Brutalism Resurgent

Julia Gatley, Stuart King, Julia Gatley, Stuart King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317228271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Brutalism had its origins in béton brut – concrete in the raw – and thus in the post-war work of Le Corbusier. The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson used the term "New Brutalism" from 1953, claiming that if their house in Soho had been built, "it would have been the first exponent of the 'New Brutalism' in England". Reyner Banham famously gave the movement a series of characteristics, including the clear expression of a building's structure and services, and the honest use of materials in their "as-found" condition. The Smithsons and Banham promoted the New Brutalism as ethic rather than aesthetic, privileging truth to structure, materials and services and the gritty reality of the working classes over the concerns of the bourgeoisie. But Brutalist architecture changed as it was taken up by others, giving rise to more sculptural buildings flaunting their raw materials, including off-form concrete, often in conjunction with bold structural members. While Brutalism fell out of vogue in the 1980s, recent years have seen renewed admiration for it. This volume is consistent with this broader resurgence, presenting new scholarship on Brutalist architects and projects from Skopje to Sydney, and from Harvard to Haringey. It will appeal to readers interested in twentieth-century architecture, and modern and post-war heritage. This book was originally published as a special issue of Fabrications: the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand.

Introduction

In a recent exposition on Brutalism, “Troubles in Theory V: The Brutalist Moment(s),” Anthony Vidler concludes that the movement was both polymorphic and self-contradictory.¹ This is apparent in attempts to trace the origin and development of the term (often done with reference to its close relative, the New Brutalism); in its initial debt to Mies van der Rohe and its use of brick, compared with its much closer and longer association with late Le Corbusier and its use of concrete, particularly béton brut, or concrete in the raw; and in the words that British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham framed as a question: ethic or aesthetic?

Banham’s two texts, “The New Brutalism” of 1955 and The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? of 1966, remain essential points of reference on the subject.² From the outset, he suggested dual roots, in Jean Dubuffet’s art brut and in Le Corbusier’s béton brut.³ He focused particular attention on the work of young London architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who two years earlier had claimed that if their house in Soho had been built, “it would have been the first exponent of the ‘New Brutalism’ in England”.⁴ Through both Banham’s writing and the Smithsons’ own, the term remained most closely linked to them and their work. Georges Candilis even suggested that it had emerged as a pun on Peter Smithson’s nickname Brutus, combined with the “Al” of Alison. But challenging the link, it was also claimed that Hans Asplund, son of Gunnar, had coined “Neo-Brutalist” in 1949 or 1950 – with the difference between “Neo” and “New” attracting further debate.⁵

For Banham, the word “New” positioned the movement as a counterpoint to the Architectural Review’s “New Empiricism,” and thus as a counterpoint to that which could be seen as nice, safe or pretty.⁶ He elaborated by giving the New Brutalism a series of characteristics: a formal legibility of plan (subsequently, memorability as an “image”); the clear expression of a building’s structure; and the honest use of materials in their “as-found” condition.⁷ He and the Smithsons promoted it as ethic rather than aesthetic, privileging truth to structure, materials and services and the gritty reality of the working classes over the concerns of the bourgeoisie. The development of the movement coincided with postwar rebuilding and the architectural language was therefore used in a range of publicly funded building types – housing, schools, universities, hospitals – all of which supported the association with the political left.

But the aesthetic was also increasingly distinctive, and the term “Brutalism” soon referred predominantly to concrete buildings, often with chunky structural members and raw surfaces and textures, including, but not limited to, off-form concrete. Brutalist landmarks abounded. British examples include the Smithsons’ own Robin Hood Gardens (1964–70), Bloomsbury’s Brunswick Centre (1960–70), Norfolk’s University of East Anglia (1961–66) and Sheffield’s Park Hill Housing (1957–60). It is these and their contemporaries that writer and film-maker Jonathan Meades identifies in his 2014 documentary, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness, as “an offensive din to many ears, but concrete poetry to mine,” adding that one person’s “concrete monstrosity” is another’s “architecture with guts”: “an architecture which shunned sweet-natured niceness.”⁸

Beyond Britain’s shores, Le Corbusier worked extensively in off-form concrete from the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1947–52) through to his death in 1965. This work was very influential internationally, with Chandigarh additionally demonstrating the adaptation of the language in an Eastern context. In some countries, direct links back to the Swiss-French progenitor can be traced, such as in Japan, with Kunio Maekawa having worked in Corb’s Paris office before establishing his own practice in Tokyo and influencing the next generation of architects, notably Kenzo Tange, who capitalised on concrete’s sculptural potential and plasticity and inspired many more.

Brutalism has attracted increased scholarly attention in the past several years. There has been a spate of conferences and journals teasing out aspects of it: a 2011 issue of October; a 2013 issue of Clog; a 2014 symposium titled “The Open Hand: A Call for Civic Debate” at AUT University, Auckland; a session on Brutalism outside of the United Kingdom at the 2014 European Architectural History Network (EAHN) conference in Turin; and a session on Brutalism in the Americas at the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference in Chicago. Of books, Elain Harwood’s recent Space, Hope, and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975 (2015), provides a substantial catalogue of not only English Brutalism but of that country’s late modern architecture more generally, and shows the commitment of English Heritage, now Historic England, to the reassessment of its extant twentieth-century buildings.⁹ Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism also warrants mention, for demonstrating interest and enthusiasm beyond architects, academics and heritage preservationists, and for looking beyond the “failures” and crediting the societies that produced modernism in general and Brutalism in particular for the ideas and ambition that made such projects possible.¹⁰

The current volume was originally published as an issue of Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (vol. 25, no. 2, June 2015). With the issue, we aimed to make a contribution to the recent scholarship on Brutalism by considering architects, buildings, critics and texts that influenced or were influenced by or associated with it. What can be said of the relationship between the New Brutalism and Brutalism? Can ethics be separated from aesthetics? To what extent did the writings and ideas of Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham inform architectural developments in other places? How were Brutalist or New Brutalist buildings received at the time of completion? How have they fared since, and to what extent are they being (or should they be) heritage listed today?

