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Welcome to stuff you should know. A production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Ben's here, sitting in for Jerry, which we're all very happy about, frankly. That's our preference. I'm kidding. And this is stuff you should know.

It's been a while since you bagged on Jerry for no reason.

I know things have felt weird. Now I just reset them again.

I'm excited about this one. This is another. If you're listening at home, we would really encourage you to try and follow along by looking up some photographs.

Yes.

Of some of the things we mentioned, because obviously we're talking about a design style of architecture, and those are always better when you can see some of this stuff and do so safely.

Yeah. Because it's really difficult to describe a building in any really good terms or any way that you're just like, oh, I don't even need to see the picture of it. I totally got what you're saying.

But we still try.

We definitely still try. And probably of all the architecture there is, brutalist might be the easiest to describe without looking at it. Maybe true.

But then when you look at brutalist things, there's so much variety within that category.

Yeah. And if you hadn't guessed by now we're talking about brutalism. If you didn't pick up from that exchange we just had, or the title of this episode. And brutalist architecture, even if you don't know what it is, you have almost certainly witnessed it, maybe even been inside a brutalist building, because they're very often public buildings, as we'll see. And brutalism is probably the most reviled misunderstood, hated architecture of all time. It's just so easy to hate it, and so many people hate it for so many different, sometimes really weird reasons. But there also seems to be a renaissance in appreciating brutalism, which is arriving just in time, because brutalist buildings are in really grave danger, being torn down and erased from architectural history all over the world.

Yeah, absolutely. I learned a cool thing today, which I never knew before. And I thought about this when I was in Mexico City, which has a lot of great brutalist architecture, including, I mean, that airport's got to be brutalist, right?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, it's got to be. I think it is. I didn't see that. It didn't come up in my research. But, yes, Mexico City has a ton of good brutalism.

But when I was there, I noticed some things, and I was like. And I saw a couple that echoed sort of pyramid style brutalism. And I was like, wait a minute. I was like, these look like ancient mayan temples. And if you look up, like, an ancient mayan temple or go visit one, it's a totally brutalist thing. But I learned that apparently, originally, these temples were very ornate. I saw. I can't remember where I got this, but. So they were as ornate as any neoclassical edifice in Europe. But they've been stripped down over the years from war and looting and just time. And they became brutalist in the.

Huh. Weird. That's fantastic. And totally surprising.

Yeah. So they weren't originally built that way, but when you look at a mayan temple compared to some of these other office buildings, I'm like, you say this came around in England in the 1950s, and I say it came around long before that.

So you hit upon something, though, that these mayan temples are brutalist now, but they weren't before, because they've been stripped of their decoration or whatever that is brutalism. It's a type of architecture that, from its outset, from the creation of the building, from design onward, it's meant to not have ornamentation. The skeleton of the building is the building. That's what brutalism is, or at least in part.

Yeah. And like we said, we'll get into some of the variety within the style. But if you've ever seen a huge, concrete, unfinished sort of concrete looking government building with the same little tiny windows, and it just looks like this blocky monolith, that is brutalism staring you in the face.

Yeah. If you look at a building and suddenly Stalin just comes into your head, you're looking at a brutalist building. Almost certainly, yeah.

Or if you wonder what evil villains layer that is, it's probably a brutalist building, right?

Exactly. I also had a brutalist epiphany in Mexico City recently. When we were down there, we went to one of the museums and they were having a brutalism exhibit, and it completely reversed my feelings about brutalism. I walked into that exhibit hating brutalism, and I walked out really appreciating it. And it turns out I didn't actually hate brutalism all this time. I hate ugly buildings, ugly, thoughtless, dumb, boring buildings. And that is not, brutalism is not synonymous with that. It's gotten a bad name over the years, and part of it is even the name itself, brutalism. A lot of people think that the whole term was coined to describe how the building makes you feel when you look at it. It's brutal, it's sharp, it's merciless. It has zero compassion. It's dehumanizing. That's not what the term brutalism means at all. It actually refers to a type of concrete that the french architect and designer La Corbusier introduced called beton brute.

Yeah, beton brute. I think the exact english translation is gross cement.

Exactly. But they call it raw concrete.

