Not really. Restorations solve many problems that the buildings have faced. Demolition erases the buildings from the planet for all time, and with them another piece of history. There are far fewer pure architecturally brutalist complexes, like this one, than people think.
I'm tired of the myth that modernism and brutalism is for the 'architecturally elite'. That's not true. If it were, this building would have been demolished a long time ago. I know people who like some famous brutalist buildings, even though they have no interest in architecture. I guess they don't count?
The problem is that for some reason people merge nice brutalist buildings like this one into the same group as the cheaply built social housing blocks that became ghettos due to poor funding. This is why the preservation and awareness efforts for modernism are important.
So you're saying the best way to reconcile the damage they did to previous buildings is to wipe them out? Do you see the irony in that? That is just childish reactionism, we need to learn to accept it as a valid part of the area's history, instead of demolishing it and replacing it with the bland Wal-Mart crap they are proposing. Surely nobody would prefer such dullness compared to the symphony of geometry and concrete of the current building.
If no buildings broke the context, there would be no innovation in architecture. And the 60s was a time of massive innovation, so we MUST preserve the building in its current design in order to remember the era properly. Besides, after a while, the buildings that broke the context become the context.
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"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
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