In general, if we look out of the eyes of a pedestrian entering or leaving one of the depicted estates (pick an estate at random, and pick the moment at which we look out at random) chances are fairly high that there will be hardly anything in our visual field to draw our "involuntary attention".
If I'm sitting in a library or something and 5 feet away is a wall of unfinished concrete, that can be a pleasant experience because there tends to be a lot of irregularities in the surface (and I don't share grandparent's dislike of unfinished concrete) but there was a temptation in the brutalist movement to require pedestrians to walk along or near blank walls 100s of feet long, and that certainly can be an alienating feeling, just like for example being in the middle of a vast frozen lake can be an alienating experience.
These look like entrances into the Soylent Green factory, where the old people in the pictures are about to get turned into food. Wretched, unfriendly, unlivable public spaces.
I can find you a similarly sized blank area of wall on any building, including St Pancras. Sure, it'll have denser tiling (bricks instead of concrete tiles), but as far as I'm concerned there's a similar amount of overall visual stimulus in a blank brick wall.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp-content/uplo...
In general, if we look out of the eyes of a pedestrian entering or leaving one of the depicted estates (pick an estate at random, and pick the moment at which we look out at random) chances are fairly high that there will be hardly anything in our visual field to draw our "involuntary attention".
If I'm sitting in a library or something and 5 feet away is a wall of unfinished concrete, that can be a pleasant experience because there tends to be a lot of irregularities in the surface (and I don't share grandparent's dislike of unfinished concrete) but there was a temptation in the brutalist movement to require pedestrians to walk along or near blank walls 100s of feet long, and that certainly can be an alienating feeling, just like for example being in the middle of a vast frozen lake can be an alienating experience.