01// new horizons
ntent content
//topic
t content cont 009 the boys of brutalism
068 urban tetris exploration of abstract shapes in Sofia, Bulgaria
who are the #brotalists of instagram
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Paul Evans pioneer of brutalist interior design
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Jagged Edges & Spikes what is crucial for interior brutalism design
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new appreciation or a trend
074 giuseppe perugini’s casa sperimentale
082 Brutality Cusine
Brutal Kitties architectural shelters for cats
an example of Italian Brutalism
after the fall of the Brutalism
022 web brutalist design
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Sound Based Brutalism an emerging aesthetic
of Otis Armada
its 7 guidelines
033 brutalist typography
from Russia and Belgium
055 zupagrafika’s series
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and how they made Brutalist lego
088 brutalist kitchen manifesto
and Carsten Höller’s notorious Brutalist Dining Experience
062 minecraft brutalist build competition
BlockWork & the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)
Sound Sculptures experimenting sound and objects
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Brutal Outwear by Martijn van Strien
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Beton Brut geometric jewelry
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Conrete & Metal interior design elements
Editor’s letter
This issue of the Brutalist magazine is the starting point of an exploration of a new era in design and art - the marvelous comeback of the Brutalist movement. As everything old becomes new again, which is a trend well-seen and known in the past years, Brutalism is no exception to that, except for the fact that the reinvention of what was known as Brutalism is quite far from its original roots. The concept of Brutalism has always been a misconception, as it is now. People confused the new wave of Brutalistic mindset as a lack of design, just as the original Brutalism architectural movement was perceived as a lack of aesthetic and a neglection of design. Truth is, there is a certain unconventional charm in this concrete and blocky aesthetic. It challenges the senses, and the moral sense of beaty. It gives uncomfort, until it gives you comfort. It asks questions, by not asking and not doubting. Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t judge a building by its concrete. There is much more to it, than just plain rocks and blocks. There is a story worth listening to, behind all concrete, block, square, or shade of gray.
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DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM ISM DIGITAL BRUTALI ISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIG DIGITAL BRUTALISM ISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGI TAL BRUTALISM DIGITA DIGITAL BRUTALISM
M DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM M DIGITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALBRUTALISM DIGITAL DIGITAL BRUTALISM GITAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALBRUTALISM DIGITAL ITAL BRUTALISM DIGIAL BRUTALISM DIGITAL BRUTALISM
the boys of Brutalism
//social media | Brotalism
#brotalism
The boys of Brutalism, or Brotalism, is an instagram account, created and curated by Benjamin Gredeson. Along with its sister account - @brutalady, Brotalism has charmed many of the users of the social media. The concept of the page is simple - taking photos of guys and girls, posing with a brutalist piece of architecture. Simple, yet effective. Because who doesn’t like boys and brutalist buildings all-inclusive?
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//social media | Brotalism
//social media | Brotalism
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//social media | Brotalism
new appreciation or a trend? after the fall of Brutalism
web brutalist design 015
the emerging antidesign Like minimalist design, brutalist digital design descends from an earlier movement. Web brutalism is inspired by the brutalist architecture of the 1950s. Brutalist buildings are characterized by their heavy and ‘ruthless’ appearance. Brutalism in digital design is a style that intentionally attempts to look raw, haphazard, or unadorned. It echoes early 1990s-style websites (think Craigslist and the Drudge Report). Sometimes this aspect of brutalism is expressed as bare-bones, almost naked HTML site with blue links and monochromatic Monospace text. Both in architecture and in digital design, brutalism is seen as a reaction against artificiality and lightness. Proponents praise it for its honesty and daring. Brutalist designers want to break away from the stale, cookie-cutter, premade-template sites that dominate the web today. They want the web to be true to itself, to feel honest and not contrived. The brutalist philosophy shares that last goal with flat design, though the two aesthetic styles achieve it in very different ways. NN/g utilized this style for many years, deliberately using a stripped-down UI even as fancier visual design (and Flash animations) became popular in the 2000s. Our goal was to prioritize function over form, as well as to take advantage of the reflective emotional-design effect this approach provoked among usability fans, who justifiably were opposed to overly flashy design. Web brutalism is beginning to take on a new meaning, quite different from the spirit of the architectural movement. Rather than just focusing on stripped-down UIs with raw or nonexistent styling, some designers interpret brutalism to mean rebelling against oversimplified design by intentionally creating ugly, disorienting, or complex interfaces. Though some lump this trend in with brutalism, it doesn’t fit with the original architectural sense of the word. For the sake of clarity, the term “antidesign” is being used to refer to this separate understanding of the movement. //web design
Antidesign sites often feature a complete lack of visual hierarchy. Some use harsh colors, disorienting patterns, weird cursors, and unnecessary distracting animations. The overall effect feels like bad 1990s’ designs on steroids. Worse than Geocities, if you can believe it.
//web design
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www.newmodels.io
bloomberg businessweek design conference 2016 website
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//web design
‘Freshness’ Some designers are becoming bored with simple, straightforward, polished design. For them, antidesign brings complexity and novelty that they feel their products have been lacking.
//web design
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www.m-o-l-l-y.com/design
www.effecava.xyz
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//web design
Of all the design trends to hit the Internet in recent years, brutalism is surely the most eyecatching, and the most poorly defined. A variety of major brands have embraced ‘brutalist’ aesthetics online. There are even directories for those interested in seeing a selection of them in one place. The style has well and truly entered the mainstream.
//web design
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www.utrecht.jp
https://rietveldacademie.nl
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//web design
Guidelines for
Brutalist Web Design ✶Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices. ✶Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks. ✶Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons. ✶The back button works as expected. ✶View content by scrolling. ✶Decoration when needed and no unrelated content. ✶Performance is a feature. //webdesign | guidelines
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“Raw content, true to its construction.” A website’s materials aren’t HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it’s consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor. Brutalist Web Design is honest about what a website is and what it isn’t. A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one. A website is about giving visitors content to enjoy and ways to interact with you. The design guidelines all are in the service of making websites more of what they are and less of what they aren’t. These aren’t restrictive rules to produce boring, minimalist websites. Rather these are a set of priorities that put the visitor to your site—the entire reason your website exists—front and center in all things.
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//webdesign | guidelines
1. Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices. Most websites exist to deliver content for you to consume, either words (such as on this site), or images, such as on Pinterest. To be true to that nature, the content must be readable in all browsers. Some screens are very large, while others are very small. Some browsers, such as screen readers, have no screen at all. By default, a website that uses HTML as intended and has no custom styling will be readable on all screens and devices. Only the act of design can make the content less readable, though it can certainly make it more. For example, this website does not use default styles, yet, it is readable on any size screen. 2. Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks. A website is a hypertext document that allows for two primary forms of interaction: navigating a link to another location, and submitting information back to a server. These functions are performed, respectively, by hyperlinks and buttons. Although JavaScript allows any element to respond to a click, websites are not applications, and the vast majority of websites should have no need to resort to such heroics in order to allow the visitor to navigate or submit data. Further, clickable areas of a page that are not obviously hyperlinks or buttons can confuse the visitor, causing them to perform unwanted actions or miss links entirely. To trick or deceive the visitor goes against the nature of a website, which is to deliver information and interact honestly with a visitor. 3. Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons. As mentioned when discussing clicks, only hyperlinks and buttons should respond to clicks, since this maintains an honest and transparent interaction with a visitor. To maintain a truth to materials, it follows that the appearance of these elements should also be honest and clear. A hyperlink has no analog in the real world. Since the dawn of the web, convention dictates a hyperlink use an underline to reveal its existence (which is a wonderful solution, since underlining has no place in modern typesetting). Because of this convention, there is no clearer indicator of more content than a bit of underlined text. Buttons, however, do have an analog in both the real world and computer programs. The browser being a computer program, it stands to reason that buttons rendered in a browser should look like buttons rendered on the computer operating system running said browser. With no effort at all, this is precisely what happens. See for yourself: //webdesign | guidelines
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This button is unambiguous, both in its function and its difference from a hyperlink. Where a link promises more information for the visitor, a button agrees to submit the visitor’s information to the server. Hiding this interaction behind a hyperlink or unadorned text betrays the core nature of a website. That said, the default visual appearance of a button is often unpleasant or clashes with the visual language of the site. Fortunately, many forms indicate button-ness to a visitor, and it’s often trivial to style a button to both match the visual language of a site while also looking eminently pressable. Here is an example of a site using a yellow color scheme and serifed fonts that has an obvious button:
Notice also that the form elements are true to themselves. An operating system has a visual language for collecting input from a visitor, and a Brutalist Web Design stays as close to that as possible.
