Category: Introversion

I have a confession to make: I love concrete architecture. I know, I know. Concrete architecture (CA, for short) is not fashionable. It’s not renewable (not yet, anyway). It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not cool.

Part of the bad-rap CA has is due to its association with brutalism, the quasi-Soviet style that was popular in the 1970s, especially in England. It’s cold. Windowless. Dystopian. Think 1984. A Clockwork Orange. Total Recall. Et cetera.

Obviously, that’s not the type of CA that I’m talking about. Rather, when I think of great concrete architecture, I think of buildings that mix smooth, rectilinear slabs of stone (that’s all concrete is, after all—artificial stone) with glass and other construction elements. When built to a more human scale, and combined with greenery and organic decoration, CA can be soothing. Symmetrical. Ordered. Neat. Human.

I keep thinking of that scene in Lawrence of Arabia when a reporter asks Lawrence, an Englishman, why he loves the desert so much. “Because it’s clean,” he says. His answer resonates on many levels: literal, moral, political, and philosophical. That’s sort of why I like CA. It’s clean. It’s calming.

I think my first exposure to CA was from movies. Specifically, James Bond movies. There’s Willard Whyte’s desert mansion in Diamonds Are Forever (actually the Elrod House in Palm Springs by John Lautner). Then, in The Man with the Golden Gun, there’s Scaramanga’s secret lair, carved into the rock of a volcanic island. Almost every male nerd has a secret fantasy of being a Bond villain (or, at least, of having a Bond villain’s lair). What could be cooler for a bookish, introverted, probably asthmatic kid than to have his own secret, clean (pollen-free) hideout where no one, not even MI6, can find you?

Which brings me to my main point. Introverts of both sexes have a fondness for CA because we associate it with solitude, in a good way. The only real experience with CA that most of us have is from public spaces—libraries, museums, research centers, etc.—whose sense of empty space is soothing to introverts (who tend to have too much internal stimulation). 

So it’s no surprise that the ultimate fictional incarnation of CA would be owned by the ultimate fictional nerd, Tony Stark. His mansion in the Marvel MCU is a Lautner-esque swirl of concrete perched on a California cliff over the Pacific. The mansion is the epitome of the Bond-villain/mad scientist aesthetic. Stark, who seems to be a selfish lout but is actually psychologically damaged by the remembered death of his parents, is free to be alone in the mansion’s cavernous rooms, jammed with post-modern decorations and transhuman technology. Stark doesn’t need a human heart; he has a mechanical one, powered by cold fusion. It can’t be broken.

So, what does it say about me that I like CA so much? Basically, it says that I am an unreconstructed nerd, who likes things clean and controlled. Oh, well.