we murder everyone in the first group and then do the thing’ with some absolutely batshit jewels of ideology mixed in.
And the commie blocks are really in the center of that venn diagram. The party that made them was soaked in leftist blood, but the reason they look like that is because building them fast meant people got homes faster, so they were less concerned with giving each one a unique style.
Yep. They did a lot of bullshit and I'd argue they were profoundly reactionary, but the Bolsheviks were still minimum viable communist, and did a lot of communism when it wasn't purge time.
Which sounds and was pointlessly awful, but I have spent a lot of time with people on the streets, and I think that's still less terror, less pointless death and suffering.
And is mostly bitterly divided between 'cool, so let's get started!' And 'we must form a committee and personality cult to do capitalist accellerationism
Who are those "cool, let's get started" leftists, and what housing did they build? Just so I can compare their housing to that of the "personality cult capitalist accelerationists".
Dunno, not my department. Like I said, at least a few that I've personally seen, but they also don't try to kill other leftists for no fucking reason. So it's probably easier.
Ah, I see, there are no real examples of "cool, let's get started" leftists building millions of housing units, so you're comparing an actually existing state having to deal with capitalist and fascist subversion in a world dominated by capitalism, with idealistic nonexisting societies. That's your problem right there. You're welcome!
Left wing is so loosely defined you can ask two people and get three answer's. In this case the poster seems right wing and for him left wing=USSR. Ignoring that, this building style is probably the most efficient way to house as many people for as cheap as possible as fast as possible, which seems pretty left wing to me
Why is total efficiency left wing? Isn't maximizing profit right wing? The buildings should be built to maximize happiness of the people who, together, decide on the architecture... at the expense of profit.
efficiency and maximum extracted profit are not the same thing
the modern western housing construction process from start to finish is an incredibly inefficient process which is designed around minimizing as much risk and maximizing as much profit to the financiers, nothing about it is designed around effecient home-building.
It's not per say but you have to be efficient when you have homeless people to house. After everyone has somewhere to live then you can ease off the efficiency.
I mean NGL the leftist architecture is very depressing. I think with current infrastructure if all houses were occupied homelessness wouldnt be a problem in most western countries right?
I wonder whether the figure still holds true if we include all of the people still living with parents or in multi-family arrangements because they can't afford individual homes.
While this is sad and I agree, you cant just go shoving homeless people into empty apartments. There would need to be way more safeguards than that.
Example, you live in an apartment with 2 children and there are empty units near you. A law passes that empty apartments are fair game. A mentally ill or meth addict person moves in next to you, then 5 people move in, people are coming and going to that apartment, right as your children are coming home from school every day. How do you feel about that?
I feel you think every homeless person is a drug addict which makes you an asshole.
Example: rich kid moves in, kid's into snorting coke, rich daddy just throws money at kid. Way better environment for the next door children i'm sure.
I definitely dont think that, but let's not ignore that its usually the norm. Let me ask you, would you go out in the street and take the first unhoused person you see into your house ? Im being realistic.
That rich kid is a piece of shit and should have the same consequences as if that happened to a homeless person. Im merely outlining what is bad about saying "give all empty apartments and houses to the homeless and it will fix if!" It wont. It would need a massive management team and billions of dollars to run it to make sure your next-door neighbor isnt throwing heroine needles into your yard.
I definitely dont want a homeless person moving in next to me. To be honest I dont want anyone to move in next to me because neighbors usually suck. But thats a different discussion.
would you go out in the street and take the first unhoused person you see into your house ?
That's the government's job.
It would need a massive management team and billions of dollars to run it to make sure your next-door neighbor isnt throwing heroine needles into your yard.
Not sure about billions (and even so, better that to spend them liberating countries of their oil), but Finland that did exactly that.
“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” ― Mikhail Bakunin
::: spoiler ...
(So, lets have both.)
"Stop promoting the knowledge that homelessness was successfully abolished 50+ years ago with socialist policy in a country with much fewer resources and technological development than what we have in 2025"
This is fascist/communist dictatorship architecture. There was a Professor in our Honors College that would go on a fucking tirade about it whenever he saw it. It wasn't even a lecture. I was working with him in his office and he just went off for 15 minutes about the Humanities building on campus.
For future readers, the emphasis was on, "Dictatorship" which creates oligarchical structures, only after which block housing was made, because the people in charge realized that their peons needed homes to live in to do the work for them. Sadly, we're not there yet in the US.
Dumb ass take. This is the architecture of a country that guaranteed housing for every single citizen and industrialized in 40 years time. Good luck building housing for 1/3rd your population during industrialization without utilizing big blocks and panel construction.
Did your professor tell you about the walkability in USSR neighborhoods? Easy access by foot to green areas, sports facilities, medicine, shopping basics, childcare and education, and public transit?
The PRC is fascist now? The same country that endured brutal massacres fighting fascist japanese soldiers? This is how crucial terms lose all meaning and risk getting bannalized by right-wing reactionaries.
There were no homeless in the USSR, the country where this housing was built. Homelessness was abolished because housing was a constitutional right and so was employment. Housing rent costed 3% of the monthly income.
But if you want real data, let's go. As per Wikipedia, home-ownership rate in China is 96% (second highest in the world) and 93% in Russia (7th highest). In the USA, for comparison it's 66%, and in Germany 48%.
Having lived in Germany, and having visited China, I can tell you I encountered more homeless in Germany in one day than in China in the two weeks I visited.
I struggle with this because I hate apartments. Theyre inherently depressing.
As long as we can have apartments and I can still have my house and land, its fine.
But a lot of times it seems like they want all of us to live in 1 bedroom ny style apartments like sardines and eat bugs, and i think thats where the backlash comes in.
I guess if youre homeless any apartment is a good one. But a lot of them would get destroyed from mentally ill people. So then what, build concrete cell block apartments ? Im really not sure.
Lol what. How are apartments inherently depressing? Several of my friends have very nice apartments with natural light, grassy spaces, and close proximity to parks and essentials.
Personally I find isolated single family homes a little depressing, but that's not an inherent property of them.
I'm the oddball who prefers living in an apartment. It has some nice features that are difficult to find in a stand-alone house, difficult to replicate, or simply don't scale down well.
Because they're tiny and you cant make any noise in them (usually not allowed, and if it was id feel bad for annoying others)
Thats probably my biggest issue. I cant understand liking such small spaces and having people surrounding me watching and listening to everything i do, even if its passively. Plus, id be the one to get awful neighbors that I dread being near.
Not every apartment is tiny. I don't have the measurements for mine but it feels comfortable with two desks, a couch, a coffee table, and some bookcases. Plus there's the bedroom with a queen size bed, bookcases, another desk, and dresser. The kitchen is admittedly a little small. This isn't a fancy apartment, and its priced pretty average for the city. I'm pretty sure all the units in this building are about the same.
I very rarely hear my neighbors. I play music through speakers and (I've asked) they never hear me.
Also no one sees me, so far as I know. For contrast, where my parents live out in the suburbs, neighbors are always creeping on each other and gossiping.
Now, admittedly, there are many apartments that are tiny, or have shit sound proofing, or whatever. But, again, that is not an inherent property of apartments. Many houses have problems, too.
People surrounding me watching and listening to everything i do
Counterintuitively, denser living spaces make you less seen. Not that you're invisible, but that you don't register. If I went for a walk out in the suburbs, people would look and see me. They'd be like "Who's that weirdo walking?" or "Did you see that weird guy with the metal band on his t-shirt?" Someplace denser, I blend in with everyone else and don't get a second thought. Not even a first thought, most of the time.