Yeah, exactly. Which is to say just a raw, unfinished, poured concrete. There are a lot of houses in our surrounding neighborhoods in Atlanta now that are being built sort of in this style, these huge, big, concrete, blocky houses that are, I think, sort of a mishmash. It definitely echoes brutalism, but most of them still have a polished sort of concrete look to them. And that is not true. True brutalism.

No. And there's a lot of overlap between modernism and brutalism. They both were going on at the same time. And some people say that brutalism emerged out of modernism. There's a big old, that's a hornet nest that we're not going to get into. But just using exposed, unfinished concrete is not in and of itself a brutalist building. There's other elements as well that come into it.

Yeah. But I think an interesting thing is brutalism isn't. I mean, you know, when you see it. But it's something that, I saw this, I think it was a New York Times article that said it has always sort of lacked a really clear, well articulated set of principles.

I saw that. I didn't agree with that. I thought it was very.

Think the, I think what it means more is there's so much variety within those principles. You can't say it's just this because depending on what region you are in the world. The brutalist architecture is going to look different. Whether it's Soviet Russia or post war London or in Brazil and Latin America, brutalism grew out of the modernist tradition. So stuff there looks quite a bit different than it does in other parts of the world.

It does. I think that they all share in common a core set of principles that is brutalism. That's what I disagree with. I know that there's differences in all. Just. I didn't agree with that statement. I thought the New York Times got it wrong. Wrong.

I'm with them. I'm down the paper of record.

Well, let's talk about where this came.

Well, I mean, you know, it came out of the post war architectural rebuilding of so many cities around the world that were completely destroyed into rubble. And in particular, this one couple, Peter and Allison Smithson in England, saw bombed out London. And instead of seeing a big bombed out mess where, like, oh, we have to rebuild it more ornate and grander than before, they saw an opportunity and were inspired and said, why don't we start using this rubble and build some sort of unfinished looking places?

Yeah. So it's almost like, visually speaking, they used the rubble as the material to build the new buildings, and they didn't actually use that, but visually speaking, they did that. And it was, like you said, an acceptance of the current reality rather than a return to a previous reality, which is radical in and of itself. But essentially, the Smithsons are credited with establishing brutalism as an architectural movement. Very frequently, a critic named Rayner Banham is credited with coining the term brutalism. That's wrong. He popularized it in a review of the Smithsons work. The Smithsons used it a couple of years before Banham did and a couple of years before that, a swedish architect named Hans Asplund used it to describe a home that he designed in Upsila called via Goth in 1949. So at least as far back as 1949, the term brutalism was being used. But you kind of dug up and you had said at the outset evidence that brutalism was around before that term was ever used. Right.

Yeah, I think clearly, they were inspired by stuff that came before them, maybe by mayan temples and things like that, but no one was calling it brutalist, obviously, until then. And I don't think it was like, a bona fide architectural movement until the post war sort of rebuilding.

Right. And post war, because of all the rebuilding that was going on, brutalism was widely adopted across Europe, not just in the west, but also in the eastern bloc, because World War II just ravaged that continent. And so a lot of countries had a lot of cities that needed to be rebuilt, largely. And not just in Europe. In Japan, particularly in Okinawa, supposedly ten to 20% of the buildings that were around before World War II were still around after as much as 90% of the buildings were destroyed. So they had a lot of rebuilding to do. And it just so happened at the time, brutalism was this new kind of up and coming, frankly, beloved style of architecture. So it happened to be in the right place at the right time to become adopted around the world because all this rebuilding was going on. But the timing isn't the full explanation of the whole thing, is it? Is it?

No, it's not, because it was also a time where in the sort of the 50s through the 70s, where the european nations that had colonized the world, that stuff started sort of going back the other way. And these countries were even either given their country back or they were flourishing. So in Latin America, all of a sudden, there was sort of a new prosperity going on in know, some of them were gaining independence. And so it all timed out with brutalism. So that's why you'll see, like, brutalism in Africa and brutalism in Latin America and brutalism in Japan. It's really interesting.

The thing is, though, is we said that modernism was in full swing at the same time. So you could say, well, why didn't they just choose modernism? You know, a lot of them did. A lot of modernist buildings were built in these same cities around the same time. But the reason brutalism truly became so ubiquitous around the world is because it was cheap. It was really cheap to make a brutalist building because they were essentially poured or slab concrete. There was no adornment to them, as we'll see. Brutalism takes a single unit very often, like the smallest unit, like, say, an apartment, and then redoes it over and over and over again. So there's a standardization of the process of the materials. So it was around at the time, and it was a very cheap alternative to other much more ornate types of buildings, like modernist buildings at the time. So that was one reason why it was so widely adopted. Yeah.

