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CO NC RE TE BRUTALIST BEAUTY The stark civic megaliths of the 1960s have been reviled for decades. Now, we are being seduced again by their concrete charms

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“ I Love You Will U Marry Me ” In the autumn, English Heritage hosted the Brutal & Beautiful exhibition, finally celebrating the beleaguered style. At its launch, Richard Rogers called for Robin Hood Gardens to be spared from the sword. This battered estate in Poplar, east London, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, and today, Tower Hamlets Council argues that demolishing it is the only solution. But it isn’t. Across the road, £40m is being spent turning Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower into luxury flats, while Preston Bus Station was recently saved for the nation at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, in South Yorkshire, the bittersweet “I Love You Will U Marry Me” graffiti crowning the Park Hill estate – a snake-like block of flats from 1961 – is now a permanent, neon-lit addition to the Sheffield skyline.

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The concrete architecture that dominated Britain’s post-war landscape has always provoked visceral emotions. The concrete monoliths that have survived popular culls still divide opinion, with some likening them to Orwellian dystopias.They were part of a massive wave of development orchestrated by a generation of architects and planners who wanted to improve the way people lived.One of those heavily involved with this regeneration was JR “Jimmy” James - a “titan of post-war planning”, as one former colleague put it. He helped launch the new towns of Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in the late 1940s, eventually becoming chief planner at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government from 1961-1967.When James died in 1980, he left behind a collection of nearly 4,000 slides amassed over several decades of interest in the work of planners around the UK. Many offer a glimpse into the evolution of town planning at a time when anything seemed possible.The slides record some of the most radical buildings the UK has ever witnessed.Thamesmead in London was billed as a “21st Century town” when it was built in the 1960s. One striking slide shows several brutalist buildings across the glistening Thames. But already by 1971 it could serve as the backdrop for the dystopian violence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.The Brunswick Centre in London had become a “rain-streaked, litter-strewn concrete monstrosity that seemed destined for the bulldozer before it was eventually redeveloped”.Trinity Square in Gateshead was less fortunate. Also known as the Get Carter Car Park, it was demolished in 2010 after decades of criticism.“These were the big bold expressions of 20th Century modernism, which were certainly popular with an architectural elite and politicians on the left,” says Clapson.Architects and planners are now quick to note that their 1960s and 1970s predecessors were making genuine attempts to alleviate very real problems. Building vertically relieved pressures of overcrowding. French architect Le Corbusier’s concrete structures were an inspiration to many.

Sheffield’s Park Hill was based on the concept of having “streets in the sky” - the idea that milk floats could drive right up to the top floor of a block of flats.

Brutalist buildings on the prairies and elsewhere are being destroyed before they even hit the half-century mark. Derided as backward, ugly and resistant to human use, these buildings—think of the Calgary Board of Education building—are facing uncertain futures. In contrast, lovers of brutalism are certain of at least one thing: the architectural movement was unfortunately named. “‘Brutalism’ comes from ‘béton brut,’ the French for ‘raw concrete,’” says Jeremy Sturgess, a prominent Calgary architect. Béton brut originally described concrete that was poured on-site, and left unfinished and exposed in the final structure. Its use was pioneered in the first half of the 20th century in France, and flourished during brutalism’s heyday in the 1960s and ’70s. While “brut” just means “raw,” the massive and unconventional structures encouraged its English misinterpretation as “brutal.” This middle-aged rogue is easy to fall for, despite the misguided love apparently lavished all over the front of it in the form of some new off-white cladding. Importantly, Eros House hasn’t been flattened, like most other works by its creator Rodney Gordon , one of the most gifted British brutalists.

70, five years before his death, Gordon stood on top of his condemned Tricorn shopping centre in Portsmouth, telling David Adjaye that: “Any piece of architecture worth being called architecture is usually both hated and loved.” Adjaye – an architect himself – was filming for the BBC series Dreamspaces (which chatted about buildings but looked like anarchic Channel 4 series The Word). “Rodney’s personal charm made a profound impression on me,” Adjaye remembers. “He was a sensitive, articulate, incredibly positive man – and it seems incongruous that his buildings might have generated a negative response.”

Modern concrete themed architecture 2015, Ontario,Canada.

But they did. Those staircases like fists, those abstract angles so bloody sure of themselves – that bravado rubbed people up the wrong way. For 30 years, these civic megaliths were the most hated buildings in history. But today, the ones that remain are making our hearts skip a beat. Brutalist buildings inhabit a polarised world of love and hate, life and death.

“It’s a style that’s very misunderstood,” says Amery Calvelli. She is one of the founders of d.talks, an organization that hosts conversations about design and the built environment in Calgary. Recently, d.talks turned its attention to Calgary’s architectural icons and how they contribute to the local economy.In part, the discussion sought to increase understanding and appreciation of the Calgary Board of Education building, an example of brutalism that “has been loved and unloved from the start.” The building had already been sold when the talk took place in 2013, but Calvelli says that “saving” the building was not the point. “We were just raising awareness,” she says. “In cities that are young like Calgary is, it’s difficult to keep the heritage from different periods. But the city loses a lot when it doesn’t have a wide variety of architecture styles.”Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness, a BBC TV documentary that aired last spring, emphasized brutalism’s roots in military architecture—those titular concrete bunkers. It also lauds the movement as proof of humanity’s decisive conquest of nature.

According to Cynthia Klaassen, president of the Calgary Heritage Initiative Society, that attitude informed urban design in the 1960s. It’s also one of the reasons why brutalism provokes negative reactions. “Brutalism is tied to the 1960s idea that, to make cities more liveable, we needed to destroy big swathes of neighbourhoods for these buildings,” she says. It was a utopian “just get rid of it and create something new” ideal that has since fallen out of vogue. Now, she says, we recognize that “new ideas do come from old buildings.”Sturgess agrees completely. He’s one of the drivers behind the bid to transform the Centennial Planetarium into a contemporary art gallery. Early in his career, Stugess worked with Jack Long, the architect of the planetarium, and he’s committed to ensuring his mentor’s work remains not just standing but relevant in the 21st century.Unlike those who see brutalism as a conquest of nature, Sturgess sees it as being in tune with its surroundings. “The thing about brutalism is that it’s a function of building organically to the landscape,” he says. “It used, typically, poured-in-place concrete to create heroic forms that are really sympathetic to the landscape.”For Sturgess, the planetarium, which won a Massey Medal for Architecture, is a great example of a building that is both responsive to its external environment and useful. “Brutalism allows architecture to be very expressive of its place and the ethos of its place,” he says. “Calgary has always been a raw, aggressive, and risk-taking kind of place. I think this building has always been a symbol of that.”

BRUTAL IS NOT DEAD.