Brutalism

Definition

Stub note: This page was created during the ingest of Internal disconnect (Marinic 2018) and requires fuller treatment as more sources on Brutalism and late modernism are ingested.

Brutalism names the postwar architectural current of raw, exposed concrete (béton brut), monolithic mass, and expressed structure — here tracked at its interior and urban register, where the wiki's sources engage it. In Marinic's chapter, Brutalism is the aesthetic Portman's atrium hotels "embraced… by appropriating exterior spatial conditions and materials to create interior urban experiences": cast-in-place concrete, exposed structure, monumental circulation ramps and stairs, "rough concrete formed the backdrop for a dream-like indoor space." The style's cultural position is the chapter's analytical discovery: it was ambivalent — heroic to the sophisticated, alarming to the public. "Brutalist forms and spatial qualities alluded to utilitarian drainage easements, expressways, and social housing – places that were perceived negatively or akin to public works. For the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated, Portman interiors were sublime and avant-garde, but for many, these grandly scaled spaces appeared stark and alienating rather than welcoming and conventionally luxurious."

Glendinning & Muthesius supply the register's British housing record and the label's own genesis: New Brutalism "encompassed a wide range of ideas, often contradictory: on the one hand, a preference of rough surfaces of concrete and brick; on the other, an essentially backward-looking sociological approach" (p. 91), with Banham's subtitle question "Ethic or Aesthetic?" naming the ambivalence. Its public-housing anchors: the LCC 'Hards' ("puritan, uncompromising," p. 109), Park Hill as the critics' flagship ("an 'utterly uninhibited functionalism'" — Banham, quoted p. 91; a "dateless" appearance that unified the factions), and the later English Brutalist turn "a new love of brick, including the reuse of London Stocks" (p. 93). The register also documents Brutalism's media fate: by the late 1960s the Architectural Review joined the denunciation "even though this meant, in effect, condemning much of what this journal had stood for a decade or so earlier" (p. 106) — and the providers' afterthought: "Yet where we did attempt to build in a vandal-resistant way, we were subsequently accused of inhuman 'brutalism'!" (p. 327).

Brutalism's fortunes frame the chapter's tragedy: "the Brutalist spirit of the Renaissance Center has been unable to withstand the forces of time, trend, financial performance, and consumer preference," so that the interiors' "hard-edged Brutalism and urban characteristics… were further subdued" — circulation carpeted, concrete painted light gray, terracotta floors replaced with porcelain. Brutalism here is not a finished historical style but a living material regime whose interiors were the first casualties of the postmodern renovation wave: "his late modernist hotel-retail interiors were among the first to be adapted in the postmodern wave."

Key Thinkers

• Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius — the British housing record: New Brutalism's contradictory range, the LCC 'Hards', Park Hill as flagship, and the 'inhuman brutalism' afterthought (1994).
• John Portman — the style's interior-scale applier: Brutalist materials turned outside-in to build interior urban experiences (no page — see log).
• Gregory Marinic — the style's interior historian: Brutalist materiality as the ambivalent substance of the atrium hotels and the eroded "material memory" of the originals.

Related Concepts

• atrium-hotel — Brutalism's largest interior register: the concrete podium as the backdrop for "a dream-like indoor space."
• material-memory — what Brutalist materiality carries and loses: the unfinished concrete, the glazed terracotta, the exposed structure.
• modernism — Brutalism as late modernism's ethic of material truth, and the "postmodern wave" that first consumed it.
• sublime — the style's aesthetic register for its defenders: "monumental, austere, and sublime interior architecture."
• iconic-architecture — Brutalist megastructures as icons "too big to fail" whose Brutalism is precisely what renovation erases.
• the-duck — the counter-type in Venturi's taxonomy: Brutalist expression vs. the decorated shed.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Tower Block (Glendinning & Muthesius 1994) — the housing register and the label's history: "'Integrity' and a 'new ethic' were among the chief new catchwords" with Banham's "Ethic or Aesthetic?" question (p. 91); Park Hill as flagship and its "utterly uninhibited functionalism" (p. 91); the brick turn and 'YDG Mark I' roughness (pp. 93, 133); the Architectural Review's reversal (p. 106); and the providers' "inhuman 'brutalism'" complaint (p. 327).
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the founding source: Brutalist aesthetic appropriation ("exterior spatial conditions and materials to create interior urban experiences"), the public-works perception, the Westin's "dream-like indoor space" in rough concrete, RenCen's "impermeable bunker" berms, and the "Brutalist spirit" that could not withstand trend and consumer preference.

Open Questions

• Is Brutalism's "ambivalence" (sublime to the sophisticated, "akin to public works" to the public) intrinsic to the style's material honesty, or a function of class-coded reception? The chapter's phrase "for the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated" implies the latter.
• The Brutalist interiors were "among the first to be adapted in the postmodern wave" — is Brutalism's fate (carpeted, painted, marbleized) the clearest instance of the wiki's wider claim that interiors are the building's most rapidly consumed layer (see material-memory, obsolescence)?
• Does Brutalist interiority exist as a distinct category, or only as the exterior's inside-out projection (the chapter's "appropriating exterior spatial conditions and materials to create interior urban experiences")? Can Brutalism be designed from the interior outward?
• What separates Brutalist materiality from the "unfinished material that conveyed interior ambivalence" — is the ambivalence a property of concrete, or of the social meaning assigned to public works?