Goldfinger’s [brutalist] buildings were decreed “soulless.” Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside of them. Some of Goldfinger’s buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly. Yet, architects praised Goldfinger’s buildings. [...]
This divide—this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects—tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger’s. Which is to say, gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete.
— slate.com
Roman Mars, host of the design-centric podcast "99% Invisible", blogs for Slate on the polarizing quality of brutalist architecture – beloved by architects and hated by pretty much everyone else. Discussing the history of concrete in building architecture, Mars also puts brutalism in perspective as a contested term, one that architects are still arguing about, and that is commonly interpreted by non-architects simply as "gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete."
More on brutalist architecture:
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Zaha Hadid offers an especially eloquent and well-reasoned defense of Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, Goshen, NY, in the NYTimes article reg controversial buildings (or, "hated" as the headline would have it; or, as I would put it: "misunderstood"). This is not Rudolph's finest building in the brutalist mode; his Yale A+A, and the Dana Arts Center at Colgate U in Hamilton, NY (and my alma mater) are better. Even so, how many significant buildings on the level of Rudolph's talents are there? Not many, really. See link:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/05/t-magazine/architects-libeskind-zaha-hadid-selldorf-norman-foster.html?_r=0
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