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Thank god the right wing blesses us with their beautiful architecture like:
or
Second one doesn’t look bad imo
Wtf is a left wing architecture.
The shit far right comes up with sometimes melts my brain.
Architecture is political. The architectural styles of the Eastern Block had their reason of being. The usage of prefab and panels in construction was an ideological idea, because the intention was to house as many people in cities as possible during the extremely rapid industrialization that took place.
They’re all made of concrete which means I don’t have to hear my upstairs neighbor stomping around at every hour of the day
I wish! As someone who have lived in one of those concrete apartments from the communist era of my country, at least as they were made here, you do hear your neighbours. And if your neighbours have an active kid or a bigger breed dog that likes to jump a lot especially. Also every time they drop something on the fooor. I’m not very familiar with construction and material propeties, but there is something about concrete that carries vibrations easily. When a neighbour starts doing some renovations the power drill can be heard in half of the building (it was a nightmare for me, who worked night shifts at the time).
Don’t get me wrong, I’d still prefer that hell to being homeless.
Why is there always a neighbour that’s drilling? I live in a similar style building, but much smaller. There’s always someone who drills.
Right wing architecture
More right wing architecture
Just one more lane!
Pls bro, just one more 🙏
I swear I can quit any time I want, I just need one more lane and then I’m done
That’s terrible. Use the nide grabber and put that right. Wobbling all over the place right now.
I fucking 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
That is a lot of gas stations and signs for them
Free market competition 🇺🇸🦅🙏
A spot in one of those for a family in Berlin costs 650.000€ because of how great the non-communist economy is doing at creating affordable housing. That is 14 times for median salary before taxes, or 21 times after taxes. https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165160850
in prague, it is 2 monthly median salaries per squared meter. there was a lot wrong with the fucking “communism”, but accessible housing was not it.
this post is a work of some ignorant teenage edgelord, the title does not even have anything to do with the screenshot.
Just paint them some color bruh. It would do wonder.
The homeless? Or the buildings?
homeless modern art piece
Make homeless colorful again
Building duh
Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It’s kind of the China Town of Paris.
It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
If you’re curious, here it is on Google Maps
I’d live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.
Well, those have been built in a highly industrialized and rich country, not in a developing economy. Social housing in China nowadays looks more like your pictures than the one in the post, let’s keep in mind that that kind of housing is at this point over 50 years old.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
Well, the Soviets and China never stopped building socially affordable housing. Turns out it’s a quirk of capitalist regimes leaving people to spend half their income in housing!
No comrade, nice looking things are bourgeoisie decadence.
They’re called commieblocks if they’re affordable to the average person. If not, they’re “highrise apartments”
I live in a city with neighbourhoods built during Socialism, they’re spacious, full of greenery and with important services within walkable/bikeable distance. Meanwhile we have new “urban villas”, which are drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
I am so happy I’m not alone seeing it. Modern “development” is such a massive scam, in every country it seems like. It’s the new equivalent of logging or mining barons- they buy up land, build shit on it, sell it overpriced, wash their hands and move on to the next project with little regard for long term urban city planning. They are creating forced gentrification.
Soviet development that was driven purely by economic considerations tends to have all the issues of modern development. Well, except car centric planning, but we know why that wasn’t a consideration ever.
Apartment complexes that didn’t focus just on economy, tended to be way better. And that is missing from modern considerations almost always.
Still, there’s a reason pre-Soviet areas to this day remain some of the most sought out ones.
I’ve seen this posted before. Important points to consider: Imperial Russia had a housing shortage in the cities due to industrialization occurring and the existing housing was often of poor quality. According to one source: “In major cities, a significant portion of housing consisted of barracks, basements, semi-basements, dormitory-style rooms, dugouts, and semi-dugouts.”
Then WW1 hit followed by the civil war and housing construction essentially stopped with some housing destroyed in the war. Then in the interwar period, priority was given to industrial construction in the USSR, resulting in low housing construction volumes, with a significant share consisting of temporary housing. Rapid industrialization and increasing population shifts to cities increasing demand. Then WW2 hit and huge amounts of existing housing were destroyed in the fighting.
So the USSR was in tight spot and did the best they could with limited time and resources which for most Russians ended up being a huge improvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_construction_in_the_Soviet_Union
Most of the issues with this era of housing projects stem from the fact that the plans for upkeep were abandoned. Most of the buildings themselves were solid and very modern and with the right maintenance they would’ve been in much better condition than they are now.
The buildings that have received that care and attention still look great. Not all the areas were well planned but most of the time they’re fine.
And that’s without constraining that judgement to Russia specifically. Many of the countries that built like this were very ambitious but the ambition faltered with time as the resources allocated to maintenance were used for other things.
My mom still lives in one of the “socialist cubes” that were built in Finland in the late 70’s (and they’re literally the same kind of design; we actually exported concrete elements to eg. the DDR and others for building more socialist cubes).
