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lists one way of doing a thing “This is the only way of doing that thing!!”
This litterally looks like any neighbourhood build in Spain in the 60s.
Hey if you need a lot of housing real quick utilitarian designs like this tend to come about, doesn’t really matter who is doing it. Hell the Romans had some prefab designs that had a passing resemblance to this.
I don’t see this as left or right wing
This is architecture that could be done better.
Yes, we need to stop homelessness, but you also want to avoid creating spaces where nobody wants to live because it’s ugly and depressing and guaranteed, the poor end up having to live there, and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas where even police is uneasy
Take a little bit more space, put a little bit more thought into the designs, add spaces for children to play, add parks, make it look nice. Wr don’t need luxury villas either, but there has to be something better than this
In my country this type of building came about in a society where many still lived in wood sheds without electricity or running water. Where people shared outhouses with their neighbors in the yard of actual residential buildings. Where every residence on average was overpopulated.
The architecture of the time homed huge amounts of people with running water, indoor toilets and electricity. Indoor heat without needing a fire.
The areas where they were erected weren’t much to look at before. The buildings today may be unappreciated but I find them lovely in a way. They’re a shadow of a society that cared for it’s citizens.
It was built cheap and efficiently, not to please the eye. It could certainly be better, and we know that our environ plays a bigger role in our outlooks than we did before. If they built it today, it would have a few more trees and green spaces but would maintain it’s very essence, which is a large domicile to house people for cheap.
Also correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t a lot of these have murals and shit painted on them back in the day. Could’ve sworn I’ve heard about these building having their outer paint stripped only to reveal a mural or mosaic.
One interesting thing I’m noting is that picture appears to have been taken on a rather dreary winter day. I can see a lot of trees between the buildings, and I’d be interested in seeing what this place looks like in other seasons and better weather
How the hell is this “left wing architecture”?? Apartment buildings have looked like this all around the world for at least 50 years.
It’s “left wing” because the buildings are identical, because they were built through central planning.
Any housing that isn’t exclusively for billionaires is ‘left wing’.
It’s left-wing in that it provides cheap housing for many. It also looks very brutalist and is reminiscent of USSR housing blocks.
Right wing architecture
That is a lot of gas stations and signs for them
Free market competition 🇺🇸🦅🙏
I fuckinf hate stroads.
I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and even driving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control
Semi relatedly, there’s some new blocks in my city that are both ugly and expensive to live in. It’s this soulless, almost corporate feeling type of architecture. Doesn’t fit into how the city looks at all. They had the opportunity to decide whether to build affordable housing or something pretty that aesthetically fits into the city and picked neither. No doubt the shareholders shed a tear of joy.
On the picture: hundreds of flats with individual windows and balcony
Oh no, giving hundreds of families a balcony, how terribile! What’s next: non-shared bathrooms and kitchens?
The only thing more depressing than left wing architecture is right wing architecture
Looks like concept art from Anno 2070… And I don’t mean that in a good way.
As someone who loves watching megaprojects, it is so sad that it is mostly a right wing vanity thing.
I hate our society’s fixation with ugly utilitarianism. We could be making beautiful things for all of us
They’re too hard to regulate. Grey square boxes are good for the poor! You’ll see! Trust us. We’re totally not stupid
Meanwhile in famously communist South Korea…
Ah, the beauties of capitalism.
Stayed in an probably illegal Airbnb in a Samsung apartment in Jeju 10 years ago. It was nice. Apartment complexes are not bad. We have to them in beautiful Switzerland too. If the building is well maintained and the surrounding is full of greenery, and local shops, and entertainment, then they are a valid option and I’d prefer them over sprawl and cul-de-sacs.
Sure, in the end a building like this is going to be what it is. I personally live on the inside of my apartment, so that’s what I care most about. If I owned a house and spent a bunch of time looking at it from the garden, I would care more.
edit spelling
South korea is speedrunning into a scify dystopia
Copying and pasting an old comment i made:
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.
And that is just the façade, some places renew the façade every few decades to keep the place fresh and desirable.
the benefits of high density urban design are also amazing and I assume I do not need to list them here. this is lemmy and I just need to wait for the appropriate autist to list them all.
And how is it controversial to build housing for everyone, instead of some pretty houses for those who can afford it.
These blocks look very different as a person on the street. They mostly only look bad from above where you can see all of them together
We have some burtalist apartment buildings in Minneapolis. They’re generally desirable apartments
Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they’d be pretty damn great, as far as skyscrapers go.
Dumb question, I know some places where they build quick and ugly and a few decades later they just remodelled the façade to make it pretty an modern. but those are small residential buildings in places where I lived. do you know of places where that happened in large projects like the picture?
Our commie blocks in East Europe tend to get colorful when their owners (either the city or the dwelers) decide to insulate the facade, which often happens across a whole district in a short time. Random image to ilustrate.
Such a lovely place to live, a bit of green, colourful housing, and I will assume it is a walkable place
Looks like the ones in the picture are already surrounded by green spaces - they’re probably already pretty great as far as skyscrapers go.
The blocks usually have a lot of green areas (that’s why most of the pictures are from winter, they look gloomier). They were designed to be lived in.
Nah man. I lived in Russia most of my life and commie blocks are as depressing as they look on those pictures. You have a point that some are poorly maintained, but that’s not some, that’s most of the country. Just a mass of featureless grey blocks. Dirty, ugly and inescapable. About them being good quality on the inside is debatable. The flats are small and I could hear my neighbors all the time. Some of them used to be painted, but the paint is peeling off, only hylighting the ugliness. There’s very little upside to them in the modern world.
Those blocks might be not perfect, but they were part of a program to build housing for all those people living in quite bad conditions after the war and after everything that went through in eastern europe in the 20th century. They needed millions of homes and quick. And they might be ugly to some people, but they are better than slums and you shouldn’t take their condition today after several decades for what they were when they were new.
It also just looks this way from a drone shot. It’s very different when you walk around there.
I actually wish they’d build more of those than the overpriced “luxury condos” people build now that no one can afford.
Left wing? LOL. This is a Soviet Block. They are everywhere in the old USSR.