Somewhat paradoxically, the soundproofing in big buildings tends to be much better than in smaller buildings. The concrete and steel and thick storm resistant windows and fire doors between unit and hallway required by the building code for tall buildings have so much weight that things like footsteps, moving furniture, and other sources of noise just don't carry between units.
I chose all the furniture and decorations. How often are you remodeling your home? What kind of remodeling are you doing? Like, more than moving the contents around? That's just not a thing I have a desire to do. (This isn't sarcastic. I'm being sincere.)
I don't even mean just large remodels, a lot of times in most Apartments the appliances are whatever you get and you can't put your own in. Many apartments have rules and limitations on what can or can't be hung on the walls personally I'm a huge fan of shelves on the walls a couple L brackets and some stainless steel string make for a very aesthetically pleasing and very useful shelf space most Apartments don't enjoy you doing that.
Electricity bill getting really high and you wish you could have a heat pump dryer instead of the cheap ass piece of s*** they put in? Well that's just too damn bad etc. Want to modify your balcony? Put up special netting or something? Some places will let you some places tell you don't even think about it. And don't you dare leave stuff sitting on the balcony we can't have that it has to look nice
There are plenty of rules and limitations on apartments that go well beyond just Mass renovations
a lot of those are more limitations of renting more than limitations of an apartment. if you own your place, you can put things on the wall, paint, and change appliances. also, you can definetely make a lot of changes in the space even when renting an apartment, even hang things on the wall, but you might need to cover the holes when leaving.
and there are HOA that would also limit what you can do with your property and put on your yard as well, so, while it is shitty, even owning a house doesn't mean that you get the freedom to do what you want.
living in an apartment is definetely not for everyone, but it has advantanges (and disadvantages) over living in a house.
Ah, I see. This apartment doesn't have any rules (that I'm aware of) about what you can put on the walls, but I don't have anything more than some picture frames up.
I'm also lucky that heat and hot water are included - a friend of mine had electric heating and it was really expensive.
Anyway, point taken that there are some limitations. I guess I'm lucky enough that I've never run into them, personally. Thanks.
A lot of apartments dont even let you paint the walls. And often living in one is an aspect of leaving it nice "for the next person" which is an annoying feeling.
If you wanna nail up a nice cedar wall, good luck.
I don't think most of my friends are living in luxury apartments. Though there are many shitty apartments, shittiness is not an innate attribute of apartments.
Luxury is a point of view. A millionaire's view of just getting by isn't the same as someone living on $35,000 a year with 2 kids. And you are right shittiness isn't an innate attribute of apartments. But it sure is pretty common in many areas.
Although I do not personally feel that apartments are inherently depressing, perhaps someone who was more worried about exactly what decisions they are allowed to make about their living space might. They may be considering the lack of agency one experiences in some regards as a renter, which could make them feel as though every apartment type situation was inherently depressing.
Yeah, could be. I said elsewhere in this thread that I think they're conflating renting with apartments. They said that buying an apartment is a "scam", and I didn't follow up with "but people rent houses, too."
I could see why eternal renting is depressing, but that's not the same as living in an apartment.
Well, I don't know. Where do you live? Where do you want to live? There are sites like zillow that let you search, but there's other listings and word of mouth. A combined budget of $1k for rent and bills isn't going to go very far most places.
Well, prices keep going up, so that's a good question. Rent last year it was $700, this year it was $800, next year it'll be $975. I got lucky and found somebody with a mortgage who needed a roommate, but I've been struggling with my health and I lost my job earlier this year because of it, so the budgeting has become impossible.
I keep hearing that there's nice places I could move to, but they all turn out to need more bootstraps than god gave me.
Depends. Having a house in the middle of nowhere is reasonable, having a house in a population center is wasted space. You could fit a two mother in law units onto the land my home sits on and not negatively impact my life even a little bit.
People are sardined like this because so little land and money are allocated towards housing them and none for providing essential services there. Then the same people who denied the funding and land permits complain about how difficult it is to keep gangs from running them.
Right wing architcture:
those are FUCKING SPIKES to keep people away, the fact that they don't use daggers instead is strange
HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT PIGEONS
Actually, they are. As far as the average conservative cares, both of them are dirty pests that should be driven away.
And under no circumstances should you feed them or they'll become dependent on you and keep coming back. It's better to let them die.
Might as well just put em out of their misery note then.
(For anyone who does not know, right wing lunatics are starting to openly advocate for this!)
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF *coo coo*
Well, not usually.
I have met a homeless furry who was kind of a pigeon.
They're still shitting all over the park I wish my toddler could more freely play at.
You could also petition the city for public toilets to be available for homeless people. I mean, every construction site/ public festival I see those aqua blue porta potties. I bet they would rather shit in one of them since no public facility/business will let them in to do that. Everyone poops. Even dogs, pigeons, rabbists, racoons and deer.
You're not wrong but people gotta defecate and frequently have no where to do it. If we cared for our people, with housing in this case, it would benefit literally everyone else too.
The difference is if you build public bathrooms, the pigeons won't use them. If humans are shitting outside to a degree it becomes a problem, the problem isn't the people doing the shitting.
Now, if we could get pigeons to use a bathroom, or even a shitting mat, that would be an achievement.
*yet, theirs always a chance
/s
If someone walking by, falls over that, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Sorry you got downvoted because that might actually be a good catalyst for undermining hostile architecture.
Talk about taking one for the team though
only commies walk.
And "commies" don't get to sue?
They keep the homeless at bay, but wait until the Ayurveda Yoga crowd discovers them. They'll be worse than a pidgeon infestation.
The last one is an actual safety hazard. Imagine someone slipping and falling (think icy sidewalks) and taking one of those to the face.
i think the things on the green bench might be anti-handholding or anti-cuddling things instead. you know, to aid against the display of lewd activity in public (/s)
Instructions unclear: one person sits on other's lap
i believe this is called "task failed successfully"
You can't even cuddle these days!!!
Or one of those homeless camps that are everywhere now.
Oh they sweep those at least weekly.
As someone who's grown up in one of those and now rearing a child in Canada, I'd like to tell you that it was an absolutely incredible place to grow up in. The urban planning is such that there's parks with kid playgrounds sprinkled between the buildings. There's ample trees. There's schools and kindergartens at walking distance where kids would often walk alone to/fro. There's convenient public transit stops. There's density that lets kids make tons of friends and always have someone to play with without "playdates." Parenting in such a social environment is so much easier than what parents face in Toronto, it's not even funny.
E: Oh and the square footage in the average commie block apt is equivalent to a large old-school 2 or 3-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Most are family-sized units.
I still live in one of these, walking my dog is a treat, so many trees, kindergarten, school, pharmacy, groceries, even a pub all within 200 meters.
The part I hate about this place the most is that they made a roundabout in front of the school so parents can drop their kid off by car easier, it's the most americanized aspect, absolutely disgusting, there are literally two bus stops next to this school going in both directions.
square footage? what kind of weird camera are you using?
That's my Canada goose brain talking. 😆🪿 It's literally the common term used to refer to the total area of a housing unit. Here for example a major real estate firm explains the importance of square footage measurement.
For extra entertainment, this is a handy flowchart of Canadian units of measurement:
💀
Wtf 😱 is that real?!
100% and it's accurate. It's how we do here. 😅
It’s missing how we measure long distances in driving time. ie: “other city is 3 hours away”
Which is also somewhat accurate in train time too given the sorry state of VIA. 😅
It's similar in the US. We use gallons for milk and fuel, liters for mid size beverage (like a liter of water or two liters of soda) and fluid ounces for single servings (12 oz can). Pints are used to measure beer served from a keg into a glass. Medications use mililiters.
