Brutalism & Apartment

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Brutalism & Apartment

The main setting for my eerie suspense novella Apartment is an apartment building pretty much built in the middle of nowhere, with nothing around for as far as the eye can see, except for one big avenue. Right off the bat, the book introduces the setting as "a tremendously ugly building" with "rough gray walls and sub-par brutalist architecture" making it "seem like an unfinished piece of construction."

It's a striking image - this huge, brutalist structure in the middle of a harsh, cracked, orange desert.


The video above discusses how brutalism is meant to make the viewer feel something and have some kind of reaction to the buildings made with that style. 

Art historian Richard J. Williams explains that "you instantly get what a brutalist building looks like, you can see how it's made, and you can see what it's made of." This is true for the apartment building on Wallstone Avenue. There is nothing particularly special about the building - it's a humungous concrete structure with simple boxy architecture and not much to hide. 

Or so it would seem. 

Throughout the story, the reader might pick up on the fact that there's something not quite right with the building. In fact, while we might be able to see that the building was made using concrete, how the building was made remains a mystery from the human perspective. Who built it? Why? How? The Manager as a character is really our only link to such information. More than that, there's this whispering evil about the place, and it seems to poison certain residents' minds...

I enjoy this juxtaposition. The building itself is unassuming as a pure entity, but when marred with the humanity (or lack thereof) that has resided in the building over the years, it has been tainted with an evil that now characterizes its existence, in a way. 

Saw this video about brutalism and thought I'd share a bit about the architectural inspiration for the setting of my book, Apartment! Do with this information what you will, but if you haven't already checked out the book, you can get it here!

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This post is part of my 49 Days of Apartment campaign. If you would like to participate and write a guest post on the subject of suspense and magical realism or an equally relevant topic, please contact me here. 

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