As someone who’s grown up in one of those and now rearing a child in Canada, I’d like to tell you that it was an absolutely incredible place to grow up in. The urban planning is such that there’s parks with kid playgrounds sprinkled between the buildings. There’s ample trees. There’s schools and kindergartens at walking distance where kids would often walk alone to/fro. There’s convenient public transit stops. There’s density that lets kids make tons of friends and always have someone to play with without “playdates.” Parenting in such a social environment is so much easier than what parents face in Toronto, it’s not even funny.
E: Oh and the square footage in the average commie block apt is equivalent to a large old-school 2 or 3-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Most are family-sized units.
square footage? what kind of weird camera are you using?
That’s my Canada goose brain talking. 😆🪿 It’s literally the common term used to refer to the total area of a housing unit. Here for example a major real estate firm explains the importance of square footage measurement.
For extra entertainment, this is a handy flowchart of Canadian units of measurement:
💀
Wtf 😱 is that real?!
100% and it’s accurate. It’s how we do here. 😅
It’s missing how we measure long distances in driving time. ie: “other city is 3 hours away”
Which is also somewhat accurate in train time too given the sorry state of VIA. 😅
It’s similar in the US. We use gallons for milk and fuel, liters for mid size beverage (like a liter of water or two liters of soda) and fluid ounces for single servings (12 oz can). Pints are used to measure beer served from a keg into a glass. Medications use mililiters.
Large quantities of weed use Pounds and ounces, smaller quantities use grams. Hard drugs pretty much exclusively use metric. Medication uses metric exclusively while most other commerce uses pounds and ounces. Firewood is sold by the “cord”
FWIW, a lot of the bougie drinks (fancy soda water, juices, pre-mixed cocktails, etc.) now come in 330mL cans, probably because at 11.7 fl oz, it’s a form of shrinkflation. And those mini cans of soda are technically 222mL.
Also, do note that a U.S. customary pint is different than an imperial pint. (You get 20% more beer in Britain.)
Yeah. That said, I think on average there’s more imperial in the mix in the US than Canada. Canada went through an intentional Metrification process but it didn’t go all the way through. In part due to trade with the US. 😅
I would measure my apartment in square meters, but I’ve realized I would use the phrase “square footage” to refer to the surface area of a living space. Is there an alternative? “Square meterage” doesn’t work.
Surface? That’s the term we use in Italian ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Living space, m2, usable area
Area, surface, size.
“Area”
There’s density that lets kids make tons of friends and always have someone to play with without “playdates.”
man, that’s what i missed as a kid sooo much. i would have needed this.
In Germany?
in austria, but it was some conservative rural backwater nowhere
Ah. That makes sense. Let me make you feel better. In some provinces in Canada (or all?) children can’t be left alone, without adult supervision until the age of 12. It’s illegal and parents get in trouble for it. Even leaving your kid to play in your backyard in the suburb while you’re in the shower can become a problem if your bored neighbour calls the authorities. Imagine growing up with that kind of lack of autonomy. Even if there are kids around and even if there’s public transit. I still heven’t figured out how to workaround that for my kid but I suspect I’m gonna be breaking the law. 😂
man, that sucks. i wish you good luck :D
It is very generational. Sorry to be part of the helicopter parent generation. However, as an early GenX I was a free-range parent and the local neighbor parents did NOT APPROVE. I had to search for people that had my same heart. It was wonderful to find an adult willing to let me drop our boys off at the movies and then she would pick them up at the end. They figured out how to purchase snacks, find their seats and how to get out the right entrance.
It’s probably fine if you’re used to it but man I’d be so depressed living in such a densely populated city.
Right wing Architecture
More like
Removed by mod
They put butt-plugs on those posts?
right wing architecture: jail
The tarpe movement was very influencial from the 80s.
Yeah my parents did crack in these blue tents, so nostalgic
Where are the cops pulling tents down for being illegally homeless?
I mean, after we build them we can also let people do gorgeous art on them
You also like… don’t have to use brutalist architecture. You can build them in any shape you want so long as the building won’t fall down.
Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times
Or if the design is suitable for machines to streamline a lot of building process so you can build them extremely efficiently, then go for it, you can “personalize” it after the building is there to live in.
I find it interesting that it’s considered a design choice and style so much when it’s kind of about necessity and just using what works.
But then it does become a sort of mode or aesthetic in art and culture for what it represents.
The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they’re built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It’s how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.
deleted by creator
Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather.
Look at the trees. They don’t have leaves. The image was definitely taken in winter. That adds a lot to the depression of it.
Didn’t anyone think to scatter a few evergreens around?
E.g. a few pine and yew trees would be nice.
That looks like a SimCity screenshot.
They mixed residential, industrial, and commercial.
/original Sim City had color-coded zones
deleted by creator
Could get artists to do far better than just monochrome per building.
deleted by creator
Yep. Colour psychology matters.