Large quantities of weed use Pounds and ounces, smaller quantities use grams. Hard drugs pretty much exclusively use metric. Medication uses metric exclusively while most other commerce uses pounds and ounces. Firewood is sold by the "cord"
FWIW, a lot of the bougie drinks (fancy soda water, juices, pre-mixed cocktails, etc.) now come in 330mL cans, probably because at 11.7 fl oz, it's a form of shrinkflation. And those mini cans of soda are technically 222mL.
Also, do note that a U.S. customary pint is different than an imperial pint. (You get 20% more beer in Britain.)
Yeah. That said, I think on average there's more imperial in the mix in the US than Canada. Canada went through an intentional Metrification process but it didn't go all the way through. In part due to trade with the US. 😅
I would measure my apartment in square meters, but I've realized I would use the phrase "square footage" to refer to the surface area of a living space. Is there an alternative? "Square meterage" doesn't work.
Living space, m2, usable area
Surface? That's the term we use in Italian ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Area, surface, size.
"Area"
man, that's what i missed as a kid sooo much. i would have needed this.
In Germany?
in austria, but it was some conservative rural backwater nowhere
Ah. That makes sense. Let me make you feel better. In some provinces in Canada (or all?) children can't be left alone, without adult supervision until the age of 12. It's illegal and parents get in trouble for it. Even leaving your kid to play in your backyard in the suburb while you're in the shower can become a problem if your bored neighbour calls the authorities. Imagine growing up with that kind of lack of autonomy. Even if there are kids around and even if there's public transit. I still heven't figured out how to workaround that for my kid but I suspect I'm gonna be breaking the law. 😂
It is very generational. Sorry to be part of the helicopter parent generation. However, as an early GenX I was a free-range parent and the local neighbor parents did NOT APPROVE. I had to search for people that had my same heart. It was wonderful to find an adult willing to let me drop our boys off at the movies and then she would pick them up at the end. They figured out how to purchase snacks, find their seats and how to get out the right entrance.
man, that sucks. i wish you good luck :D
It’s probably fine if you’re used to it but man I’d be so depressed living in such a densely populated city.
Same here. I guess different people like that but I cant be around that many people.
Pandemics happen easier because of dense populations too.
China has incredibly dense cities compared to the USA and the effect of the COVID pandemic was much smaller in deaths per capita
Right wing Architecture
More like
They put butt-plugs on those posts?
Very odd to call things like that right-wing given they are most notable for being built in cities. Places well-known for being lefty.
Not really. Who do you think is more likely to sign off on this kind of thing? Certainly not a leftie.
From the top of the comment thread: "Right wing Architecture"
Again, these are most well known in cities, places that aren't known for being controlled by the right....
right wing architecture: jail
“Rugged individualism.”
The tarpe movement was very influencial from the 80s.
Yeah my parents did crack in these blue tents, so nostalgic
Where are the cops pulling tents down for being illegally homeless?
I mean, after we build them we can also let people do gorgeous art on them
You also like.. don’t have to use brutalist architecture. You can build them in any shape you want so long as the building won’t fall down.
Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times
Or if the design is suitable for machines to streamline a lot of building process so you can build them extremely efficiently, then go for it, you can "personalize" it after the building is there to live in.
I find it interesting that it's considered a design choice and style so much when it's kind of about necessity and just using what works.
But then it does become a sort of mode or aesthetic in art and culture for what it represents.
The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they're built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It's how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.
Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather. The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore).
Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they'd look nice.
Look at the trees. They don't have leaves. The image was definitely taken in winter. That adds a lot to the depression of it.
Didn't anyone think to scatter a few evergreens around?
E.g. a few pine and yew trees would be nice.
That looks like a SimCity screenshot.
They mixed residential, industrial, and commercial.
/original Sim City had color-coded zones
North Korea is actually real life SimCity, that's why people aren't allowed in there.
As someone in a city with tons and tons of commieblocks - the apartments are usually fine, but no, these areas almost always look like shit and are depressing to be around, regardless of the weather.
And this is not one random guy's opinion, no one I know likes these parts of the city and is excited to live there.
I've lived my whole life in and around commie blocks and I do not share your sentiment. My blocks are colorful with massive murals painted on their sides making each unique. The green spaces in between also help a lot, there are nice playgrounds for the kids, outdoor gyms etc. All the commodities I need are very close to my living space. I have not seen a single space in my city that looks like one in the picture even though we do have a lot of commie blocks standing around. Although I must say that the city isn't taking enough care of our buildings. While mine and most others around are holding up fine there's one that looks like it has rotted over the years. It is really starting to ruin the atmosphere but it's just an odd one out and I hope proper steps will be taken in the future to restore it back to it's shape.
Yeah, in Czechia most of the are painted (perhaps not as well as in the original picture)
You're seeing the commieblocks 35 years after the dissolution of the country that built them, and likely 50-70 years after their construction. Anything that old without proper maintenance looks like shit.
Could get artists to do far better than just monochrome per building.
True, but even just the colour there makes the whole thing seem less depressing.
Yep. Colour psychology matters.
Also these are not painted, where I live we have their walls painted in colours with sometimes shapes and some have big art on them. Also there are usually small parks or grass plots with trees around and playgrounds.
In the USSR, they also often had murals or mosaics and alike; public art for everyone to enjoy and to encourage them with e.g. messages of equality
commercial ads in public spaces should be banned. they are an eye-sore. source: personal experience
📠
I mean, it's the left-wingers who want to increase the level of education for everybody, and that's one of the things that is shown to slow population growth. It's the insane population pressures that result in the need for building stuff like that.
Also projects are not left wing architecture. They're compromise with shitstain conservatives that will never properly fund a project even if it gets approved.
Population across the world will start decreasing, fertility rates are all lower than they should be to sustain population. I think the main reason it increased so much is the average life span is high these days with all the advances in medical care.
Please note that you sound like an eco-fascist
Having children is not the problem OMFG. Unsustainable consumerism and capitalism is, however
I think you may be mistakenly assuming I'm suggesting we outlaw or limit the right to procreate. There are currently people having children who don't even want to be having them. I'm suggesting governments stop forcing that to happen by allowing people to plan their own families.
e: I'd also like to add that unending population growth is a capitalist problem. Capitalist governments have to expand the work force or else they can't maintain growth for growth's sake. Under a healthier government or anarchy there would be no need to encourage population growth because people who want children would simply have them.
Yup, approximately 50% of pregnancies are unplanned globally. The U.S. has a rate similar to the global rate.
Focus on preventing unplanned pregnancies. And make being child-free socially acceptable. That's it. No "eco-fascism" measures needed.
Ah yes so depressing and ugly that they’re featured in an architectural magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/vienna-social-housing/
vienna social housing is beautiful (a lot of the times at least). source: i live there
Yeah it’s a little bit cheating to talk about Vienna, but they have been doing a lot of things right. Seems that’s buckling under pressure a bit though. More private buildings, reducing the top tax rate - hopefully doesn’t turn into the failed neoliberal ideology from the 80s.
I’ve only seen it through rose tinted glasses of a tourist, but the city seems lovely. I would quickly consider living there if the opportunity presented itself.
That isn't left wing architecture. It's USSR architecture. Don't make everything bad from that dictatorship a part of the left. The Soviet Union wasn't even real communism. Because communism wouldn't have a regime consisting of oligarchs and a dictator for example. Just because some people abused something for bad, doesn't make the thing itself bad.
But these Stalin blocks were actually built an mass to house all the nomads living in the USSR. Most people didn't have a home, electricity, running water. They used to live in tents. So even though these blocks are ugly and depressing, it made sure people didn't have to live in a tent with -40°C and Stalin was widely praised for that.
