Brutalist architecture

Unité d'Habitation, Marseille
(Le Corbusier 1952)

Brutalism is an architectural style that spawned from the modernist architectural movement and which flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. The early style was inspired largely by the work of Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, and in particular his Unité d'Habitation (1952) and the 1953 Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India.

The term Brutalist Architecture originates from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a term used by Le Corbusier to describe his choice of material. In 1954, the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term, but it gained currency when the British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1954 book, "New Brutalism," to identify the emerging style.^[1] The style has been refined at times and experienced historic appreciation and resurgences into the twenty-first century.

Brutalist buildings usually are formed with striking repetitive angular geometries, and often revealing the textures of the wooden forms used to shape the material, which is normally rough, unadorned poured concrete. Not all Brutalist buildings are formed from concrete. Instead, a building may achieve its Brutalist quality through a rough, blocky appearance, and the expression of its structural materials, forms, and services on its exterior. Many of Alison and Peter Smithson's private houses are built from brick, and Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano's Centre Pompidou often is regarded as a Brutalist structure. Brutalist building materials may include brick, glass, steel, rough-hewn stone, and gabion (also known as trapion).

Brutalism as an architectural style also was associated with a social utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style. The failure of positive communities to form early on in some Brutalist structures, possibly due to the larger processes of urban decay that set in after World War II (especially in the United Kingdom), led to the combined unpopularity of both the ideology and the architectural style.

Style

Brutalism is related to and similar to (and often confused with) the modernist, minimalist, and internationalist styles of architecture. All of these styles make heavy use of repetition and regularity in their features, but Brutalist designs also often incorporate striking, blatant irregularities as well.

Another common theme in Brutalist designs is the exposition of the building's functions—ranging from their structure and services to their human use—in the exterior of the building. In other words, the Brutalist style is "the celebration of concrete." In the Boston City Hall (illustration left), designed in 1962, strikingly different and projected portions of the building indicate the special nature of the rooms behind those walls, such as the mayor's office or the city council chambers. From another perspective of this theme, the design of the Hunstanton School included placing the facility's water tank, normally a hidden service feature, in a prominently placed and visible tower.

Critics argue that this abstract nature of Brutalism makes the style unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of being integrating and protective, as its proponents intended. For example, the location of the entrance of a Brutalist structure is rarely obvious to the visitor.

Brutalism also is criticized as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear very stark, out of place, and alien.

History

Brutalism gained large momentum in Britain during the middle twentieth century, as economically depressed (and WWII-ravaged) communities sought inexpensive construction and design methods for low-cost housing, shopping centers, and government buildings. Nonetheless, many architects chose the Brutalist style even when they had large budgets, as they appreciated the 'honesty', the sculptural qualities, and perhaps, the uncompromising, anti-bourgeois, nature of the style. It has been suggested that the style was based subconsciously on the austere German gun turrets left littered along beaches after World War II.

Combined with the socially progressive intentions behind Brutalist "streets in the sky" housings such as Corbusier's Unité, Brutalism was promoted as a positive option for forward-moving, modern urban housing. In practice, however, many of the buildings built in this style lacked many of the community-serving features of Corbusier's vision, and instead, developed into claustrophobic, crime-ridden tenements. Robin Hood Gardens is a particularly notorious example. Some such buildings took decades to develop into positive communities. The rough coolness of concrete lost its appeal under a damp and gray northern sky, and its fortress-like material touted as vandal-proof soon proved vulnerable to spray-can graffiti.

Campus Brutalism

The Math and Computer Science Building at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

In the late 1960s, many campuses in North America were undergoing expansions and, as a result, there are a significant number of Brutalist buildings at U.S. and Canadian universities. These include the very early Yale Art and Architecture Building (1958) by Paul Rudolph; the campus of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Massachusetts (Paul Rudolph,); numerous buildings such as the Geisel Library at UCSD; Belson Hall/Finley Hall at St. John's University School of Law; the Math and Computer Science Building at the University of Waterloo, Wesley W. Posvar Hall, a classroom and administrative building for the University of Pittsburgh; the Health Sciences Center at Stony Brook University; the Stratton Student Center of MIT (1968) by Pietro Belluschi; The Law Tower of the Law School of Boston University; Funger Hall at The George Washington University, The Charles Odegaard Library of the University of Washington, Seattle: Uris Hall (1972), at Cornell University, by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, who also designed several buildings in that manner for the University of Texas, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library (1971); and several of the early-1960s buildings at Ithaca College, including Friends Hall, Muller Faculty Center, and the East and West Tower residence halls. Excellent examples outside of the U.S. include Rand Afrikaans University (1967) in Johannesburg, South Africa and Churchill College, Cambridge (1962-8) in the United Kingdom.

