Brutalism

Post-War British Architecture, Second Edition

Alexander Clement

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785004247
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

The term 'Brutalism' is used to describe a form of architecture that appeared, mainly in Europe, from around 1945-75. Uncomprimisingly modern, this trend in architecture was both striking and arresting and, perhaps like no other style before or since, aroused extremes of emotion and debate. Some regarded Brutalist buildings as monstrous soulless structures of concrete, steel and glass, whereas others saw the genre as a logical progression, having its own grace and balance. In this revised second edition, Alexander Clement continues the debate of Brutalism in post-war Britain to the modern day, studying a number of key buildings and developments in the fields of civic, educational, commercial, leisure, private and ecclesiastical architecture. With new and improved illustrations, fresh case studies and profiles of the most influential architects, this new edition affords greater attention to iconic buildings and structures. Now that the age of Brutalism is a generation behind us, it is possible to view the movement with a degree of rational reappraisal, study how the style evolved and gauge its effect on Britain's urban landscape. This book will be of interest to architecture students, design students and anyone interested in post-war architecture. Fully illustrated with 160 colour and 4 black & white photographs.

Chapter 1

Historical Context

To understand fully the development of Brutalism in Britain, we must first look at the genesis of Modernist architecture in the twentieth century. Probably the single most significant influential force in the development of Modernist design and architecture was the Industrial Revolution. This not only provided new materials and construction methods but also heralded a new age, the machine age, and a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

As 1900 approached, there was a groundswell of interest, particularly in Europe, in cultivating a style of design and architecture which embraced the spirit of the age. Many practitioners felt that the best way to find this style would be to break completely with tradition, to move away from historicist ornamentation. To the growing army of ‘modernists’, the notion of dressing up a factory or an office block to look like a Greek temple or Venetian Renaissance palazzo was an absurdity.

Beginnings

Approaches to this problem of style varied dramatically in the early years of the twentieth century and it was not for over two decades that something resembling a cohesive Modern Movement emerged. In Spain Antoni Gaudi explored organic forms in a uniquely Expressionistic way. Organic forms were also prominent in France around the turn of the century, but applied differently in the Art Nouveau style, exemplified by the work of Victor Horta and Hector Guimard. But to some practitioners the work of Horta and his ilk was considered too ostentatious and dependent on ornamentation. A signal to an alternative direction in architecture came in the work of Auguste Perret from around 1905 onwards, who used reinforced concrete structures which were entirely visible, reducing historical ornament to a minimum so that the exterior could reflect the inner structure rather than hiding it.

This notion of stripping away ornament to allow the structure of a building to be seen and, indeed, celebrated, became a core theme among architects throughout Europe by the 1920s. In Germany the designer Peter Behrens espoused the notion of finding beauty in objects that reflected their function without unnecessary embellishment. This sense of design integrity was initially inspired by the British Arts and Crafts Movement and the teachings of William Morris. Behrens’s most celebrated work was produced as architect and consultant for the A.E.G. Company, for whom he designed the Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909) which embodied his philosophy of form following function.

Between the wars Germany was a hotbed of avant-gardism, fuelled by the liberal Weimar Republic, which meant that new concepts of style in design and architecture were allowed to flourish. One particular nerve centre for such work was the Bauhaus design school, founded in 1919, when the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts merged. The School’s new director Walter Gropius reinvigorated the institution, designing its new buildings and recruiting a new wave of faculty tutors, including László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who were all to become leading lights of the Modern Movement.

LE CORBUSIER

The French architect and designer Le Corbusier is regarded as one of the fathers of Modernism and is arguably the father of Brutalism. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in 1887 at the French-Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he took his pseudonym from a maternal ancestor Le Corbesier which he modified into Le Corbusier, suggesting crow-like qualities, which he used in his early writings and later as architect and town planner. He studied under Charles l’Eplattenier at the local art school and it was this teacher who persuaded him to abandon painting and take up architecture.

