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"I don't know anything about architecture, but I know Brutalism when I see it" - Roger Ebert's Journal
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120919192033/http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/art-in-many-forms/i-dont-know-anything-about-arc.html

"I don't know anything about architecture, but I know Brutalism when I see it"

     dubai4506786837z.jpg
 
 
"Cooling Plant, Dubai," a photograph by Bas Princen. Reproduced in the April 2011 issue of Harper's magazine. The source seems to be this flickr page.
 

 
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9 Comments

THE MONOLITH HATH ARRIVED! And the 2011 Space Odyssey begins...

I take this as a sign we are either all screwed or entering a new stage of human consciousness. Perhaps both simultaneously.

Have you seen this yet, Roger?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ_9-Qx5Hzใธใ‚‹ใค4
Susan Blackmore on how we are now in an evolutionary race with the parasitic technology we created.

Blackmore: "It doesn't need a mind to have a plan..."

Lol, I guess Dubai had done everything else...

Why would it be "sacrilegious"? It's not a cube, as one side is clearly longer than the other. And I'm not sure how the design of a water cooling plant/tower is particularly one thing or the other. It was designed simply to be a part of the cooling system for a large building, say an office building or hotel. It's simply functional, that's all.

The Borg Cube?

Wow, do you have to walk around it seven times before you go to work?

It looks like the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation have finally arrived. Probably a scout ship, given the relatively small size of the craft.

Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

well, no that's not Brutatlism; brutalism, maybe, but not Brutalism.

Brutalism is the inspiration for the set design for The Hunger Games.

No Roger, you do not know Brutalism when you see it. Brutualism is a style aspiring to honesty regarding how a building is built and the materials it is built with are used. It was a quest for honesty in response to the International Style modernism of Mies van der Rohe and others that sometimes "expressed" honesty without actually practicing it. Somehow the uneducated assume that anything not either dressed in shiny metal or festooned with faux Victorian decoration is "brutal" and therefore "Brutalist". And especially some seem to think the connotation of "Brutalist" is supposedly "inhuman" or "insensitive" even though that posture is in opposition to the intention (and achievement) of many Brutalist works. You wouldn't accept people calling every black-and-white movie a "film noir" or calling just anything in color "Cinemascope" I'd would think, so why should somebody otherwise as intellectual (as you certainly are) speak so shallowly about art when it's architecture?

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