And with that repeating mean, it can even just be like. Well, like that airport in Mexico City with the. Or what was the one, the french guy, like the unit?

Yeah.

I mean, if you look at that, that's another great example of these. I guess they're windows. What are they?

Yeah, I think they're balconies or, like, patios.

Okay. It's hard to tell from like a distance, but it's just this repeated thing. And there's obviously a building efficiency when you're not adorning things and we're kind of repeating the same design feature over and over and over. Also, this is a time, post war, where people really started moving to the cities a lot more, especially in the eastern bloc. It's cheap. It was a cheap way to house tons of people as far as the US goes. That's when the federal government really beefed up and said, all right, we're going to take some steroids here and see what happens. And so all of a sudden, you had a much larger bureaucracy and there were more people, more employees, and so they needed these big federal government buildings. So you'll see a lot of, some of the best brutalist architecture in american cities could be like the city library, like here in Atlanta, or the IRS building or something like these big government buildings.

Also, one of the reasons brutalism was such a great idea for government buildings is because they're so stable and they're so just immovable. And so the designers were like, well, this is going to remind people that the government is stable and you don't have to worry because the government's in control. Just look at the buildings that they operate out of.

Yeah, DC has a lot of brutalist stuff, right?

Yes, it's a brutalist town. If you want to acquaint yourself with brutalist architecture, just walk around DC and look at the federal buildings. They are brutalist through and through.

Should we take a break, buddy?

I say we take a break. Yeah. All right.

Because we need to go to Washington, DC and apologize.

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Okay, Chuck, I didn't understand. Why do we have to apologize to DC?

I don't know. It sounded like you were saying, I know you appreciate brutalism now, but it sounded like you didn't have much love for the DC style of brutalism.

No, it's not that. I've always appreciated DC because it's just so weird architecturally, isn't it, that nothing can be taller than the Washington monument? That's why there's no skyscrapers in DC. I think I've heard that the monument or the Capitol building, one of the two. So, yeah, it's a very low, slong city, but that also is ready made for brutalist design, too, because they're often, like, low, wide, hulking forms as well.

Yeah, you're never going to see a brutalist tower.

That's not true. There are some brutalist towers, but they're very rare. Very rare.

Well, yeah, I mean, I've seen some skinniesh apartment buildings and things, but I guess. I don't know, I'm thinking in terms of, like, skyscrapers.

Well, do they have those, the skyscrapers that we think of when we think of the cities today? Those kind of came along and replaced brutalism starting around the 80s. Yeah. So, no, you wouldn't have seen that as brutalist because it just wasn't brutalist.

So it's not all concrete all the time. It's obviously a very big part, that unfinished concrete of brutalism but you might see a little brick in there every now and then. Probably not going to be like some super colorful thing. You'll probably see some steel, obviously some glass. I have seen, especially in Brazil and Latin America, out of the modernist movement, incorporating wood. And I'm a big fan of combining cement and wood and natural things like that. Natural elements with unnatural elements.

Well, that's the new thing. That's brand spanking new. They call it organic brutalism, which is combining a brutalist space with organic touches to it. Yeah, you'd love that. I don't even know if you can say that it's not all concrete all the time. I think one of the basis of brutalism is that it's got to be concrete. Right? Or are you saying, like, other people have experimented with other stuff and still considered brutalist?

No, I just mean that every square inch of the place got you isn't.

Concrete, but that features very prominently. Yeah. One of the things about these reinforced concrete buildings is because they were using just unfinished concrete or unadorned concrete, they figured out interesting ways to kind of play with the concrete so that every building didn't look exactly alike. So you'll often see, like, vertical ripples going down long, tall columns. That's a type of concrete. There'll be, like, aggregate, like maybe pebbles that are on the surface of the concrete. There's all sorts of stuff they did, but at the end of the day, it's all reinforced concrete, and there's not, like, drywall over it. There's not, like, a nice paint job over it. There's no decorations or any kind of woodwork or anything like that.

Right.

The building itself. The point of brutalism is the building itself is allowed to stand on its own. And I saw somewhere that somebody said that if modernism is meant to be honest, then brutalism is brutally honest. Like, what you see is what you get with the building.

