A big red kiosk greets you at the entrance of the new MoMA exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. It’s a 1966 model of a modular design by Saša Janez Mächtig, made of reinforced polyfiber, steel, and glass. The kiosk is cuboid but with sinuous curves instead of vertices. As a video installed beside the kiosk explains, the design could be used singly, or combined with other kiosks. Across Yugoslavia, the kiosks were used as florists, newsagents, parking attendant lodges—anything. “How beautiful,” I said to my companion, an architect. She reached out as if to caress it. “How sad,” she responded, “that they did not realize how quickly rubber perishes.”

This is just one of the many wistful things that can be said about modernist architecture of the twentieth century. How sad it is that concrete, that most utopian and promising of materials, streaks so badly in the rain. How sad that this particular dream is dead. Such is the romance of these buildings for the contemporary Western viewer.

Installation view of Kiosk K67, by Saša Janez Mächtig (1966). Martin Seck / Museum of Modern Art

Brutalist architecture has become a kind of visual shorthand for Cold War-era socialism. Their looming concrete towers, so devoid of ornamentation, remind us of scary Soviet dictators. Their devotion to functionality also embodies socialist principles. Yugoslav architects built ergonomic housing, where each unit was the same size; large and accessible kindergartens, so that everybody of all genders could go to work; and dreamed of rebuilding entire cities for better, more efficient living.

But this aspect of brutalism is not part of an ongoing political conversation. American culture is engaging with a postcard version of the design that found such favor with governments seeking to reimagine public space after World War II. This is the nostalgic, internet-optimized version of history, and it has become very popular. As The New York Times Style Magazine declared in 2016: “Brutalism Is Back.” Photographs of brutalist buildings are all over Tumblr (see: “Fuck Yeah Brutalism”) and Instagram, where accounts like @brutal_architecture showcase “the beauty, menace, and raw power of brutalist architecture around the world.”

Brutalist architecture has become the stuff of “aesthetic,” the shallow visual trickle that drips through social media and into the feeds of young people. It conflates brutalism with a fetishized minimalism—a Silicon Valley, cappucino minimalism that extends from apartment design to Everlane clothing to overpriced coworking space—at the expense of understanding what brutalism might actually contribute to the places where we live and work.