Microblog post: "Is there anything more depressing than left wing architecture?" with a picture of soviet style residential building blocks. Comment: "Homelessness"

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[–] 248 points 8 months ago (26 children)
  • [–] 188 points 8 months ago (23 children)

    those are FUCKING SPIKES to keep people away, the fact that they don't use daggers instead is strange

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  • [–] 45 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT PIGEONS

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  • [–] 51 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Actually, they are. As far as the average conservative cares, both of them are dirty pests that should be driven away.

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  • [–] 169 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (25 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 51 points 8 months ago

    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.

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    [–] 139 points 8 months ago (11 children)
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    [–] 78 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I mean, after we build them we can also let people do gorgeous art on them

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  • [–] 72 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago

    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.

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  • [+] 55 points 8 months ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)
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    [–] 48 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 42 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Ah yes so depressing and ugly that they’re featured in an architectural magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/vienna-social-housing/

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    [–] 40 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    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.

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    [–] 34 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 30 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Ultra luxury apartments are usually vacant most of the time, because the owners live elsewhere and only use that property for money laundering.

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    [–] 26 points 8 months ago

    I didn’t realize an expansive category of political ideologies had adopted a unified architectural language. 🤦

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    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

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    [–] 22 points 8 months ago (17 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    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

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    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?

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    [–] 19 points 8 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (1 child)
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    [–] 18 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    And yet, there's more greenery around this blocks than you'd see in a US city.

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    [–] 17 points 8 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I recall that picture being a photoshop of a right-wing country. So it's both fake AND fundamentally right-wing in design.

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