I am a loud critic of the USSR but WW2 destroyed an enormous amount of housing in their country and they spent decades struggling to catch up. Even prior to that, they had WW1 and a civil war negatively impact housing and during the interwar industrialization they focused on increasing industrial output with most home building relegated to cheap temporary construction. A number of the economic issues faced by the USSR were unrelated to any specific political or economic system (for example, the vastness of the country added transportation expenses)
Better than live in ugly apartments than freeze in the harsh Russian winters.
Not completely right. The main reason for panel construction wasn't war reconstruction, it was rapid industrialization. The USSR in 1929 had 80+% of peasants working the land with a horse or with their hands. By 1970, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority urban population. This required the construction of housing for over a hundred million people over the span of a few decades.
Compare that to England, France, the USA or Germany, which had a few centuries to develop the cities together with their industry since the industrial revolution.
Now compare the housing in the USSR in 1970 with that of Brazil in 1970. The USSR in 1929 was actually less developed than Brazil.
I listed industrialization
Ultra luxury apartments are usually vacant most of the time, because the owners live elsewhere and only use that property for money laundering.
Just expropriate the building and turn them into communal living spaces; e.g. the USSR did that after the revolution with all the fancy aristocratic- and capitalist-owned buildings
not money laundering, gambling. secure a loan with the property as collateral, put that $ into the stock market.
I've always suspected that ultra-expensive apartments in London might be mostly for money laundering. Like, i give you a ton of cocaine, and i don't give you money for that; Instead, i buy one of your luxury apartments in London for $150m (70 m² apartment btw).
I didn’t realize an expansive category of political ideologies had adopted a unified architectural language. 🤦
Critiquing the visual appearance of architecture sounds like some Woke Leftist Liberal Arts shit to me.
My parents raised me in a hole under a tree stump and it built my character. Now I'm the assistant manager at three different car dealerships. You lefties with your indoor plumbing and central air will never have this much success
Please use a /s 😭
Also, how can this be considered ugly with all the greenspace?
Yes, there is something even more depressing than late soviet (or late Francoist, if you want a right wing equivalent) residential monsters: just look at any first world homeless camp.
also, if you live in the states, go look at some car oriented developments. they are just as brutalist, just as same-y, just as sad
image source: https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/573354-the-longest-road-in-america-runs-through-12/
Top image looks like one of the movie posters for Vivarium
And the bottom looks like a clip from the title sequence of Terminator 2.
Yup. And look at the warehouses all these cars are going from these bullshit suburbs to get to. If you find joy in the architecture of a Home Depot you are a profoundly odd person
TIL I'm a profoundly odd person
J/k, I've always known that 😂
I live in WV in a rural area. Houses differ greatly. 2 floor, one floor, trailer, 2 garage, trailer, mcmansion, trailer... all on each street. Then I go to Houston and find this setup. I kept driving past my inlaws cause every damn street and house looks exactly the same.
I mean, those are basically just large apartments at that point, all cookie cutter. But at least the house is decent size and has a yard and you own it.
With an apartment you have no yard, probably no garage, cant make any changes to it, and you hear all your neighbors, and smell them if they smoke, and you dont own shit. Apartments actually benefit the wealthy class, which is why I find it funny lemmings love them so much.
I guarantee 99% of people would want a house on 2 acres thats a 30 minute drive to town than an apartment.
2 acres 30 minute from town is just not a realistic expectation, unless by town you mean a small rural town. even most suburbs are at least 1 hour drive away from downtowns.
apartments are a real solution to a lot of environmental and financial problems, and offer a higher quality of life for particular areas (mostly access to culture and socializing). it is ok not to value those things and prefering a more rural place, but then you should expect to be giving away a lot of the benefits of living in a city. the (orders of magnitue) higher cost of land in cities over rural areas should tell you that a lot of people actually want to live there, and while access to job opportunities is one of the factors, a lot of it is the cultural benefits of cities.
and regarding aparments benefiting the wealthy class, i have no idea where you are coming from. obviously there is a big cost of living crisis, and city living is not expect from that, but car dependance benefits the wealthy class much more than walkable apartment life, which is why the US has been pushing for suburbs and car dependance for the last 80 years.
What if you buy it? You can buy apartments, you know.
I think that owning a house is also a lot of work, because you're responsible for everything yourself, including construction and maintenance, and i don't like that. There's a proverb: You build the first house for your enemy, the second house for your friend, and the third one for yourself. It says that when you're young and inexperienced, you don't know what to look out for when you build a house. So you might build rooms without proper ventilation, and that makes mold grow. You might build the garage in the wrong dimensions, because you don't know better. You might mess up the room layout or their sizes. When you buy an apartment built by the city, you can have a reasonable expectation that they've built 10000 apartment units before and know what they're doing. With private construction companies, i'm reasonably worried about being ripped off or fucked with. I trust public housing much more than private construction companies.
On top of that if i live in the city, i don't even need a garage, nor a car. It's all very efficient and compact.
I know you can buy apartments, but its a joke to me. If you dont own the land its on, thats as worthless as renting.
I can see your take on liking things already done for you. Im someone who likes doing it the hard way and doing things myself. Maybe when im really old then it'd be fine to let others do things. Ive just always preferred to do anything i can myself, and if I really cant, then ill call a pro, like for gas line work. Electrical, I do myself just fine.
Ive heard many many more complaints about apartments and terrible landlords and awful appliances than I have from a homeowner because you can fix shit yourself.
Also, garages can be for a lot more than just car stuff. Workshop, band space, hangout space, etc.
This is an insane take.
Many people like density.
Many apartments have yards.
If you own that apartment, you can make changes to it. Maybe not some drastic changes, but I imagine the real limited there is money rather than architectural.
Many apartments are sound proof. I almost never hear my neighbors.
I don't know if my neighbors smoked. I've never smelled anything.
You seem to be confusing renting with apartments
Maybe apartments in non US countries are nice? Any I've ever seen in the US are shit. And not cheap ones either. Paper thin walls and trash electrical.
And yes I know you can "buy" apartments but thats kind of a joke. You cant seriously think buying an apartment is like buying a house on a plot of land. You dont own the land your apartment is on and you sure as heck cant add on to it or build a small workshop near it! "Owning" an apartment or a townhouse is a scam.
Again, I just prefer open spaces and not being surrounded by people I dont know and probably won't get along with. You cant pick your neighbors and it takes 1 Karen to ruin your life.
And yes, of course Karen's exist in other communities with houses. I also think homeowner associations should absolutely be illegal and no one should be able to tell anyone what to do with their own house. Ill never live in one.
My apartment isn't bad and blows away houses around here unless I want to spend about 3x what I pay for rent on a mortgage (after a 20% downpayment). Any house cheaper than that is going to be a shitbox. Yeah, I know about equity, but 3x is a huge gap that I instead choose to put towards retirement.
The sound insulation here could be better, but even so most of the noise comes from outside. Garbage trucks, barking dogs, etc. The house I lived in growing up was actually louder. A lot more neighbors' dogs that were left outside at all hours of the night, more lawn equipment (when I was home, instead of during the business day), etc.
If I had hobbies that were loud or took up a bunch of space (particularly outdoor space), then I'd probably have to look into getting a house. But I'm in a good spot and see no reason to change.
That makes sense ! I can see it from that point of view. Im also lucky to be in an area with cheap ish housing.
Yeah thats my thing. Tons of hobbies that are loud and also take up space ha
What parts of the US have you visited? I've only really spent time in the NYC area. Many apartments in NYC are pretty nice, though I can't judge their electrical quality. When I lived outside the city, I rarely had problems with hearing neighbors.