The building was kinda bleak back in the 80’s and 90’s, although at least it was painted and not just grey like some of the more egregious ones, but the exterior has been renovated over the years, the windows were redone, plumbing got upgraded, the balconies were all torn down and rebuilt, it’s been painted, etc etc. It’s still affordable to live in even after all that, and it looks nice too. And the floor plan is actually meant for humans to live in unlike 99% of modern developments in Finland which are meant to produce the maximum amount of income for some giant construction conglomerate, so the apartments end up eg. being shaped like long tubes with one window at the end, or with the entry being in the kitchen, which is the same space as the living room.
Also part of why it looks depressing is because it’s old and poorly maintained.
Just a touch of renovation and the houses start looking way better:
Ugh. Disgusting.
Give me a single structure on a plot of land, 10ft from my neighbours walls, and a lawn to maintain, any day I live for the additional costs on the place I never spend the best hours of my day in. Worth every gallon of commute fuel. My brain is so aerodynamic.
This, but unironically. People suck, give me distance. I’ll let the lawn die.
So, don’t live in a city.
Moving to a countryside can give you both decent enough isolation and teach you to reconnect with others in a more healthy way
I like how living in the countryside lets me disconnect from others in a more healthy way. I live in the suburbs now due to supporting family, but would love to be back in a residence clearly disconnected from anyone outside my household. It doesn’t even have to be that far as long as there is separation due to natural barriers like dense foliage or elevation changes.
If you live out in the country you can just mow a meadow
Please don’t, critters live in them thar meadows
Yep, my building hasn’t had a good amount of care in a while but the one right next to it has recently and it looks just fine.
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.
Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they’d be pretty damn 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.
Looks like the ones in the picture are already surrounded by green spaces - they’re probably already pretty 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
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
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.
I live in Russia nearly all my life, and I can tell it really is a matter of proper maintancnce. Many cities do a very poor job keeping these buildings in a good shape, but when they do, it looks fairly good. Look through the comment section for examples, they are real, I’ve seen quite a few.
Not to mention European neighbors where they are still common, but due maintenance makes them look actually good.
The sound issues are fair, but there are ways to limit them.
is a matter of proper maintenance to an extend. You can paint a box, it’ll still be a box, just not as grey. And let’s not pretend Russia maintains anything. In Moscow maybe, but most of the country looks just as depressing as shown on the picture in OP. Our government never has money for fixing old infrastructure, only for war. My point is, panel houses don’t have to look so ugly anymore. But people here are arguing like it’s the only alternative to homelessness. Live in ugly, cramped panel houses or nowhere at all.
I don’t think the point is about present.
More like, “back when these things were built, government had to build the most resource-efficient and mass-constructed housing, responding to a surge in demand for urban living due to industrialization”
It was either this or leaving people without any place to live.
Sure, modern situation is different, and we can have nicer homes.
take notice of your capitalist car park next time you go to big box centre. more depressing than housing
How the hell is this “left wing architecture”?? Apartment buildings have looked like this all around the world for at least 50 years.
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.
It’s “left wing” because the buildings are identical, because they were built through central planning.
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.
You’re forgetting the public transport availability, walkability, and facilities being part of the planning, i.e. the design was to include kindergartens, schools, hospitals, shops, etc., all not too far away to access on foot or a short commute that is regular and predictable and also easy to get to. Admittedly, it didn’t always happen, but still resulted in more liveable cities and areas than many of the new neighborhoods being built today in the same cities.
because it’s ugly and depressing
Speak for yourself, this is much more beautiful and less depressing to me than cookie-mold single-family sprawling housing in the US. You’re just cherrypicking a bad picture in winter with dead trees.
the poor end up having to live there and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas
This did NOT happen in the eastern block. Housing was guaranteed but so was work. Crime is mostly a consequence of lack of job prospects enforced on marginalized people, and when you give everyone an education and a fair chance, the vast majority of people gladly accept that. There were no “criminal ghettos” in the Eastern Block. You’re just applying the capitalist logic to countries that weren’t capitalist. When you don’t segregate people by wealth (rich vs poor neighborhood) you eliminate the possibility for ghettos to exist.
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
you should not give lectures about something you know from bad tv show at best.
what a suprise, these communities look according to how you maintain them and people who live there are happy to have a place to live. and when it undergoes revitalization, it looks quite nice.
the photo in the post is typical manipulation, everything looks grayish if you capture it in the middle of the winter with bad sky and trees without leaves.
But they aren’t wrong either. Some places with these type of buildings have been build wrong. Like in the Netherlands in the 60’s they build an entire new neighborhood that had only these mega modernists apartment buildings that followed Le Corbusier futuristic vision. And nobody wanted to live there, because other neighborhoods with history were much more pleasant to live in. So eventually only the poor and desperate moved into the neighborhood. And the neighborhood turned into a rundown ghetto. Today almost every one of those 1960’s apartment buildings in that neighborhood has been torn down. Was much cheaper to rebuild from the ground up than to renovate. Same is true in many suburbs of Paris.
So eventually only the poor and desperate moved into the neighborhood. And the neighborhood turned into a rundown ghetto
Sounds like the problem is wealth inequality and poverty, not housing itself. There were no ghettos in the eastern block, period.
thay may very well be true, but that is not problem of the houses. architecture is not responsible for solving issues in the society. if you devastate your neighborhood, it is your fault, not the architect’s.
same country, same houses, different residents:
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.
