/u/KerasTasi talks very clearly about public housing being a problem for Brutalism. But depending on your definitions, the failures of public housing projects in the UK were not just about failures of Brutalist (in the strict sense of Béton brut) buildings, but the wider ideas of "vertical cities". Most of the tower blocks built in Birmingham, for example, would not pass muster as Brutalist (they were mostly "system built") but were failures for all the same reasons: windswept land, dangerous and badly maintained walkways, etc.
But it's worth looking at the fate of non-residential Brutalist buildings. There are some which have been, in broad terms, successes. Kera mentions the Barbican estate, and amongst the successes there are the Barbican theatre and concert hall. Similarly, also in London, the National Theatre is a pretty decent building: handsome to look at, effective as a theatre.
But let's look at a building of which I was very fond, but which was in many ways a failure: John Madin's Birmingham Central Library.
The problem here, as with so many other post-war buildings, was that it was built badly and was never finished. The original idea was that it wasn't going to be raw concrete anyway: it was going to be clad in (accounts vary) Travertine marble or Portland stone. That meant that the building never really managed to be fully water-tight, a fatal flaw in a library, as the concrete finishes were never intended to be external. There was a full programme of work for things like the undercroft (a bus station! squash courts! a rifle range!) and the various water features, none of which was ever finished. The money ran out, and because the building was somehow accused of a crime it didn't commit -- the demolition of the Victorian central library -- it was a marked building long before Prince Charles' criticism of it as looking like an incinerator for books.
I was a long-term user and enthusiast for the building, but only after it had been condemned did I learn about (indirectly, from Madin himself) the unused spaces on the reference floors for the desperately missed lavatories, or the small and perfectly formed theatre around the back. And although there was a concerted campaign to save it, documented in an impassioned book by one of the leaders, by the time the building was under threat it was already doomed: its poor construction and compromised design saw to that.
There are other Brutalist buildings in Birmingham, some of them more successful. The best example is the (mercifully, now listed) Muirhead Tower on the university campus, which is a very handsome building indeed and looks even better now the terrible 1950s library has been cleared. However, it still wasn't a wildly successful building when first put up, having problems with draughts, overheating and poor access.
And that was the general story of Brutalist buildings. The accusation was that architects were too busy fondling books about Le Corbusier or Erno Goldfinger and not interested enough in the people that would use the buildings. In short, that they were more interested in building for their peers than for their customers. How much merit that accusation had is something that PhD theses will be written about for years to come, but I think it's hard to escape the idea that architects considered both the living and working accommodation of others differently to how they considered their own spaces.
For an encyclopaedic view of 20th century council housing, from a perspective that is quite sympathetic to the designers, it is worth setting aside a day and exploring Municipal Dreams. A reasonable test of such a project is when it is both correct and sensible about things you know about intimately, and the things it says about places I know well are accurate. I commend it to people interested in these issues.
I don’t agree with your supposition that brutalist buildings are (almost) universally hated. While I do understand there are some common aspects of their design—such as rough, exposed concrete and small, inoperable windows—that often provoke disdain, there are many who delight in living and working in brutalist structures, myself included. But I don’t want to get bogged down in the philosophical argument.
I do, however, want to challenge the idea that many brutalist buildings were created. Because of the difficulty involved in their design and construction, brutalist buildings were relatively rare—especially when compared to the number of functionalist buildings created in the middle of the 20th century. Brutalist buildings were not cheap or easy to build, as their bold designs and daring use of materials required a high degree of structural innovation and technical expertise, leading to high costs and long construction timelines. As a result, there weren’t all that many brutalist buildings constructed in the brief period when the style flourished, from roughly 1955 to 1975.
What is brutalism? Brutalism was one of the predominant modes of building design in the middle of the 20th century, along with empiricism, organicism, structuralism, and others. The lines between these styles are often blurred because of their shared use of construction materials and similar treatment of building programs, leading to many mid-century structures (especially those with exposed concrete) being inaccurately labeled as brutalist. But brutalism is a distinct style with specific characteristics beyond the selection of building materials.
