Well, I don’t really care about the artistic value or any of that surrounding any given aesthetic, I care whether it looks good. And brutalism is… really easy to fuck up, but the Soviets tended to do it really fucking well and make it look so good that specifically Soviet brutalism defined What Socialism Looks Like to Western eyes for the entire Cold War, for decades afterward, and likely for decades still to come. (Unfortunately, a lot of modern socialist state urban planning today has left Soviet brutalism behind, if those states and regions ever used it in the first place. Which sucks. Some of the aesthetics that replaced it are great. Some of them are… very much not. The “ultratech commie aesthetic” thing China’s got going on… I guess it looks neat in certain contexts, but I just don’t like the vibes as much as I like old Soviet brutalism, I guess.)
Well, I don’t really care about the artistic value or any of that surrounding any given aesthetic, I care whether it looks good. And brutalism is… really easy to fuck up, but the Soviets tended to do it really fucking well and make it look so good that specifically Soviet brutalism defined What Socialism Looks Like to Western eyes for the entire Cold War, for decades afterward, and likely for decades still to come. (Unfortunately, a lot of modern socialist state urban planning today has left Soviet brutalism behind, if those states and regions ever used it in the first place. Which sucks. Some of the aesthetics that replaced it are great. Some of them are… very much not. The “ultratech commie aesthetic” thing China’s got going on… I guess it looks neat in certain contexts, but I just don’t like the vibes as much as I like old Soviet brutalism, I guess.)