The Thiccctionary

Our previous article on industrial-scale thiccc argued that some machines are bulky because physics requires it, they cannot do their work at any other shape. This is a sibling argument about buildings.

Three programs in architectural history converged on the same answer. The programs were not similar, defense, ideology, and the math of cheap housing have almost nothing in common as motivations. But each one led architects to a building that is fundamentally a wall: solid, deep, refusing the slimness that civilian comfort would prefer.

Branch I, Defensive thiccc

The earliest motivation for a thiccc building is that someone is trying to knock it down.

Caernarfon Castle, built between 1283 and 1330 by Edward I in north Wales, has curtain walls that are roughly 4.5 meters thick at the base. Its towers, in places, exceed 6 meters of stone between the inside and the outside. By any modern standard this is preposterous. By the standard of trebuchets (siege engines capable of throwing 90-kilogram stones at a respectable arc) it is approximately the minimum.

Crusader castles like Krak des Chevaliers in present-day Syria were thicker still in places, with double curtain walls separated by a killing zone, the inner wall sometimes 8 meters thick. The depth was not architectural ego. The depth was the answer to a specific engineering question: how much rubble does it take to absorb the kinetic energy of a counterweighted projectile and remain standing afterward?

Defensive thiccc has a clean test. Strip the decoration. Ask: would the building survive having things thrown at it? The walls of Constantinople, the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, the missile silos of the Cold War, all the same lineage. Different eras, same logic.

Branch II, Ideological thiccc (Brutalism)

The second branch is younger and stranger. It arrived in postwar Europe as an aesthetic movement, but it produced buildings that look like they belong in branch one.

The term Brutalism comes from the French béton brut, meaning "raw concrete," and was popularized by the British critic Reyner Banham in a 1955 essay. It describes a school of architecture, roughly 1950 to 1980, that exposed structural concrete instead of cladding it. Iconic examples include Boston City Hall (1968), Trellick Tower in London (1972), the Geisel Library in San Diego (1970), Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952), the Barbican Estate (1969-1982), and Habitat 67 in Montreal (1967).

The buildings are thiccc, but the thicccness has nothing to do with siege defense. It has to do with the program of the movement: honesty about materials. A Brutalist concrete column does not pretend to be wood. A Brutalist beam does not hide inside a wall. The building shows you exactly how it is built. And concrete, as a structural material, has to be deep, its compressive strength is high, but its tensile strength is low, and the only way to get around that with cast-in-place construction is to make sections generous and reinforce them with steel rebar.

The ideology said "show the structure." The structure had to be thiccc to work. The buildings, accordingly, are thiccc and proud of it.

Whether you find Brutalism beautiful or oppressive is a separate question. Many people find it both at once. The Boston City Hall has been voted one of the world's ugliest buildings and one of the most architecturally significant buildings of the twentieth century, sometimes in the same year, sometimes by the same magazine.

Branch III, Utilitarian thiccc (mass housing)

The third branch is the largest by floor area. It is also the one most people who live in cities have personally been inside.

From roughly 1955 to 1989, the Soviet Union built tens of millions of square meters of prefabricated concrete-panel apartment buildings. The early generation, called Khrushchyovka after Khrushchev (under whom the program scaled), are typically four or five stories tall, made of standardized concrete panels craned into place over a few weeks per building. The later, taller variants (known generally as Plattenbau in East Germany, panelák in Czechoslovakia) followed the same logic at greater height. Hong Kong's public housing estates and São Paulo's Cohabs use a related approach.

These buildings are thiccc because the math demands it. To house a million people quickly, on a fixed budget, with available labor, the only option is precast concrete walls and floors that arrive on-site as panels and bolt together. Concrete panels of a certain minimum thickness (typically 14 to 18 centimeters for load-bearing walls, 20+ centimeters for floors that double as ceilings) are non-negotiable for fire ratings, sound dampening, and structural rigidity. There is no slimmer version of this construction technique. Make the panels thinner and they crack during transport, fail acoustic tests, or collapse under live load.

Utilitarian thiccc is the inverse of defensive thiccc. The walls are not designed to resist attack. They are designed to be cheap, modular, and exactly thick enough to qualify as a building. The aesthetic of flat surfaces, repeating openings, and no ornament is an artifact of the manufacturing process. The thicccness is the floor below which the buildings stop being legal.

A note on the slim alternatives

Not all architecture is thiccc, obviously. The point of this taxonomy is that some architecture cannot be slim. There is no version of a defensive bastion that is thin and works. No version of cast-in-place concrete that is delicate. No version of prefab mass housing that is light. The buildings have to be the shape they are.

Compare this to the buildings whose programs allow slimness. Glass curtain walls on a steel frame can be arbitrarily thin because steel handles tensile loads that concrete cannot. Wood-frame houses are slim because wood is flexible and inhabited by few people per square meter. Tents and yurts are obviously slim. Each of those works because the program permits it, the building is not being besieged, is not making an ideological claim about materials, is not housing 200 families per stairwell.

The thiccc buildings are the ones where the program forbids slimness.

What this means for the dictionary

Most of the buildings we will catalog in the archive belong to one of these three branches. A Cold War bunker is defensive. The Habitat 67 silhouette in our future entries is ideological. A Khrushchyovka or a Hong Kong public-housing tower is utilitarian. Each entry will say so. Each entry will give the year, the architect or program, and a single sentence on which constraint produced the silhouette.

Architecture rewards close looking. The point is not just that these buildings are large. The point is that they could not have been smaller without ceasing to do what they were built to do. The thicccness is the program made visible.

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