Guardian: Don't Knock Brutalism

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http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2008/06/dont_knock_brutalism.html

Steve Rose


Don't knock brutalism
This stark architectural style became synonymous with 70s ugliness, but is it about to undergo a renaissance?
June 26, 2008 11:45 AM

No PR firm would have dreamt up the word "brutalism". The term was derived from Le Corbusier's "Béton brut"- French for "raw concrete", the movement's preferred material - rather than anything to do with brutality, with which it has sadly become better associated. In the popular imagination, brutalism is synonymous with harsh, hostile, ugly architecture (or death metal). Two key examples of the movement are currently under threat, Birmingham Central Library and Robin Hood Gardens, and both have sparked furious debate.

Birmingham Central Library, opened in 1974 and designed by John Madin, is apparently the busiest library in Europe, though Prince Charles judged its hulking inverted ziggurat more suited to incinerating books than storing them. The building was slated for demolition as part of a £1bn plan to regenerate the city centre (and build a brand new library) but now English Heritage has recommended it be listed, arguing that it has "defined an era of Birmingham's history". There seem to be plenty in the city who would rather leave that era undefined, but others have defended it as a successful, high-quality design, including my colleague Jonathan Glancey.

It's a similar story with Robin Hood Gardens, in Poplar, East London. One of the original "streets in the sky" housing developments, completed in 1972, this relentless mid-rise estate displayed the worst of public housing design: crime, grime, and societal and material decay. But it was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, arguably Britain's most celebrated modernist architects. When discussions over its future arose, the architectural magazine Building Design launched a campaign to save it led by heavyweights such as Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid. As Simon Jenkins pointed out, nobody who actually lives there has joined this campaign. Why not please everybody and convert it into a National Museum of Bad Architecture?

It's ironic that these buildings should come under threat just when Britain is beginning to realise that modernism wasn't so bad after all. Tastes change. Look at Birmingham's gleaming new Rotunda, a former "eyesore" now made over into desirable apartments (they sold out in three hours). Look at London's scrubbed-up Brunswick Centre , which was little more than a giant public urinal a decade ago but is now so posh it has a Waitrose. And watch out for Sheffield's Park Hill estate - another listed former brutalist blackspot being rejuvenated by hip developers Urban Splash. Perhaps Birmingham Central Library and Robin Hood Gardens are also just a makeover away from becoming national treasures. Maybe, sometime in the near future, we'll realize that brutalism wasn't so bad after all. Perhaps it just needs a new name.

 

[smuncky]

our former sears headquarters looks a lot better than the library.

but you gotta love how instantly you can recognize a building from the brutalist period anywhere in the world.

 

[khris]

<3 Brutalism

 

[LowPolygon]

there is no question that Brutalism was a significant movement in 20th century architecture, and it is definitely due for a reconsideration and revival.
the best brutalist buildings have absolutely stood the test of time, and have a stark almost timeless beauty.
all the more so since the best ones are now almost 50 years old.
unlike almost all postmodern buildings which are aging rather badly, our view of brutalist buildings continue to evolve, and they continue to engage our minds.

 

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080710.RUSSELL10/TPStory/Entertainment/columnists

ARCHITECTURE: BRUTALISM IS BACK

It's cool to be a blockhead

RUSSELL SMITH

rsmith@globeandmail.com

July 10, 2008

There is a debate going on in Birmingham, England, about the fate of its famously ugly central library. The English Heritage organization is recommending that the concrete mass be "listed," or designated as a building of historic significance. The Twentieth Century Society, a British group devoted to preserving the architecture that best characterizes the past century, whether beautiful or commonplace, is also campaigning for its preservation. The city council has been planning for some time to have it demolished and replaced. This conundrum - the choice between glorification and total destruction - is typical of discussions going on around the world about the value of brutalism, that utopian postwar architecture that it was so chic to disdain about 20 years ago. Brutalism is back.

The Birmingham Central Library was built in 1974, designed by John Madin, toward the end of the vogue for hulking utilitarian concrete design in Britain. (Madin's other famous bunkers were built in the 1950s and 1960s; many of them have been demolished.) The library is an inverted ziggurat: That is, its upper floors project outward and loom over the street below. Prince Charles, one of many to voice rebellious thoughts against late modernist architecture in the 1980s, said the Birmingham library looked "more like a place for burning books than keeping them."

Interestingly, its design was inspired by that of Boston City Hall, another famously hideous building, built 10 years earlier. And the same debate is happening over that one, with newspaper columnists demanding it be torn down and preservation societies springing to its defence.

Originally, the term brutalism was humorously pejorative: It was coined by architecture critic Reyner Banham in punning reference to the French béton brut (raw concrete), the material Le Corbusier said he liked best.

Banham was primarily attacking the work of the British husband-and-wife team Peter and Alison Smithson, who were responsible, in the fifties and sixties, for many failed housing projects and authoritarian public buildings. The funny thing was that all these disciples of Le Corbusier were socialist idealists; they believed that social progress would come from experiments in communal, vertical living. There was something puritanical about this ideology too, as if comfort and beauty were bourgeois.

Why brutalism became the style of choice for North American university campuses isn't so clear, but it's in university buildings - libraries, in particular, for some reason - that one finds the most amazingly awful examples of the genre. For example, the library of Ryerson University, in downtown Toronto, is a square block so featureless it appears from the outside to be solid concrete all the way through. And it still doesn't rival the University of Toronto's Robarts Library for gaudy inhuman unpleasantness.

But I am sounding very uncool by saying this now, as hipsters all over the educated world are singing the praises of concrete. Books and articles are coming out monthly on the most influential concrete structures of the fifties through the seventies, and societies are developing to fight for their preservation.

In Berlin a few years ago, I saw a number of books and games on sale in intellectual bookstores devoted to pictures of plattenbauten, the dreary apartment blocks of the former East Germany. Those buildings were made with precast concrete plates and often ended up with strange geometric patterns covering their façades. Close-ups of the patterns look pretty cool in photographs, like the op art of the period (although I still wouldn't want to live in one of these buildings). A lot of them are being torn down, which is indeed reckless. Victorian architecture was also once considered ugly and silly, and many interesting examples were torn down in the 20th century. Now, we miss them.

But it's hard to tell if the fashionable affection for communist housing is slightly ironic, or if it's simply another form of ostalgie, the yearning for East German kitsch. Interestingly, a lot of the people singing the praises of brutalist university libraries are baby boomers who spent their undergraduate years on these campuses. I suspect there is some nostalgia at work there too.

Trellick Tower, a high-rise apartment building in London, built in 1972 as public housing, was notoriously crime-ridden. But now that real estate is worth as much as diamonds in London, a one-bedroom apartment in it sells for $500,000. The concrete boxes of Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, also conceived as affordable housing, are now similarly sought after. And it has always been chic to live in a Le Corbusier building, cramped and slab-like as they may be. This is understandable: His designs are still startling, and there is a majesty to such bold ugliness on such a scale. There is a thrill to be had from the huge and menacing; if there weren't, we wouldn't listen to amplified electric guitars and drums.

More importantly, it's probably the optimism of the era, the belief that the future would all be geometric, that is worth preserving. The gaudiest and strangest of brutalist designs are therefore probably the ones that are most historically significant.