The volume comprises five essays. They address related themes and issues, and they make use of some of the same key sources. However, each has set its own parameters for understanding the terms “New Brutalism” and “Brutalism”. In editing the volume, we have left these explanations in place within each essay, rather than trying to establish one theoretical grounding here in the introduction for the book as a whole, to ensure the completeness of each of the texts, as intended by their authors.

The volume opens with Mirjana Lozanovska and “Brutalism, Metabolism and its American Parallel: Encounters in Skopje and in the Architecture of Georgi Konstantinovski”. Lozanovska considers international exchanges, both within and beyond Europe, and their lasting impact on the architecture of Skopje. Building on an earlier article on Kenzo Tange’s contribution to the city’s built fabric, she focuses here on the work of local architect, Georgi Konstantinovski. She pursues two of his key projects, the Skopje Archive Building (1966) and the “Goçe Delčev” Student Dormitory (1969), completed after he had undertaken a Masters program at Yale University and worked in I. M. Pei’s New York office. Within the international exchanges, Lozanovska searches for evidence of Reyner Banham’s New Brutalist concern with “image” and the movement’s privileging of ethics over aesthetics. She concludes that Skopje’s Brutalist buildings are serious – defiant, even – demonstrating “the desire for modernity” and “a protest-type stance against insignificance”.

Tange also features in the second essay, Philip Goad’s “Bringing it All Home: Robin Boyd and Australia’s Embrace of Brutalism, 1955–71”. Goad explores Brutalism’s arrival in Australia. He finds regional diversity, impacted by geographic isolation, Commonwealth ties, European émigré architects, the overseas experiences of young Australian architects and changing attitudes towards the Australian landscape and Australian identity. He shows that Robin Boyd played a crucial role as both an architect and a commentator, with key texts including Kenzo Tange (1962), New Directions in Japanese Architecture (1968) and articles in the Architectural Review, among them, “The Sad End of New Brutalism” (July 1967). Crucial, too, were large-scale tertiary building projects nationwide and monumental new public buildings in Canberra, which turned the federal capital into a “showpiece of Brutalist architecture, but of a distinctly Antipodean strain.”

The third essay, Paul Walker and Antony Moulis’ “Finding Brutalism in the Architecture of John Andrews”, is premised on the fact that John Andrews’ work has often been described as Brutalist, but is not, in fact, linked to the English scene of the 1950s – the Smithsons, Banham, et al. Rather, it developed out of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and its late focus on monumentality. To tease out this apparent contradiction, Walker and Moulis explore the relationship between Andrews’ work and the wider architectural culture and context of the 1960s and 1970s. This opens up links between Andrews and José Luis Sert on the one hand, and between Andrews and James Stirling on the other. Walker and Moulis trace both threads back to “the late work of Le Corbusier, its poetic engagement with ordinary building practices, and its ambitions for the (re)establishment of a humanist culture.”

In a more specific Australian case study, “Aesthetics as a Practical Ethic: Situating the Brutalist Architecture of the Sirius Apartments, 1975–80”, Russell Rodrigo examines the deployment of the Brutalist language in the design of a New South Wales Housing Commission block of flats. Interviews with the building’s architect, Tao Gofers, inform Rodrigo’s reading of it. Gofers insists that he was not following overseas protagonists or their well-known precedent Brutalist projects. Rather, the design demonstrates how pervasive the Brutalist language had become by the mid–1970s, when he designed it. Rodrigo argues that the honest expression of structure, materials and function was a pragmatic or practical response to a public housing brief. Nonetheless, the Sirius Apartments exhibit a powerful image. For Rodrigo, it is an image of a practical ethic and an egalitarian ideal. He also addresses changing attitudes towards the Sirius Apartments, identifying a shift from early complaints of ugliness to an increasing appreciation of the project’s image and its power as a symbol of its time.

In the final essay, ““Group-cum-Brutalism”? Highgate Spinney, London, 1964–66”, Julia Gatley examines a British building with New Zealand connections. Highgate Spinney is a five-storey block of thirty flats in the north London suburb of Crouch End. It was designed by Howard & Rotherham and was published in Italy in 1968, but is today little known. The essay examines the partnership of Howard & Rotherham, comprising French-born John Howard (1930–68) and New Zealand-born Bruce Rotherham (1926–2004). It also considers the design of Highgate Spinney. It reveals interactions between Bruce Rotherham and James Gowan, who was in partnership with James Stirling from 1956 to 1963. These provide grounds for considering buildings by Stirling & Gowan, particularly the Flats at Ham Common and Preston Housing, as points of reference and comparison for the design of Highgate Spinney.

This is the first issue of Fabrications to have been re-published as a Special Issue Book. We thank Routledge for their interest in the journal and look forward to working with them again, to republish and thus give broader readership to other issues of Fabrications and some of the articles published within it. Thanks also go to those who refereed the articles submitted for consideration for the Brutalism issue. Many of them made detailed comments and suggestions for the authors to consider. This input, in terms of both time and expertise, is much appreciated.

Julia Gatley and Stuart King, Co-editors

January 2016

NOTES

1. Anthony Vidler, “Troubles in Theory V: The Brutalist Moment(s)”, Architectural Review 235, no. 1404 (February 2014): 96–101. See also Anthony Vidler, “Another Brick in the Wall,” October 136 (Spring 2011): 105–32.

2. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, Architectural Review 11...