What defines a building as brutalist, and where did brutalism come from? The origins of brutalism as a style are murky. Some credit the béton brut (raw concrete) of Le Corbusier (particularly his Unité d’habitation constructed in Marseille shortly after World War II) while others claim the source is the art brut of artists like Jean Dubuffet. The historian and theorist Reyner Banham traced brutalism to Sweden via the designs of Alison and Peter Smithson in the UK. The exact source is not important as much as brutalism’s shared goals, which Banham succinctly describes as the articulation of the building structure on the surface and the sculptural expression of materials with the goal of creating a “memorable image”. This idea of the “memorable image” is what sets brutalism apart from other related styles and explains in part why brutalism is so polarizing despite the relatively small number of brutalism buildings. Brutalist designers were reacting against functionalist architecture, which may have been far more economical to build but was repetitive and anonymous.
Why would anyone bother commissioning a more expensive building in the brutalist style—especially when it came to public amenities like social housing and bus stations? Because brutalism represented what the historian Siegfried Giedion described as the “new monumentality”, an original style of architecture that eschewed historicist forms and developed a new design vocabulary to celebrate democratic institutions and communities created by a new type of postwar man. Clients in search of this “new monumentality” commissioned these daring designs to represent a bright, new future. Their sweeping curves and daring cantilevers were meant as emblems of a community and symbols of aspiration.
Why did we stop building brutalist buildings? Aside from the technical issues, the rise of neo-liberalism and the decline of public spending meant a decreasing investment in civic institutions. Because brutalism is heavily associated with the architecture of the welfare state, especially social housing, government offices and facilities for tertiary education, it suffered from an association with bureaucracy and alienation. Combined with construction mistakes and cut corners, which resulted in structural and environmental failures, this ultimately led to the rejection of the style as inefficient and inflexible.
Irregular maintenance—which can impair buildings of any style but seems to particularly affect brutalist ones—may be brutalism’s greatest enemy. If a building is not properly maintained or is altered in a manner not consistent with its original design, it will fall into disrepair and not appear or function as intended, often leading to unpleasant and unappealing surroundings. This creates an inaccurate image of a building and leads us to question why it was designed and built in the way it was in the first place. Fortunately, these problems can be remedied. Recent renovations of brutalist structures like the Art & Architecture Building at Yale (Rudolph Hall) or the Preston Bus Station in the UK have restored these buildings to their former glory and revealed the lofty ambitions of their clients and designers.
I would like to discuss brutalism in terms of its context in architectural history to help you understand why this particular style became so popular among architects in the decades after WWII. But first, a word on its public notoriety, which is only partly due to its unfortunate name. Because brutalism’s heyday coincided with the heyday of the welfare state on both sides of the Atlantic, it is associated in the popular consciousness with social housing, government office complexes, and public universities. Perhaps because of these existing connotations, brutalism has become a go-to style for “evil” buildings in pop culture. It didn’t help that by its very nature brutalism was abstract and uncompromising. But let’s peel away the decades of tropes and negative connotations that have attached themselves to brutalism and examine how and why it became popular when it did. Brutalism was a rich aesthetic movement with a set of values based on the honest beauty of raw materials and the sculptural qualities of structural engineering. Contrary to popular belief, brutalist buildings were not designed to be riot- and arson- proof in the turbulent 1960s, and rather than being cheap, many famous brutalist buildings utilized complex engineering. Before we get into why brutalism was appealing, let’s clear up some misconceptions.
Let's start with the name. Now, it's become a common refrain among architecture buffs to say that the term "brutalism" has nothing to do with the apparent "brutality" of its aggressive forms and materials. They say it derives from the French beton brut or raw concrete, which is the defining material of many brutalist buildings. However, this is not entirely true. In his influential article The New Brutalism, published in the December 1955 Architectural Review, the English architecture critic Reyner Banham explains that it was initially a term of derision applied toward modernism in general:
It was, in the beginning, a term of Communist abuse, and it was intended to signify the normal vocabulary of Modern Architecture – flat roofs, glass, exposed structure – considered as morally reprehensible deviations from ‘The New Humanism,’ [...] The New Humanism meant, in architecture at that time, brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate) – picturesque detailing without picturesque planning.
