Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Looking for an example of a Constructivist building that would be clearly pre- and non-Brutalist, I’ve stumbled on a half-ruined structure remarkable for reasons not limited to architecture. Actually, it was by coincidence that I spotted it – here’s the…
Alexander Adams has reviewed a number of books on architecture in the Soviet block (aka the Second World) and the Third World. It’s in the Critic, one of those Save Western Civilization mags whose writers are generously paid to keep…
Owen Hatherley writes of British architects active in the first post-WWII decade: In the first ten years after 1945, the pure white style of Bruno Ahrends’s Berlin had been Anglicised, but not in the direction of the monumental dissonance of…
In his latest LRB review, Owen Hatherley writes about Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture by Nicolas Grospierre: Grospierre puts next to each other the Vilnius House of Ritual Services (a Soviet type sometimes known as a ‘Sorrow Palace’, where funerals were…
Some brutalist architecture is great – but when it’s bad, it can be very, very ugly, depressing and miserable. Sometimes it ages disgustingly, especially if the concrete is of poor quality. And if there’s a fire… Look at what happened to…
I would recommend Owen Hatherley’s well-researched piece on Moscow’s residential districts (not quite suburbs) to anyone interested in post-Soviet urban life and urban planning in general. I suggest that readers also browse the photos in the author’s Flickr albums, some linked…