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I belong to a Facebook group called The Brutalism Appreciation Society; it has 64,000 members. Every day, they post photos of gorgeous concrete slabs and stairwells and walkways, all the crumbling, soaring futurist visions of socialist utopia from the 1960s, 70s and 80s from all over the world. The members love the architecture that everybody still seems to hate: the brooding blocky masses of university libraries, the Jetsons car parks awaiting demolition, the terrifying public housing towers between overpasses, the empty communist hotels.
And we are far from alone. A movement to recognize and preserve this architecture is building powerfully – especially in Britain, where town councils don’t seem to hesitate to pull down concrete buildings they don’t like, regardless of their architectural originality and ambition.
Perhaps as part of this movement, art book publisher Phaidon released last fall a massive – one can’t help but say brutally massive – Atlas of Brutalist Architecture, with 560 pages of black-and-white photographs of geometric buildings from around the world.
Each photo is annotated with a descriptive history and a code indicating whether the building is still in use, in good condition, demolished or given heritage status. It contains early examples of the forbidding style – a German hat factory from 1923 by architect Eric Mendelsohn, for example – and very recent ones that purists may not consider part of the golden age of Brutalism (the 2013 Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, by Saunders Architecture).
The book’s introduction is a history of the movement. The origins of the name Brutalism are disputed: Béton brut, raw concrete, was the favourite material of Le Corbusier, but there were also Swedish architects in the 1940s who used the term Nybrutalism (new brutalism), and then the British critic Reyner Banham, um, concretized the term in his 1955 essay The New Brutalism, in which he stressed the valuation of building materials “as found” (i.e. without finishing).
I got this expensive book ($195 from the publishers) as a birthday present and I have been spending hours poring over these fantastical structures. I get as much pleasure from these designs as I do from any art. What is it exactly that makes Brutalism – the poster child for the soulless and inhuman, the archetype of impractical and utopian social scheming – so inspiring to me and to the legion of revivalists buying this book?
Well, there is something to be said for artistic radicalism of any kind. The postwar period, with its urgent need for housing projects and public buildings, permitted the construction of elaborate geometric sculptures that didn’t look like any previous architecture. It was a time of radical imagining, a time when the past looked awful. Who would want an architecture respectful of tradition when tradition had led to the death camps and Hiroshima? Only the future held promise of improvement.
Optical art was on painters’ canvases at the time. The geometries of mathematics looked so pure and clean and forward looking; geometrical patterns spoke of computers, not nationalism. Some of these buildings are so wild, so weird – the book’s introduction refers to an acknowledged spirit of je-m’en-foutisme among architects; the willful imposition of the ugly and unpopular in the name of experimentation – that they can only be called psychedelic.
But there’s also their complex harmonies, all their shifting planes and levels and asymmetries and modules and unexpected open spaces. For me there is a personal connection as well: the university buildings I grew up around, their smell of cloister and grown-ups.
In fact, one of my childhood buildings is in this book: the Killam Memorial Library at Halifax’s Dalhousie University (1971), where my father briefly had an office. It looks, from the outside, like a windowless bunker – a flak tower or a techno-medieval keep. But I remember my father’s excitement and pride in the new building. Light came from the glass-walled inner courtyard, he liked to explain, and there was a stream going through it, and common areas with sofas all along those windows, and so on. It was a vast new amenity. It was progress.
(There are a few other Canadian examples in the book, including the almost unbelievably ugly Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. Strangely, Robarts Library in Toronto – surely one of the weirdest libraries in the world – did not make the cut.)
The ambition of Brutalism was often socialistic. The vertical housing complexes reflected a belief in classless and Communitarian societies. Some of those went on to become crime-ridden, unmaintained failures – “The location has become stigmatized,” the book’s editors say in an occasional euphemistic admission of this – and others, such as Habitat 67 in Montreal, evolved to become chic and expensive, home to elites rather than to happy labourers.
I want all of these ambitious forms – whether failed or successful – to be given historical status and protected, as we will never have an architectural period like this again. And I love abstraction and minimalism and futurism and techno and looking at black-and white pictures of shadows on concrete.