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Americans can’t handle the bold beauty of brutalist architecture. They mostly want their cookie cutter houses and postage stamp of Bermuda grass.
Am a burger, can confirm the one on the right is burgerland. Red filter and all.
What do you mean? Have you not seen the 50 propagabda videos shoved into your youtube feed that all say how terrible they were? yet never acknowledge that they managed to house most of the country after whole cities were destroyed by the nazis? And never answer the question of housing everyone first and worrying about quality later? Shit I actually want to live in a copy paste home that will eat up all my money on maintenance, destroy the local ecosistems, create exponential urban costs from suburban sprawl, have all my necesities many hours away by car making me spend the rest of my money on car maintenance and gas, and isolating me to never create a sense of a local society, and then get destroyed by a tornado anyway
Huge thanks to the urban hell subreddit for guiding me to communism by failing to convince me cheap apartments for everyone is actually worse than racist ass suburbs and mass homelessness
woaw these apartments which haven’t been properly maintained since the fall of the soviet union are so dirty this truly is an urban hell
Not pictured: all the playgrounds and little gardens between the blocks, full of children playing all day and having full social lives. The horror!
also it’s a winter photo, so no green trees.
Imagine how much wildlife and birds and other shit you get outside your window on the left compared to that desolate ecological wasteland on the right
i dislike being woken up 10 minutes before dawn, can we compromise with the birds
Double glazing
I have a mourning dove nesting on my balcony for the third time this season and the amount of joy it has brought me is immeasurable. It’s fucked up so many people are deprived of this experience
I have a tit nest directly above my front door right now, I have to be careful not to close the door too hard when entering/exiting.
Tits on a door.
I feed crows at work and observe falcons out the window at home (though they are quite far away).
there’s a family of black redstarts nesting in the courtyard every year. they’re incredibly loud. i think the male (maybe?) is expending like a bodyweight’s worth of energy every day to scream/sing.
one of them managed to intimidate my cat once. cat just scurried away.
Well, it’s been proven, that birds can enjoy singing. So if it’s outside mating season and it’s not a warning call, it might just be doing it for fun.
oh no, i think it’s mating season and he’s trying to defend his territory or draw our attention to him so we dont look for the nest. or something.
Very brave of him. I would definitely feel intimidated and/or distracted enough not to try munching on the nest or it’s contents.
I’ve heard criticism of the Commie Block housing all my life and like damn I wish I could have a small flat surrounded by trees instead of the three storey particle board bullshit we get
This Lithuanian YouTuber has a video about Soviet Housing (using a famous Lithuanian housing district as an example) where he goes into detail about the Pros and Cons. One thing he points out is that a lot of the Cons weren’t things the Soviet government was unaware of, the fact the buildings looked monotonous and had poor sound insulation was addressed by the government. But there was still a lot of positives to the project overall.
Knew it was Lazdynai even before opening the video.
A lot of it just has to do with the fact these were built in a time when resources were not abundant and technology hadnt advanced as much yet. Like China builds stuff like this today and theirs do not have as many issues because 1. China exists in different economic conditions, and 2. technology is better now for things like soundproofing.
they were also built in the context of a country recovering from a civil war and then a world war
This is widely repeated and only partially true. Prior to WW2, the Eastern Block was mostly preindustrial, meaning 90%ish of people lived rural peasant lives in rural areas and rural housing. They literally had to build housing in cities for half of the population of the eastern block, and they successfully did it in record time.
Yeah I was kind of lumping that all into the economic conditions umbrella. The stuff messing with the USSR was a laundry list of totally insane threats. Since its founding it was ostracized by the world. Had the revolution. Then it got invaded by the Nazis. Then it had to rebuild half of europe. Try to get a huge population of reactionaries who had just invaded it under control. Half the countries on its borders (Iran, China, India/Pakistan) were in states of upheaval too. The fact they did so much is a complete miracle of state planning.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
God I wish I lived in a ring.
I was cheated out of a ring based childhood
Anyway the Hakka people in China have slightly smaller versions of this that they’ve been maintaining for several centuries, clan houses called tulou.
That’s a lot of trees, is that real? I’ve seen photos of blocks like that and they never had that much trees, though always considerably more than any western suburb.
Yes, it’s the Матвеевское neighbourhood in western Moscow. Most Soviet neighbourhoods are a little less forested than this, but not by much.
You can look this up yourself! Just go to an aerial view of any soviet looking neighbourhood in any eastern block country. Random example from Kazan:
Trees pretty much surround every building block
Most of them weren’t this nice but this is a real one. Probably just a bit old and therefore filled out foliage wise
That’s incredible then, it would be great in the summer time
The angle and season are determined by what the photographer is trying to convey, the quantity of trees is determined by the greenspace allocation/landscaping budget.
Picture is probably from much more recently im sure there’s trees around the suburbs now too
why is it possessive?
It’s housing of the 1950s. Housing belonging to the 1950s. Maybe it should be 1950s’ housing. Or if we’re talking about the specific year 1950, then it could be 1950’s housing.
Those are the retirement villages the 1950s live in.
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please, go on
Everyone else has already kind of eaten you up so I just want to add maybe examine your kneejerk reaction to this post? Seeing something positive said about the nation to put the first man in space and defeat the nazis among other things and then to immediately feel the need to find something bad to say about them is not a sign of someone with an open mind free of propaganda. But we were all there at one point its totally possible to break out of that. Not saying you have to love the USSR but getting to a point where you can discuss it objectively without having some need to bring up random failures in an unrelated conversation is healthy. You don’t do that about the USA right? If I said Union Station in DC was pretty you wouldn’t feel the need to bring up Japanese Internment, or Slavery for example right? Might be time for some introspection.
This is like someone admiring early 20th-century art deco architecture in New York City and someone else responding with “pfft, Three Mile Island would like a word”
Did you hit your fuckin head or something? In what universe does your quip make any sense?
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, leading to almost totally equal redistribution of the land amongst the peasantry.
What exactly do you mean by this and what is your excuse for being stupid?
That’s not a house
Chernobyl was the power plant, not the city
The city is Pripyat
And by all accounts both are still standing fifty years later, so that’s a point in the Soviet’s favor right there
