Brutalist architecture
Based on Wikipedia: Brutalist architecture
The Buildings That Dared to Be Ugly
Imagine walking through a city and encountering a building that looks like it was designed to intimidate you. Raw concrete walls rise at stark angles, their surfaces still bearing the imprint of the wooden boards used to mold them. No paint softens the gray. No ornamentation distracts the eye. The structure seems to announce, with brutish honesty: this is what I am made of, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
This is brutalism, and for decades it has inspired both passionate devotion and visceral disgust in nearly equal measure.
The style emerged in 1950s Britain, born from the rubble and rationing of the postwar years, when architects faced an urgent question: how do you rebuild a shattered nation with limited resources and unlimited ambition? Their answer was radical. Strip away the decorative flourishes of the past. Expose the bones of the building. Let concrete speak for itself.
A Name Born in Sweden, Raised in England
The word "brutalism" sounds like it should describe something violent, and critics have certainly used that association against it. But the etymology is more playful than menacing.
In 1950, a Swedish architect named Hans Asplund coined the term "nybrutalism"—new brutalism—to describe a modern brick house in Uppsala designed by his colleagues Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. The house was unusual: steel I-beams sat visible above the windows, brick remained exposed inside and out, and poured concrete in several rooms still showed the tongue-and-groove pattern of the wooden forms used to shape it. Nothing was hidden. Nothing was prettified.
A group of visiting British architects heard the term that summer and, according to one account, it "spread like wildfire" among a certain faction of young designers back in England.
The phrase gained its most influential champion in Reyner Banham, a British architectural critic who published a defining essay in 1955 simply titled "The New Brutalism." Banham made a clever linguistic connection: the French phrase "béton brut" means raw concrete, and "art brut" refers to raw or outsider art. Brutalism, he suggested, was the architectural equivalent—unpolished, uncompromising, authentic.
But Banham emphasized something crucial that often gets lost in modern discussions of the style. Brutalism was not merely an aesthetic choice. It was an ethic.
An Ethic, Not Just an Aesthetic
The husband-and-wife team of Alison and Peter Smithson stood at the center of the early movement, and they were emphatic on this point. "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such," Peter Smithson once explained, "but rather the quality of material." He spoke of "the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand." Materials should be seen for what they truly were, not disguised or transformed into something else.
This philosophy extended beyond surface appearances. A brutalist building should make its inner workings visible. The structure holding it up, the pipes carrying water, the ducts moving air—these functional elements, normally hidden behind finished walls and ceilings, became part of the visual experience.
Consider the Smithsons' Hunstanton School in Norfolk, completed in 1954 and widely regarded as the first building in the world to be deliberately designed as "new brutalist" by its architects. The school featured an exposed steel frame and visible brick, but more surprisingly, its water tank—normally tucked away as unsightly infrastructure—occupied a prominent tower. Water and electrical utilities ran through visible pipes and conduits rather than disappearing into walls.
At the time, critics called it "the most truly modern building in England."
Banham attempted to codify what made a building genuinely brutalist. First, the floor plan should be formally legible—you should be able to understand how the building was organized just by looking at it. Second, the structure should be clearly exhibited. Third, materials should be valued for their inherent qualities "as found." But beyond these technical requirements, a brutalist building needed something harder to define: visual coherence as an image, a unified aesthetic presence.
The Godfather in Marseille
While British architects developed the brutalist philosophy, the style's visual vocabulary owed an enormous debt to a Swiss-French architect working across the Channel: Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, one of the most influential and controversial architects of the twentieth century.
Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, became a touchstone for brutalist designers. The massive residential block rose on pilotis—concrete stilts—and featured apartments arranged around interior "streets." The building's concrete surfaces were left deliberately rough, showing the marks of their formation. Le Corbusier himself described his concrete work as "béton brut," and Banham later wrote that this phrase, more than any other, "made the concept of Brutalism admissible in most of the world's Western languages."
Le Corbusier's influence extended far beyond France. His Chandigarh Capitol Complex in India, built between 1951 and 1961, demonstrated that brutalism could work on a monumental government scale. His 1955 church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, showed that raw concrete could also be sculptural and even spiritual.
Other modernist masters contributed to brutalism's development, sometimes unknowingly. The German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous for his minimalist glass-and-steel buildings, influenced the Smithsons' work at Hunstanton School. The Estonian-American Louis Kahn, though he reportedly opposed "the muscular posturing of most Brutalism," produced work that shared many of the same underlying ideas. The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto demonstrated how modern materials could be used with warmth and humanity.
Streets in the Sky
Brutalism's early champions were not simply interested in how buildings looked. They wanted to reshape how people lived.
The Smithsons and their fellow travelers were drawn to socialist ideals. They believed architecture should serve the masses, not the wealthy. Low-cost social housing became a proving ground for brutalist principles: if you could not afford decoration, then decoration should not matter. Concrete emphasized equality. Everyone got the same honest materials.
