BRUTALISM

BRUTALISM Until a very recent spur in popularity, the architectural style known as Brutalism suffered a complete fall out of favour similar to that which ornament suffered at the hands of Modernism. Characterised by massive, mainly concrete structures, the reception of Brutalism has been tainted by the unfortunate translation of the French term for raw concrete –béton brut – to an ‘ism’ with a prefix associated with violence and aggression. From a starting point of this unfortunate transliteration, Brutalism flourished as the civic style of post-Second World War rebuilding and the reintroduction of monumentality to architecture. Brutalism’s characteristics of concrete and massive shapes make this style easily distinguishable and therefore the subject of much debate among architecture circles and laypeople alike.

As a branch of Modernism, Brutalism harnessed the desire for honest materiality in architecture, expressed through the “as found”36 quality of concrete formed using wooden formwork. Such attention to surface is the topic of Ben Pell’s book on examining the re-emergence of this type of ornamentation in The Articulate Surface. 37 In contemporary parlance, ‘surface’ has been used as a more benign term to describe ornament, almost certainly due to the negative connotations associated with ornament due to Modernism.

BRUTALISM

36 Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism," October 136, no. Spring (2011). Reprint of original essay in December 1955 edition of Architectural Review 37 Ben Pell, The Articulate Surface: Ornament and Technology in Contemporary Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010).

Figure 13. Paul Rudolph. Yale Art & Architecture Building. 1963.

Pell analyses how different technological developments have facilitated the return of surface – and by extension ornament –to favour in architecture, especially in creating eye-catching facades. Pell attributes this rise in popularity to technological developments that enable architects to create novel and unique surfaces from new and existing materials. These surfaces then become the identity of the buildings they encase, adding to the vernacular of ornamental recognition. Such innovation carries on from the era of Parametricism which enabled the realisation of Gehry’s and Hadid’s organic, flowing, folding shapes. Yet Pell acknowledges that such innovative textures are not peculiar to this current digital era, but probably had some grounding in the attention to and fixation on material qualities during Modernism. Pell references the Brutalist work of Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art & Architecture building as evidence of this treatment of and revitalisation of ornament as demonstrated in its surface quality.

Figure 14. Frank Gehry. Guggenheim Bilbao. 1997.