I like that.

I do, too.

Like you said, there's a sense of permanence to a brutalist building. And I think that's another reason why government buildings like them, because, like you mentioned, they just sort of convey this thing of, like, I know you hate paying your taxes, but look at this IRS building. It's not going anywhere.

Right?

It sends a message.

It says, Ts. There's some other basic parts of the brutalist concept, Chuck. Like, the buildings tend to be angular, geometric, sculptural, blocky, top heavy. The windows are very frequently deep set. They're called Fortress like. I don't know if you mentioned that one before, but it pops up almost everywhere. When you're talking about what brutalism is, fortress like seems to be like just a common description. And then we talked about them being self repeating. Right?

Yeah. And that was a big reason why, because the efficiencies and the cost.

Right. So sometimes some brutalist buildings will take like the single unit, like, say it's an apartment building and they'll design the one apartment building and they just repeat it over and over and over again. And then the next row over and over and over again. And by combining these modular units together, it forms the building just through repetition. And so some people call it a fractal as far as architectural movements go, which makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And I appreciate it a lot and I always have. But I get why people don't like a lot of these buildings. And I think that maybe, like you, previous to Mexico City only had in the brain like sort of one thing, which is, God, that ugly building downtown that I have to go to get my driver's license or something.

Exactly.

And to expose yourself to more. And we're going to talk about some famous buildings. But brutalism had sort of a pre hatred going on before it even became a thing. The people that were, I believe it was La Corbusier's. How do you pronounce this building again?

The units? Da batacion.

That's right.

I think if my high school French can hold up.

He designed this thing for working class families to house a lot of people, which was the whole idea. But no one wanted to live there. None of those people wanted to live there. So the intelligentsia of Marseille was know they appreciated that architecture and they're who moved in, right?

They said sold.

I also think it's interesting that they have been used in a lot of, as the one here that I sent you in Georgia, that is so cool looking. And of all places, Noonan, Georgia was used as, I believe in Ant man and the wasp as the evil villains lair from the clockwork orange. And just this association with evil villains or the bad guys or the communist soviet bloc. It just sort of always had this reputation of like, you should probably hate.

This architecture also dystopian too. Like if you ever watch a movie or look at artwork set in a dystopia, if you look at the buildings, they are almost always brutalist in some way, shape or form, often very frankly brutalist. Right? Yeah. And it kind of makes sense because a lot of times dystopian settings are, well, they're set in the future or maybe they're post apocalyptic.

Yeah.

And it makes sense that if any kind of building is going to survive, a brutalist building would survive far into the future or would survive an apocalypse. So it makes sense intuitively. But also, I think brutalism gets used in that because it's so associated with things like dehumanization, depersonalization, that the scales that they're built on are inhuman scales. And that's ironic because, again, most of the brutalist buildings that were ever built were meant to be public buildings, where you bring a lot of people together to do things like enjoy a ballet or a show or performance or to live together as a community in, like, a tower or something like that. And yet the irony of it is that they're viewed as inhuman, dehumanizing rather than humanizing, which is, I think, what they were after. But it just, over time, it just became associated with the opposite of that.

Yeah, for sure. And if you have an evil villain in your movie, you're not going to put them in a quaint cottage.

Well, maybe if they're on vacation and it's like a rental.

One of my favorite examples of brutalism as a bad guy's place is in karate Kid three, which I watched it when it came out, and I clearly hadn't watched it since because I'd forgotten all about it. And we watched it on vacation last year, and it is one of the most wonderfully awful movies I've ever seen. One of those bad movies. That's a lot of fun to watch.

Is that the one with Hillary Swank?

No, that is, I think, the next karate kid. Karate Kid three was the third of the Daniel and Mr. Miyagi tale.

Wow. Okay.

Where he battled the bad guy, Terry Silver, who was, I think he was a Vietnam buddy of. What's his name?

I can't remember from the sensei from the first. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. So Terry Silver's place is the ultimate brutalist bad guy lair. And it is the Innis house in Los Angeles that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is that the hell house or Hill house?

I don't know. I mean, it's called the Ennis house.

I got to look that up because I've been at some Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Los Angeles, and they're pretty awesome.

