And the brutalism of the entire design had a honesty about it. It wasn't trying to be anything it wasn't. It wasn't trying to impress you. It was just had a quiet confidence about itself.
And you know what my present hunch is? That the whole spin about how "nobody likes Brutalism" (needless to say, implicitly or explicitly advanced by bad actors on the right as well as the Heather Mallicks on the left) is a smokescreen. Because as I said, the real mass instinct might be more along the lines of a "Doors Open pluralism". People *aren't*, in and of themselves, hung up over its being "ugly", any more than they are over modern art being more "displeasing" than traditional portraits and landscapes.
Rather, it's about a fashionable "sticking it to the elites". It's about framing Brutalism (or *all* modern architecture) as the style of "elites", one being imposed upon "real people". In its present form, that spin's been in the air at least since Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus To Our House", and it became monetizable mass architectural outrage with world's-worst-buildings and carbuncle contests in the 90s and 00s. And it characterizes the post-traditional-gatekeeper mediums of stoked-outrage social media. It's the notion that those *actively championing* such architecture (or the preservation thereof) are, almost invariably, some kind of educated-elite cultural class, haughty and removed from "the people". It's not just the architecture that's evil; it's its defenders, the holier-than-thou tastemaker 1%, trying to pull a fast one on us in trying to make some kind of aesthetic "fetch" happen.
I was recently witness to a bot post on Facebook showing, without comment or context, a before-and-after of Montreal's Pointe-à-Callière--the old Custom House with its tower, and the present Dan Hanganu-designed museum--that seemed designed solely for outrage-farming, presenting it in implicit terms of "old = good, new = bad". And of course, the vast bulk of comments and responses treated it thusly, and the very few comments which tried to explain what was *really* going on there went over like a lead balloon. People weren't there to learn; they were there to vent and rage and feed Meta-style data-mining monetization of "meaningful interactions".
And paradoxically compounding it all is that very notion of the preservation of Brutalism--an old, "aging" architecture, and not Timeless Beauty like all that stuff w/columns and arches. That is, the elites in question championing Brutalism are championing its preservation, not building it in the present day--and that's where we get to the broader idea of "hysterical preservationists" being themselves "elites"; they don't wanna do nuthin', they just wanna cling to what they have, a little like that legacy media which "nobody" reads. And the fact that they're *not* championing building it in the present day is a signal of their cynical arrogance--as in, "if they like Brutalism so much, then why" etc etc. As if the appreciation of *any* preexisting style was premised upon the will to build it today--which really seems a mentality stoked within our fan-art era...
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