Separated at Birth: Pop and Brutalism special

On a less depressing note, I'm going to follow the FJ in playing Mockitecture's pop-avec-architecture game (which can also count as my contribution to xavecy, in that each is the truth of the other, here). It's going to be Brutalism only. Starting with the obvious.

West 11, throbbing bass, scraping guitars and synths like rusty reinforcement, and only Lydon's lack of Goldfinger's urbanity stops this one being a precise match: 

Once, with my Dad in one of those elegantly furnished, never-closing bars in Berlin, he told me (not meaning it as a compliment), 'this reminds me of the bar at the top of the Tricorn Centre'. So - not only do we have here the Brutalist truth to (electronic) materials, strange shapes and cold electro textures, we also have the place 'where the people look good and the music is loud':

Walkways and streets in the sky = the technological sublime, ergo, 'Strings of Life'.

Or really, in the latter case, something a bit more Sheffield in its Brutalism:

Not strictly Brutalism, except for among the architecturally ill-informed, but Zeilenbau is the truth of Bowie's Low. Or at the very least, its employment in East Germany:

(photo via)



The GLC's Thamesmead estate will always sound like Wendy Carlos. Or perhaps Rossini.

This could go on and on, obviously...Hulme Crescents = truth of Joy Division, Crossways Estate, Bow = truth of Grime, etc. It does make the point pretty clearly of just how far architecture was in advance of music for most of the 20th century - I mean, temporally you'd have to place Lonnie Donegan next to Park Hill. Pop music just doesn't catch up until the late '70s in terms of artificial textures, lack of human scale and referent, rectilinearity and force. Hence argument in forthcoming book that post-punk was, finally, the music 1960s architecture deserved, emerging after a delayed reaction...