Suspended Brutalist Architecture
The ex-People's Republic of Bulgaria and ex-Yugoslavia are littered with aging gray apartment towers in the Brutalist style of architecture. For fans of modernity and raw concrete, Dupnitsa, Bulgaria is worth a visit. There are a few communist-era apartment tower blocks typical of the entire region, but there is also a special treat downtown. A mysterious suspended, hexagonal structure hangs off the hillside looming over the downtown square. It is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion house but in concrete rather than aluminum. Four sturdy concrete towers throw cables down to a honeycomb of protruding (now empty) offices.
Brutalist buildings attract and repulse me; at once completely efficient, simple, logical, & pure but simultaneously uninhabitable. The spaces created are lifeless, barren wastelands inside the city. Perhaps if the communists invested in paint, their experiment would have succeeded.
Brutalist buildings attract and repulse me; at once completely efficient, simple, logical, & pure but simultaneously uninhabitable. The spaces created are lifeless, barren wastelands inside the city. Perhaps if the communists invested in paint, their experiment would have succeeded.