One of the most ambitious brutalist concepts was the "street in the sky." Rather than traditional corridors, residential towers would feature wide, open walkways where neighbors could encounter each other as they might on an actual street. Pedestrian circulation and vehicle traffic would be rigorously separated. The dream was of vertical communities, stacked villages of working-class residents liberated from the cramped Victorian terraces and war-damaged slums of the past.
This vision found its fullest expression in public buildings. Boston City Hall, designed in 1962, became an icon of American brutalism. Its façade is a study in functional honesty: the strikingly different projecting sections of the building indicate the special nature of the rooms behind them. You can locate the mayor's office or the city council chambers just by reading the exterior.
Universities embraced brutalism with particular enthusiasm. The style seemed to embody academic seriousness—massive concrete library stacks, lecture halls that looked like fortresses of learning. At Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, the architect Arthur Erickson created an entire campus in the brutalist mode, its buildings marching along a mountain ridge like a concrete fortress.
Concrete Utopias, East and West
Brutalism found receptive audiences across the political spectrum, but it held special appeal for socialist and communist governments.
The logic was ideological. Traditional architectural styles—the ornate facades of bourgeois townhouses, the classical columns of banks and government ministries—carried associations with the old ruling classes. Concrete was different. Concrete was modern, industrial, democratic. A concrete apartment block announced that its residents were workers in a workers' state, not subjects in someone else's kingdom.
Throughout Eastern Europe, from Bulgaria to Czechoslovakia to East Germany to Yugoslavia, brutalist buildings rose by the thousands from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s. In Czechoslovakia, the style was explicitly promoted as both "national" and "modern socialist." The prefabricated apartment blocks that came to dominate the urban landscape were called "paneláky"—panel buildings, named for the concrete panels from which they were assembled like enormous Lego sets.
The Soviet Union exported the style along with its economic planning. In Vietnam, Soviet architects were sent to train local designers during the "bao cấp" era of subsidized, centrally planned economics. Garol Isakovich became particularly influential, designing landmarks including the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Palace of Culture and Labour in 1985. In his later years, Isakovich blended brutalist principles with traditional Vietnamese architectural elements, creating what some called "local modernism."
In Serbia, the architect Mihajlo Mitrović designed one of the most striking brutalist structures anywhere: the Western City Gate, also known as Genex Tower, completed in Belgrade in 1977. Two towers, connected by a two-story bridge and topped with a revolving restaurant, rise 117 meters above the city. The building combines brutalist mass with elements of structuralism and constructivism, and its sculptural treatment of form hints at the postmodernism that would soon displace brutalism in architectural fashion.
Brick Brothers
Not all brutalism is concrete. A significant sub-genre, sometimes called "brickalism," uses brick as its dominant structural material while maintaining brutalist principles of honest expression and functional clarity.
The Smithsons themselves designed an early brick brutalist house in Soho in 1952. But perhaps the most prominent example is Colin St John Wilson's British Library in London, designed between 1982 and 1998. The library's massive brick exterior, with its angular forms and industrial aesthetic, shows how brutalist ideas could be translated into a warmer, more textured material.
Brick brutalism often proves more palatable to critics and the public than its concrete counterpart. The material ages more gracefully, developing a patina rather than stains. Its color provides visual warmth that gray concrete cannot match. Yet the underlying philosophy remains the same: honesty about materials, clarity about structure, functionality over ornament.
The Builders
Brutalism attracted distinctive personalities, architects who seemed to embody the style's uncompromising nature.
Ernő Goldfinger, a Hungarian-born architect working in Britain, designed some of London's most famous brutalist towers, including the Trellick Tower in North Kensington. Legend has it that Ian Fleming, who lived near Goldfinger and clashed with him over a planning dispute, named his James Bond villain after the architect. Goldfinger was reportedly not amused and threatened legal action.
In London, the County Council's architects department produced a remarkable body of brutalist work, from housing estates to cultural buildings. Sir Denys Lasdun designed the National Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames, a building that remains controversial decades after its completion. Norman Engleback designed the Hayward Gallery nearby. Sir Basil Spence, better known for his controversial modernist Coventry Cathedral, also contributed brutalist buildings to Britain's postwar landscape.
The Chamberlin, Powell and Bon partnership created the Barbican Centre, a massive residential and cultural complex in the City of London that represents brutalism at its most ambitious: an entire neighborhood of concrete towers, terraces, gardens, and arts venues.
Across the Atlantic, Marcel Breuer became known for a "soft" approach to brutalism, often incorporating curves rather than the sharp angles favored by his peers. Walter Netsch specialized in brutalist academic buildings, bringing the style to American universities. In Atlanta, the architect Ted Levy introduced brutalism to the affluent Buckhead neighborhood with luxury condominiums that proved concrete could appeal to the wealthy as well as the masses.
