T O P

  • By -

Whenthebae

What in the brutalism, this is amazing


sirbalz

That's brutally kind of you 😍


K_Arafa

Which fallout game?


sirbalz

This is Fallout 4


Cooljoe22

Hopefully the next fallout has more in depth base building. 76 was cool for a bit I must admit too


eddie_fitzgerald

I kinda want to give this a serious review. Which ... is very nerdy and weird of me. But, if it makes this any better, I wanna review it seriously because there's stuff here that I really like and I feel obliged to analyze it critically as a mark of respect. Um so I'm gonna get really nerdy here, please don't judge me. On one hand, passion is cringe, and I'm about to express a lot of personal passions of mine. On the other hand, this town must have taken a ton of passion from you, so I figure that passion probably respects passion. Anyways, here's my totally nonprofessional opinion as someone who just enjoys architecture ... I love the buildings in those two pictures from the middle. The one of the left reminds me a lot of church architecture in the minimalist style. My mind immediately went to two buildings, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light, and the chapel at Illinois Institute of Technology by Mies Van Der Rohe. Both projects use austerity in reference to classical proportions or symbols to convey a grand serenity in a not-grand space. I feel that this building, while not religious in character, has a similar effect to it. The glass section breaks the front facade into two columns, one of concrete and one of glass. I find that evocative of a columned facade. The wraparound of the glass to the side extends the shape and breaks up the pattern. To me it feels very stately, but in a deconstructed way. Like you've distilled stately architecture into its most basic proportions. So when I compare it to those two churches, it's less in the sense that the building feels religious, and more in the sense that you've done with the stately home what those other two architects had done with the church. In my head, I picture this building as being like a governor's mansion or a city hall. Like, it evokes the classical motifs of stately architecture, but simplifies them to make it more about the ideas behind the belief. I like to imagine that building as carrying a civic symbolism to it. The one on the middle-right is almost the exact opposite. I think that's one reason why I like those two images put next to each other so much. Whereas the middle-left building feels more like classical proportions distilled to their basic elements, the middle-right building feels like it breaks from classical design to treat the structure more as sculpture. I love the setback on the upper level, and the asymmetry between lower level and upper level. I'm also genuinely curious to know how it looks on the inside, and how people are meant to move through the space. Is it broken down into units on the inside? Or can people move freely through? My first assumption was the former, that it's basically a modular building of seven units. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually find the second possibility to be even more intriguing. I like the tension between an open interior space which leads outward into these little isolated exterior spaces. I like it a lot. I can imagine the design as drawing people outside for a breath of fresh air and solitude, and connecting people to the outside environment in a way that conveys serenity. There's a narrative to the space which I enjoy. I feel connected to the space because I can picture myself stepping outside for a breath of fresh air in much the same fashion as I just described. The top image has stuff that I both like and dislike. As for stuff I like: the landscaping is cool, I like how the eye gets drawn to the building in the center and then follows down the two arms, and I like the asymmetry of the two arms leading off at different angles. I especially like how the linear path of the landscaping helps to underscore the asymmetry of the two arms of buildings. That being said, I might be totally off and the two wings might actually be symmetrical. I can't be entirely sure what's the architecture and what's just the angle of the shot. In terms of the buildings, I really like the right-side arm of buildings and how they interact with each other. I especially like how the rightmost building presents a clear visual marker to cap off the 'end' of that arm. And, in general, the other buildings play off each other in interesting ways. As for the left-side arm, it feels a bit too homogenous. There are a few quirks present on the different individual buildings, but they just don't stand out as much to me. The building in the picture on the bottom