I don't think most people really want to build a small workshop in their day to day. I did know a guy who got up to some weird shit in his apartment's back yard. Bunch of artists doing weird metal sculpting stuff.
That's fine, man. You don't need to live in a city. But I don't think it's accurate to say most or even "99%" of people feel the same. Many people are happy in denser living spaces.
I had a friend who lived in one of these (but in Canada), he said that when he first moved in they gave him a brochure that had like 5 pre-approved trees in it and he had to pick one. Also one time he was a day or two late cutting the grass (in a fenced-off backyard that you can't even see from the back lane) and one of his next door neighbours reported him and the HOA came round to his house to bother him about it.
Bleak
And yet, there's more greenery around this blocks than you'd see in a US city.
Of course! What use are green spaces? Cant extract profit from it.
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #102: "Nature decays, but Latinum lasts forever"
:3
Those look very similar in style to the 5-over-1s being built all over the United States. Four floors good, ten floors bad? Or does "left-wing architecture" refer to leaving the trees instead of paving every square inch of outdoor space for parking?
5 or 6 stories are the most you can do with 2x4 construction bought from the local hardware store. They don't want to spend the money on concrete and use the cheapest shit to furnish the apartment they can. There was a pretty bad fire in my state and they made the fire codes stricter on them. Faux luxury.
Yeah. The live/work/shop complexes are profitable. Especially when you can charge for parking, too.
Seen a lot of appartments built by developers that are similar in a smaller way. I always put it down to cheapest cost and maximum profit. Nothing to do with ideology just expedience or greed.
Right wing architecture
TIL the hammers in The Wall were based on Nazi architecture.
Bonus: this happened while we're listening to Pink Floyd and bakimg christmas cookies.
The thing is, a lot of capitalist countries also used to build these, except they stopped due to outrage from real estate barons and NIMBYs losing value on their buildings.
I mean the dark grey houses of capitalism using every square centimeter of ground are way more depressing than blocks with a lot of trees around them
Concentrating human populations into cities, apartment living, etc is the healthiest thing for our planet.
Forest arcologyscapes would be way healthier.
And/or provisioning everybody with spaceships, and vast spinning orbital habitats
Or even, perhaps, underground habitats.
Or...
~ okay, seems "Concentrating human populations into cities, apartment living, etc" is not the healthiest thing for our planet.
We have so much headroom without the plans of the crooks in charge.
Until we live in Iain Bank’s imagination, that is. I should have clarified
I suppose, yeah, ample range within what you said, to find specific arrangements that do make it true.
I recall that picture being a photoshop of a right-wing country. So it's both fake AND fundamentally right-wing in design.
This one is Moscow.
eli5 how this is specifically left-wing architecture?
Brutalism is associated with Soviet bloc buildings.
This is functionalism. There is none of the architectural expression of brutalism here.
Housing people efficiently so everyone can have a roof over their head, running warm water and central heating; regardless whether they have money or not
It always kills me to see a tower with 200 units, 200 air-conditioners, and presumably 200 water heaters.
Homes are better than homelessness 100% but those commieblock suburbs can be pretty depressing. And I've lived in a few. Different colours and some evergreen stuff helps a bunch. Even some other marerials, some wood panels etc. But it all ads cost.
tbf, they were built after ww2, the goal was to rebuild as many homes as possible as fast as possible. which was accompanied.
I'd rather live in a commie block post ww2, than be homeless through a few Russian winters.
These sort of housing projects popped up in many parts of the world and sometimes they definitely were needlessly austere. Better than nothing though. A lot better.
To me this says less "Leftist" and more "rich urban planners cutting corners for lower-class housing which will end in a horrific fire or collapse."
The above is definitely not because of developers.
Look at all that greenspace.
Why is the above considered ugly on the first place?
Rows of uniform monotonous rectangles made of concrete. Even a coat of paint and some color would be more pleasing on the eye but I'm not sure you could reasonably paint concrete and get it to last thru Russian winters.
Imagine what "left wing architecture" looks like after we end manufactured scarcity...
Vast forest arcology-scapes.
Enough to increase the carrying capacity of earth past 300 trillion humans, with vast space enough to live in lush nature...
But no, we have to keep the polluting rents extraction to keep the little people down, to keep the billionaires on top, even if it means even the billionaires have vastly less than they could in egalitarian emancipatarian abundance. At least they have more than others. That's the most important measure. /s :-/
And pay no attention to the imminence of the bubble popping. ;D
Crazy how detached from reality, compassion, and morality, some are, that they pleep about aesthetics, preferring to keep millions destitute and homeless, to maintain their profiteering gamble.
I want what you're smoking
At the time I was researching the technology and doing the maths, 20 years ago, I was mostly smoking Power Plant. High beta-pinene. Sharp clarity.
But where would all the cars go? /s
"Roads? Where we're going... we don't need... ... "roads"." -- Doc Emmett Brown, Back To The Future trilogy.
Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape, something with trees and other plants growing all over the building. Not only is that significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won't last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.
Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.
This sounds like the kind of argument I hear against spaceships for everybody, that's basically like "We can't have spaceships! Screen doors don't work in space!". Yeah, well, don't build them like that.
[Edit: Also sounds like people complaining about indoor plumbing, not understanding what that meant, imagining poop all over the place inside. No. We have tubes to manage where stuff goes. Ample dry clean space.]
:3
A house that is a forest arcology-scape... lol... just one house, going from horizon to horizon, with vast layers big enough to fit giant trees in... just a house? Seems more than a little opulent-overkill.
And, by myself? :3 If I had the resources, I would not do it just for myself.
Also, I did draft a small example (and even 1000 variations) of a largely self-sustaining house, using environmentally friendly materials, that would strengthen over time, and as intended to be lived in would increase in capacity to produce food and energy over time, and I was enslaved to do this design work while at my worst health, under promise I'd be put in it, if I'd only design a house fit for my needs, then, after much blackmail, slavery, and torture, they defrauded me, and built a design that inverted every key design element for my health, turning a healing home into a torture box, and what's worse, it cost them at least twice as much. ... I still don't really know why they did that. Can only presume some kind of sadistic narcissistic Munchhausen-by-proxy. Gets me wondering how much more human potential is being squandered for utterly insane reasons. By this worse-than-Sisyphusian task, I have envied Gregor Samsa. ... And I shall recover enough health, and build it properly, and more, yet.
You're kidding, right? That's insanely farcical. Not even funny. If we've availed the means to build forest arcologyscapes, you think this makes housing building more scarce and expensive? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that, correct or incorrect. I wonder where your're presuming screen doors. Like... concrete? LOL. Or perhaps unimaginatively in cognitive dissonance presuming aspects of the current economic paradigm would persist along side the deployed ability to construct vast linked forest arcologies...?
Also, just the same as we don't have to increase the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions, nor fill that capacity, and that's just an example to illustrate some of the headroom we have with proper resource management, we don't have to make everything on earth a forest arcologyscape.
Anyhoo, please don't be put off by my reflexively scoffing incredulity, and do elaborate on how "Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive". You might be right. I wouldn't want to be barking up the wrong tree. (Pun not intended, noticed, and did nothing to avoid.)
Don't be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.
Wanting to be approximately decent doesn't overcome physics.
We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.
Fun spray of fallacies there.
Starts with Ad-hominem (plausibly/presumably projection), proceeds through a lack of a constructive argument/engagement (ignoring what I said) with false dichotomy, appeal to status quo, appeal to authority, begging the question, circular argument, ... and seems like incurious arrogant naive realism, and lack of an educated mind (as in the expression "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting or rejecting it).
