Brutalism is back

What if we are romanticizing the reindustrialization of Europe?

Yesterday, I had an experience that feels almost exotic today: visiting a small town whose economy is mostly based on industry. In a Europe where the service sector is everywhere and industry is usually hidden away or outsourced far away, seeing the "guts" of the system up close changes your perspective

On my way there, I passed a silica sand quarry producing material for fiber optics or rocket components. But what I saw wasn't futuristic, it was a wide-open geological massacre. I felt the violence of the extraction: massive machines devouring the ground to take in hours what nature took millions of years to create, with pine trees cut down en masse to expand the site while trucks roared nonstop. It was enough to make you sick

When I got to the city, the feeling didn't get any better. I found a mess of giant warehouses and buildings from different eras crammed together without any aesthetic sense. It’s the triumph of functional urbanism: a design based purely on economics where human well-being isn't part of the equation. I felt a physical tension, a nightmare-style anxiety that made me want to run away. It’s cortisol spiking in an environment of sharp angles, concrete and depressing colors that your brain (rightly so) interprets as a place hostile to life

And this is where I go back to the question: Are we romanticizing "strategic sovereignty" just because we’ve forgotten what industry looks like, feels like and the toll it takes? We talk about economic autonomy from offices with plants, but do we really know what it means to tear open the earth and cover our landscapes in concrete? Have we weighed what it means for the extraction of "critical" materials to happen in our own forests and mountains, instead of in some invisible corner of the map?

The reality is that these sectors are brutal by nature, but their true violence is that they force us to face the raw reality of our economic system. It’s like hot dogs: everyone loves the taste until they see how the scraps and cartilage are ground up in the factory. At that point many lose their appetite

For decades, we’ve lived in an aesthetic bubble, enjoying shiny cheap products without thinking about where they come from or how they’re extracted. It was easy because the "ugliness" happened far away. But when the extraction is in your country, or in the next town over, the impact is devastating because you have to live with the process every day. It’s great to get a package at your door, but it’s not fun to see endless asphalt, noisy workshops, and heavy machines taking over the quiet suburbs

Jobs and manufacturing are welcome, but let’s be clear: this change won't just affect factory workers. It will be for all of us. We’re going to see our surroundings fill up with a visual brutality we had forgotten

Reindustrialization is going to show us the "backstage" of our consumption again, and unfortunately, it’s going to be very ugly