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//webdesign | guidelines
4. The back button works as expected. All browsers have a built-in button called the back button. This button is a form of “undo”, taking the user back to where they were before their last navigational click. To break this core and enduring feature of the web requires a confluence of design and programming (such feats would be better applied to smoothing the experience of going back after a form submission). It also requires either ignorance of (or contempt for) the site visitor, as the back button is often their only means of undoing an errant click. 5. View content by scrolling. A website is neither a book nor a magazine. Because it’s viewed in a browser, users can scroll the browser’s viewport to read content that can’t fit on one screen. This mechanism works beautifully and allows visitors to read content without the interruptions caused by clicking and page-reloading (also note that all browsers are able to scroll properly and don’t need any assistance from JavaScript). While long-form content may require navigation and multiple pages, there’s rarely need to artificially paginate articles, blog posts, or other medium-length content simply to satisfy advertisers or inflate engagement numbers. Scrolling also allows the visitor to consume content at their pace using a method they prefer. Like the back button, this can only be broken by intentional design and careless implementation. Advertisers need not suffer from scrollable content, however. 6. Decoration when needed and no unrelated content. A website is neither an application nor a video game. It is for content, and so its design must serve that purpose. Being true to these materials need not imply a boring website or require that all sites look the same.
For example, on large screens this section has a pull quote with a washed blue background, a different text font, and an emoji! //webdesign | guidelines
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While this design employs decoration, it’s not distracting (though the pull quote is distracting on a small screen, which is why it’s not shown to those visitors). Decoration for its own sake, often to satisfy the vanity of the designer, goes counter to Brutalist Web Design. Such needless decoration distracts the visitor from the reason for visiting and makes the content secondary. The same can be said of unrelated content, such as misleading links, sensationalist headlines, or distracting images. These all attempt to take the visitor away from the content either for advertising or to create a false increase in engagement. Effort should be spent on compelling content, not trickery. Content drives engagement. 7. Performance is a feature. Websites aren’t physical like a book or magazine. Their contents must be downloaded over a computer network and then rendered in a web browser. This takes time, but visitors are accustomed to this (up to a point). Consider that the entirety of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is 708 kilobytes. To download this much data using a very slow mobile connection would be around one second (try it for yourself by reading it on Project Gutenberg). Pride and Prejudice is over 200 pages long, and would take almost six hours to read. Certainly a news article, tweet, or product catalog can be downloaded and rendered in a comparable amount of time to a novel. The good news is that by adhering to the other guidelines, your website will download and render quickly. By embracing its nature and materials, a website adhering to Brutalist Web Design is fast. It allows the system of network, browser, content, and operating system to work together smoothly and efficiently, as they were designed to. Even with decoration, advertising, and imagery, a website embracing Brutalist Web Design will respect your visitor’s time, bandwidth, and battery.
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//webdesign | guidelines
Embrace
Brutalist Web Design How much better would the web be if every site embraced Brutalist Web Design? How amazing would it be to have readable text, clearly-marked interaction points, unobtrusive advertising, all wrapped up in a fast-loading site you could consume using the native tools of your chosen device? A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem. This is good advice. Embrace this, and you embrace Brutalist Web Design. Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration or tricking your visitors into clicking ads, and your content will suffer, along with your visitors.
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Here are some specific tips: ✶Understand
the semantic meaning of HTML elements. ✶Learn about typography. ✶Try designing for a small screen by default. ✶Learn from designers about the choices they made and why they made them. ✶When in doubt, do what Tron does: fight for the users.
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//webdesign | guidelines
BRUTALIST GRAPH I GRAPHIC DE SIGN BRUT BRUTALIST GRAPHIC GRAPHIC DESIGN BRUT BRUTALIST GRAPHIC GRAPHIC DESIGN BRUTALI TALIST GRAPH IC DE DE SIGN BRUTALIST GRA TALIST GRAPHIC DES DESIGN BRUTALIST GR TALIST GRAPHIC DESIGN DESIGN BRUTALIST GRAPH GRAPHIC DESIGN BRUTA BRUTALIST GRAPHIC DESIG
IC DESIGN BRUTALIST TALIST GRAPHIC DESIGN C DESIGN BRUTALIST TALIST GRAPHIC DESIGN C DESIGN BRUTAL IST IST GRAPHIC DESIGN BRU ESIGN BRUTALIST GRAPHI APHIC DESIGN BRU SIGN BRUTALIST GRAPHIC RAPHIC DESIGN BRU N BRUTAL IST GRAPHIC HIC DESIGN BRUTALIST AL IST GRAPHIC DESIGN GN BRUTALIST GRAPH-
IS BRUTALIST TYPO
GRAPHY A GOOD IDEA ?
Brutalism is a design trend that no one can quite agree on the definition of. Every time someone describes something as “brutalist,” another person will jump in and say “that’s not what brutalism is.” Whatever the exact definition, brutalist designs tend to look purposefully raw and unpolished with harsh colors and non-traditional layouts. I like to think of the look as the polar opposite of a corporate website—something that makes you think there is no way upper management would ever approve of that design direction. Pretty much everyone hates brutalist design, yet it somehow magically keeps getting more popular. Some brutalist design can lean towards the ironic 90’s-style (think Comic Sans and rainbow unicorn GIFs), however, the style I feature on Typewolf tends to be of the more subdued and type-driven variety. The fonts featured here aren’t necessarily brutalist themselves—they just seem to be used frequently in this style of design, however you want to describe it. A lot of people these days are exploring/creating brutalist designs and it definitely brought a breath of fresh air in today’s design currents. The brutalist trend touches many areas of the design world from architecture to pieces of furniture, materials, and color palettes, this style seems to have earned a permanent spot on the design trend list. Brutalism in graphic design is a great way to create visual tension in your designs. It’s so raw and unpolished that it stands out well enough to grab the person’s attention. It’s a great option when designing artists websites portfolios or posters. Fonts play a major role in brutalist designs. The busy-ness of those design most definitely require type to convey a message which is ultimately what design needs to do. Some of them are really edgy while some are more conventional while following a specific trend.
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//typography
BRUTALIST TYPOGRAPHY literally
//typography | Jack Kerner
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Brutalist typography by Jack Kermer, March 2018. Project: Visual Communication Industry Research Industry: Architecture, Brutalism
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This project aimed to explore the public’s sentimental dichotomy surrounding Brutalist aesthetic. It’s notorious for being one of the most controversial forms of architecture and I wanted to investigate these views. To further develop my understanding of Brutalism I interviewed Peter Chadwick, author of “This Brutal World” for a professional insight and opinion. A transcript of this interview, would later be silkscreened on a concrete slate to amalgamate critical understanding of Brutalism with the product itself. I formed a large concrete letter B in order to represent the crude and abrupt style of Brutalist architecture through both it’s literal material, shape and texture. At 300kg and standing at 634 x 460mm high, the shape gave off an imposing and stoic impression. As a free standing sculpture, the B can be experienced through a range of angles and touched as the reader is given a sense of raw Brutalism. //typography | Jack Kermer
//typography | Jack Kermer
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I split the project into two sections: The proposal consisted of a 300 x 300mm concrete tile with my concept silkscreened and miniature concrete type set within a silicone mould. The final 300kg piece was created by manually mixing and pouring into a polystyrene mould. I had planned to incorporate a removable tile within the shape in order to deliver a more interactive experience for my audience. However, this compromised the structural integrity of the piece. Initially the B was set to be viewed in the studio. However, due to it’s immense weight it had to be abandoned within an alley way. Unexpectedly this unwarranted location for my exhibition instilled a sense of publicity within the piece. People walking past would engage with the piece by scanning the silkscreened type and even climbing on top of the B. Creating interaction between Brutalism and the public.
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//typography | Jack Kermer
//the process
//typography | Jack Kermer
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//the result
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//typography | Jack Kermer
MIRATRIX FONT by Andy Karter @kkkarterrr
Miratrix font is an accidental font, created by Andy Karter - a graphic designer, based in Moscow, Russia. The font is a classic example of Brutalist architecture and silhouette-inspired typography design. The font is free for personal and commercial use, and you can find it on Andy’s Behance.
//typography | Miratrix Font
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//typography | Miratrix font
//topic
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MIRATRIX FONT by Andy Karter
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//topic
ZENGA FONT by Jonathan Hill & Tom Sutton 2017 | The Northern Block
Zenga is a type family of 5 weights + italics. It is a contemporary typeface that fuses precise geometry with subtle hints of blackletter forms.
