[ericmay]

In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.

In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.

Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.

And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.

Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.

[chrismatic]

This is a point well taken, but it also instills a certain incuriosity about expert opinions which is on display in this article.

In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...

Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.

It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.

[ijk]

Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.

There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.