Yeah. I mean, he definitely was not known as a brutalist architect, but there are a handful of his designs. And if you look at Ennis House, it is super brutalist. And then when I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I saw the West Hope house in Tulsa. Frank Lloyd Wright also, I think, if not purely brutalist, fairly brutalist. And then you look at the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim is sort of brutalist as well.

Right?

I don't know if you could call it. If you're a brutalist purist, a rapuralist.

Right.

Jeez, if you would count the Guggenheim, because it's the concrete. It's much more smooth. But it's not. Not know.

No, and I was mistaken. It's not Hill House. It's the house on Haunted Hill, is what that Ennis House stood in for. But it is super brutalist. And it's funny because you had mentioned that the mayan architecture seems brutalist now, but it wasn't originally. It very much echoes some sort of mesoamerican architecture. Almost like a mishmash of it.

Yeah, for sure. But this is sort of what I was getting at. All of these reasons that people hate brutalism is why we are losing so many great brutalist buildings in the world. It's not a hard sell to tear these things down a lot of times in a city.

No. And I have to say one other thing. The hatred of brutalism also is sometimes associated, depending on your political beliefs. It's associated with the welfare state because so many were built as public housing. And so if you are, say, right leaning or probably very far to the right, you hate brutalism for that very reason. And it also is no coincidence that the era of brutalism ended abruptly at 1980, which is the time when Reagan and Thatcher came to power. And the welfare state was like, no, no more welfare state, or we're going to cut it so thoroughly that we're certainly not going to invest in any brutalist architecture any longer. And it became associated not just with totalitarian governments of the eastern bloc here in the United States. It also became associated on the right with welfare. And the right doesn't really like welfare very much. So they don't like brutalist architecture. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, super. Like, they were looked at as blights a lot of times.

Well, they became that way, too. And that's another reason why that they're under such attack. They show their age pretty poorly, right?

Yeah, over the years, because they're not adorned, because they have that rough concrete finish. Water damage can happen a lot. Decay can be really more evident. I think that Paul Rudolph, and when you say famous brutalist architect, you got to be in the know to kind of know these names, right? It's not like a Frank Lloyd Wright, but Paul Rudolph's Orange county government center in Goshen New York was torn down. If you look this thing up, it is amazing looking.

Yeah. I became a fan of Paul Rudolph's, just researching this. I'd never heard of him before, but he was good.

That building is unbelievable. But they tore it down. And it wasn't just because like, oh, look at this big blocky thing. But apparently it leaked from day one. There was constant mold. There were always water issues. They were having to close courtrooms and move them around. And they did a cost study, and it was like retrofitting and making this thing a workable government center isn't even feasible. So they tore it down.

So I had a hard time getting to the bottom of this because I saw plenty of places that it was torn down. I also saw that it was going to be torn down, but they decided to do a retrofit or a rehab of it instead. And that the update, the refresh of it was so faithless to the original that it's no longer a brutalist building. I saw it described as disfigured.

Interesting.

Yeah. But either way, Paul Rudolph seems to be, I think Arch mag called him the unluckiest architect ever.

Arc mag.

Is it arc or arch?

Is it architecture?

Well, why don't you just call it Arc mag then? Why add the h and make me look stupid in front of everybody?

I'm with you. I think it's kind of an awkward.

Anyway, Arc Archmag called him the unluckiest architect around because so many of Paul Rudolph's buildings are just being torn down left and right. And I don't even know that it's a distinct dislike of Paul Rudolph's work. I think it's just people are tearing brutalist buildings down, and his happened to be being torn down at a faster rate than other architects. Brutalist buildings.

And I know we're going to get email from someone who works at that magazine. That's like, Chuck doesn't know what he's talking about. We call it Arch mag.

Right, exactly.

Chacha's right.

Arch mag.

Other buildings. Architect named Bertrand Goldberg designed the princess women's Hospital in Chicago. That was torn. Yeah, it was gorgeous.

Yeah. How are you going to look at that and be like, that's an ugly building? It was elevated clover made of concrete. It was gorgeous for sure. And at the very least, even if you don't think these buildings are gorgeous, I get that, but they're admirable for they're, they're amazing achievements, for sure. I just don't think that they're ugly. Across the board, I think there's plenty of amazing brutalist buildings out there.

