99% Invisible - 176- Hard to Love a Brute

Episode Date: August 12, 2015

No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who turned cat-stroking into a thing that super-villains do, and then there’s Goldfinger—Bond’s flashiest nemesis. Fun fact: the … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The best James Bond is either Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I lean towards Daniel Craig. The new movies are just better. But the Sean Connery films definitely had the best villains. There's Blowfeld, of course, who's so iconic that he turned the act of cat stroking into a thing that super villains do.

But Bond's flashiest nemesis has to be gold finger. Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! Do you expect me to talk? Yeah, I expect you to talk. There's this dorky fun fact that the Bond villain, Goldfinger, was actually named after a real person.

That's truffleman, a very truffle. The author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, named Goldfinger for a man he found so dastardly, so terrible that he immortalized him in pop culture. The real Goldfinger was an architect, Erno Goldfinger, and he made giant, hulking, austere, concrete buildings. Goldfinger's buildings were decreed sole lists. inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside them. some of Goldfinger's buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly.

and yet many architects praised Goldfinger's buildings. his trellic tower, which was once threatened with demolition, has been awarded landmark status. This divide, this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects, tends to be the narrative around buildings like gold fingers, which is to say gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete. What some people refer to as brutalist architecture. And a lot of folks beyond the creator of James Bond love to hate them. We are in Worcester Hall, which to my great-dismay illustration is often considered the worst building on campus or

Worcester Hall, more like Worst. I met up with Sarah Briggs Ramsey in Worcester Hall, a brutalist building at UC Berkeley. I can't tell you how many times I've been locking up my bike outside and I over here undergrads, walking with their parents and going, ironically, this is the architecture school and it's the ugliest building on campus. Yep, Worcester Hall is the architecture school. Sarah completed her masters there. Buildings like this are pretty pervasive across most American and Canadian campuses.

Yeah, there was a big bulky concrete building on the campus where I went to college. And I hated when I had to go through it. It just reminded me of a bunker or a bomb shelter. These big concrete buildings just like bum me out. Absolutely. I mean, it has these connotations of, you know, Soviet era construction, sometimes third world construction, all these negative associations. This is Professor Adrian 40, author of the excellent book Concrete and Culture. He's been researching concrete for around 10 years now. It has a bad name.

Apart from aesthetic criticisms, concrete buildings present environmental concerns. A lot of these buildings built at a time when energy was cheap and they used up an awful lot of energy to heat and cool them. Concrete buildings were built with the illusion of plenty, that we will always have enough energy to build and heat and cool these massive inefficient structures. As harsh as it looks, concrete is an utterly optimistic building material, arguably too optimistic.

Really from the 1920s, it was seen as being a material that would change the world. It had the potential to build things in a way that hadn't been seen before. Concrete was this material that seemed boundless, readily available in vast quantities, and could create massive spaces unlike any other material. So concrete sprang up everywhere. It's the second most heavily consumed product in the world. The only thing we consume more of than concrete is water. We use concrete for sidewalks, bridges, tunnels, and highways,

and of course for giant buildings. Whether we're talking about whether we're talking about Stadia or Auditoria or Condominia or Gymnasia or Planetaria. So historically government programs all over the world loved concrete. Particularly in Soviet Russia but also later in Europe North America. It was used for welfare, welfare state projects. Concrete presented the most efficient way to house huge numbers of people. And philosophically, it was seen as humble, capable, and honest. Concrete was just out there in all of its rough glory,

not hiding behind any paint or layers, saying, here I am, love me or hate me. And as Concrete buildings came to signify humility, honesty and integrity. They were erected all over the world as housing projects, court houses, schools, churches, hospitals, and city halls. You'll stand outside and a tour bus will go by and they'll be able to, ladies and gentlemen, voted the most ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall. How do you compete

with that? Chris Grimley is up against a lot, but he's trying to restore Boston City Hall's reputation. My name is Chris Grimley. I'm with my fellow heroic people, Mark Paznik and Michael Kubo. Chris, Mark, and Michael have embarked on what they call the heroic project, chronicling the concrete structures in and around Boston. Rather than referring to these concrete buildings as brutalists, they prefer the term heroic, because like so many superheroes, these structures have the best most noble intentions, but are sorely misunderstood. Also, just generally, brutalism is a big, broad label that gets used inconsistently in architecture. People tend to disagree on one precise definition.

The name brutalism also just sounds intense, even though it's not actually related to brutality. It comes from Beton Brute, which is a French term for raw concrete. In any case, to these guys, heroic feels like a better term, especially in Boston, where concrete architecture swooped in and saved the day. You have to situate Boston in late fifties, 1960s. It is America's first city. Well, it is America's most historic city. Again, not really, but I get your point. And yet, it finds itself in the doldrums. Boston, like a lot of other American cities, was plagued by a loss of manufacturing jobs

and white flight to the suburbs. And for decades, Boston had the highest property taxes in the nation and almost no development. There is this recognition from civic authorities that something needs to be done and something needs to be done quickly. So Boston sets an agenda to make the city great again, with big, soaring, capable,

thoroughly modern buildings made, of course, out of concrete. And though some of these buildings were celebrated, others were really not. What we call the third rail of Boston concrete modernism is city hall. When Boston City Hall was built in 1968, critics were put off by this concrete style.

It was called alienating and cold. And since it was a government building, this criticism became impossible to remove from politics. Boston City Hall became a political pawn. Mayors and City Council members kept trying to win public support with promises to get rid of the building. Like John Tobin did when he ran for City Council. Hi everybody, this is John Tobin. Thanks for visiting VotewonTobin.com. Here we are on City Hall Plaza in front of Boston City Hall.