//typography | Zenga font
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//typography | Zenga font
//typography | Zenga font
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//typography | Zenga font
BRUTAL:
Concrete //typography | Brutal font
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Views from
Utopia 051
Brazil’s
Using the Cannibalist Manifesto — which guided much of the Brazilian modernist movement — as a starting point, I sought to create a language (and ultimately a space) that translated the tensions, vitality, and the boldness of the works produced during this period. The Cannibalist Manifesto, written by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928, was a call for visual artists, poets, writers, architects, and designers, to seek the real meaning of the Brazilian identity in their works. It revives Cannibalism as a metaphor, encouraging Brazilians to “eat” their European influences only to create works that are exclusively Brazilian. It urged artists to come up with meaningful ways to express the realities inherent in Brazilian culture, while also attempting to define Brazilian identity itself. In Architecture, this movement gave birth to works that aimed at emphasizing the social importance of the architectural space, and reconciling historically marginalized groups. The use of humble materials was also a characteristic of this period, and designers sought to rethink the impact of form in urban spaces. The design of modular custom typography speaks to the boldness of the architectural forms in the works of Brutalist architects from Brazil, while the richness of the colors serves to establish a second layer of visual tension. This language travels across media and can be seen used in print, on screens, and ultimately merging back into space through an interactive installation. Processing.js and a kinect sensor were used to transform the exaggerated typographic forms of the analog installation into a platform where one is able to appreciate the works of architects such as Lina Bo Bardi, Oscar Niemeyer, and Joao Villanova Artigas. A reactive response is prompted as the user walks towards or away from the installation, and Brutalist buildings reveal themselves or hide in-between the exaggerated typographic forms.The encounter of essentially divergent mediums (analog and digital) serves to accentuate the tensions that are so commonplace in Brazil’s complex past, and the large typography not only miniaturizes the architectural works, flipping general expectations, but also becomes the architectural structure, which engulfs the viewer, the content, and imposes itself on the very space it inhabits.
//typography | Brutal font
//typography | Brutal font
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ZUPAGRAFIKA RELIGION
from Poland
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Zupagrafika are David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka, an independent publisher, author and graphic design studio, established in 2012 in Poznań, Poland, celebrating modernist architecture, design and photography in a unique and playful way. Over the last decade, David and Martyna have created, illustrated and published award-winning books and kits exploring the post-war modernist and brutalist architecture of the former Eastern Bloc and beyond. Their publications have featured contributions by such architects and writers as: Norman Foster, John Grindrod, Barnabas Calder, Christopher Beanland, Konstantin Budarin, Anna Cymer or Florian Heilmeyer. Zupagrafika are the authors and publishers of such titles as: Blok Wschodni (2014), Brutal London (2015), Blokoshka (2016), Paris Brut (2016), Blokowice (2016), The Constructivist (2017), Brutal East (2017), Modern East (2017), Hidden Cities (2018), as well as the books Brutal London (2016, Prestel), Brutal Britain (2018), Eastern Blocks (2019), Panelki (2019), Concrete Siberia (2020), Brutal Poland (2020).
Featured in The NY Times The Guardian Der Spiegel BBC Wired Archdaily Dezeen It´s Nice That Domus Designboom The Londonist The Sunday Times Time Out City Lab Monocle Cool Hunting Le Parisien Architectural Digest Gazeta Wyborcza Polityka Culture.pl Icon Newsletter Pl
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//Editorial | Zupagrafika
Panelki Build Your Socialist Prefab Panel Block
Book | Hardcover | 44 pages Contains 164 press-out prefab panels and an illustrated history on mass housing in the former Eastern Bloc
Plattenbau, Panelák, Wielka Płyta, Panelky, Panelház or Панельки: Prefabricated panel blocks go by different names around the former Eastern Bloc, but no matter where they were built, their goal was always the same... Panelki allows you to assembe a genuine Soviet-era pre-cast block, panel by panel, while learning about the history of mass housing behind the Iron Courtain I Released: October 2019. Author: Zupagrafika (David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka) Zupagrafika © 2019. All rights reserved
//Editorial | Zupagrafika
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BRUTALIST ARCHIT IST ARCHITECTURE CHITECTURE BRUT TURE BRUTALIST BRUTALIST ARCHITE ARCHITECTURE BRUTA BRUTALIST ARCHITE ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE BRUTA ARCHITECTURE BRUTA BRUTALIST ARCHITE
TECTURE BRUTALE BRUTALIST ARTALIST ARCHITECT ARCHITECTURE ECTURE BRUTALIST TALIST ARCHITECTURE ECTURE BRUTALIST BRUTALIST B R U TA L I ST TALIST TALIST ARCHITECTURE ECTURE BRUTALIST
Minecraft brutalism
Who says video games are just mindless fun?
The Royal Institute of British Architects recently took up an idea to heart and opened up a Minecraft server for players to build their own brutalist creations. The project, which was organized in collaboration with Minecraft architecture collective Blockworks, ran for a week and produced 119 buildings, many of which are now immortalized in an imgur gallery. While the hard, polygonal shapes of these entries suit Minecraft’s digital aesthetic, the also clearly reference the language of brutalism. A cluster of cubes by Wuxa, for instance, comes across as an updated version of Moshe Safdie’s Expo67 complex. Another entry has the concrete bird aesthetic of the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. RIBA’s project suggests that the language of Brutalism is not dated—it may only work in specific contexts, but it can very much survive in the 21st century.
//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
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the brief A digital exhibition and an online competition, produced in a special collaboration between the Royal Institute of British Architects and Blockworks. The project was designed to engage a younger audience with Brutalist architecture, and coincided with the RIBA’s Brutalist Playground exhibition.
the build Blockworks set up a Minecraft server which hosted a one week competition to build a Brutalist-inspired building in Minecraft. Their own recreation of Birmingham Central Library served as inspiration for users and a powerful example of the Brutalist style.
the result Over 230 builders from 22 countries took part in the competition. The products of the competition were picked up by architectural press from around the world; the entries varied hugely, all demonstrating an impressive level of research into a rarely taught period of architectural history.
By Lindblumen
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//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
first place - Wuxa
//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
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2nd place - Knuckles528
3rd place - Clebdoesstuff
4th place - Anwillus
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//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
By RobChambers
//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
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By Kills
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//architecture | Minecraft brutalism
ur ban tet ris Bulgarian photographer, artist and graphic designer Mariyan Atanasov reimagines the urban architecture of Bulgaria by creating oversized tetris-like scenarios. in his surreal photo series titled ‘urban tetris’, Atanasov transforms sofia’s high-rise apartment blocks into abstract forms reminiscent of the classic video game.
//mariyan atanasov
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Urban exploration of abstract shapes of tetris in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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Mariyan Atanasov, an exciting photographer who is becoming notable for stunning landscape photography, revealed a brilliant eye-pleasing series named Urban Tetris. In this series, Atanasov uses Tetris, a game made in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, to explore and re-imagine architecture around him. The photos were originally taken in Sofia, Bulgaria. Throughout the series Atanasov uses a clear sky as a background and detaches parts of a buildings to make them into tetris-like tiles. This fantastic use of creative tools is a fantastic homage to Tetris and the architecture in Sofia. These aesthetically pleasing photos showcase the exciting use of various tools that now allow creatives to become free and forward-thinking. Using images of buildings in Sofia, the series also celebrates examples of Soviet architecture. Atanasov abstracted the Eastern-European buildings by first dissecting the volumes, isolating each abstract form against a flat background, drawing our eye downwards towards the rest of the building at the bottom of the frame. With the suspended pieces in mid-air, Atanasov has us excitedly anticipating and rooting for them to fall into the right place. The result is a collection of attention-grabbing visuals, the architecture appears to float as if ready to slot into place and stack in the same way as the 80’s video game just like the video game, deliciously addicting. The project is the latest from the designer whose portfolio includes many other minimalist and urban environments. In another series, titled ‘Urban Fragments‘, he explores the subject of contrast across a number of variables like size, space, color, direction, shape and texture. He also has series’ documenting Berlin, Istanbul and Georgia. Mariyan Atanasov is based in Paris, Texas and shares his photography and design projects on Behance and Instagram. //architecture | urban tetris
//architecture | urban tetris
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giuseppe perugini’s casa sperimentale //architecture | casa sperimentale
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Brutalism in ruins Architects: Giuseppe Perugini, Uga De Plaisant, Raynaldo Perugini Design and Construction: 1968-1975 Location: Fregene, Italy
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Fregene is a seaside village that exists on two different levels. The seaside bathing rituals are still observed in the shade of a centuries-old curtain of pine trees, originally planted by Pope Clement IX in the midseventeenth century to protect crops on the Maccarese plain from damaging salt-laden winds. At nearly thirty metres high, this thick and compact foliage has grown together andhas woven itself into a single natural artefact. In fact it is considered so valuable that already back in 1920 the government declared the pinetum a National Monument. Silent and impassive, supported on colossal trunks that emerge as totems in the middle of the tracks and paths, the Fregene pine trees seem to belong to another dimension compared to the abstract geometries of the city
below. Here, numerous summer houses and holiday homes fill the more or less regularly drawn up urban grid pattern and it is impossible to recognize Fregene today as that Capalbio forerunner where even in the early 1960s Fellini, Flaiano, Moravia and Lina Wertmüller sun-bathed in relative isolation, protected by the access charge to the pine forest that kept the tourist masses on the shores of Ostia and Torvaianica. regene’s Belle Époque was shortlived: in a few years the arrival of Elia Federici the removal of the toll and the summer opening of the capital’s largest nightclubs marked the beginning of an era of massive numbers, building speculation and proliferation together with endless queues on the Aurelia (because even today there is still only the one bridge). //architecture | casa sperimentale
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Towards the end of the 1960s, a family of architects designed a building which bridged the gap between the two Fregene. Giuseppe Perugini, his wife Uga de Plaisant and son Rainaldo transformed the construction of their holiday home into an opportunity for technical testing, free reflection on living spaces and dialogue with the context of the pine forest which the same Rainaldo Perugini, now a professor of architectural history, defined as a genuine “building set created on an urban scale”. In actual fact the Perugini house is not one but three experimental houses. The main building is the Casa Albero, a fully modular system of frameworks and suspended sheets, unfinished due to being potentially replicable ad infinitum. The exposed reinforced concrete structures form a horizontal symmetry which is echoed in the reflections in the water at the base of the building and which could be repeated almost up to the top of the pine trees. The interior is a single and kaleidoscopic space where the floors multiply and thanks to the special structural system, the glass can creep into and bully its way through the concrete surfaces, so much so as to deny the connection between horizontal and vertical. The offsetting and height difference between the different modules ensure the privacy of the bedroom without the need for partition walls while the bathrooms are rounded capsules that emerge and project from the main body, the only exception in this Cartesian building composition.The elevated Casa Albero, accessible by a single flight of stairs that was originally used as a drawbridge, is in the words of Rainaldo Perugini an “un-finishable house” and one which acts as a counterpoint to the “single unit house”, an enigmatic five metre diameter sphere designed to function as a self-contained housing module. Inside it was to have contained a self-supporting structure (which was never built) that would have laid out the spaces and acted as support for a spherical satellite-toilet. At the opposite end of the garden, the “repeatable house” composed of three metre cubic modules, is a further variation on the concept of minimum housing. Unused and abandoned for many years, the Casa Albero will soon be converted into a museum and space for events. Suspended for now in time and in space, terribly glamorous with its forms and shapes balanced between constructivist references and extraterrestrial fascination, the Perugini’s experimental house remains above all the surviving fragment of a utopia, testimony to an alternative (anti-) urban vision in the Fregene pine woods that remains confined within a single plot of land.
