The Barbican

My appreciation of Brutalist architecture seems to be in direct proportion to the number of plants it incorporates.

A Brutalist building with zero plants looks like a totalitarian prison hellscape designed to destroy your soul before it destroys your body.

A Brutalist building surrounded by trees with every nook containing greenery and vines dangling down looks like some kind of idyllic Star Wars planet populated by fuzzy hobbit-like creatures.

I'm not sure why I find this effect so strong. Perhaps because flat gray concrete is aesthetically ambiguous. When paired with greenery, it looks like stone. In it's absence, it looks like industrial mechanism.

Agreed. I think greenery and water enhances most architectural styles, but Brutalism is the only one that absolutely _requires_ it. I wonder how differently the perception of the style would be if the Brutalist estates in the UK that became a byword for grimness and ugliness had been embowered and properly maintained by their housing groups and local councils.

With greenery on it, the concrete takes on the aspect of a cliff or a rock face, so it feels more they homes were carved out of stone, than poured out of a truck.

Unfortunately without careful continuous maintenance the plants destroy the concrete. Whenever I see plants on one of these buildings that's usually a sign it's been abandoned. It has a post-apocalyptic HZD feel. Like the RBS Dundas Street "ziggurat". https://x.com/sallymiranda/status/1400883551751610381

> Perhaps because flat gray concrete is aesthetically ambiguous. When paired with greenery, it looks like stone. In it's absence, it looks like industrial mechanism.

Yes, this is the fundamental error of modernism/brutalism - the belief that flatness and the lack of ornamentation is beautiful. It can be .. but only under optimal conditions, like the concept art. "Material design" for buildings. As soon as it gets a bit weathered and dirty it becomes merely drab. Plants provide some organic variation over the surface, breaking up the now-dirty "clean" lines.

For many modern buildings, the concept art used to sell it to the planners has a lot more plants in than actually get planted, or survive the first year.

> embowered

I think this is a typo for "empowered", but it's also a great word for covering something with trees.

There's only so far you can economically maintain a building of bare concrete in a damp maritime climate like the UK I think, the porous material is just going to be a nightmare when it doesn't dry out for much of the year.

I don't like Brutalism in general, but it looks a lot less ugly somewhere sunny like Spain or the South of France than the UK in my opinion.