I wake up, snooze the alarm on my phone to make sure that I don’t sleep in after I turn it off, and I stand up lazily to pull the curtains open. I look around. It’s 7 a.m. and the sun is up, shining through the gap between the roofs of the buildings that surround my view. I see the big white Orthodox church on my right and I fix my gaze on my neighbor’s balcony which has almost completed its transformation into his workspace. Small colorful decorations that adorn his space enliven the grey color of the walls. Like my neighbour’s balcony, most of the surrounding buildings look like a uniform mass of concrete in their greyness . Indeed, grey is the predominant color that I see in front of my eyes. More than being dull and boring, grey is the color of home.

Brutalist architecture is a movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, and was adopted widely throughout Eastern Europe. It is characterized by a bold and confrontational style that combines concrete and rough surfaces, intended to express the roughness of life. The term brutalism originates from the French term for raw concrete. The buildings that mushroomed under the communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain aimed to offer a solution for mass housing within their unpolished concrete walls as many people migrated to cities after World War Two.

The bold shapes of the buildings resemble monuments that were meant to last forever. The Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, Romania is the most iconic hotel in Bucharest and also a landmark of the city. Since 1971, when it was opened to the public, the hotel has been a reference point for many tourists who visit the Romanian capital. Considered a gem of brutalist architecture, the building may seem like the vision of an architect stuck in the past to the contemporary, untrained eye. However, for those that see these buildings every day, the unconventionality is not obvious at all. You can even find beauty in the geometrical cuts.

The beauty of Brutalist architecture lies in a fractal uniformity that forces you to see the things that stand out rather than those that conform to the style. Like the Intercontinental Hotel and the apartment blocks that I was used to seeing every single morning, many of the buildings follow the match box style, which refers to the conglomeration of cubic-like apartments that shelter as many lives as matches in a box.

For those of you that wonder how people can live in such aesthetically unpleasant settlements, I wondered the same thing as a kid. I didn’t live in the times when the communist regime flourished in Eastern Europe, but I inherited its legacy. My parents still live in a grey block of apartments that was bought for a big price and at the expense of sacrifices that I will never know of. I was only told that it used to be a privilege to have your own apartment in an urban area. The 10-year-old me was mesmerized by the stories of my own people making their way through hard times with bravery — nonetheless, the American buildings in the cartoons seemed more appealing to me than the matchbox I was living in.

I didn’t learn how to find beauty in oddity until middle school, when I learned about the art of the grotesque connected to the sense of appreciation for the art represented from the outside. The grotesque in poetry was brought up by the Romanian poet, Tudor Arghezi, who describes in his poetry the beauty of mildew flowers, prisons and abandoned buildings. The aesthetic recovery of this degraded existential environment has to be understood also as a form of moral recovery. That is to say, just as there is an aesthetic beauty in the ugly sides of the existence, there is also a morality in degradation and filthiness. Every aspect of society has its own beauty, and a story that stands out in its own way.

Now, looking at the bigger picture, I can understand the fascination of tourists with the architectural style of Eastern Europe. However, when their perspective is tinted with the stereotype of a region that is considered to be uncivilized, obsolete and broadly perceived as the other side of Europe, it is hard to understand their ignorance.

If you put the word spomenik into the Google search bar, you will get a myriad of pictures that represent futuristically designed memorials built between the 1960s and 1980s when Josip Broz Tito was leader of the Republic of Yugoslavia. The primary intent of these memorials was to honor the events of the National Liberation War, which took place from 1941 to 1945. In Romania, the spomeniks are scattered in places of historic interest to commemorate the heroes that sacrificed their lives in the two world wars. Knowing the true significance of these concrete monuments, it is hard to swallow the so-called anti-fascist resistance that they represent in the eyes of foreigners. In this case, it is important to point out that many of these monuments do not have a literal interpretation. They are pieces of art that take abstract forms to represent the narratives of the artists who were expressing their frustrations and struggles. While the spomeniks are not special in the form of art they represent, they are unique because of the historical period in which they were built.

Thus, you cannot appreciate the beauty of the Eastern European architectural style without understanding its significance. Both symbols of resistance and monuments of an era, the grey buildings are fascinating in the stories they tell. Sometimes, stepping back from the aesthetic considerations can offer a broader scope of critical enquiries. Whether you find them ugly or visionary, the brutal buildings’ striking style are a legacy of the people for as long as people find shelter and comfort in those places.