Concrete Concept: Brutalist buildings around the world

by Christopher Beanland

funny kind of love; desire filtered through wonder and disgust.

piazzas,

History is reliant on a million chances; on breeding, war, natural disaster, the theories and drawings of a few that filter miraculously down to the many.

The best people pushed the style to the extremes, gave the forces of reaction the middle finger, waved magic wands, and built overblown megastructures

Concrete was cheap, but it could be stretched into crazy shapes.

French for raw concrete – ‘beton brut’.

No pussy-footing. This lot built like they meant it. They had confidence; society put its trust in them – well, the flabby chaps in charge did, the public didn’t get a say.

these chunks of engineering all look like they do because they were meant to stand up to the city, to answer back to it, to challenge it: not to hammer the human.

or at least came with computers masquerading as phones rather than aeroplanes masquerading as cars.

Glasgow reimagined itself in the post-war years in surreal, flamboyant style just like Newcastle and New Haven and Belgrade.

priapic

Brutalism was the visual language of a post-war

welfare state on which the sun is setting – of schools, higher education, libraries, hospitals, housing estates, playgrounds, city halls.

Brutalist buildings pay little heed to history, seldom tip their caps to local tradition.

it’s a book about a vision of the future from the past.

The style was globalised:

could also be deployed on a huge scale.

brutalism could be anonymous too.

They slotted perfectly into an urbanised late 20th-century landscape of cars and concrete.

Art that begets art: now there’s a thing.

The clichés of Kraftwerk, crack, dole and despair aren’t the whole story.

Newspapers, TV and academics rallied to trash the modernist project.

nipper.

psychologists had chosen brutalism as a venue to discuss the mind

this seemed proof that concrete could be forgiving as w...

Perhaps these buildings were too utopian, too avant garde.

Life is – or should be – lived with fiery passion, an intensity that befits its brevity and ultimate road to nowhere.

These buildings are (slowly) being rediscovered:

Neo-brutalist buildings are going up:

nostalgia is the preserve of a culture with something missing.

Compromise is useful. But no one writes books about it.

galleries and museums are today’s cathedrals.

Those brutalist buildings were meant to impress. They didn’t always oppress. Why brutalism? Why not.

architect Hans Asplund.

Michael Ventris, the decoder of Linear B (an ancient script seen as one of the great linguistic riddles).

finished in 1954, derives from Mies van der Rohe and has little in common with subsequent buildings that

were deemed brutalist.

Exposed concrete, left rough and unfinished, would become the defining trait of brutalism.

pacific.

the French, to whom the pun was clear, have been no more appreciative of

their brutalist buildings than the English.

in spirit if not style, have affinities with the primitivist tendency of the arts and crafts.

Le Corbusier never applied the word brutalist to his own work.

Brutalism is the decor of dystopian films, literature and comics, just as gothic is for horror.

roots in expressionism, the jagged, often counter-intuitive, mostly brick idiom

The boundary between architecture and sculpture, which Le Corbusier had broached, was now comprehensively trampled.

Their work defines brutalism.

accretive, ostentatious, hyperbolic in its asymmetries and protracted voids, composed of parts that do not connect or are in a fragmentary state, dramatically vertiginous, geometrically farouche, extravagantly cantilevered, discomfiting, aggressive (in so far as an inanimate object can be

aggressive). There is no desire to please with prettine...

The reaction demanded is t...