However, Banham notes that the term was quickly appropriated as a badge of honor by a group of radical young British architects including Alison and Peter Smithson (more on them later). These young architects were inspired by the late work of an aging modernist master, Le Corbusier, particularly by his experimentation with sculptural forms in raw concrete/beton brut:
The term had no sooner got into public circulation than its meaning began to narrow. Among the non-Marxist grouping there was no particular unity of programme or intention, but there was a certain community of interests, a tendency to look toward Le Corbusier, and to be aware of something called le beton brut, [...] and, in the case of the more sophisticated and aesthetically literate, to know of the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and his connection in Paris. Words and ideas, personalities and discontents chimed together and in a matter of weeks [...] it had been appropriated as their own, by their own desire and public consent, by two young architects, Alison and Peter Smithson [...] The phrase had thus changed both its meaning and its usage. Adopted as something between a slogan and a brickbat flung in the public’s face, The New Brutalism ceased to be a label descriptive of a tendency common to most modern architecture, and became instead a programme, a banner, while retaining some-rather restricted-sense as a descriptive label.
Now that we've cleared up some misconceptions about the name, let's talk about what brutalism is, exactly. There's a tendency among laypeople to label any severe-looking post-war modernist building "brutalist". This is not accurate at all. So what is brutalism? Let's return to Banham, who named three qualities the then-emerging movement displayed:
These three qualities can be summed up as "architectural honesty". The most important qualities of a building are clearly visible and legible: plan, structure, and material. No ornamental trickery is allowed in brutalism. Even concrete should be left raw and unfinished, so the joints and imperfections in grain and color are visible for all to see. What provides visual interest in brutalism is the inherent qualities of the raw material (usually, but not always, concrete) and the exhibition of the building’s structure (or structural expressionism–I’ll talk more about that term later).
In order to understand the appeal of these qualities, and how brutalism became an architectural style distinct from orthodox modernism, we need to step back and take a brief look at modernist architecture itself.
Modernist architecture emerged in the interwar years in Europe and spread globally after the end of World War II. Its emergence is closely tied to the social upheaval that affected Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. In that respect, modernist architecture is similar to modernist visual art and modernist literature: they were all radical aesthetic movements that arose in response to changes in the European social order caused by industrialization and World War I. Radical architects did not believe that the established architectural paradigm was suited to the social, cultural, aesthetic, or technological advances of the new century.
So how was this new modernist architecture going to be different from what came before? The answer lies at the intersection of technology, society, and aesthetics. Technologically, architecture was revolutionized by structural steel and reinforced concrete, which, combined with the invention of the elevator, allowed the creation of a new typology: the skyscraper. In addition, society was growing increasingly centered around cities, around factories, and around new modes of transportation like the automobile. Modernists believed architecture should reflect the new Machine Age through the Machine Aesthetic–the celebration of technology and the industrial world. Aesthetically, cubism, constructivism, and abstraction were taking the European avant garde art world by storm.
So the leading thinkers of the new modernist architecture wanted a style that would show off the latest technological advances (steel, concrete, and glass), exalt the new machine aesthetic that had upended daily life through mass production and the automobile, and engage with the rise of abstraction in the visual arts.
The result was the first wave of modernist architecture produced by early luminaries like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Eileen Gray, and early Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Looking at their pristine white minimalist buildings, the most readily apparent commonality is the complete lack of ornament. To modernists, ornament was crime (a slogan coined by the architect and writer Adolf Loos). They viewed ornament as the ultimate architectural fig leaf: a frivolous indulgence that served only to cover up a building's truly interesting qualities, its structure and materials. The modernist rejection of ornament ties into two concepts: rationality and honesty. Ornament serves no structural purpose, obviously, so rationally, it doesn't need to be there. Form should follow function. Then there's the fact that ornament covers up the true nature of materials and disguises a building's structure. If you're a modernist who wants to exalt the brave new aesthetics of steel and concrete, that's the last thing you want to do. To modernists, structure wasn't something to cover up, it was something to be celebrated.
Okay, let's fast forward a few decades to the 1950s. Mid-century Modernist architecture, with its minimalism, pure geometry, expanses of glass and steel, and boxy forms had become the dominant architectural style throughout most of the Western world (the USSR's relation to modernism is much more complex and subject to the whims of leaders like Stalin, who was hostile to the movement). Known as the “International Style", it was incredibly adaptable, you could design an identical modernist skyscraper in Manhattan or London--hence the name. It was efficient and rational--a little too efficient and rational. Certain architects and critics began worrying that the rapid proliferation of corporate International Style modernism was robbing architecture of vitality and creativity. Modernism–once a radical movement–was becoming the sterile minimalist aesthetic of bankers and ad men. These young designers and writers were opposed to the slick, processed corporate Park Avenue Modernist aesthetic and wanted to invigorate modernism by taking it back to its radical roots. The result was brutalism.
(Continued)