Oh, totally. It also doesn't help that. And I think you found stuff from Jessica Stewart in my modern met and begonia bescos. Great name. And Arca magazine. That's a lot easier that they both talked about. The fact that these are basically, they can be kind of a symbol of human abandonment is what they said in Arca magazine. And if it starts to decay, it's got these big, open, bare concrete walls. So obviously vandalism. It's a perfect canvas for something like that. And I think Jessica Stewart's the one that said they basically symbolized urban decay at one point and economic hardship.

Right? Yeah. That failure of the welfare state. And because they show their neglect so readily, because they're unadorned, because they're exposed concrete, they stood as symbols of like, yeah, look what a bad idea welfare is. This building is like a symbol of that. By the way, I've been pronouncing it ersa magazine. Is that not right?

All right, I think we should take a break. We're going to call these magazines up and get the record set straight. Then we'll be right back after this.

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So, Chuck, I'm glad you said Paul Rudolph's Orange county government center was in Goshen, New York, because I definitely would have said goshen, no joke. And just want to say one more thing about that. It was made of three buildings. It had 87 roofs. Just wrap your head around that for a second.

Wonder why it leaked, right?

Exactly. But that's just wonderful. Look up some of Paul Rudolph's work and you're going to be like, this is super 70s awesomeness. Like, that guy was talented.

Yeah, totally. I think a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright stuff leaked, though, as well.

Yeah, he was very famous for some guy he designed a house for. Said, the roof is leaking on my desk. And Frank Lloyd Wright said, move the desk. And if you ask me, these guys get way too much of a pass because part of architecture is to make a building that doesn't leak, too. In addition to making it awesome, it's.

Got to function as a place to live in or work in.

Exactly. Well, when we were in Mexico City, we went with our two friends, Mitch and Patrick, who are architects and designers, and I was explaining that to them, too. And they're like, yeah, it's absolutely true. I was expecting pushback or like, no, no. People do give famous architects way too much of a pass, especially former legendary ones. Hopefully I didn't just get Mitch and Patrick in trouble.

I don't think so.

Okay.

They're out of the club. If you're as far as brutalism coming back, it is coming back in certain ways. Even if you don't have, let's say, you have, like, a modern house or even not a modern house, you can decorate your interior in a little more brutalish style. And sometimes just a touch or two of that kind of thing can really give you what you're looking for.

I'm not a big fan of that. How stuff works. Office used to be, I guess, new brutalist interior design. It kind of checked the boxes. I was never comfortable there.

Now, isn't every office that's got concrete walls and exposed air ducts and Edison bulbs. They're all sort of new brutalist, right?

Kind of, yeah. And also it seems like little geometric pattern. Copper knickknacks on shelves that float, that don't really serve that much of a purpose. They're just decorative. I don't like that either.

We had that great mural, though, really warmed up that place up.

It did. I wonder what happened to that, because we're not in that building anymore. But surely they preserved the mural in.

That question mark table. Where the heck is that thing?

I don't know. Space, I think. Yeah.

Here, though, in the 2020s, brutalism as an actual architectural style is making a bit of a comeback.

Yeah.

Like I said, I've seen quite a few houses in the neighboring neighborhoods that are. Some are just sort of like, hi, we're a blocky house, so that's more modern. But there are a couple that are true brutalist concrete layers.

It looks like there was a triumphant brutalist refurbishment here in Atlanta back in 2018. The central Atlanta library in downtown was designed by Marcel Brewer. Amazing building. But apparently that was the last work that Brewer completed before he died. And I guess some of the design and some of the actual construction didn't quite jibe. And some of his original intentions were covered up. Like, there was an elevator that had to be centrally placed. That just screwed things up quite a bit. And then they came along and they added more lights. They refurbished the place. They got rid of that central elevator. They opened it up. There's like a zigzagging staircase. That's amazing. That's now much more prominent. And in doing so, they actually made the building closer to Marcel Brewer's original intentions with his design than it was when it was built, when Marcel Brewer was still. So, like, that's an example of the ideal of what's being done with brutalist buildings. The opposite end is that they're being torn down because people vote them as, like, the ugliest building of all.

Should we. Should we rattle off some of these famous ones?

Yes.

Well, architecture architect wise, is it Lewis or Louis? I never know. I think Lewis, but Lewis Khan. K A H n is usually the first name. You'll hear if people are kind of throwing the brutalist architect name around.

