![]() Going forward, we need to talk about them too. It has also, in its fifty years on this earth, lived many lives. Concrete architecture gives you shadows, temperature changes, vistas, drama. Glass architecture, see-through cladding systems, and transparent sky bridges are all worse in person than they are in photographs-and the photographs are often worse than renderings. Even as we consume design in pixels, we long for spaces where we can feel the weight of the world. My theory about why we love concrete architecture now is simple: It has body. Photo: Valentin Jeck, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, 2016 ![]() 1965-71, Tjentiste, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Or the space frame to end all space frames at the National and University Library of Kosovo (1971-82), in Priština, by Andrija Mutnjaković. New books on Brutalism, high on dramatic photography, low on context, rushed to incorporate the most charismatic examples, like the stalactic wings of Dorde and Miodrag Živković’s Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska (1965-71) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was as if a forest of concrete mushrooms had sprouted and grown to gargantuan size while we were otherwise occupied. ![]() To an American audience the forms, names and locations were strange, adding to the abstraction and the othering headlines: “These 1970s brutalist buildings in Serbia look like Star Wars spaceships,” said Quartz, who filed them under the category “Futuristic Finds.” ![]() Like Yugoslavia: first through the photographs of Jan Kempenaers, widely published in 2013, then through Instagram accounts like and for a daily dose of concrete. So social media gave us more: bigger buildings, more flamboyant and flowing forms, more spectacular settings. Paul Rudolph’s bush-hammered walls? Been there. First on Tumblr, then on Instagram: frame-filling, deep-shadowed, looming edifices, gray and often looking perpetually damp, pocked by windows, frilled with balconies, enlivened by murals or supergraphics or plants.īut popularity breeds restlessness. ![]()
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