For anyone interested, this is one of a series of sculptures in Poland meant to evoke playground equipment. You can crawl on it, but it's not actually meant as a slide.
I think you can get concrete pretty smooth if you really want... You can also put a coating on it that would make it very smooth. Maybe this had some kind of coating on it back in the 70s/80s? Probably not, but who knows.
I lived by a concrete slide that you needed cardboard to use like a sled in order to go down. Otherwise the slide would burn the everliving shit out of you if you didn't, but damn it was fun
When you're thinking of brutalist structures you have to keep in mind the architectural world they were coming into. How the world had rarely seen such, flat, pure surfaces. We take them for granted now, every box building ever built owes something of itself to brutalisim.
But in the wake of WWII, I think it made a statement that things done in this building are done in a modern way. No gargoyles, no baron von-fuckpants, none of the old world trappings.
Maybe it's because I grew up within walking distance of the Indiana University campus, which has a lot of brutalist architecture (for example, this is the library), but I honestly don't mind it if it's done well. It can just also be done really poorly.
That's a total misrepresentation of a late soviet playground!
Where are handles and stopper you can kill yourself with while sliding? Where's the Hole in the end, the one you feed bad kids to (and it starts to call you 'tovarish' at some point)? Where's someone's dad (also from CheKa) who takes kids out and never returns them.
You can do better Leutenant Squid. That's said, I forgive you. But you'd not like to know the lenght my tolerance can go.
To be fair, its probably better than those plastic spiral slides they used to have that seemed like they were designed to generate static electricity...
Do those kinds of slides even still exist? Y'all know what I'm referring to right?
Hmm this just gave me a thought... We could harness the power generated from hyperactive kids sliding down those slides at Burger King, and feed it back into the grid.