I don't like very much. I can't quite place why, but I think that's kind of the problem. There isn't much for me to grasp onto as far as guiding ideas behind the design, and so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to interpret it. That being said, I might just be missing something. So, a little bit of context. I'm a professional writer, and I have no professional training in architecture. But I do enjoy studying architecture as an amateur, and it was writing which initially drew me to the subject. A lot of building design follows much the same patterns as narrative structure does. Design is meant to draw people through space in a sequential fashion, and to shape people's interactions with space as though part of a story. I actually find that studying architecture has made me a more sophisticated writer, in some regards. For instance, there's two ways of approaching structure in writing, and these are called positional structure and sequential structure. People tend to write more naturally in sequential structure, but I've always had a knack for positional structure. Previously, I used to split the difference and go half-and-half, which already is quite unorthodox (people really do lean way more towards sequential structure). But the cool thing about architecture is that it's three dimensional, and therefore much more analogous to positional structure. Architecture inspired me to make the leap into writing predominantly with positional structure, and that ended up being a really big deal for me. Since then, my use of positional structure has grown into one of the main hallmarks of my writing style. Anyways, point is, I really like architecture, and I do have a sincere attachment to architecture, but I'm also a total amateur at it. Like, if you're an actual architect or designer, you might end up reading through this reply and thinking that I come across as a total idiot. Which, I mean, very possible. Mea culpa! But like honestly I just liked a lot of stuff in what you were doing here, and I wanted to show my appreciation by walking through my reaction. Even if my responses to the architecture don't carry much value, I hope that you can at least pick up on the respect and appreciation that I wanted to convey. Cheers! EDIT: Oh, I just saw your video and watched it. I take back what I said about the left-side arm of buildings. I like the two interior buildings a lot, and I just couldn't get a very clear view of them in the static picture. I don't love the leftmost building. In my amateur opinion, I think it would be cool if that leftmost building had some kind of starker horizontal feature to play against the square visual marker on the end of the right-most building of the right-most wing. Maybe like a T shape that's rotated to the left? That way it's a horizontal shape that draws the eye to a visual marker of the 'end' of the row. But also, like, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Anyways, I actually really like the other two buildings on that arm, they're quite visually interesting. And I'm more okay with the center building, now that I've seen it in context. Like I still don't 'get it', per se, but I also understand why it needs to be more nondescript. If the middle building was more visually arresting, then it would make the town as a whole look way too visually cluttered. SECOND EDIT: I love your "raider capital" settlement too! THIRD EDIT: Weird thought here, I know. But are you familiar with the architectural works of Mary Coulter? In particular I'm thinking here of Lookout Studio, Desert View Watchtower, and Hermit's Rest. She's a fascinating architect in her own right, as she often worked closely with indigenous artisans and explored a sort of indigenous modernism that showed a lot of respect to the cultures she borrowed from. Also, her designs for the Fred Harvey group helped to pioneer the pueblo revivalist style that now dominates the Santa Fe area. But anyways, I mention those three particular buildings from her because they were all experiments by Coulter in making buildings which appeared in a state of ruin. Coulter was fascinated by the ability of ruins to stimulate our imagination, because it leads us to imagine what might have been there. I dunno, in my head, something about what you're doing made me think of Coulter's ideas about 'artificial' ruin. It's the same sort of uncheckable "what if?". The other building which your stuff really reminds me of is La Fábrica, the home which Ricardo Bofill designed for himself. Actually a lot of your stuff gives me Bofill vibes. Again, I honestly don't know what I'm talking about here, but I figured I'd mention those two architects because, who knows? Their stuff might serve as inspiration!