You assert "Leftist housing looks" only one way. ... So anarchist or agrarian housing are not "leftist" in your meaning of "leftist" (like it's only the one type) are not "leftist"? Sounds like circular argument, appeal to definition, begging the question, a cherry picking lie of omission, a false dichotomy, appeal to cynicism, reification (new term to me). and whatever else I missed. Gets me wondering if this is a case of "received opinion" that's not been introspected upon and scrutinised.
Perhaps for a more constructive argument, you could elaborate on what specifics of "physics" you think refute the possibility specific to my thought experiment I invited readers to imagine. Otherwise it looks like handwaving an appeal to authority to close the argument.
"We can build a world" amuses me, for the open positivity opening, and the limitation of just "world", because much of the suppressed technology that avails such vast construction overlaps with the technology that avails all space to us (not limiting us to just a world). Though the amusement is short lived with the rest of that sentence falling to the false dichotomy, and the dismissive presumptive strawman for the ending portion of that false dichotomy.
I look forward to your elaboration on the physics aspect of your counter-argument. Or better yet, your entertaining the idea in curiosity, engaging in the thought experiment, leaving the incurious cynical presumption behind, getting constructive in a "how can we" rather than a "stupid cant".
[Edit: PS, just for a fun extension to this, bouncing off a piece of an llm's dubious analysis, that I looked at after hastily churning out ^,
reminds of a fun idea asserted emphatically as an invitation to entertain in the recentmost episode of derp with kurp that "if communism didn't exist, capitalism would have to invent it" (paraphrased from memory ~ works better in original context/video/wording). ~ (albeit apparently using the newspeakified definition of "communism", obviously not as originally coined by anarchists at least 5 years before Marx usurped it and handed it over to the tankies, authoritarians, totalitarians, fascists etc to wield as a means to abuse us by).]
You getting paid by the word count?
just xkcd386'd into brandolini's law.
& always been more verbose than the average cat.
The weird thing is that I don't mind that architecture. Gray buildings? OK. That's fine.
Of course very old buildings have their own issues. They all do. And so do many new buildings... But looking at this picture, I just wonder what is supposed to be so bad... Shit, I mean, go to modern suburbia or gated communities and tell me you like the look of the cookie cutter homes that will fall apart in twenty years.
Ok, but we have to agree that Soviet blocks are systematic government slop that destroy individuality and make people miserable.
I can see some of that given the uniformity, but suburbia isn't exactly all that diverse. So ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, they're both pretty crap compared to what they could be
Funny story, suburbia is systemic government slop that destroys individuality, too.
Yeah, I know. But these are exclusive to America and the underdeveloped world, and we're not defending that. It also has similarities with it. Europe has good housing (Though unaffordable) that isn't suburbia, but modern day commie blocks aren't exactly affordable in Russia either.
I loved to hate these buildings, but behind those grey boxes there was planning. Lots of nurseries, kindergarten, schools, playground, pharmacies, shops, and parks in-between, and public transportation. Whereas modern construction is all for maximizing profit, "luxury residence" everywhere, putting the most of sq meters in every plot, and f.ck the rest.
Also: the size layout of the flats is really good, not like the 39.5sqm random polygons of a modern buildding.
No, we don't have to agree to that. The abolition of homelessness didn't make people miserable, guaranteed housing made people thrive.
We're talking of a country that in 1929 was a preindustrial feudal backwater nation with 85% of the workforce being peasants who, with a bit of luck, worked their landlord's land with a horse, and without luck they worked it with their bodies. These people lived in poverty conditions without running water, electricity or more heating than a simple fireplace.
By 1970, even after suffering catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Nazism they heroically defeated, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority of the workforce in cities. People, for the first time, enjoyed access to commodities such as running clean water, central heating and electricity. This was literally a revolution for most. This housing was guaranteed, most people accessed it through their work union, and its rent costed a meager 3% of monthly income on average.
The USSR didn't have the 200 year long process of industrialization that the UK, Germany, France or the USA enjoyed. They literally had to build new, modern housing for a hundred million people in a few decades. The only way possible to do this was with industialized panel construction. Since unemployment was abolished and jobs were guaranteed, everyone was employed in the country. It was literally impossible to build more housing.
This housing was not only guaranteed, it was also designed in walkable neighborhoods with easy access by foot to public transit, basic services such as childcare, shopping and medical attention, and there was a wide variety of cultural centres, sports facilities and other public activities. The socialist country created social people.
I know this, I used to live in a Stalin era house in Moscow. But Stalin's Russia had a big problem with housing, only Khrucshev fixed it. All of these things may come as a shocker to an American, but they're quite common in Europe. And it wasn't that easy to get a house, you had to wait in line for half your life and the system didn't work with a bit of corruption, like centralized systems always do. Comparing the USSR to western countries is especially bad, because western countries had no regard towards workers, and if we look at the same timeframe we could say they advanced their housing capabilities equally.
I don't get the individuality aspect. Do you mean the uniform aesthetic? You can still personalize inside, you know, the place you usually see where you live. I live in a beautiful altbau building in Germany and I couldn't care less, like fuck do I care about the outside of the house, inside I cannot drew one hole into the wall without it becoming a day long project.
You cannot really express individuality with housing, unless you are building a house from scratch, which few of us do. We can hardly afford to rent anything, it's not exactly pick and choose?
I'd argue insulation and soundproofing are bigger issues than individuality and making people miserable.
I feel like Vienna did it better. And in European cities that didn't get bombed to shit in ww2 these houses look out of place and terrible. These houses weren't build for the benefit of people, but for the benefit of production, like in good old capitalism. They often disregarded the enviroment and historic parts of the city
Image looks like Toronto LOL
Yeah.
Not my left.
[citation needed]
They are designed with productivity in mind, much like capitalist architecture, they aren't designed to be liveable.
I would like evidence supporting
I was under the impression they were centrally planned, modern brutalist buildings that didn't meet all expectations as 2was typical of modernist project of the time (c.f. le corbusier's projects).
Not some darstardly unliveable conspiricy.
Why did they leave so much room for light and green space?
They left so much green space so the workers would be happier and wouldn't revolt
Still, some colors. And we know now a lot more about livable non-depressing urban planning.
Many of them were colorful in Soviet times, but the capitalist regimes don't care for maintenance. As they say, "what communism built, capitalism cannot even paint".
if the us were a socialist/communist country, land ownership would be abolished and housing would be free and nationalized/collectivized which means a lot of people would be living comfortably in shelter. seriously!
You can find virtually identical construction in Franco’s Spain. Source: I was grown in one of those places.
you were there during the franco regime in spain?
Yes. I grew here… and in one of those ‘barrios’.
in the 1960s and 1970s?
Yup. Born in 1964.
how did you feel when the franco regime fell?
To be honest?
Afraid.
My parents had been indoctrinated into the belief that son of a removed was the only thing preventing people to kill each other. And I was just 11, so I had not been able to build anything similar to a worldview.
So my mum thought the war would return and she would be bombed as she was when she was a kid.
Housing stock in Spain wasn't destroyed after Franco, many people still live in homes built in the 1960s-1970s.
Yeah, except for the unlucky guys who got in one of those aluminose concrete which started falling during the 80s. Some of them went down, with some fatal casualties. Most had to be basically rebuilt from the inside to replace the defective beams.
somebody still has to build them, so somebody would still have to work for them.
i think, however, the amount of hours worked that are needed to build a house might be drastically reduced if they had more uniformous form. However, whether people actually like that is a difficult question, because people are so different.
Of course building them would still have a cost, but they wouldn't be sold as a commodity to create surplus value for a few pockets.
Excellent answer
Isn't this authoritarian architecture and not left wing architecture?
That moment when ensuring housing for everyone and eradicating homelessness is considered "authoritarian architecture".
