Celebrating brutalism

Berlin's glorious 1970sPalast der Republik on Marx-Engels Platz.


Warren & Mahoney's Stalinist-Germanic inspired brutalist, linear masterpieces continue to this day in austere, cold, formal, inhuman, multi-facade impracticality for haus und kirche.

Only for the most pretentious of glorified accountants is the prospect of actually living in the bleak cavernous voids of a personality-free home of sharp lines and naked edges that only Warren & Mahoney can authoritatively impose. Their impersonalised structures at Auckland University's city campus constitute a now legendary hegemonic triumphalism of the detested Works Registry, an historical holocaust and an architectural genocide. The deprevation of human privacy and relentless steel and grey of exposed concrete invoke the hopelessness and utilitarian economic degradation of the spirit of youth that pervades the institution.

The closest mere mortals can come to over-powering the form is the executive play pen of our Prime Ministerial dictatorship - the Beehive's cabinet room.



Originally planned as a foyer for robotic overseers in W&M's early sketches the image cleary shows the large refrigeration unit suspended from the ceiling. The Vampire-Zombie chairing this meeting of humanoids keeps the temperature to -5 degrees C in order to survive during the daytime. All of the mirrors were removed prior to opening.