I'm not in our context, but I know bad eye context when I see it. This is a bad building and I think we can do a lot by knocking this building down. Former Mayor Thomas Manino actually started a study to really look into tearing it down. It turned out as a result of the study that you would need something like a nuclear-grade weapon basically to destroy this building because it was so heavily over-built in concrete. And so when they couldn't tear down City Hall, officials chose to ignore it. People that occupied the building for decades and decades didn't like it and so they didn't invest money into the building and effectively wanted to see the building go away.

This is called active neglect and it happens with a lot of concrete buildings. They are intentionally unrepaired, unrenovated and uncared for. Which only makes the building more ugly and then more hated and then more ignored and creates this vicious cycle where the public hate of Boston City Hall feeds itself. And then the discussion years on really became about what the original architects had done wrong as if this were not a failure of maintenance but a failure of the initial design.

When people built these mammoth concrete structures, no one really thought about maintenance. They seemed indestructible. In the early days of concrete, people assumed that this was an everlasting material that wouldn't need any attention at all. And I mean, that's wrong. We know that it does need to be looked after. It does deteriorate. It does decay. But it can be hard to tell when concrete is decaying. If you think of brick and timber, the decay takes place on the surface of them.

But with concrete, the deterioration is internal. Concrete deteriorates chemically from the inside out. Part of this has to do with the metal reinforcements that help hold up most concrete buildings. The rebar, well they can rust, and the rust eats away at the overall structure. But Adrian 40 says, tearing them down is not the answer. Because as soon as you tear them down, then you have a problem, first of all, what you do with a detritus that's left. And secondly, you've got to replace them with something else and use up a whole lot more energy

and create a lot more CO2 in building something in that place. They already used up all that energy when they were made. They're already there. We can adapt these buildings to make them greener and make them more appealing places to be by adding windows, for example. But basically, Professor Forty thinks we can all develop the capacity to love these concrete roots in all their whole game glory.

Yeah, sure, people can learn to love anything, but, you know, as with any art form, whether it's opera or painting or literature, the more you know about it, the more you'll get out of it, the more you'll appreciate it. And this is especially true of concrete buildings. Architecture students appreciate them because they know that concrete actually requires a hell of a lot of skill and finesse to work with. To do architecture in concrete is proof that you are really are an architect. It's the test of being an architect. The concrete building, every little detail, needs to be calculated in advance. Concrete is wildly intimidating to work with. Once you pour it, there's no going back. With a concrete building, it's like the result of an immaculate conception. The whole thing is an integral monolithic hole, and it has to be right.

And aside from the interesting design challenges that poses, Concrete itself as a material can be subtly beautiful if you look closely. You know what we think of as just a monolithic, consistent, homogenous texture is actually really rich and has a lot of interest when you actually go up to it and consider it. Sarah Briggs Ramsey, the one I spoke with at Berkeley's Worcester Hall, did a year-long project traveling around the world Looking at concrete buildings in Europe and Asia and South and North America to create a global comparison of one material that I think is so

sort of under considered It's like the background of all the cities, but no one actually stands to look. We call the city a concrete jungle to talk about the artificialness of the urban landscape. But concrete can actually be a very natural expression of the environment. Concrete's color and texture can be dictated by local climate, local earth, and local rock. This is the Harvard Science Center on the Harvard campus.

And it's got a very purpley, like a really pronounced purpley color, and that's the ground from the site. Concrete can also be an expression of local style and custom. Like how UK concrete has big, thick, textured chunks of rock while Japanese concrete is very fine and flat. But the beauty of concrete architecture is all the better when you can just observe the buildings like pieces of sculpture without actually having to live and work in them, which brings in concrete, surprising ally, photography.

Concrete looks good in photographs. It provides this kind of neutral background. It provides a wonderful setting for people's skin tones, color of their clothes. Fashion photographers realize this first and then pockets of the internet started to appreciate these concrete buildings. There are lots of these blogs and so on, which show an extraordinary enthusiasm for concrete. Photography is allowing a new audience of non-architects to appreciate these buildings for their strong lines, their crisp shadows, and increasingly the idealism they embody.

They represent a set of ideas about the state of the world and what the future was imagined to be, that we want to preserve. We should remember what people were thinking 50 years ago. If we tear these buildings down, we will lose all of that. Architecture, whether we want to admit it or not, has a sort of shelf life, a time after which buildings fall out of fashion, and then are allowed to fall apart. Back in the 1960s, Victorian style buildings were considered hideous, falling apart, impossible

to repair, and we were tearing batches of them down, all the while erecting big concrete buildings. But enough Victorians were saved that today they are these beautiful, lovingly restored treasures. Brutalist, heroic, whatever you want to call it. Concrete architecture now finds itself at a potential inflection point. Too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. In a small but growing band of architects,

architecture enthusiasts and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see. Maybe with a little time and love we might discover some architectural diamonds in the rough that we just can't see right now. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffelman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. 99% invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffelman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to our pal, Allison Areff at Spur, along with Michael Abrinson, the curator of The Beautiful Site, f**k theabrudelism.tumbler.com.

Additional thanks to Renee Tap and Arkside Zone, the Fannual Mueller. The book, Heroic, Concrete Architecture, and the new Boston will be out in October. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced by the offices of ArcSign, an architecture and interior sperm in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. Our pal Melodium, whose music I'm talking about right now, has a new mini album called Beneath for sale on Bandcamp. It's pay what you want, so be generous. He's one of the good guys and he makes this show so much better.

Go to Melodium.bandcamp.com and just buy all of his albums and walk around as if you're in an episode of 99% invisible all the time. That's what I do. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. If you're in an episode of 99% of visible all the time, that's what I do. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, I'm at Roman Mars. Avery is at Truffleman Katie Mingle, is at Katie Mingle, and Sam Greenspan is at Sam Lissons.

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