"...What once seemed special now looks rote..."

[aesthete8]

[Michael Bulatovich]

"Too few museums undertake a deep inquiry that combines an insightful designer with museum leadership that knows what it wants. Whether a design is subdued or extroverted will emerge from an open-minded consideration of growth that teases out what's unique about the collections, setting and city. "

Yeah, either that or a completely arbitrary, preconceived notion, based on what attracted tourists to another city somewhere, and reused in toto from another project built on an entirely different site.

[++]

often ending up with difficulty enjoying art on a pedestrian level in a vast brutalist waste of space.

[Michael Bulatovich]

At a all-night arts festival it was interesting to watch crowd dynamics in front of 'the crystal' if you can still call it that....the sidewalk was packed and the crowd almost at a standstill. The cops even put barricades in the curb lane of the street to devote it to pedestrians, but the people/square meter dropped off as you approach the front door of that thing. If you wanted to walk freely you had to 'risk' walking under it. I did it, and felt a distinct, visceral sense of unease, which I had to consciously overcome. Right up against it, the sidewalks were *clear*. While not "Capital B" "Brutalist", it's making the some of the same mistakes as many buildings from that period did. History is cyclical.

[++]

I don't think that elements have to be metal to be brutal. Spatial elements, as you desribed, that are austere and distancing are brutal, too.

[Michael Bulatovich]

Capital B Brutalism is know for the heavy massing of poured concrete and, to a lesser degree, masonry and precast. Exposed metals were not part of the palette: too thin.

[++]

I wasn't referencing I think I named everything brutalist during a certain period in the 90s, that seeemed to me dehumanist and heartless and lacking any reference to nayure, classicl elements or any romantic notion, color or texture. A lot of this kind of architecture went beyond mid century brutalism to kind of impose some kind of ugly asthetic. There is an office building in DC crowned, literally, with a kind of spiky , nasty metal crown, the kind that looks conceived to impale large birds of prey. Neobrutalist buildings love the use of steel. Lloyd's is an example:

An example of an interior, more what I was talking about:

So large a space for so little art:

junkpile approach:

[Michael Bulatovich]

'Ugly' has been 'the new beauty' before. For me 'brutalist' or 'brutalism' is a 'reserved namespace' so when you use them my mind goes to "béton brut"

Private money too, well, sort of...

heheh A classic "Architectural Photography" shot. "HELLLLLOOOO?" ..."Helllllooo?".......'helllloooo?'.....helloo? Since there's no one around, how about a rousing game of paintball?

I wonder if the building glows red and yellow like the model in real life.....

How's that for a completely fresh approach to windows and doors, eh?

[++]

m'=20

Of course, which is why I posted the Alice quote

[Kris Krieger]

"Michael Bulatovich" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

*That* is supposed to look like a crystal? A crystal *what*? Crystals are not just haphazard jumples of this shape and that shape. They are expressions of *molecular order*.

This looks to me more like someone took a crystal, and threw it against a wall.