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Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather use the recent Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist as a jumping-off point to talk about the profound effect of built environments on our lives. We may not have seen this movie, but we’ve all been in buildings, and we have opinions about them.

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Our architectural survey starts in New Haven, CT, where the ugliest building on Yale’s campus is ironically (or appropriately?) the architecture school.

By Ɱ – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125929427

From there we visit another surreal Brutalist environment: the office building that serves as a phantasmagorical battleground of the video game Control.

Less phantasmagorical, but still brutal: Boston City Hall.

By andrewjsan – https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewsan/6776358460/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101393496

More ecclesiastical, but VERY brutal: Newman Hall, a Catholic church in Berkeley, CA.

Less brutal, more gentle: we visit the animals at Franklin Park Zoo and Smolak Farms, and get frustrated by need to backtrack back to your stroller that you left by the entrance to the gorilla enclosure.

Lastly, we tackle the built environment in the streets of Culver City, Los Angeles, where an attempt to redesign the streetscape in favor of bikes and pedestrians at the expense of cars caused much consternation. It’s Los Angeles, after all.

30 people getting coffee vs. 30 people getting coffee
byu/lushe3D inpics

Episode 871: We Will Fight Them in the Menageries originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]