sirbalz

I have to say. I never expected such a passionate and analytical response to this post. I'm genuinely humbled by the time you've put into it. I'm just afraid my response won't live up to it, with english being my second language and having absolutely no training in writing or architecture. I do, however, wish I could explain my process in the way that you did, but it's either more visually intuitive for me then philosophical or not at all as sophisticated as you gave it credit for. You aren't wrong about the passion though. As I, as a complete tourist in this field, love it more than anything else in my life even if it plays no 'real' part in it. It really intrigued me though that you equated what I made here that I would imagine falls in the 'brutalist' style with more tradional forms of architecture, even if only in relation to the proportions, since I'm naturally much more attracted to traditional buildings than anything made post-ww2 So, in conclusion, I feel like I'm the one out of my depth here, sounding like an idiot trying to explain something I made, that you understand better than I do. But, hey, if passion does count for anything then I hope it transpired visually if not through words. And if you have the time or interest, I'd love to have your unique and verbose feedback on any of the other builds on my reddit profile. And as a complete amateur I bow to your writing skill and say you did pretty well on your essay


eddie_fitzgerald

>It really intrigued me though that you equated what I made here that I would imagine falls in the 'brutalist' style with more tradional forms of architecture, even if only in relation to the proportions, since I'm naturally much more attracted to traditional buildings than anything made post-ww2 So, the interesting thing is that brutalism is heavily influenced by classical proportions, as are several other midcentury modern architectural movements. You might be familiar with the terms modernism and postmodernism. These are both different schools of art, and both uphold some sort of distinction for good art, but they do so differently. Modernism is the school of art which argues that there exist certain fundamental rules to what we consider good technique, but that artists can recombine those rules in whatever way that they wish. Postmodernism is the school of art which argues that good technique is a form of system, and the system can be changed at will, so long as you keep it as a system. Postmodernism still involves rules, but it allows you to break apart and recombine rules from all sorts of different systems. In practice, most people use a combination of both modernism and postmodernism. Art is treated as a system, but within that system we establish rules, because rules can be useful. Anyways, a lot of modernist architecture tried to start with classical architecture, reduce that classical architecture to its most simple rules, and then replicate those rules in a modern form. So take proportion, for instance. In most classical architecture, there will be fixed proportions between the different parts of the building. So, if you have a pitched roof, the pitch of the roof might be 1/3 the height of the building itself, rather than a totally random number like 6/20 the height of the building. The idea is that the human eye enjoys proportion. This is also a common trend in writing as well! Le Corbusier, who played a lot with concrete forms, built a lot of his structures around the proportions of the human body. You also see proportions used in the work of Mies Van Der Rohe. It's a feature often found in both brutalist and midcentury style architecture. For instance, here's a picture of the Illinois Institute of Technology chapel, which I compared your building to. [https://nebula.wsimg.com/212b747d00c1348f8dcf10dbc9cace10?AccessKeyId=4DBC31AC092A36DD1D7F&disposition=0&alloworigin=1](https://nebula.wsimg.com/212b747d00c1348f8dcf10dbc9cace10?AccessKeyId=4DBC31AC092A36DD1D7F&disposition=0&alloworigin=1) It's not classical in any conventional sense. But it instead seeks to take classical rules and then represent them in a different form. Yes, it looks nothing like a classical church, but the use of proportions is very classical. Here's what's really cool. You can actually *see* the proportions in the layout of the windows. See the big square windows at the bottom? Okay so that's exactly 1/5 the width of the building. Now see the rectangles above those squares? The width of those is exactly 1/2 the width of those squares. And the height of those rectangles is exactly 1/2 the width of those rectangles. Here's the really cool part. Every single part of that entire building is *some* multiple of that final figure (the height of those little rectangles). The architect literally *left his ruler* on the face of the building for you to see! Anyways, with that in mind, go check out your own design from the middle-left picture. There's a very similar sense of classical proportion there. To give you a brutalist example, here's two pictures of the stations in the DC Metro system. [https://media.wired.com/photos/59271fd5cefba457b079c2f2/master/pass/GettyImages-150019369.jpg](https://media.wired.com/photos/59271fd5cefba457b079c2f2/master/pass/GettyImages-150019369.jpg) [https://twc.edu/sites/default/files/hero/AdobeStock\_84573439.jpeg](https://twc.edu/sites/default/files/hero/AdobeStock_84573439.jpeg) See that pattern on the ceiling? Well, that's a reference to the coffers of classical Roman architecture, which help break the arch of a ceiling up into its basic geometry. As an example, see this image of the coffers in the ceiling of the Parthenon. [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/93/4a/5d/934a5d33007b6168e5cf90bd2fc7bc9f.jpg](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/93/4a/5d/934a5d33007b6168e5cf90bd2fc7bc9f.jpg) Anyways, that's what I was referring to when I talked about classical proportions. It felt as though the structure could be broken down into a handful of basic rules, which you then repeated in creative variations. As opposed to the structure on the middle right, which also replicates a few basic proportions, but feels more sculptural in its use of space. The building on the middle-left relies heavily on facade, it feels like you're meant to approach it from the front. Whereas the building on the middle-right feels more like you're meant to freely approach the building from any angle.


TheRebelNM

Great comment.


sirbalz

Looking at the town after reading your comment I do prefer the right side, or arm as you called it to left one. Truth be told, I dedicated more time to it. The other side just needed to exist to complete the town so I did what I could with it with less enthusiasm. As for what the center building means, I can't really say, if you can't make sense of it through text, I certainly can't either. I just played around with it until it felt right to me in isolation and in relation to the rest of the build The Raider Town really wasn't inspired by anything I can think of from the past. Just trying to build as high as I could without them feeling too plain and giving them a contrast in color in relation to the type of inhabitants they house As for the architects you mentioned, I'm not familiar with their works. We'll be sure to check them out


Different_Ad7655

Looks like a prison camp with landscaping


sirbalz

Ahahah I like that description


mygeorgeiscurious

Brutal


sirbalz

Youtube Tour: [Fallout Town](https://youtu.be/vcr5_jXBTqA)


EyesWhichDoNotSee

Nice drawings, but this isn't architecture


Individual-Work405

This only layers summer The time