Right wing Architecture
The tarpe movement was very influencial from the 80s.
Yeah my parents did crack in these blue tents, so nostalgic
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?
Yeah. The live/work/shop complexes are profitable. Especially when you can charge for parking, too.
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.
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.
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
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.
Still, some colors. And we know now a lot more about livable non-depressing urban planning.
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.
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.
I didn’t realize an expansive category of political ideologies had adopted a unified architectural language. 🤦
Right wing architcture:
those are FUCKING SPIKES to keep people away, the fact that they don’t use daggers instead is strangeThey keep the homeless at bay, but wait until the Ayurveda Yoga crowd discovers them. They’ll be worse than a pidgeon infestation.
If someone walking by, falls over that, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.
only commies walk.
Sorry you got downvoted because that might actually be a good catalyst for undermining hostile architecture.
HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT PIGEONS
They’re still shitting all over the park I wish my toddler could more freely play at.
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.
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.
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.
It’s probably fine if you’re used to it but man I’d be so depressed living in such a densely populated city.
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:
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”
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. 😅
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.)
Wtf 😱 is that real?!
100% and it’s accurate. It’s how we do here. 😅
💀
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.
Area, surface, size.
Living space, m2, usable area
Surface? That’s the term we use in Italian ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
