Kleiburg Flats, Bijlmer Estate, Amsterdam
SBMG: OEH NA NA (2014)
A while back I did a post on the recent prevalence of British Brutalism, specifically Council Estates, in music videos. This trend has occurred as part of a wider resurgence of appreciation for the aesthetics of Brutalism. The interesting thing is that many of those videos simultaneously acknowledge - even exploit - this newfound fashionability, and yet also selectively ignore the incumbent gentrification. In many cases the buildings being used as symbols of a gritty urban underclass - such as The Barbican Estate or Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower - now actually comprise privately-held residences with million-pound price tags. The European version of this is addressed in SBMG’s 2014 video, which takes place on the construction site of a regenerated Modernist estate. After years of neglect, the building’s original residents were required to depart to enable demolition, which was then aborted in favour of restoration. Like so many similar projects, the architecturally-award winning re-development maintained the building’s Modernist aesthetic, but not its (less bankable) social ethos: the apartments, now purchasable as Buy-to-Let investments, are no longer aimed at, nor accessible to, those displaced original residents.