Jeanneret toured Europe in the early 1900s, coming into contact with designers such as Josef Hoffman, Frantz Jourdain and Eugene Grasset, the last of whom introduced him to the Perret brothers. In 1908–09 Jeanneret worked at the Atelier Perret, learning about the principles of reinforced concrete which the brothers had begun to use extensively in their designs. Through this period he began to leave behind the organic formalism of his art-school days and develop theories about architecture which leant strongly towards functionalism. Also of influence was a period in the office of the German industrial designer Peter Behrens, but his journey into Asia Minor and Greece in 1911 brought him in contact with architecture that had a simple geometry and which, with its pale, stuccoed facades, reflected the dazzling light of the region. He also found in the Parthenon at Athens a purity of form and spirit that would greatly influence his later work.

The two key elements that Le Corbusier brought to his own work over the next ten years or so were the ‘Dom-ino’ system and his ‘five points’ of new architecture, both of which would permeate his work through to the post-war period. The Dom-ino system (derived from the Latin Domus meaning house and a contraction of innovation) was designed to allow modular dwellings to be simply built and expanded and was based on three floor slabs supported on six columns, with stairs attached at one end to give access to each floor. This led towards his developing the five points of new architecture, which Le Corbusier held as the basic principles of building in the modern age, a thesis that he wrote in 1925 and published in 1927. They were:

Pilotis, raising the main structure above the ground supported by narrow columns;

Free facade, setting no restriction on the exterior surfaces;

Free plan, the structure allowing complete freedom from interior supporting walls;

Ribbon windows, which would provide uninterrupted views from inside; n Roof garden, creating a usable exterior space to replace the ground taken up by the building’s footprint.

Regarded as the archetypal International Style villa, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy in France, 1931, encapsulated the architect’s ‘five points’ of modern architecture.

The two buildings which exemplified these theories and gave life to Le Corbusier’s imagination were his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau of 1925, built for the Paris Exposition of the same year, and the Villa Savoye of 1931. The latter, which still stands, was built at Poissy near Paris and has come to symbolize the International Style and the first phase of truly modern architecture.

In the immediate post-war period Le Corbusier’s architecture took a new direction aesthetically, although it still embodied the principles developed during the previous twenty-five years. The first flowering of this new style came in the form of a project he was commissioned to build in Marseille as part of a scheme to address an acute housing shortage at the time. The Unité d’Habitation (1947–52) was a study in modular housing as well as social engineering with its combination of dwellings, shops and recreational facilities. But aesthetically it was a departure from the stuccoed purity of his pre-war houses. Here the concrete structure was left unadorned and rough-cast, the massing of volumes was heavy, chunky and brutal. It was, one might argue, the birth of Brutalism. The other key structures at this time were the Jaoul houses at Neiully-sur-Seine (1951–55), with the combination of brick and béton brut concrete in distinctive arched forms, which would resonate throughout British Brutalism in the coming decades. Structures that followed, including his monastery at La Tourette and his scheme for the parliament buildings at Chandigarh in India, confirmed the new direction in modern architecture that would influence the pioneers of Brutalism in Britain and elsewhere.

The International Style

What developed in Europe, almost independently, was a new style of architecture which eschewed ornament and embraced the machine age, using materials such as steel, glass and concrete in new ways and setting aside the conventions of the past. Modernist buildings had completely free plans often with no internal load-bearing walls, which also allowed for large expanses of glass, cantilevered floors, smooth blank exterior elevations and flat roofs, which could house terraces and sun decks.

Much of the work of architects such as Gropius in Germany, Le Corbusier in France and J.J.P. Oud in Holland seemed to coincide stylistically and philosophically in the 1920s. This new wave became known as the International Style, after an exhibition of the same name organized by Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1932. The exhibition catalogue sought to group examples of modern architecture of the day stylistically, although it was later criticized for omitting examples that did not conform to their criteria. What the exhibition achieved, however, was a holistic appreciation of the new style, identifying a common language between architects all over the world.

Two other events should also be identified as decisive to the development of this new architectural vocabulary: the Weissenhoff Siedlung exhibition in Stuttgart, 1927, and the formation of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the following year.

The Weissenhoff estate comprised a collection of twenty-one buildings which formed the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition of 1927. Organized and administrated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition brought together sixteen architects from Germany, Holland and France to produce individual houses and apartment dwellings for working-class people. What is significant about the exhibition is the congruous style of the buildings: free plans, ribbon windows, pilotis, interlocking spaces and rendered exteriors devoid of historical ornamentation. At Weissenhoff, the work of European architects to develop a new style solidified, although a great deal still had to be done to reconcile economic and cultural barriers.