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FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALISM F ISM FOOD BRUTALIS FOOD BRUTALISM FO ISM FOOD BRUTALIS FOOD BRUTALISM ISM FOOD BRUTAL ISM FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALISM FO BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALISM FO BRUTALISM FOOD
FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALSM FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD B R U T A L SM FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALLISM FOOD BRUTALM FOOD BRUTALISM OOD BRUTALISM FOOD D BRUTALISM FOOD OOD BRUTALISM FOOD BRUTALISM FOOD
You’re Invited to A unique dining experience brought to you by Melbourne culinary collective Otis Armada.
Melbourne’s upcoming Brutalist Block Party is a month-long tribute to that concrete-heavy postwar architecture you love to hate. Presented by Assemble Papers and Open House Melbourne, the events series stretches far beyond a base level appreciation of grey columns and warehouses; it’s also a celebration of local food and community. One such celebration is an intricate five course drinking and dining experience designed by Otis Armada, a group of Melbourne-based creatives interrogating the relationship between installation art and fine dining. Hosting their first event in 2014, they’ve staged a series of ritualistic themed communal eating experiences that honour creative thought and good eating. Their “Otis. Brutal.” menu will be brought to life by experimental young chef Ali Currey Voumard, who grew up in Tasmania but moved to Melbourne at the age of 16 to work in some of the city’s most renowned restaurants. Currey Voumard will take her cues from the brutalist emphasis on practical form and function over ornamentalism. It’s a concept that strikes a chord in the age of Instagram, where fancy food is necessarily forced to prioritise looks over taste. Fred Mora, one of Otis Armada’s Creative Directors, explains that the concepts behind brutalism actually lend themselves rather well to those of fine dining. “It’s been really fun to create the menu, because while your initial idea of brutalist food is probably cold gruel, prison food and that sort of thing, what we’ve realised by looking further into the brutalist movement is that the approach is quite practical and functional and lends itself to the style of food we like to make,” he tells The Creators Project, adding, “It’s food that is really true and has integrity.”
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a Dinner Party Inspired By
Photo courtesy of Phebe Schmidt for Otis Armada
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Brutalist Architecture //Food | Otis Armada
“It’s a celebration of
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Photo courtesy of Phebe Schmidt for Otis Armada
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Otis Armada source their simple ingredients from local producers, and they have a no-nonsense approach to plating up their dishes. “Flavours are always true to the ingredients used, and presentation is straight to the point. It’s about getting rid of unnecessary garnishes, and being really bold about food,” Mora says. The ongoing creative fascination with brutalism that fuels events like Brutalist Block Party can be traced back to the architectural style’s perceived ugliness. Mora says these ongoing arguments about looks versus integrity are integral to the Otis Armada vision for their brutalist-inspired dining series. “We’re now so used to seeing food that is covered in flowers and is made to look overly ornamental and decorated. But we like types of food that are undervalued because of how they look: ugly looking ingredients that have fallen out of trend that we think are still really amazing, like roots and tubers.” Otis Armada place an emphasis on the unique kinds of social interaction that communal dining offers, and the elaborate five course parade of curated dishes and snacks will provide plenty of chances for conversation with new friends. The addition of what Mora refers to as “an authoritarian seating plan” promises to change things up a bit, too. “The majority of brutalist buildings ended up being educational institutions or government buildings,so there’s an office-like feeling of control, and that will be reflected in how people are made to sit on the night. I think it will be really fun to see how people respond to it and interact.”
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Photo courtesy of Phebe Schmidt for Otis Armada
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CAR STE N HÖLLER: the
Br utalist Kitchen M a n ifesto
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“We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist.”
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What could such a bold statement, taken from the artist Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto, possibly mean? This October, I attended his Brutalist Dining Experience at Restauranglabbet in Stockholm, the latest instalment of an ongoing series in which he attempts to apply the principles of this much-discussed architectural movement to cuisine. The experience raised some interesting questions about the nature of Brutalism, and how its influence is felt beyond the sphere of architecture today. Brutalism has become, by some distance, the most talked about form of 20th-century architecture – almost to the point of cliché. Eye-wateringly expensive books dedicated to the subject still adorn the coffee tables of countless flats in Hackney or Bushwick; while an interest in Brutalism takes pride of place in the dating-app bios of any number of left-leaning, Ian Sinclair-reading millennials. It hasn’t always been widely popular – in many cases coming to serve as a symbol of neglect and impoverishment – but recent community-led attempts to save buildings such as Robin Hood Gardens in London and Birmingham’s Central Library have helped prove how far opinions have changed. More and more people are beginning to believe, correctly, that Brutalist buildings can be something other than inhuman monstrosities. //food | the brutalist kitchen manifesto
//food | the brutalist kitchen manifesto
Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Dining Experience
Despite this, certain misconceptions about Brutalism persist. Anyone with a passing interest is aware that the name derives from the French for raw concrete – Béton brut – rather than being a description of the style, but it’s hard to divorce the two notions when much of it looks so, well, brutal. When we think of Brutalism, a certain set of images readily comes to mind: the Barbican, perhaps, or the National Theatre. We probably think about buildings with bold shapes, imposing scale, and a harsh quality. But this isn’t necessarily the best way of thinking about Brutalism. As architectural critic Reyner Banham recently concluded, Brutalism is more an ethic than an aesthetic of architecture. It’s possible to adhere to the former without necessarily echoing the latter – and arguably, this is what Höller’s Brutalist kitchen seeks to do. Just as Brutalist architecture predominantly uses concrete for the entirety of a building (or as much as possible), Höller’s cuisine is based around the sole use of one ingredient per dish. In the manifesto, he offers an example: “instead of Duck with Orange Sauce, Duck with Duck sauce is served.” This principle was strictly adhered to throughout the dinner: one of the dishes showcased “the three stages of bread”; while another featured broccoli in three forms: florets, stalk and souffle. This approach is similar to the way in which Brutalist architecture exposed the nuts and bolts of buildings, which had previously been covered over – think of the external stairways at the National Theatre. “It’s not so much about exposing the cooking, though,” Höller says, “it’s more about the taste of the ingredient – you’re not hiding it through taste layering. If you make a mistake, you can’t just cover it up with some sauce. It’s an honest way of cooking.” To complement the food, all of the wine served throughout the evening was natural – that is, unfiltered and with no additives or sulphites. It might be a stretch to argue that natural wine is Brutalist, per se, but it does match Höller’s principles of Brutalist cuisine. Its popularity also suggests that people are seeking out a new purity in what they consume. One of the other major principles of Brutalist cuisine is the use of “overlooked, hard-to-get or rare” ingredients. This aspect is harder to square with the architectural tradition – after all,
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Brutalism is hardly renowned for its deployment of quirky materials. “It’s more about overlooked, rather than rare, ingredients,” Höller says. “Take rapeseed, for instance, which we served at the dinner. 20 years ago, rape was inedible to humans because it contained two elements which were toxic. Now, due to selective breeding, these toxic elements have been grown out, and we have a whole new plant at our disposal.” Other unusual ingredients at the dinner included a prominentlyclawed partridge which looked like it had escaped from Jurassic Park and fjallko – a savoury ice cream made from bovine bone marrow. It was considerably nicer than it sounds. The extent to which a focus on underused ingredients can be described as Brutalist is debatable but it does make for an interesting dining experience. That said, the emphasis on unusual ingredients came to be my undoing: I forced myself to eat an extremely bitter young walnut shell in its entirety, all the while writing an angry screed in my notebook about how disgusting it was, before being told that it was not intended to be edible. In my defence, this surely contravened point seven of the manifesto: “There should be no decoration on the plate.”
