OOP's bro might actually explode if he ever learns about the Khrushchovka, how concrete prefab buildings solved the housing crisis in 1960s Europe, and how similar mid-rise buildings could solve the suburban sprawl festering in current day North America.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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you can make tall buildings out of brick and poor people deserve nice homes too every time someone says hey living in one of those things is soul crushing and awful someone goes oh so you want people to be homeless no I want free housing for everyone and it to look good and not reaffirm the class and poverty of those who live in it
Did you run out of punctuation or something? Here, use some of mine: .........,,,,,,,,,,,,!!!???
Despite what some simple minds may think, residential buildings are not restricted to being either high density commie blocks or American cookie cutter suburban hellscapes. Medium-density townhouses are all over Europe, but the regressive bigots in America created zoning laws that made them illegal to build.
There is nothing inherently soul-crushing about concrete architecture. Some of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the world (especially in tropical/storm-prone regions) are made from concrete. For example
Also, in construction there is a saying: fast, cheap, good. Pick two.
Government-constructed housing will always strive to be cheap. Neither autocrats nor voting tax payers want to spend more money than they have to on any given project. This doesn't mean that they are always going to go with the absoulute cheapest option - but it does mean that there will always be a price constraint. And this is very legitimate, as any money spent on housing people is money not spent somewhere else - eg, replacing old sewer pipes, funding scientific research, health care, etc.
Meanwhile, you want housing for people now. Ie, fast.
And therefore, you are sacrificing "good". And the least essential part of "good" is aesthetics.
Demanding perfection is the surest path to failure due to analysis paralysis. This is essentially your tactic here - saying "I want X, and Y, and Z, and everything else is TERRIBLE." A far better tactic is to say "what would be pretty good?", and do that. Then once you have something that is pretty good, you say "okay, how can we make it better?"
not reaffirm the class and poverty of those who live in it
This will likely be quite difficult. Social strata try to distunguish themselves over time, and one of the ways they do this is via their housing - how it looks, where it is, the amenities it provides, etc. If you build government housing out of brick, in 10 years the middle class will be building with wood.
poor people deserve nice homes too
Concrete makes a nice home
I really want to say fake and gay but this checks out so much for 4chan that it's surely real and gay (anon's brother loves to smash but no woman was mentioned)
OOP and the brother are German so it checks out
On the internet things can be fake and gay, and still be true.
But brutalism is awesome. I want to live in a square fortress of plain concrete.
Make it for two
Ideally a living space for like 5 would be nice. 3 at minimum to accommodate the family.
Don't bring your brother to ex soviet countires then
I wonder if he had the same hatred for cast-in-place concrete.
I don't like concrete blocks, nor bricks, when cast-in-place concrete is an option.
If I could afford it, I'd build my house with cast-in-place concrete walls and floors, with the interior walls finished with wood studs and drywall. The problem is both cost, and finding an experienced crew to do the work. Some countries just don't have contractors who know how to do it, and will only build concrete block walls.
Monolithic dome house! Been a fantasy of mine since college. Might be difficult to hang pictures on the walls, though.
I've always wondered, how do you cast concrete vertically? I've never really seen it being done, so maybe this is something obvious.
Build a form strong enough to hold the concrete, pour the concrete, take down the form. Essentially, you build two wooden walls, make the concrete wall between then, then remove the wooden walls. ICF lets you build the form like LEGO and leave it mostly in place after.
Wasn't that semi-standard to build large, sturdy buildings just some years ago? I swear "concrete with wood pattern etched on" was the background to all my high school memories.
Absolutely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture Uncommon for small residential projects, even then. Now, I feel like it's more common to build poured-concrete floors supported by columns, which gives them a lot more flexibility in what the facade looks like - more glass & natural light, shiny metal patterns, fancy colors. There's a couple buildings I remember thinking, "Wow, they put a really realistic wood grain pattern in that concrete - is that supposed to fool us into thinking it is wood?" before I realized it's just that they were too lazy to cover up the molding texture.
Valid as fuck
What has minecraft done to the kids?
Too bad I Loooove concrete!! I would so get in an autistic fight with this guy
Brutal
I absolutely get it
Damn, concrete has enabled some of the best modernist architecture OAT
He's right