A further step towards a cohesive Modern Movement in architecture came in 1928 with the formation of the CIAM. The inaugural meeting was organized by Le Corbusier at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland and included twenty-eight European architects. The group not only identified the principles of the movement but sought also to act as a political collective, using urban planning to improve the world.

Trends in North America

It is important also to look at the development of modern architecture in North America, which was to have a direct impact on what would happen in Britain after the Second World War. Like Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, America developed the materials and the technology to produce truly modern buildings but lacked the political will, cultural need or cohesive avant-garde to advance with a new vocabulary as happened in Europe. Initially, the new materials and technologies were used to solve the problems of space in crowded urban centres by extending upwards. While these technically modern buildings pushed the boundaries of engineering and began changing the skylines of cities such as Chicago and New York, the first examples were clad in traditional materials and historical ornament.

One North American architect did break from these traditions, although not in quite the same way as his European contemporaries. Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) took vernacular architecture and reinterpreted it in an increasingly stylized way. Indeed, much of his work during the early 1900s had more in common with that of the Vienna Secession (and particularly with interior detail) and with Charles Rennie Mackintosh than with the International Style. In spite of this, though, Wright’s work was noticed from Europe and influenced both Oud and Gropius. Through the inter-war period Wright brought to his projects a monumentality of style which would later play a key role in the development of Brutalism.

Trends in Britain

The British architectural scene between 1900 and 1930 was, by contrast, resoundingly historicist. Like North America, Britain enjoyed a period of complacency while Victoria’s empire remained pre-eminent, which meant that there was no cultural or political impetus to fuel the development of a new style in architecture, but, as in America, materials and techniques did develop and so under the traditional skin of many late nineteenth-century buildings there was something decidedly modern going on.

Reinforced concrete can be seen as early as 1897 at Weavers Mill in Swansea, designed by the French émigré Louis Gustave Mouchel. Steel structures emerged in the early 1900s, perhaps the most celebrated example being Daniel Burnham’s building for the Selfridge department store on Oxford Street in London, of 1910. Here the essentially Neo-classical facade covered a ground-breaking structure which allowed for large expanses of glass on the front elevation.

Arguably the first assuredly modern building in Britain was New Ways in Northampton (1925). The house was commissioned by the industrial modeller W.J. Bassett-Lowke and designed by Peter Behrens. That a foremost Continental designer worked in the heart of steadfastly traditional England is not entirely surprising when Bassett-Lowke’s previous house is considered; it was remodelled at Derngate by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who had met Behrens through the Vienna Secession in the early 1900s. Indeed, the client transferred much of the interior detail from Derngate to New Ways, but it was with the exterior that Behrens sewed the first seeds of Modernism in England with the flat rendered brick surface, cantilevered door canopy and the arrangement of windows. Intersecting the front elevation is a vertical, V-profile-glazed projection accenting the central staircase from the first to the second storey, surmounted with black concrete fins which run along the whole roof.

The Scottish architect Thomas Smith Tait developed his modern architectural style with Le Chateau in 1927, built as part of a series of houses for workers and managers of the Crittall window company at Silver End in Essex. Here the proportions were played with to give a more Continental design, with white rendered brickwork and horizontal metal windows – fabricated, of course, by Crittall. The appearance of the house fell into the pattern of foreign examples and would not have seemed out of place at the Weissenhoff Siedlung. Also part of the Silver End development was a terrace of smaller houses showing a clear influence from Behrens’s New Ways with V-shaped window projections. Tait, as part of Sir John Burnet Partners, had seen first-hand the exciting developments in France and The Netherlands and injected this new vocabulary into the Crittall buildings, which Henry Russell Hitchcock regarded as comparing favourably with the best examples of Modernism on the Continent.

But Silver End was just a tentative step towards a Modern Movement which was really only surface deep. One of Tait’s partners in the project, Frederick McManus, confessed his reservations in a letter to the architectural historian Jeremy Gould in 1972, ‘I worked enthusiastically on these houses but subsequently realized they were really the traditional house styled in the manner of the new architecture that was just beginning to emerge on the continent…’.

With the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition of 1928 this new direction in architectu...