Broccoli Parthenon Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Dining Experience
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Carsten Höller on his “Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto”: 1. Don’t think recipe. It’s all about the ingredients. Go shopping and see what you find. Put effort into finding particular ingredients. I don’t understand why there are so many cookbooks around with recipes. I find that really bizarre. Okay, I understand some people have fun reading it, but when it says, “Take a chicken and do this …” – what kind of chicken do you take? There are so many different chickens. And then, what about the temperature – should it be taken from the fridge? Do you get a fresh one, or one that’s been laying a little? And if so, how long exactly? Under what conditions? All these things are rarely mentioned. A recipe like this is like an architecture do-it-yourself book that says, “Take a glass window and some stones, and then put a piece of wood on top of it.” What kind of house would that be? If I have guests, I never know what I’m going to cook. Even though I may have some ingredients at home, aging, cur- ing, or just in the cupboard, I like to go shopping for special, rare ingredients. For instance, there’s a mushroom that grows in northern Sweden which is highly appreciated by the Japanese. It’s super expensive. In Japan it costs more than the white truffle. Almost nobody eats it in Sweden, so they ship it to Japan, where there’s a big fuss about it. So, it’s interesting for me, living in Sweden, to contact this one guy picking these mushrooms and ask him to send two, three kilograms to Stockholm. And he does. You have to be knowledgeable about food, curious, and careful about where you can source very special things.
2. Pay special attention to overlooked, hard-to-get, rare ingredients, or ingredients that are generally discarded. As a starter, why don’t we eat chicken brains? I’m sure they would be delicious, especially with regard to the woodcock I ate at El Bulli. In our part of the world, the heads of birds are not usually eaten. What do we do with all the heads of all these chickens that we kill for consumption? So the manifesto is also about using ingredients which are not used, or overlooked, or considered not //food | the brutalist kitchen manifesto
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good enough. By preparing them the right way, you not only make them edible, but you can also make a proper Brutalist dish. In these photos of Brutalist dishes, we have a common sandpiper, which I prepared in Ghana, with the head opened after it accidentally died. I’m an environmentalist. I would say I’m a conservationist, but it’s such a strange word – it sounds politically wrong. I would like to be able to protect vulnerable lifeforms from over-exploitation. That’s why I say the ortolan bunting shouldn’t be caught anymore. It could still be eaten, but to eat it, you have to breed it, and you would probably get very similar results to the wild ones. The wildcaught ones are still fattened in small cages for months before being killed. But you can’t just find pleasure in eating the last specimens of its kind, knowing they’ll soon be gone forever. This is reckless and ridiculous. Brutalist cuisine also means a certain responsibility towards protecting your ingredients. 3. Prepare straightforward dishes that are about the taste of one ingredient. Avoid putting together several ingredients. Grey shrimp were actually the first thing I ever cooked, and perhaps my first strong food memory. These little shrimp are common on the Belgian North Sea coast, and as a boy I caught them with a little net on a wooden stick that you push through the sand. You get a good ingre- dient like these shrimp and you cook them in their own natural medium – seawater – and then eat it without anything else. That’s a nice Brutalist dish. They have to be peeled by hand. There’s no machine for this. So they ship them to North Africa to factories where people peel them, then they ship them back and sell them as “local” with loads of preservatives. 4. Elaborate cooking techniques are allowed. It’s not about a lack of sophistication, just a commitment to purity. rutalist cooking doesn’t have to mean a piece of meat that you fry quickly. That can be Brutalist food, but Brutalist food can also be something that you have very carefully planned over long periods. Like slow cooking, or like how I do soups. I like to extract the taste in a way by letting it simmer, boil, and then cool down again. And to do this process five, six times. Sous-vide cooking is allowed. It’s actually quite Brutalist, because it’s a technique that tries to keep the ingredient as whole as possible, and cooking in its own juices. Cooking with sous-vide is a very acceptable, even highly favored, Brutalist technique.
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A round-up of sea creatures. Photo: Carsten Höller
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5. Liquids like soups and stocks do generally require a combination of ingredients, But they should be treated ike the nutrients that feed the plant, mushroom, or animal. It should all be part of the “singular” taste of an ingredient. This is a contradiction. If you say you want to achieve something pure on a plate, you could argue a soup is not pure because you need ten different ingredients to make a soup. So, how do you deal with that? You can answer it by pointing to plant biology. For instance, a salad plant grows in the soil and there it takes up a lot of different nutrients and trace elements. It might also respond to a herbivore attack by producing a chemical defence. It might communicate with its fellow salad plants and other plants both above the earth and underneath. So this salad plant has this whole history of taking up and changing things that then produces its unique taste. A soup is somehow similar in this sense. You’re adding ingredients in a solution, and you extract the taste. You come up with something comparable to an organism, because it’s also about producing a base. So, a soup can be compared to an ingredient itself. Freeze-drying is not available to all of us, and you want to avoid some kind of hocus-pocus theatrical cooking. You want to make this as simple as possible. It’s not just about purity but also about simplicity, which often go hand in hand. What to drink with brutalist cusine? It depends on you, the time of day, and on your wallet, but a good wine is always recommended. Good wine is Brutalist in the sense that it can be very complex. You drink it at a certain temperature to optimize the flavor of it, and it’s a pure product in which you wouldn’t want to put any ice or whatever. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but these new “natural” wines may be comparable to Brutalist food in how they try different techniques in order to bring out something that is within the ingredient. More than in some very sophisticated techniques where they blend different grape varieties. 6. Decoration on the plate should be avoided. Hypertrophied thyme branches are the thing I hate most. A branch of thyme on top of a steak. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s bad. It’s probably a derivative of this idea from the 1950s where you have half a tomato with some parsley as a decoration on the plate.
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7. Portions should be of a substantial size. I dislike it when there’s not enough on my plate. If you avoid the combination of ingredients on the plate, you have only one ingredient to focus on. And while you eat this ingredient, there’s a whole process going on. It is a process that also happens inside you, the eater: from when you first see, then smell, and then put something inside your mouth. The more you eat, the more you take in of it, and the more twists it gets. You know this very well from wine. You open the bottle, decant it maybe, and the first sip is a very differ- ent taste to the last sip at the end of the bottle – not only because the wine has changed, but also because you have changed. The same applies to food. To just serve one or two bites, as they do in many fancy restaurants, is okay if you want to present a lot of tiny dishes, but the Brutalist likes to have a substantial amount and explore the change of perceptions of this food during a prolonged meal. 8. Brutalist cooking has its origins in traditional Mediterranean or Japanese cuisine, but is neither Mediterranean nor Japanese. Sashimi is properly Brutalist. Many people at home cook Brutalist, because you don’t want to do this layering. You just want to eat your ingredient the way you want to eat it. It’s a kind of natural thing. Thai food is the opposite of Brutalist cuisine. It can be delicious, but it’s a different concept. Brutalist cooking is open to all kinds of cuisines in the world. It’s just a certain concept of treating the ingredients while you make the food. Brutalists hate fusion food.