Criticism and reception — ("The New Barbarism")

Brutalism has some severe critics, one of the most famous being Charles, Prince of Wales, whose speeches and writings on architecture have excoriated Brutalism, calling many of the structures "piles of concrete." "You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe," he said in 1984, addressing the Royal Institute of British Architects, "when it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble." Much of the criticism comes not only from the designs of the buildings, but also from the fact that concrete facades don't age well in a damp, cloudy maritime climate such as that of northwestern Europe, becoming streaked with water stains and sometimes, even with moss and lichens.

At the University of Oregon campus, outrage and vocal distaste for Brutalism led, in part, to the hiring of Christopher Alexander and the initiation of The Oregon Experiment in the late 1970s. This led to the development of Alexander's A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building.

The current Fodor's guide to London mentions the former Home Office building at 50 Queen Anne's Gate as "hulking." Because the style is essentially that of poured concrete, it tends to be inexpensive to build and maintain, but very difficult to modify. In the case of Trellick Tower, however, the design ultimately has proved very popular with both tenants and owner-occupant residents. In time, many Brutalist structures do become appreciated as landmarks by their communities for their uniqueness and eye-catching appearance.

In recent years, the bad memories of under-served Brutalist community structures have led to their demolition in communities eager to make way for newer, more traditionally-oriented community structures. Despite a nascent modernist appreciation movement, and the identified success that some of this style's offspring have had, many others have been or are, slated to be demolished.

The architecture column of Private Eye, "Nooks and Corners", began life as "Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism", with "new Barbarism" clearly intended as a reference to "new Brutalism". The column sometimes is skeptical about modern architecture in general, but over the course of some four decades, has been uniformly, vehemently, critical of Brutalism, especially in government-sponsored projects.

Resurgence

Although the Brutalist movement was largely dead by the mid-1980s, having largely given way to Structural Expressionism and Deconstructivism, it has experienced an updating of sorts in recent years. Many of the rougher aspects of the style have been softened in newer buildings, with concrete facades often being sandblasted to create a stone-like surface, covered in stucco, or composed of patterned, pre-cast elements. Many modernist architects such as Steven Ehrlich, Ricardo Legorreta, and Gin Wong have been doing just that in many of their recent projects. The firm of Victor Gruen and Associates has revamped the style for the many courthouse buildings it has been contracted to design. Architects from Latin America have been reviving the style on a smaller scale in recent years. Brutalism has recently experienced a major revival in Israel, due to the perceived sense of strength and security the style creates. With the development of LiTraCon—a form of translucent concrete—a new Brutalist movement may be on the horizon.

Even in Britain, where the style was most prevalent, and later most reviled, a number of buildings recently (as of 2006) have appeared in an updated Brutalist style, including deRijke Marsh Morgan's 1 Centaur Street in Lambeth, London, and Elder & Cannon's The Icon in Glasgow in Scotland. The 2005 Stirling Prize shortlist contained a number of buildings (most notably Zaha Hadid's BMW factory and the eventual winner, Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament Building) featuring significant amounts of exposed concrete, something that would have been regarded as aesthetically unacceptable when the prize was inaugurated nine years previously. There also has been a reappraisal of first-generation Brutalist architecture and a growing appreciation that dislike of the buildings often stems from poor maintenance and social problems resulting from poor management, rather than the designs. In 2005, Channel 4, out of London, ran a documentary, I Love Carbuncles which placed Britain's Brutalist legacy in a more positive light. Some Brutalist buildings have been granted listed status as historic and others, such as Gillespie, Kidd and Coia's St. Peter's Seminary, named by Prospect magazine's survey of architects as Scotland's greatest post-war building, have been the subject of conservation campaigns. The Twentieth Century Society (headed, ironically, by Gavin Stamp, also known as "Nooks & Corners" columnist 'Piloti') has campaigned against the demolition of buildings such as the Tricorn Centre and Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park.

Figures

Architects associated with the Brutalist style include Ernő Goldfinger, husband-and-wife pairing Alison and Peter Smithson, and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Sir Denys Lasdun. Outside of Britain, Louis Kahn's government buildings in Asia and John Andrews's government and institutional structures in Australia exhibit the creative height of the style. Paul Rudolph is another noted Brutalist, as is Ralph Rapson both from the United States. Marcel Breuer was known for his "soft" approach to the style, often using curves rather than corners. More recent Modernists such as I.M. Pei and Tadao Ando also have designed notable Brutalist works. In South America, the style is evident in the works of Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Brazilian architects Oscar Niemeyer (1998) and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2006).