And let's pretend like we know what makes architecture "authoritarian."
Why is ensuring housing authoritarian? Isn't the cheapest most depressing architecture authoritarian? No one says it had to be depressing and lack deicent design... unless the dictator mandates it. No true left wing design would look this bleak and forced.
If you've come to look at a given architectural style (or any object for that matter) in its abstracted, ahistorical form, then you may not find much value nor truth to what it actually signifies. You must instead look at the material conditions that led to its creation.
First of all brutalist architecture emerged in the USSR after the end of WW2 after the economy and the entire infrastructure of the country were entirely wiped out. Simplified construction techniques using concrete were revolutionary in the sense that they were efficient and easy to streamline on a national scale for millions of people on the one hand, while being cost effective on the other hand. Whilst the rate of homelessness was not decreasing (if not increasing) in capitalist economies, socialist countries were at the vanguard of providing free housing for everyone.
In short, brutalist architecture was shaped by the material conditions of the post-war era and developed further as the economy progressed in later decades. This is simply because policies and social and cultural phenomena are not the mere product of ideas and thoights as much as the material conditions which are the basis for every human movement.
Secondly, the term "brutalist" does not give credit to what the Soviets and other socialist countries have achieved in the architectural fields. Most pictures that are publicized on the Internet picture either abandoned and unmaintained buildings or pictures that are taken in the gloomiest period of winter, since this id what is believed to fit the narrative or the "aesthetics" of socialist architecture.
Lastly, in reality there isn't really an artistic style that dictates what leftist architecture should look like. If you search through pictures of Soviet architecture or even DPRK or PRC architecture for something recent, you will find that they vary so much in colors and shapes, because it all depends on the architect's individual and distinct taste. Rather, what distinguishes leftist (or your so-called "authoritarian") architecture is that it serves the needs of the proletariat, contrary to capitalist societies that boast about their individualism.
Generally left wing is 'making things better for people would be nice'
And is mostly bitterly divided between 'cool, so let's get started!' And 'we must form a committee and personality cult to do capitalist accellerationism, only then can we murder everyone in the first group and then do the thing’ with some absolutely batshit jewels of ideology mixed in.
And the commie blocks are really in the center of that venn diagram. The party that made them was soaked in leftist blood, but the reason they look like that is because building them fast meant people got homes faster, so they were less concerned with giving each one a unique style.
Yep. They did a lot of bullshit and I'd argue they were profoundly reactionary, but the Bolsheviks were still minimum viable communist, and did a lot of communism when it wasn't purge time.
Which sounds and was pointlessly awful, but I have spent a lot of time with people on the streets, and I think that's still less terror, less pointless death and suffering.
Who are those "cool, let's get started" leftists, and what housing did they build? Just so I can compare their housing to that of the "personality cult capitalist accelerationists".
We're around. And I personally have-though admittedly not much; I'm not one for manual labor.
So "we're around-type" leftists have built how many homes exactly?
Dunno, not my department. Like I said, at least a few that I've personally seen, but they also don't try to kill other leftists for no fucking reason. So it's probably easier.
Ah, I see, there are no real examples of "cool, let's get started" leftists building millions of housing units, so you're comparing an actually existing state having to deal with capitalist and fascist subversion in a world dominated by capitalism, with idealistic nonexisting societies. That's your problem right there. You're welcome!
'Having to deal with capitalism' there it is. Last time I credit you murderhobo shitsticks with anything.
Go back to the soviet Union.
Left wing is so loosely defined you can ask two people and get three answer's. In this case the poster seems right wing and for him left wing=USSR. Ignoring that, this building style is probably the most efficient way to house as many people for as cheap as possible as fast as possible, which seems pretty left wing to me
Why is total efficiency left wing? Isn't maximizing profit right wing? The buildings should be built to maximize happiness of the people who, together, decide on the architecture... at the expense of profit.
efficiency and maximum extracted profit are not the same thing
the modern western housing construction process from start to finish is an incredibly inefficient process which is designed around minimizing as much risk and maximizing as much profit to the financiers, nothing about it is designed around effecient home-building.
Making anything better is left wing.
It's not per say but you have to be efficient when you have homeless people to house. After everyone has somewhere to live then you can ease off the efficiency.
I mean NGL the leftist architecture is very depressing. I think with current infrastructure if all houses were occupied homelessness wouldnt be a problem in most western countries right?
there are more empty homes/apartments in every city/town in the country than there are homeless people in those areas, yes.
I wonder whether the figure still holds true if we include all of the people still living with parents or in multi-family arrangements because they can't afford individual homes.
While this is sad and I agree, you cant just go shoving homeless people into empty apartments. There would need to be way more safeguards than that.
Example, you live in an apartment with 2 children and there are empty units near you. A law passes that empty apartments are fair game. A mentally ill or meth addict person moves in next to you, then 5 people move in, people are coming and going to that apartment, right as your children are coming home from school every day. How do you feel about that?
I feel you think every homeless person is a drug addict which makes you an asshole.
Example: rich kid moves in, kid's into snorting coke, rich daddy just throws money at kid. Way better environment for the next door children i'm sure.
I definitely dont think that, but let's not ignore that its usually the norm. Let me ask you, would you go out in the street and take the first unhoused person you see into your house ? Im being realistic.
That rich kid is a piece of shit and should have the same consequences as if that happened to a homeless person. Im merely outlining what is bad about saying "give all empty apartments and houses to the homeless and it will fix if!" It wont. It would need a massive management team and billions of dollars to run it to make sure your next-door neighbor isnt throwing heroine needles into your yard.
I definitely dont want a homeless person moving in next to me. To be honest I dont want anyone to move in next to me because neighbors usually suck. But thats a different discussion.
That's the government's job.
Not sure about billions (and even so, better that to spend them liberating countries of their oil), but Finland that did exactly that.
Then you haven't seen it in it's surroundings and what it looks like when it's cared for.
For example, here is a brutalist theatre during winter (with a stylised perspective):
And here is what it looks like during summer with the whole picture:
If the sky is pretty and golden you don't don't have to look at or think about the actual people in the streets. Like magpies.
Dude I love brutalism
Reminds of one of my fave quotes:
“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” ― Mikhail Bakunin ::: spoiler ... (So, lets have both.)
Brutalism is the architectural style of these buildings, the commenter above isn't calling them "slavery and brutality"
Stop promoting left-right brain rot. Is what they want
Yup. Freedom first.
"Stop promoting the knowledge that homelessness was successfully abolished 50+ years ago with socialist policy in a country with much fewer resources and technological development than what we have in 2025"
This is fascist/communist dictatorship architecture. There was a Professor in our Honors College that would go on a fucking tirade about it whenever he saw it. It wasn't even a lecture. I was working with him in his office and he just went off for 15 minutes about the Humanities building on campus.
Miss that man.
It's evident now that AI doesn't understand history the same way we do.
For future readers, the emphasis was on, "Dictatorship" which creates oligarchical structures, only after which block housing was made, because the people in charge realized that their peons needed homes to live in to do the work for them. Sadly, we're not there yet in the US.
Dumb ass take. This is the architecture of a country that guaranteed housing for every single citizen and industrialized in 40 years time. Good luck building housing for 1/3rd your population during industrialization without utilizing big blocks and panel construction.
Did your professor tell you about the walkability in USSR neighborhoods? Easy access by foot to green areas, sports facilities, medicine, shopping basics, childcare and education, and public transit?
Phew, so glad there is no homelessness in Russia or China...
Both of which are not lefty?
They're fascist dictatorship wearing a lefty mask
The PRC is fascist now? The same country that endured brutal massacres fighting fascist japanese soldiers? This is how crucial terms lose all meaning and risk getting bannalized by right-wing reactionaries.