Yeah. And I mean, you can make a pretty good case that brutalism, I don't know if it's because the buildings were meant to take center stage or whatever, but it's just not household names compared to other movements. You know what I mean? Lewis Khan is definitely far and away the most famous, but I saw that he's technically not even a brutalist. He just used brutalist elements. There are some, like we talked about, Paul Rudolph, Vigenza, Slay Richter, Marcel Brewer. There's a lot of other really great, I think, Erno Goldfinger people you just have never heard of. These are just random names. It sounds like that a writer made up. No, they're actually legit architects. This movement didn't have star power like some of the other movements did.

Yeah, and like we said, like Frank Lloyd Wright had done a thing or two, but he's not known for that. I am pay has dabbled in it. In New York City, if you see kips Bay Plaza by im pay, very much brutalist. But that's not how his name was made.

No, but there are ones there like. No, I'm brutalist through and through. The Smithsons obviously were brutalists because they founded the movement. And one of the things they completed was Robin Hood Gardens, which was a housing estate from 1972. And it's. Okay.

As brutal as brutalism gets.

It is. And part of it was demolished. Just part of it. Right. And it was actually acquired, three stories of the building were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum to preserve it, because it's just such a fine example of brutalist architecture, even though to me it's kind of ugly. But London, because this was the epicenter of the brutalist movement, the creation of it. It has a lot of good examples of really good brutalist buildings, what Prince Charles has to say about them notwithstanding.

Yeah. King Charles. But he was prince when he said that the Royal National Theater of London was a, quote, clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting.

Right.

I think it's cool looking. I like it.

Yeah. I was going to say it's hilarious, but he's a madman for saying that. I think he came up with a clever quip and was going to use it at all costs because anyone who looks at the Royal National Theater and isn't like, that's an amazing building is wrong. I'm sorry, wrong. Yeah.

It was also, at the time, Princess Charles's best stab at telling a joke.

Well, he was apparently well known for being a mean critic in the media about architecture in particular. I didn't realize that, but that was, like, one of his greatest hits, from what I can tell. But the thing about the Royal National Theater, it had really great horizontal and vertical lines that were harmonious, which can be unusual for a brutalist building. But even more unusual, it fit the site that it sits on. It's not imposed like every other brutalist building of all time. If there's ever been a brutalist building that fit the site, that royal National Theater, is it?

Yeah, for sure. For my money, if you want to have your socks knocked off by a blocky architectural gym, then you should go to Montreal and look at Safti's Habitat 67. It was built for the 1967 World's Fair there in Montreal, and it is super cool looking. It looks like something a child might build out of building blocks.

I've got one, the peace center in Hiroshima. I really feel like every American should go there. It's amazing. The Japanese, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed by nuclear bombs, their response was to build this peace center to preserve what happened for generations to come, so that it never happened again. They turned peacenic rather than retributive or vengeanced. It's a pretty amazing response, if you think about it. And so it's a pretty amazing center. And Kenzo Tange, who was a student of La Corbusier, started it in 1950. And it's just a long rectangular structure that seems to be kind of floating on the horizon. It's just a really amazing place. Really amazing museum. It gets you in ways that I'd never been gotten before.

Just five years after the bomb was dropped too. So how heavy was that? Still in the air?

Yeah, in Hiroshima, it's a part of the town.

Oh, sure.

They preserved a bank that was just completely wasted, but the frame was still there. It's preserved. They build a fence around it, and the blocks are still where they landed after the bomb was dropped. They didn't touch it after that. They just cordoned it off. And now it's part of the museum. Parts of the city, entire parts of the city have become part of this living outdoor museum. It's just amazing, man.

Japan, it's got to happen for me one day.

Yes, it does. And seriously, go to Hiroshima. It's really something. Yeah. It's also a really cool town, too, in addition to the whole museum segment of it.

Right. If you go to Tunisia, in Tunis, the Hotel Dulac, and if you look at that building and you say, man, if you chopped off the back of that thing, that would be a sand crawler that the jawas rode around in in Star wars.

Right.

Then you would probably not be surprised to know that and supposedly inspired George Lucas. I say it had to have been because when you look at that building, it looks just like that thing, that inverted pyramid, 416 rooms over ten floors. It's really something. And inverted pyramids are sort of a brutalist thing as well. But it's a great example.