A night market in Kinshasa, DR Congo. Photo: Carsten Höller
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9. The “Brutalist Kitchen” is named in reference to Brutalist architecture, renowned for its “linear and blockish” appearance. It’s just a proposition. Brutalist food is not some kind of dogma that needs to have a sharp border towards other ways of cooking. It’s about getting some things that have developed in a different direction to be more straightforward. It’s about using techniques in the Brutalist way. I eat a late lunch, because after lunch the day is different – lunch divides the day into two parts. I have my artistic energy – if that’s what you want to call it – in the morning when I wake up. So my routine is more like: coffee in bed, breakfast I don’t care much about, unless I’m in a hotel and they have an exceptional breakfast, then lunch, which I take care of in a good way, and then dinner, which is usually the highlight of the day when it comes to eating. 10. We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist. One other thing to consider is that we all have been, or most of us have been, Brutalists in the early days of our lives, because what else is mother’s milk but Brutalist cuisine? We were born Brutalist. I’m proposing we should stay Brutalist, come back to the roots of it, and appreciate what Brutalist cuisine could do for us. In the 50s, for instance, we had a limited amount of variability in food. We had local food that was different from place to place, and you couldn’t easily get Italian food in a German town, or at least Italian food that was deserving of the name. And in the last few years, we have witnessed an enormous increase of variability in food, especially in bigger cities like London – you can have almost any kind of food there. And you can find a lot of ingredients. This has definitely enlarged itself because of a certain need for people to explore food, and I think it’s affected them, as Marinetti al- ready pointed out. “Du bist was Du isst,” as we say in German. You are what you eat. And in this sense, the “Brutalist Kitchen” is another extension of variability of food by extending into ingredient-based food.
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11. As of today, there is not one restaurant in the world that deserves to be called Brutalist. However, people often cook Brutalist at home. St. John’s deserves credit for bringing traditional English cooking back on the plate with a contemporary twist, in a sense purifying it, and taking some things away that may suffocate the taste of certain ingredients. This definitely goes in the right direction, but I think you can go even further. Take their langoustines with mayonnaise, for example – if you have a good langoustine, you don’t need the mayonnaise, which I find to be another suffocating, unnecessary extra on the plate. If you don’t take lemon with your oysters, then you can taste the differences between all the different varieties of oysters that are out there. There’s another seafood which is so remarkable, the sea urchin – each one tastes different from another. It would be a crime to add lemon to it. A Brutalist restaurant could be possible – a restaurant where you don’t order a dish but an ingredient, and then another one, and you don’t eat them together on the same plate as you normally do, where you try to create a “supertaste” that’s bigger than nature. But you eat them one after another, or put everything on the table at the same time, and in the end you curate your own experience within your stomach. You don’t pile it up on the plate. It all gets piled up in your intestines. It would be like a tapas bar, but with Brutalist portions.
Meat, Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Dining Experience
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If we’re taking single-ingredient essentialism as a Brutalist trait, it’s also worth considering trends in skincare and fragrance. As well as Aesop’s retail interiors embodying a Brutalist aesthetic, its products also emphasise the ethics of Brutalism, with a focus on craftmanship, rawness and purity – ingredients-led, taking centre stage on branding, boldly proclaiming the lack of artificial additives. This attitude extends to even the tiniest details, such as the undyed, untreated raw canvas bags in which their products are proudly carried – lightyears ahead of the no-plastic movement. Anyone with a keen interest in fragrances will also see Brutalist parallels in the industry-leading Escentric Molecules, whose products are so iconic and complex that it’s hard to believe they contain just one ingredient. It bears repeating that none of this is about simplicity – the processes behind these perfumes are often extremely technical and complex. Instead, it’s about isolating and elevating the aspect of a design which is most important. So why are we seeing this movement towards, if not specifically simplicity, then conceptual purity? Höller suggests that it could be a response to the clutter and complexity of 21st-century life. “There’s a real sense of saturation today,” he says, “everything is so readily available, whether that’s via the internet or simply being able to access every type of cuisine imaginable – and not just in major cities. So Brutalist cuisine is about getting back to something essential.” I found the Brutalist Kitchen a singular and memorable dining experience – there was something refreshing about being able to focus on a single flavour with no distraction. Höller hopes that we’ll soon see Brutalist dishes becoming a common menu staple, if not entire restaurants devoted to the style. If this does happen, then it’s definitely worth trying.
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Appel ‘Fanny’ Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Dining Experience
‘Lobster Westcoast’ Carsten Höller’s Brutalist Dining Experience
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BRUTALIST INTE R TALIST INTERIOR DE TERIOR DESIGN BRU DESIGN BRU TALIST BRUTALIST INTERIOR INTE RIOR DESIGN TERIOR DESIGN BRUT SIGN BRU TALIST BRU TALIST INTERIO IST INTERIOR DESIGN RIOR DESIGN BRUTALI SIGN BRUTALIST INTER
RIOR DESIGN BRUESIGN BRUTALIST IN TALIST INTERIOR T INTERIOR DESIGN DESIGN BRUTALIST N BRUTALIST I N TALIST INTERIOR DET INTERIOR DESIGN OR DESIGN BRUTALBRUTALIST INTE IST INTERIOR DEERIOR DESIGN BRU
Concrete & Metals //interior | elements
Brutalist interior design – the unique mid-20thcentury design movement with a “don’t-messwith-me” attitude and heavyweight supporters – has divided opinions for decades, potentially drawing more criticism than any other style of recent centuries. An evolution of the French “béton brut” (meaning “raw concrete”) – Le Corbusier’s definition of his favourite material – the term was made popular by architecture critic Reyner Banham in the 1950s and 1960s. With it, he hoped to encapsulate the newly emerging architectural style borne of post-Modernism and (at least in Britain) the post-World-War-II years. Despite fierce opposition, Brutalist Interior Design has come to be known as one of modern design’s most difficult styles to date – giving it a timeless quality enjoyed by none other.
Faceted Credenza, Paul Evans.
Of the style, the Royal Institute of British Architects says, “Consider [it] as architecture in the raw, with an emphasis on materials, textures and construction, producing highly expressive forms.” And of Brutalist interior designer Paul Evans (although it could refer to any one of the style’s adherents), collector Lenny Kravitz said, “His work is stunningly beautiful, stunning ugly, stunningly tacky, stunningly sophisticated – it’s all of it. And that’s what makes a great artist.”
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Anyone who follows the trends of the design world with be aware of the resurgence of concrete (or concrete effect). The material has been used for everything from floor lamp bases to walls and baths to tables. Most large-scale concrete walls and flooring will, in fact, be concrete tiles as the raw material – although inspirational – is very difficult to refine enough to be deemed attractive. Along with concrete, metals are a key Brutalist material choice. Chosen for its inherent simplicity and perceived strength (although it was sometimes used in more delicate ways), metal helped give Brutalist interiors its strong industrial aesthetic. Recently, the Brutalist interiors realm has been taken over by sculptural metal furniture and decor such as angular vases, objet d’art and wall sculptures.
Contemporary Brutalist Style Small Table #5 in Solid Oak and Linseed Oil Warm furniture’s made by Russian designers from “Soha” studio. Simplicity of shapes. Authentic material. Wooden items are created from oak and are boiled in oil from several days to several weeks, to achieve a natural wood coloration from a dark brown to a complete black color. Patterns are applied solely by chain saw.
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Dimensions: 50 x 123 x 45 cm //interior | elements
Paul Evans
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Paul Evans is probably the best known designer of Brutalist furniture, creating roughly sculpted pieces out of wood and metal. While some of his pieces are highly decorated, it tends to be rather raw and harsh in appearance, not at all sleek or sinuous like much mid-century design. Although Brutalism has had severe critics, it is enjoying somewhat of a comeback among young loft-dwellers who appreciate its industrial aesthetic and understand its honest, intellectual approach to function over form.
Metal sculpted credenza, Paul Evans.
Cocktail table, Paul Evans.
Bronze sculpted chairs, Paul Evans.
Metal Sofa, Paul Evans.
Argente low cabinets, Paul Evans.
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Paul Evans, Cityscape C-Shaped Side Tables, USA, 1970s Materials: Chromed steel, laminate Dimensions: 50.8 H x 50.8 W x 50.8 D cm
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Paul Evans, Forged Steel Lounge Chairs, USA, c. 1960’s A superb example of Paul Evans’ forged metal techniques, this unique pair of chairs features hand-sculpted bases formed from forged, welded, patinated and polychromed steel. Each has an elegant recline and large seat and back upholstered in parchment colored leather. Floating in a room, the bases are unique sculptures to be experienced from every angle. Created in Evans’ studio in New Hope, PA, the chairs are in excellent original condition. Dimensions: 28 H x 31 W x 26 D inches
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Paul Evans, Argente Skyline Dining Table, USA, c. 1968 A popular form that Paul Evans would revisit through his career is a composition he called Skyline. Skyline pieces, such as this magnificent unique dining table, were comprised of individually hand-welded boxes of varying heights, shapes, textures and designs, bonded together as solid base. While this arrangement was used extensively in his welded steel, Sculpted Bronze, and eventually Cityscape works, there is no other record of Skyline works in the Argente series apart from this dining table and a corresponding low table commissioned by a Virgina collector. The dining table is constructed of 14 distinctive boxes. Perhaps one of the most expressive of Evan’s forms, the Skyline tables are reliably popular for their whimsical composition and utility. Dimensions: 42 H x 84 W x 24 D inches
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Paul Evans, Sculpted Steel Floor Lamp, USA, c. 1960’s A fantastic example of an early, commissioned sculptural steel lamp by Paul Evans, the L-shaped lamp’s square obelisk body is formed from rectilinear sections of welded steel with alternating blackened and polychromed enamel in a patchwork pattern. An unexpected and amusing foot is constructed with an internal light mimicking the torchiere’s main upright light source. The unorthodox form is a testament to Evans’ idiosyncratic approach to design and unwavering confidence as a sculptor. Dimensions: 60 H x 27 W x 27 D inches
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JAGGED EDGES & SPIKES //interior | elements
Seen sometimes in the style’s architecture but mostly in its decorative arts, jagged edges and spikes were the perfect counteraction to the style’s sweeping plains of concrete and metal blocks. These jagged edges are sometimes caused by the chosen techniques of the designer, as in the case of Tom Greene’s torch-cutting. Collage-style techniques were also used, recalling Cubist tendencies and the destructive aesthetics of Picasso’s Guernica and, later, the art brut (or outsider art) movement.
