Brutalism doesn’t sound very friendly to the general public, but it is an established and well-known term in the history of 20th century architecture. It was coined in the 1950s and 1960s for buildings made of exposed concrete, which could be smooth or clad with patterns. Later, architecture in which the visibility of the building material became a stylistic feature was classified as Brutalism. What was previously intended to remain invisible was placed on the façade surfaces in order to break up the compact effect of a building: pipes, manifest lines, unclad walls, a lot of unadorned concrete and the spatial interplay of the components thus entered the urban space – all in all not a very delicate architectural style, as the name Brutalism suggests.
Brutalism doesn’t sound very friendly to the general public, but it is an established and well-known term in the history of 20th century architecture. It was coined in the 1950s and 1960s for buildings made of exposed concrete, which could be smooth or clad with patterns. Later, architecture in which the visibility of the building material became a stylistic feature was classified as Brutalism.
What was previously supposed to remain invisible was placed on the façade surfaces in order to break up the compact effect of a building: pipes, manifest lines, unclad walls, a lot of unadorned concrete and the spatial interplay of the components thus appeared in the urban space – all in all, not a very delicate architectural style, as the name Brutalism suggests. Here we reveal which architects played a decisive role in the style and created icons with their buildings.
The Swedish architect Hans Asplund was the first to coin the term Brutalism. Later, English architects adopted it and spread the term Brutalism, which they derived from “Béton brut” (exposed concrete). In Great Britain, the architect couple Alison and Peter Smithson played a pioneering role. As early as 1953, they described their architecture as examples of Brutalism. The author and theorist Reyner Banham defined the architectural style in 1955 in his essay “The New Brutalism” in the magazine Architectural Review, thereby sparking a lively international debate.
Brutalism was linked to the economic and material, but especially also to the mental and psychological situation of the post-war period. As a result, it became an international phenomenon on the one hand, while reacting to local conditions on the other. In addition to concrete, metal, brick and stone were also used as building materials.
Brutalism spread to all continents in the 1960s and remained in vogue until the 1980s. Its proponents believed that modern industrialized countries needed powerful, raw and honest architecture. In the 1990s, the architecture scene abandoned this path and brutalism was now even considered aesthetic vandalism. Urbanists and architects were now once again working on the renaissance of the civic city. Brutalist architecture was hardly maintained and concrete is very susceptible to dirt, algae growth and decay. The ravages of time were always clearly visible on the Brutalist icons and often made them unattractive in the cityscape.
Although architectural critics rediscovered and appreciated Brutalism as an aesthetic concept in the early 21st century, many of its buildings are still under threat of demolition today. Concrete and its use as a building material is currently considered a building and environmental sin – there is talk of “gray energy” in this context. Nevertheless, experts are campaigning for Brutalism. In 2018, the New York MoMA presented the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980”, making the previously controversial architecture worthy of a museum. (More about the MoMA exhibition in the video).
We can find examples of Brutalism in architecture everywhere. Le Corbusier’s “Unité d’Habitation” in Marseille was one of the first significant buildings in this style. The apartment block was built between 1946 and 1952 as a residential project with room types for individual or communal living arrangements.
Measuring 138 meters along its longitudinal axis and built over 18 storeys, Le Corbusier’s first work in this area offers 330 residential units and many social islands on the roof terraces. The serial spatial structure enabled efficient planning and structural implementation and was something of a precursor to the prefabricated building in a reinforced concrete skeleton.
High-rise towers are very prominent in the cityscape. One successful example of well-designed vertical concrete architecture is the “Torre Velasca” in Milan by the BBPR architects’ collective, which has been a listed building since 2011. The plans for it were based on ideas from the early 1950s. In 1956 and 1957, the 106-metre-high tower was erected in just 292 days.
Its architecture anticipates what is known today as “mixed use” or “hybrid architecture”: The lower 18 floors house business premises and offices, while the upper floors of the mushroom-shaped, cantilevered transverse structure contain apartments with a great view over Milan.
The 81-metre-high “Torres Blancas” in Madrid, designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza in 1961, is also used in this way. This tower, which was commissioned by the daring client Juan Huarte as an avant-garde experiment, is one of the most complicated and innovative reinforced concrete constructions of the 1960s. Incidentally, the architect himself lived in the tower until his death.
In Great Britain, London-based architects Alison and Peter Smithson were among the pioneers of Brutalism. Their “Economist Building”, which they worked on from 1960, was the editorial building of the British business newspaper The Economist. With its compact design and exposed concrete façade, it is considered a pioneering example of Brutalist design principles. In addition to administrative buildings, the Smithsons were also active in the field of social housing.
“Robin Hood Gardens” is the name of their London housing estate, which was built at the same time and completed in 1972. Long concrete blocks, wide walkways and green spaces characterize the complex, which consists of two buildings with seven and ten storeys respectively. The western block was demolished in 2017 due to its poor condition. Part of it was preserved by the Victoria & Albert Museum and presented in a documentary at the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice to show the world the Smithsons’ vision for a better urban life.
Cultural buildings were also given their scaffolding and shell with a large proportion of concrete. The main library building of the University of California in San Diego, the so-called “Geisel Library”, is one of the well-known brutalist examples. It was designed by William Pereira. Its sculptural design is a symbiosis of brutalism and futurism: in combination with the design of the individual floors, the arches of the building were intended to look like hands holding up a stack of books.
In London, the National Royal Theater, built between 1967 and 1976 according to plans by Denys Lasdun, is an interesting example of a cultural building in the Brutalist style. A great deal of exposed concrete was used here, which made the architecture the subject of much public debate. Prince Charles said that the building reminded him of a nuclear power station. The National Royal Theatre was voted one of the ten most loved and ten most hated buildings in the city by the people of London.
Church construction and exposed concrete also go well together: Gottfried Böhm and Fritz Wotruba have proven this. Böhm, known for his expressive concrete architecture in expressive cubature, created one of the largest pilgrimage churches in the archdiocese of Cologne with the Neviges pilgrimage cathedral in North Rhine-Westphalia from 1966 to 1968. He designed a suspended concrete structure in which the mutually supporting wall and ceiling elements form a single unit. From the outside, the sacred building appears as a cubist construction with a closed surface in exposed concrete.
The Viennese sculptor and set designer Fritz Wotruba designed a church building made of concrete blocks, while the architect Fritz Gerhard Mayr drew up the construction plans. The Roman Catholic church “Zur Heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit” in the south of Vienna was built from August 1974 to October 1976. It consists of 152 unclad concrete blocks, the tallest of which measures 13.10 meters. The light falls through simple panes of glass inserted into the irregular spaces between the blocks, resulting in overlapping beams of light.
Research buildings and experimental architecture have a lot of potential in common. In Berlin Lichterfelde, for example, there is the so-called “Mäusebunker”, a former animal laboratory of the Charité hospital. It was designed by architects Gerd Hänska and Kurt Schmersow in the early 1970s. The building was completed in 1981. The body of the building consists of an elongated and tilted truncated pyramid, the surface of which is made entirely of exposed concrete. Blue-painted ventilation pipes penetrate the façade surface from the inside – they almost look like gun barrels.
The façade openings on the long sides are designed as triangular window elements whose tetrahedrons also protrude from the façade plane. The “Mäusebunker” was actually supposed to be demolished, but last winter, with the support of the Berlin cultural scene, it was declared a model project of the State Monuments Office and will be preserved.
Would you like another history of style? When we think of Cubism today, the names of famous painters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque or highly esteemed sculptors such as Alexander Archipenko and Henri Laurens spring to mind. But the art movement also had a central influence on architecture.