Australia developed its own brutalist tradition. Robin Gibson designed the Queensland Art Gallery. Ken Woolley created the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. Christopher Kringas built the High Court of Australia. John Andrews produced government and institutional structures across the country. In Melbourne, Daryl Jackson and Kevin Borland designed one of the first brutalist buildings in the city: the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre, completed in 1967 and named for the Australian prime minister who had drowned the previous year.
Argentina's most significant brutalist architect was Clorindo Testa, who designed the Banco de Londres y América del Sur Headquarters and the National Library of Argentina. Both buildings demonstrate how brutalism could achieve genuine monumentality while maintaining its principles of structural honesty.
The Fall
By the late 1970s, brutalism's popularity was collapsing.
The reasons were both aesthetic and practical. Concrete, it turned out, did not age gracefully in wet northern climates. Rain left streaks. Moss grew in cracks. The bold gray surfaces that looked pristine in photographs became dingy and stained in reality. Heating and maintenance costs proved higher than expected. Many brutalist housing projects, designed with utopian ideals, became associated with urban decay, poverty, and crime.
Critics connected the style with totalitarianism. The same qualities that made brutalist buildings feel honest and democratic to their designers—their mass, their rawness, their refusal to ingratiate—made them feel oppressive to others. Why, people asked, should anyone have to live or work in buildings that looked like bunkers?
Postmodernism arrived with a message precisely opposite to brutalism's. Where brutalism rejected ornament, postmodernism embraced it playfully. Where brutalism emphasized industrial materials, postmodernism delighted in historical references and visual jokes. Where brutalism sought to express universal truths about structure and function, postmodernism suggested that meaning was relative and architecture could be witty.
Brutalist buildings, many still relatively new, faced demolition campaigns. The style that had promised to build a better society came to symbolize, for many, the failures of mid-century planning: tower blocks isolated from street life, public spaces that felt threatening after dark, housing estates where crime flourished in the very "streets in the sky" meant to create community.
The Resurrection
And yet brutalism did not disappear. It found new admirers.
A generation that had not lived through brutalism's construction or decline began to see the buildings with fresh eyes. The raw honesty that had seemed bleak now appeared bold. The rejection of ornamentation looked principled rather than punishing. The massive concrete forms, once derided as inhuman, took on a sculptural grandeur.
Photography played a role. Brutalist buildings proved remarkably photogenic, their strong forms and dramatic shadows perfect for black-and-white images. Instagram accounts dedicated to brutalist architecture accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers. Coffee-table books celebrated buildings that had recently faced wrecking balls.
In the United Kingdom, preservation campaigns saved some of the most threatened examples. The Barbican, once described as a concrete jungle, became one of London's most desirable addresses. The Trellick Tower, originally nicknamed the "Tower of Terror," achieved listed status and gentrified rapidly. The National Theatre, despite decades of criticism—Prince Charles once compared it to "a nuclear power station"—won grudging respect and, eventually, genuine affection.
Scholars began to argue that brutalism had been unfairly blamed for social problems that had little to do with architecture. High-rise housing projects failed not because of their design but because of inadequate funding, poor maintenance, and the broader economic decline of the communities they served. Similar buildings in well-maintained, well-funded contexts continued to function successfully.
The style's association with socialist ideals, once a liability, became attractive to younger generations disillusioned with market-driven development. Brutalism represented an era when governments built ambitious public projects—universities, libraries, cultural centers, social housing—rather than leaving such facilities to private developers. The concrete itself seemed to embody a lost belief in collective action and public investment.
The Meaning of Ugly
What does it mean for a building to be ugly? The question matters more than it might seem.
Brutalist architects never intended to create beautiful buildings in the conventional sense. They sought something else: honesty, authenticity, truth to materials and function. If a building revealed its structure and served its purpose, beauty would follow—or, if it did not, beauty was not the point.
This was a radical position, and it remains controversial. Architecture, after all, shapes the public realm. People who had no say in a building's design must nevertheless live with it, walk past it, see it from their windows. Should architects have the right to impose their philosophical convictions on an unwilling public? Or should buildings defer to popular taste, whatever that might be?
Brutalism's critics argued that the style represented a kind of architectural authoritarianism: elite designers forcing their austere vision on ordinary people who would have preferred something more conventional and comforting. The movement's defenders countered that most architecture throughout history has been imposed without public consultation, and that the real question was what values it embodied. Brutalism, at least, tried to serve egalitarian ideals rather than aristocratic display.
The debate continues. Every few years, another brutalist building faces demolition threats, and every few years, preservation campaigns mobilize to save it. The buildings themselves, whether loved or hated, refuse to be ignored. They were designed to make a statement, and they still do.
Perhaps that is the ultimate achievement of brutalism: creating architecture that cannot be overlooked, that demands a response, that forces people to consider what buildings are for and what they should look like. In an era of bland commercial development, where one shopping center or office tower looks much like another, brutalism's stubborn distinctiveness may be its greatest legacy.
The concrete stands. The arguments continue. The question of what we owe each other—in how we build and how we live—remains as urgent as ever.
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