Yeah. And, I mean, it was open in 73, and he was there shooting in the years later. So it was definitely there in Tunis while he was there. So I buy that totally. One of the most famous brutalist buildings in the United States, if not the world, is the Geysel library at UC San Diego. It was originally called the Central Library, but Ted Geisel, Dr. Seuss's widow Audrey, donated $20 million, and the university said, let's just rename it in honor of you and Ted.

Well, she said $10 million and they kept the name. And she was like 15.

Right.

And then she said, what do I got to do to get our name on the front of that thing?

Right.

This building is amazing. And this, again, is an example of how just sort of the variety that you can find in a brutalist building when you look at this compared to the Robin Hood Gardens building in London.

Right? Yeah. This one really prominently makes use of glass, which can be rare for brutalist building.

Super.

And yet when you look at it, you're like, that is a brutalist building. It's just an amazing, beautiful brutalist building.

Yeah, I love it. Can't wait. Go back to Mexico City and see some of that stuff.

For sure. Also, I would strongly advise anyone not to make a drinking game out of how often we say brutalist in this episode because we said it a lot.

They already have drinking games. I saw that stuff on Reddit.

I know, but don't do this one because you would die.

Someone said, I counted how many times you got said, like, in the, like, episode. And I was like, well, yeah, it.

Was kind of the name of the episode.

How many times did we say llama in the llama episode?

Right.

Well, plus we had our additional likes because we talk like regular people.

One other thing, too, Chuck. If you want to see cool post apocalyptic brutalist architecture used really adeptly in illustration, go check out eternal dystopia's YouTube videos. Did I send you that one called research center? It's like drone music, but the video is like just this. It's like a dystopian brutalist building kind of set in the haze. And sometimes it's raining. I'll send it to you again. It's really amazing. But the drone music alone is pretty cool, so check that out.

Into the drone. Lately.

I am. Because it's not distracting. It helps me know I like it. Well, Chuck said he likes it, which means, everybody, that it's time for listener mail.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

It's another correction. But, Josh, this one is on me.

Okay, now you're talking.

I think the first 1 may have been on us, but in the nuclear Boy Scott episode, we said the USS Enterprise was a nuclear submarine. It's in fact, an aircraft carrier. But the big one was when we had our sort of brief debate about military discharge. And I was just wrong. Wrong. Because I thought if you just served all your time, then they just called it leaving the military.

Yeah, you just stopped showing up one day.

You just stopped showing up. Or you call it retirement or whatever. I didn't think it was. I thought anytime you left before your time was up was the only time it was called the discharge. Not so. We heard from a lot of our current service members and veterans, but this one's from Scott Oliver. He said, guys, what Chuck said was not correct. Any way you leave the service is some form of discharge. And then he goes over. This was the most detailed one. So we're going to read these discharges. You got the honorable discharge. It's the highest level given to those who complete their service and are discharged or are discharged early for no fault of their own, like a medical issue. That's one you want to shoot for.

Sure.

General discharge, lower level, but given to those who have, like, a minor misconduct or a performance issue. I was going to hazard a comical guess on what that might be, but I'm not going to. Okay, there's. Other than honorable or the OTh, that's a negative level. So now you've crossed the Rubicon.

Okay?

And you're not good anymore. And it's given to people who have serious misconduct or violations of regulations. Then there are two more. You've got the bad conduct discharge or the BCD. This is actually punitive. And that is if you were convicted by a court martial for something like desertion or assault or theft. And then you know what we've got last, don't you?

Yeah.

Dishonorable. And that is a punishment for a serious offense by committing a felony. Sorry for being pedantic, guys. You weren't at all, Scott. But as a veteran, I find myself particularly attuned to erroneous statements about military matters.

Sure.

And that's every veteran, Scott. So you're in good company. And we heard from a lot of service members and all apologies for screwing that up. Sometimes when I say things off the dome without researching, quite often, in fact, I'm dead wrong, man.

Well, you really owned it, Chuck. Like somebody with an honorable discharge.

Oh, thank you.

That was Scott.

Scott Oliver.

Thanks a lot, Scott. You weren't pedantic at all. Chuck's right. That was very nicely put, and we appreciate being schooled. And also, Chuck, thank you for selecting one where you were wrong and not me.

Yeah, I guess we were military schooled.

If you want to get in touch with us like Scott did and school us and do it nicely, we love that kind of thing. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast iHeartRadio.com.

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