Utah is beautiful. See here.

People in SLC are really nice. Strangers greet you on the street. Motorists are also more polite and patient. I had no idea how to respond. I suspect it might have something to do with there being less traffic and, in turn, less frustration. But again, even if you ignore what happens on the road, people are nice.

You will need a serious utility vehicle to navigate the topography of this region. Venturing into the surrounding canyons requires 4-wheel drive or chains during snowstorms. I was only there for a week and already I have visions of a classic Defender in my mind. Do they come in electric versions?

The streets are too wide for proper enjoyment as a pedestrian. This is a challenging problem to fix, as I have mentioned before. That said -- and this is going to be an unpopular opinion -- the city felt void of any sort of real traffic. The distances travelled are great, but the highways actually flow freely. You also never really need to worry about parking.

Electric scooters are popular in SLC. As is cycling -- both for getting around and as a reason to wear tight-fitting bright clothes.

SLC feels as if it is both under the radar and also rapidly emerging. My new favorite restaurant in SLC is a place called Post Office Place. We walked in without a reservation on a Friday night and they gladly took us. I couldn't understand why the place wasn't rammed. I mean, they have Marseille-style panisse on the menu!

The Granary District is an area to watch. It is a former industrial area to the southwest of downtown. It is already home to breweries, food halls, and creative offices. But it needs some more time to properly fill in. We stayed at the Evo Hotel in Granary (highly recommend). The campus amenities include a rock climbing facility, an indoor skatepark, and plenty of places to work and Zoom.

Most of the new infill housing appears to be mid-rise in scale and most of it is wood-frame construction on top of concrete.

By my estimation (and by estimation I mean that I have a spreadsheet for this), the ski and snowboard communities surrounding SLC are some of the most accessible in North America. Land at SLC airport and you're in the mountains in 20-30 minutes.

Park City-Canyons is the most well-known ski destination. But if you're a more aggressive skier -- the kind that keeps your gloves together with duct tape and counts the number of ski days per season -- you'll want to head over to the Cottonwood canyons and places like Snowbird and Brighton.

Snowbird remains one of my all-time favorite ski destinations for two reasons: the mountain itself and the brutalist architecture at the bottom of it. There's none of that faux alpine crap over here -- just exposed and unabashed concrete and wood. And who doesn't love brutalism, right? (I haven't been to Brighton yet but one of my local friends told me that it's a great snowboarders mountain.)

The Canyons Village at Park City is developing really nicely. As I understand it, it's only about 30-40% built out at this stage. The Pendry Hotel just recently opened (announcement here) and I can tell you that the restaurants were generally busy every night of the week (summer experience). The project team did a wonderful job creating a place and a new anchor in the village.

What did I miss in this list?

This article from the Guardian about two Brutalist housing estates in London is now more than five years old. But the story is perhaps just as interesting. The article is about two "New Brutalism" estates that were designed and built in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first is the Barbican Estate (which appeared recently on the blog over here) and the second is Robin Hood Gardens (pictured above, partially). Both were designed by notable architects and both have been equally divisive when it comes to their aesthetic appeal. We're talking about Brutalism. So it's likely that you either love them or hate them.

One of the big differences between these two housing complexes is that one is a private estate and the other is (or was) social housing. And perhaps because of this, the Barbican has remained desirable and Robin Hood Gardens was ultimately demolished starting in 2017. This is despite numerous outcries from the architecture and design community that it should be both preserved and listed.

We could get into questions of funding and maintenance, as well as the design differences between the two complexes (I don't have any of these details), but even without all of this, I find these two divergent outcomes pretty interesting. Architecture, it would seem, isn't everything.

I am sure that many of you have been eagerly waiting for an old Brutalist wine warehouse to come on the market near Bordeaux, and so here is a listing from Espaces Atypiques. The site is over 1 hectare. The ground floor is about 2,000 square meters. And the central atrium space is some 25m tall. It's listed for €550,000 and I reckon it needs a bit of work.

I don't know where exactly it's located in Saint-Émilion, France (nor have I ever been) and I can't vouch for the condition of the existing building in any way shape or form, but I do think it would be a lot of fun to turn a Brutalist structure like this into a hotel, restaurant, and creative event space. Public gathering space(s) in the atrium; private rooms along the perimeter.

Image: Espaces Atypiques