Brutalist Torch Cut Chandelier by Tom Greene Arresting midcentury Brutalist movement handcrafted torch cut patinated brass four-tier chandelier by Tom Greene, circa 1950s-1960s. This architectural and sculptural chandelier for The Feldman Co. features six candelabra sockets and one down socket.
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Patina is the thin layer which develops on materials (particularly metals and stone) as a result of oxidisation and ageing over time. Patinated finishes give Brutalist interior designs a less refined, textural and industrial feel. Burning was often used by designers like Silas Seandel, patterning simplistic forms with oil-like slicks and mottled ombres for a Brutalist-approved decorative element.
Brutalist Abstract Metal Wall Sculpture by Silas Seandel Brutalist abstract wall sculpture in welded metal with a gilt patina, created by American sculptor and designer Silas Seandel (b. 1937). The piece was made in the United States during the 1970s-1980s and is in good vintage condition. //interior | elements
m s i l a t u r B d n a s t Ca ies t t i k or f ses u o rh e t l he s l ura t c hite c r a
Curving concrete. Modular construction. Sustainable materials. Roof gardens. These are the elements of some of the finest architectural projects across the globe. It just so happens those dwellings belong to cats, not people. These stunning cat houses were created for Architects for Animals’ “Giving Shelter” fundraiser in Los Angeles. The designs drew a crowd of not-so-crazy cat people, and all proceeds went to FixNation, a Californian spay-neuter nonprofit. Kind and contemporary, the designs please feline friends and design-conscious guardians alike with their geometry, texture, and clean look. The cat houses were designed by various architects: Formation Association, HOK, Perkins + Will, DSH architecture, Standard Architecture and Design, Wolcott Architecture, Abramson Teiger Architects, d3architecture, Lehrer Architects, NAC architecture, Pfeiffer Partners Architects, RNL, RTKL, and Space Int’l. //interior | Cats Brutal Houses
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The Cat Cube, was done by Standard Architecture Design. The minimalist, brutal play house is made of thick planks of wood and slabs of concrete in order to keep the cats inside warm. There are multiple tiers and textures so that more than one kitty can roost and move around throughout the day.
The Cat Pod, by Standard Architecture, offers kittens a prefabricated, vaulted concrete shell. It’s a structure that’s probably more robust than your wood-framed house. Meanwhile, teak wood forms the door, and a wool felt serves as a soft floor that you just know cats are going to obsessively paw at for hours on end.
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Then there’s a mixed-use cube by HOK. The porthole construction invites cats into a cardboard lair, which is wrapped in acrylic to give the box an iPhone-like sheen. The entire structure doubles as a seat for human companions too— should the cat allow it.
And of course, no cat furniture collection would be complete without an inexplicable link to Star Wars. The Rise of SkyWhisker, by Stantec, takes some liberties with canon by placing the character Luke SkyWhisker into a structure that appears to be the Death Claw, run by the Galactic Dogpire; “when completed, this fur-midable weapon in the catmousephere will spell certain doom for the small litter of kittens struggling to restore freedom to the galaxy.” In any case, it all equates to a very cozy little nook for cats. //interior | Cats Brutal Houses
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And while most pet owners can’t imagine springing to commission an international architecture firm to handle their pet-related designs, it’s unbelievable to me that beige-carpet-wrapped wood is still the de facto way we offer comfort to our cats. With some exception, the materials in these designs aren’t very precious or difficult to mass-produce. We really could build these things, en masse, for our favorite, four-legged rulers of our families.
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SOUND BRUTALISM S SOUND BRUTALISM ISM SOUND BRUTALIS TALISM SOUND BRUTA TALISM SOUND BRUTALISM SOUND BR TALISM SOUND BRUTALISM SOUND BRUTALISM SOUND B SOUND BRUTALISM TALISM SOUND BRUT TALISM SOUND BRUTA
SOUND BRUTALISM SM SOUND BRUTALSM SOUND B R U TALISM SOUND BRU BRUTALISM SOUND RUTALISM SOUND BRU BRUTALISM SOUND BRUTALISM SOUND BRUTALISM SM SOUND BRUTALISM SOUND BRUALISM SOUND BRUTAL-
Sound-based Brutalism The term sound-based music is used as a slightly refined equivalent for sonic art, in reference to ‘the art form in which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic unit’ and suggests sound-based artworks for the non-Cageian reader, arguing that from a liberal viewpoint, sound-based artworks would be a subset of music (Landy 2007: 17, 241). Accordingly, soundbased artwork is here used as an overarching term for reference to cross-medium artworks (e.g. electronic music, installations, sound-sculptures) in which the primary focus is sound.
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Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.
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e r u t c e t i f h o c r s A e i r t e s s i l S e a r t a u u t Br rms culp o S f n I d n u o S H. o M ist t r da n u So
gs. n i d l bui y k loc b y in t u bea c i t poe s find i e re Za
A series of monolithic blocks of concrete and glass comprise the Ekbatan apartment complex in Tehran, Iran. There, the current Wellington-based sound artist, Mo H. Zareei, grew up adoring the “gray Lego-like giants.” They were Brutalist structures, as Zareei explains on Streaming Museum, but he loved their “strict geometries,” and the “poetry,” he says, of their parallel lines. Most people, especially artists, aren’t so kind to Brutalist architecture, which has come to symbolize totalitarian bureaucracy. But for the last several years, Zareei has been working on combining his interest in Brutalist architecture with sound sculpture and noise. For him, brutalism intersects the type of sound art and music that has influenced him, particularly in his recent series of 10 sound sculptures pieces, titled machine brut(e). Zareei showcases the sound art in a new video, which features three sound sculptures— Rasper, Rippler and Mutor—playing ten distinct installation pieces. //music | Sound Sculptures
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“Strictly metric and pulse-based rhythms are used as a sonic metaphor for the grid-based and geometric structure of Brutalist architecture. By using nonstop repetitions of one or two-bar long loops, the piece draws attention to the very essence of its constituent sonic material and every detail and nuance of their noise, in parallel to the validation of material in Brutalist architecture.” Zareei’s goal with the constant repetition is to create a “temporal monolithism” that matches Brutalism’s block-like aesthetics. The repetition is also designed to produce an “instant audible structure” that links to the imagery of Brutalist buildings. “The physical placement and distribution of the sound-sculptures in each composition has also been taken into account meticulously, abiding by the strict geometries and highly ordered visual aesthetic of Brutalism,” Zareei adds. “Therefore, each piece is developed not only as a work of sound art, but also a sculptural composition. To further highlight the visual Brutalist aesthetic, a block of raw concrete (béton brut) is emblematically featured in all ten compositions.” While the sounds heard in the ten audiovisual pieces might at first seem merely noisy and harsh, there is a hypnotic allure and a poetry to them. Much like the music of IDM masters Autechre, there isn’t simply beauty in the repetition and geometry of the audio, but in the tonal qualities of the sound. So, much like Brutalist architecture, there is a depth to Zareei’s machine brut(e) that isn’t immediately accessible, but most certainly there.
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“Each piece incorporates a different combination of the sound-sculptures and is composed as a one or two-bar long pattern that goes through an endless loop”.
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FASHION BRUTALIS ISM FASHION BRUTA TALISM FASHION BRU ION BRUTALISM FASHION BRUTALISM ISM FASHION BRUT BRUTALISM FASHION BRUTALISM FASHION ION BRUTALISM FASH FASHION BRUTALIS TALISM FASHION ION BRUTALISM FASH
SM FASHION BRUTALALISM FASHION BRUUTALISM FASH FASHION BRUTALISM FASHION BRUTALTALISM FASHION BRUTALISM FASHION BRUTALISM FASHHION BRUTALISM ISM FASHION BRU BRUTALISM FASHHION BRUTALISM
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Martijn van Strien (1988) graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven 2012 with majors in textile design and trend forecasting. After working for Bruno Pieter’s Honest by. label in Antwerp he moved to Rotterdam, where he started his own studio in 2014. Van Strien’s studio uses modern technologies to bring innovative ideas to the fashion world. By testing radically different approaches to garment design, production and consumption he changes our perception and opens possibilities for a more sustainable industry. The eponymous label ‘mphvs’ shows the merging of his fascinations for science, architecture and style. In 2015 his studio launched The Post-Couture Collective, an open-source project that spawned the first maker community for garments. It gives consumers the possibility to produce their own clothing by introducing a line of wearable clothing designed specifically for production on lasercutters and 3d printers.
