[vidarh]

The same is true all over Europe. Workers rarely lived in those buildings. Look to London for example, and the beautiful town-houses in the centre were built for the rich. The run down brutalist tower blocks and vast expanses of terraced housing surrounding the centre were what was built as there was a need to house workers within reach of the city.

You don't see the worker housing from before, because it's been torn down, or because the people in question didn't live in towns, but what was there was even worse.

The buildings in the quarter where my great aunt grew up in in Oslo is in a museum, as the last example of the awful conditions the working class lived in back then. The replacement was a brutalist tower block that certainly looks atrocious compared to the lovely early 1900's city blocks that remain in Oslo.

But those city blocks that remain are where the rich people lived.

[rubber_duck]

Not really true - there are plenty of buildings for the common folk from say 1920-1950, large apartment complexes where your middle class people would live. They aren't grandiose but the level of attention to detail, design and fitting into the landscape is unmatched by anything from the Communist era. I'll dig up some example photos when I get home.

The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.

It really feels like it went from being a part of the civilized world (it was an important natural port for a long time in history for Austria) to a depressing city of old poor people slowly dying away - and there is so much potential there - the coastline is beautiful (industrial pollution can be cleaned up since the industry is also mostly dead), on a river bed and sunk in between hills (next to Opatija which was a summer place for monarchs). It has all hallmarks of a city and could be turned into an amazing place to live - but the people and the mentality left over from communism just make this impossible - there aren't enough quality people.

[vidarh]

> large apartment complexes where your middle class people would live

Middle class was not "common folk".

> The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.

The cookie-cutter construction of working class housing in Western Europe was largely of very poor quality too, and in much of Western Europe you can't find examples that haven't either been massively renovated, because much of the rest has been torn down, so the point is not that I'm suggesting that there wasn't plenty of really awful architecture in the Eastern Block - especially post-war, but that this was the case in the West too.

But this [1], is an example of the Brutalist post-war architecture in the UK that was built to replace and improve on the 20's and 30's housing.

I live in a 30's UK terraced house which was towards the upper end of what was built to house growing city populations at the time, and the construction methods are ridiculous - it's probably over the years cost several times what it cost to erect the house to bring it to a decent modern standard.

> The real problem is how uninspired everything from the Communist era is - dirty industrial buildings, concrete slabs randomly thrown all over the place, built with terrible quality control.

Post-war, sure, because the focus was cost-reduction, and meeting demand temporarily. E.g. the housing under Khruschev was built with an intent to replace it within 20 years. Of course they didn't get replaced.

The Stalin-era was a very different issue. The point being that the choice was more housing or nicer looking cities. Stalin was focused on demonstrating power more than anything, and so you got buildings like [2], while Khruschev pushed for more housing, and Eastern Europe followed, and so you got shoddy concrete panel buildings.

But the brutalist architecture of that era was copied from the West, not a "communist" invention.

The focus on cost-cutting itself was a conscious decision, and one you can see all over Europe from that time period, irrespective of political leanings. The big difference is that Western Europe stopped building these sooner and/or started replacing them or upgrading them (and the brutalist buildings in Western Europe were mostly more expensive and higher quality to begin with, though still awful looking), while Eastern Europe and Russia couldn't afford to. But e.g. the UK kept building brutalist concrete monstrosities well into the 80's, and many of them still stands. E.g. this charming thing still stands next to my local train station in London [3] on some of the most expensive land in the borough.

I'm not defending these regimes, they were awful. But brutalist architecture was an import, not something they came up with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trellick_Tower

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture#/media/...

[3] https://www.derelictlondon.com/post-offices.html

[rubber_duck]

You make a good point !

The thing I would put on communism is reduction of wealth and standards, so when the west rebuilt and went forward we got stuck with concrete slabs.

It's just shocking to me how the architecture and aesthetics regressed and never really recovered.

Here's an example of a building from 30s that I would consider built for common folk but inspired : http://www.lokalpatrioti-rijeka.com/forum/download/file.php?...

It's not grandiose - but it follows the hill line and the corner perfectly, it has distinctive visual elements. Compare it to that concrete slab you see in the background which the city is full off.