Also these are not painted, where I live we have their walls painted in colours with sometimes shapes and some have big art on them. Also there are usually small parks or grass plots with trees around and playgrounds.
In the USSR, they also often had murals or mosaics and alike; public art for everyone to enjoy and to encourage them with e.g. messages of equality
commercial ads in public spaces should be banned. they are an eye-sore. source: personal experience
📠
Ah yes so depressing and ugly that they’re featured in an architectural magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/vienna-social-housing/
vienna social housing is beautiful (a lot of the times at least). source: i live there
Yeah it’s a little bit cheating to talk about Vienna, but they have been doing a lot of things right. Seems that’s buckling under pressure a bit though. More private buildings, reducing the top tax rate - hopefully doesn’t turn into the failed neoliberal ideology from the 80s.
I’ve only seen it through rose tinted glasses of a tourist, but the city seems lovely. I would quickly consider living there if the opportunity presented itself.
That isn’t left wing architecture. It’s USSR architecture. Don’t make everything bad from that dictatorship a part of the left. The Soviet Union wasn’t even real communism. Because communism wouldn’t have a regime consisting of oligarchs and a dictator for example. Just because some people abused something for bad, doesn’t make the thing itself bad.
But these Stalin blocks were actually built an mass to house all the nomads living in the USSR. Most people didn’t have a home, electricity, running water. They used to live in tents. So even though these blocks are ugly and depressing, it made sure people didn’t have to live in a tent with -40°C and Stalin was widely praised for that.
I am a loud critic of the USSR but WW2 destroyed an enormous amount of housing in their country and they spent decades struggling to catch up. Even prior to that, they had WW1 and a civil war negatively impact housing and during the interwar industrialization they focused on increasing industrial output with most home building relegated to cheap temporary construction. A number of the economic issues faced by the USSR were unrelated to any specific political or economic system (for example, the vastness of the country added transportation expenses)
Better than live in ugly apartments than freeze in the harsh Russian winters.
Not completely right. The main reason for panel construction wasn’t war reconstruction, it was rapid industrialization. The USSR in 1929 had 80+% of peasants working the land with a horse or with their hands. By 1970, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority urban population. This required the construction of housing for over a hundred million people over the span of a few decades.
Compare that to England, France, the USA or Germany, which had a few centuries to develop the cities together with their industry since the industrial revolution.
Now compare the housing in the USSR in 1970 with that of Brazil in 1970. The USSR in 1929 was actually less developed than Brazil.
I listed industrialization
Ultra luxury apartments are usually vacant most of the time, because the owners live elsewhere and only use that property for money laundering.
Just expropriate the building and turn them into communal living spaces; e.g. the USSR did that after the revolution with all the fancy aristocratic- and capitalist-owned buildings
and only use that property for money laundering.
I’ve always suspected that ultra-expensive apartments in London might be mostly for money laundering. Like, i give you a ton of cocaine, and i don’t give you money for that; Instead, i buy one of your luxury apartments in London for $150m (70 m² apartment btw).
Yes, there is something even more depressing than late soviet (or late Francoist, if you want a right wing equivalent) residential monsters: just look at any first world homeless camp.
also, if you live in the states, go look at some car oriented developments. they are just as brutalist, just as same-y, just as sad
Top image looks like one of the movie posters for Vivarium
And the bottom looks like a clip from the title sequence of Terminator 2.
Yup. And look at the warehouses all these cars are going from these bullshit suburbs to get to. If you find joy in the architecture of a Home Depot you are a profoundly odd person
I had a friend who lived in one of these (but in Canada), he said that when he first moved in they gave him a brochure that had like 5 pre-approved trees in it and he had to pick one. Also one time he was a day or two late cutting the grass (in a fenced-off backyard that you can’t even see from the back lane) and one of his next door neighbours reported him and the HOA came round to his house to bother him about it.
Bleak
Those look very similar in style to the 5-over-1s being built all over the United States. Four floors good, ten floors bad? Or does “left-wing architecture” refer to leaving the trees instead of paving every square inch of outdoor space for parking?
And yet, there’s more greenery around this blocks than you’d see in a US city.
Of course! What use are green spaces? Cant extract profit from it.
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #102: “Nature decays, but Latinum lasts forever”
:3
Seen a lot of appartments built by developers that are similar in a smaller way. I always put it down to cheapest cost and maximum profit. Nothing to do with ideology just expedience or greed.
I recall that picture being a photoshop of a right-wing country. So it’s both fake AND fundamentally right-wing in design.
This one is Moscow.
I mean the dark grey houses of capitalism using every square centimeter of ground are way more depressing than blocks with a lot of trees around them
To me this says less “Leftist” and more “rich urban planners cutting corners for lower-class housing which will end in a horrific fire or collapse.”