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If ever the worlds of fashion and science were located on two different sides of the universe, Martijn van Strien is well on this way to assemble them together into one perfect dark harmony. He creates a world where anything is possible and constantly changing. Urban becomes rural, ugly turns into beauty and rainbows come in black and white. Ever future-focused, his aim is to make the best possible version of everything. Textile design might just be the beginning. Van Strien’s interest in the technical side of fashion and design made him stand out at the Design Academy Eindhoven where he graduated in December 2012. There he specialised in textile design and trend forecasting. Skills and knowledge he developed further at the Textile Department of Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, focusing on handcrafts and textile manufacturing. His two graduation projects at DAE, Threads for Cockaigne and Dystopian Brutalist Outerwear, received wide international praise and recognition. Both collections arose from imaginative worlds and abstract concepts. The first found inspiration in craftsmanship from the past, Medieval tales in particular. While the second explored future and ‘sustainable’ adaptations of textile design. For this he was awarded a prestigious ‘Keep an Eye’ grant during the Dutch Design Week, to continue designing and experimenting with various materials. His interest in future-focused and sustainable fashion, brought him to Antwerp, where he is currently assisting fashion designer Bruno Pieters at Honest By. Besides exploring material //fashion | Martijn Van Strien
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sourcing, his work includes all the Honest by graphic design, website, publicity and organising a book project. ‘’Nothing endures but change’’, (Heraclitus) and in the case of Van Strien this craving for evolution has become a recurring element in his work. Intrigued by the speed of fashion, standing still will never be an option for the young creator. In order to do this, it is important to keep your eyes open at all times, discovering and analysing new things. Preferably with one eye peeking into the future. At the same time, he likes the mystery of not knowing how something is constructed. It is this curiosity that makes him want to take a new approach to ‘sustainable’ fashion, working with recycled or organic-based synthetic materials instead of the old fashioned eco materials like organic hemp or cotton. He plans to develop his expertise in textile design through partnerships with established studios in the fashion industry. In the world of Martijn van Strien anything is possible, stylish and constantly evolving. Whereas ‘fear’ is a word unknown to his vocabulary.
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Béton Brut //fashion | Béton Brut
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Amanda Nogier has dabbled in many areas of the arts—photography, welding, graphic design— but jewellery design was never on her radar. That is, not until she decided to craft a selection of wearable concrete bling for a student-organized pop-up shop at the University of Alberta, where she was majoring in industrial design in 2014. That’s when the emails started coming. “People kept asking me about my jewellery: where they could find it, if I was going to make more of it,” she recalls. “And it grew organically from that.” Now based in her hometown of Saskatoon, Nogier is the founder of Béton Brut (French for “raw concrete”), a line of, in her words, “minimal, modern” concrete jewellery with a “Memphis-y” edge. More specifically, the pared-down shapes of her drop earrings, necklaces and double-finger rings are inspired primarily by Brutalism, an architectural style that was popular in the 1950s and ’60s and is characterized by its—no coincidence here— stark concrete constructions. Meanwhile, the colours—vibrant teals, pinks and lilacs—that are incorporated into Béton Brut’s pieces take more closely after the Memphis Group, a design-andarchitecture collective founded in the ’80s that was known for its colourful post-modern works. The jewellery is made up of a lightweight mix of concrete that Nogier produces in small batches. She blends powder pigments into the mixes before pouring them into handmade moulds, resulting in marbled concrete forms that showcase a range of dreamy, at times ombré-like, hues. Framed by 3D-printed brass or sterling silver, these highly durable, hand-polished pieces stand in for shimmering beads, metals or gemstones, highlighting the possibilities of a seemingly frigid, inflexible substance. “I love that concrete is an everyday material that most people kind of overlook,” notes Nogier. “It’s really accessible in the sense that it’s not super expensive. And, aesthetically, you can make it into such a beautiful thing.”
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Fashion Designer of the Year 2019:
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Photo by Carey Shaw
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Such beautiful things include geometric studs and pendants, as well as larger statement items such as the Goldfinger, a striking double-finger ring inspired by “oft-misunderstood” architect Ernő Goldfinger, and the High Line series, a collection of necklaces commissioned by New York City’s High Line Shop that uses obsidianand jet-black-stone-infused concrete to mimic the material of its namesake park. And then there’s Nogier’s favourite piece, the Arch earrings, a pair of dangle earrings that feature slabs of concrete that have been designed to resemble grand 3D archways. The jewellery has a timeless, artful quality to it, one that’s earned Béton Brut a spot in boutiques across Canada and the U.S., as well as at institutions like the Royal Alberta Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “I was really drawn to the jewellery’s beautiful blend of perfect shapes and imperfect materials,” says DOTY judge Danielle Wilmore, co-founder and designer at Vancouver-based jewellery brand Pyrrha. “The concrete designs make each piece one-of-a-kind, yet the finish is clean and modern.”
Photo by Carey Shaw. The Lavalier earrings are inspired by Art Deco.
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Photo by Carey Shaw. The Radii studs may resemble the shape of Pac-Man, but they’re actually informed by geometry: radii is the plural of radius. //fashion | Béton Brut
Q&A Q: A:
Q: A:
Q: A:
You’re organizing a designer dinner party: which three designers, dead or alive, would you want there? I’m going to have to go with all dead designers because I feel like I still might be able to meet the alive ones that I admire most one day. Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis Group; Marcel Breuer, a well-known Brutalist architect and student of the Bauhaus; and Aino Aalto, a Finnish designer who was my first female design idol. What’s your dream project? I would absolutely love to design facades and large public installations in my style of brightly coloured concrete. But I think the industrial designer in me really wants to design public furniture and spaces for interaction—not necessarily in concrete. I’ve always been incredibly interested in sociology and the way people interact with their surroundings, so I’d like to be able to use more of those ideas in the future. Who do you admire most as a designer? Stefan Sagmeister. I forget how I learned about him, but it was back before I chose design as a career. He made me think—what do I love enough in this world that I would carve my skin to make a point? In other words, what do I want to do so badly that it doesn’t matter how hard it is, because I would endure it regardless? He has always been a bit of a controversial designer, constantly pushing the boundaries, which is why I love him so much. I’ve always been really bad at following rules and answering to authority, which often caused difficulties with my professors to the point where I was threatened to be expelled from design school, until my professor sat down with me and learned a little more about where I was coming from. Reading and learning about Sagmeister makes me feel like it’s worth being myself, and to keep pushing on.
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Photo by Carey Shaw. The Oculus pendant gives a nod to our galaxy.
In recent years, Nogier has also extended her concrete expertise to the world of home decor, producing small planters and vessels and collaborating with Edmonton-based companies Libertine Fragrances (on a candle) and Birch and Grey (on furniture pieces). However, there’s a certain thrill that Nogier finds in jewellery making that’s sure to keep the designer in the field for years to come. “Every time I pull a piece out of a mould Photo by Carey Shaw. and polish it, it’s a different experience,” she says. “I love the The Hex pendant is an homage excitement to the first of concrete constantly jewellerybeing piece that able Nogier to ever create constructed. something new.”
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Photo by Carey Shaw. Moduli Necklace by Beton Brut
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Photo by Carey Shaw. Gold Concrete Rope Necklace by Beton Brut
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credits Editor in Chief Creative Director Silva Shaleva Supervision Cecilia Melli Marina Bonanni Graphic Design Silva Shaleva Photography Carey Shaw Imke Ligthart Phebe Schmidt French+Tye Mariyan Atanasov Tomo Taka Carsten Höller Todd Merrill Studio Phaidon © Klaus Frahm Meghan Bob Writers Lucy Lau Rose Etherington Kate Moran David Bryant Copeland Jessica Stewart Silva Shaleva PangramPangram Foundry David Navarro & Martyna Sobecka Tomo Taka Laura Staugaitis Paul Keskeys Jade Bloomfield Divisare MH Zareei DJ Pangburn Rose Etherington Lucy Lau Print house Mail Boxes Etc. - Centro MBE 0041 Via Col Moschin 14, 20136 Typography Gosha Sans by PangramPangram Foundry
The Brutalist is an editorial magazine, which explores the concept of Brutalism outside of its common understanding of architectural expression. Rather than that, the Brutalist magazine examines the voice of Brutalism in more unconventional fields of design - such as graphic, web, fashion, interior, even music.
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