Brutalism’s often taken as a communist idiom, I think that’s largely an epiphenomenon of it being an eastern european idiom. There was a Polish church in my hometown that did some great things with stark concrete and stained glass. They more recently clad it in stone and added a niche and statue, which I think was a downgrade.

The place smelled of what I took as holiness, and maybe attributed to the holy water fonts. When I was in LA I noticed an office building in the same style with the same smell, so maybe it was just some fungus or something that thrived on such surfaces. (Ironically I think the building might’ve been owned and used by the Foursquare Church - it was adjacent to Sister Aimee’s original temple.)

It’s funny that so many of the canonical Polish jokes (screen doors on submarines, ejection seats on helicopters) focus on poor material design when Poland, and the whole region really, has such a strong engineering tradition.

I went to the Corning Museum of Glass once. It was the worst museum layout I’ve ever seen - exhibits were stashed in spurs and loops off the natural traffic flow such that they were very easy to miss, exhibits near the entrance made reference to terms and processes that wouldn’t be explained until much deeper inside. There were a lot of beautiful figurative and geometric glass sculptures. Puzzlingly, the overwhelming majority were tagged as coming from Czechoslovakia. Puzzling until, right near the end of the walking loop, it was explained that non-representative glass sculpture was the only artistic medium not subjected to regime controls.

As far as I know eastern europe might have an equally strong humanities tradition, it’s just that how many different Slavic languages would you have to learn to appreciate more than a small fraction of it?