The 1960s, a Golden Age for European Architecture

Thande

Donor
Inspired by a thread in NPC...

The 1960s are infamous in Britain (and, I believe, Western Europe) for producing some truly awful brutalist architecture, which still leaves a scar on our landscape even nowadays. Of course, this is reinforced by the fact that often much finer buildings were torn down in order to build it.

So how could the 1960s instead be remembered as a golden age?

Architecture in this period would probably still have to be new and 'daring' because it was the mood of the time, but could it have been more realistic? I've seen some of the artists' conceptions and plans at the time, and most of the buildings built in this time in OTL would only work in some perfect world where the sun shines all the time and there's never any rain, wind or erosion. And, while being new, could it have worked more in harmony with what was already there?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the mood of national pessimism that still persists to this day in many parts of Britain (especially urban centres) is due to living around rotting, damp and gloomy 1960s architecture, so this might be a more significant what-if than you think.
 
The country needs to be richer, all that frightful architecture came about because the country was broke, Britain got awful architecture because it was cheap to build ugly buildings.

Eliminating the bombing in the Second World War would help too.
 
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