A single-party human rights-abusing government is not fascist? Cute.
This tells me quite enough that you don't know what fascism actually means.
There were no homeless in the USSR, the country where this housing was built. Homelessness was abolished because housing was a constitutional right and so was employment. Housing rent costed 3% of the monthly income.
But if you want real data, let's go. As per Wikipedia, home-ownership rate in China is 96% (second highest in the world) and 93% in Russia (7th highest). In the USA, for comparison it's 66%, and in Germany 48%.
Having lived in Germany, and having visited China, I can tell you I encountered more homeless in Germany in one day than in China in the two weeks I visited.
I struggle with this because I hate apartments. Theyre inherently depressing.
As long as we can have apartments and I can still have my house and land, its fine.
But a lot of times it seems like they want all of us to live in 1 bedroom ny style apartments like sardines and eat bugs, and i think thats where the backlash comes in.
I guess if youre homeless any apartment is a good one. But a lot of them would get destroyed from mentally ill people. So then what, build concrete cell block apartments ? Im really not sure.
Lol what. How are apartments inherently depressing? Several of my friends have very nice apartments with natural light, grassy spaces, and close proximity to parks and essentials.
Personally I find isolated single family homes a little depressing, but that's not an inherent property of them.
I'm the oddball who prefers living in an apartment. It has some nice features that are difficult to find in a stand-alone house, difficult to replicate, or simply don't scale down well.
Because they're tiny and you cant make any noise in them (usually not allowed, and if it was id feel bad for annoying others)
Thats probably my biggest issue. I cant understand liking such small spaces and having people surrounding me watching and listening to everything i do, even if its passively. Plus, id be the one to get awful neighbors that I dread being near.
Not every apartment is tiny. I don't have the measurements for mine but it feels comfortable with two desks, a couch, a coffee table, and some bookcases. Plus there's the bedroom with a queen size bed, bookcases, another desk, and dresser. The kitchen is admittedly a little small. This isn't a fancy apartment, and its priced pretty average for the city. I'm pretty sure all the units in this building are about the same.
I very rarely hear my neighbors. I play music through speakers and (I've asked) they never hear me.
Also no one sees me, so far as I know. For contrast, where my parents live out in the suburbs, neighbors are always creeping on each other and gossiping.
Now, admittedly, there are many apartments that are tiny, or have shit sound proofing, or whatever. But, again, that is not an inherent property of apartments. Many houses have problems, too.
Counterintuitively, denser living spaces make you less seen. Not that you're invisible, but that you don't register. If I went for a walk out in the suburbs, people would look and see me. They'd be like "Who's that weirdo walking?" or "Did you see that weird guy with the metal band on his t-shirt?" Someplace denser, I blend in with everyone else and don't get a second thought. Not even a first thought, most of the time.
Somewhat paradoxically, the soundproofing in big buildings tends to be much better than in smaller buildings. The concrete and steel and thick storm resistant windows and fire doors between unit and hallway required by the building code for tall buildings have so much weight that things like footsteps, moving furniture, and other sources of noise just don't carry between units.
Also can't make many changes, limits to what can be installed in general etc etc. How is owning literally nothing about your home NOT depressing
I chose all the furniture and decorations. How often are you remodeling your home? What kind of remodeling are you doing? Like, more than moving the contents around? That's just not a thing I have a desire to do. (This isn't sarcastic. I'm being sincere.)
I don't even mean just large remodels, a lot of times in most Apartments the appliances are whatever you get and you can't put your own in. Many apartments have rules and limitations on what can or can't be hung on the walls personally I'm a huge fan of shelves on the walls a couple L brackets and some stainless steel string make for a very aesthetically pleasing and very useful shelf space most Apartments don't enjoy you doing that.
Electricity bill getting really high and you wish you could have a heat pump dryer instead of the cheap ass piece of s*** they put in? Well that's just too damn bad etc. Want to modify your balcony? Put up special netting or something? Some places will let you some places tell you don't even think about it. And don't you dare leave stuff sitting on the balcony we can't have that it has to look nice
There are plenty of rules and limitations on apartments that go well beyond just Mass renovations
a lot of those are more limitations of renting more than limitations of an apartment. if you own your place, you can put things on the wall, paint, and change appliances. also, you can definetely make a lot of changes in the space even when renting an apartment, even hang things on the wall, but you might need to cover the holes when leaving.
and there are HOA that would also limit what you can do with your property and put on your yard as well, so, while it is shitty, even owning a house doesn't mean that you get the freedom to do what you want.
living in an apartment is definetely not for everyone, but it has advantanges (and disadvantages) over living in a house.
Ah, I see. This apartment doesn't have any rules (that I'm aware of) about what you can put on the walls, but I don't have anything more than some picture frames up.
I'm also lucky that heat and hot water are included - a friend of mine had electric heating and it was really expensive.
Anyway, point taken that there are some limitations. I guess I'm lucky enough that I've never run into them, personally. Thanks.
A lot of apartments dont even let you paint the walls. And often living in one is an aspect of leaving it nice "for the next person" which is an annoying feeling.
If you wanna nail up a nice cedar wall, good luck.
So they are living in those 'luxury' apartments. So many of those low income apartments are not very nice at all.
I don't think most of my friends are living in luxury apartments. Though there are many shitty apartments, shittiness is not an innate attribute of apartments.
Luxury is a point of view. A millionaire's view of just getting by isn't the same as someone living on $35,000 a year with 2 kids. And you are right shittiness isn't an innate attribute of apartments. But it sure is pretty common in many areas.
Although I do not personally feel that apartments are inherently depressing, perhaps someone who was more worried about exactly what decisions they are allowed to make about their living space might. They may be considering the lack of agency one experiences in some regards as a renter, which could make them feel as though every apartment type situation was inherently depressing.
Yeah, could be. I said elsewhere in this thread that I think they're conflating renting with apartments. They said that buying an apartment is a "scam", and I didn't follow up with "but people rent houses, too."
I could see why eternal renting is depressing, but that's not the same as living in an apartment.
Cool, where can I get an apartment like that? I have one roommate, and combined we have a budget of $1k for rent and bills.
Well, I don't know. Where do you live? Where do you want to live? There are sites like zillow that let you search, but there's other listings and word of mouth. A combined budget of $1k for rent and bills isn't going to go very far most places.
You said these nice apartments were available, but I can't find any, so I'm asking you.
Where do your friends live, and what do they pay for housing? How can I be like them?
I live in new york city. I don't get the impression you're engaging in good faith, though.
I keep being told that better is available, but am frustrated that there are never any details on how I can obtain it.
Well, you haven't provided any details yourself so that seems fair.
What kind of single family house can you afford with that in comparison?
Well, prices keep going up, so that's a good question. Rent last year it was $700, this year it was $800, next year it'll be $975. I got lucky and found somebody with a mortgage who needed a roommate, but I've been struggling with my health and I lost my job earlier this year because of it, so the budgeting has become impossible.
I keep hearing that there's nice places I could move to, but they all turn out to need more bootstraps than god gave me.
Sorry, my question was rethorical. My point was that single family housing is more expensive than flats
I'm not talking about detached housing vs flats, I'm talking about staying where I'm at vs moving.
Depends. Having a house in the middle of nowhere is reasonable, having a house in a population center is wasted space. You could fit a two mother in law units onto the land my home sits on and not negatively impact my life even a little bit.
Agreed
People are sardined like this because so little land and money are allocated towards housing them and none for providing essential services there. Then the same people who denied the funding and land permits complain about how difficult it is to keep gangs from running them.