Now, like the chevron mustache, Brutalism is undergoing something of a revival. Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness. For an aesthetic once praised for its “ruthless logic” and “bloody-mindedness” — in the much-quoted phrasing of critic Reyner Banham — it is a surprising turn of events.

For long-suffering admirers of Brutalism, the internet has proved an unexpected boon companion. Popular Tumblrs unleash endless streams of black-and-white images of gravity-defying cantilevers from the world over. A hulking concrete school in downtown Miami swallowing students! A concrete ski resort in Chamonix, France, that appears poised to tumble off the edge of a mountain! Brutalism, it turns out, lends itself to ­Instagram-style scrolling, one eye-popping hunk of brush-hammered weirdness after another.

The long overdue intellectual revival has also followed. In countries still reeling from the worldwide financial crisis, it’s a solace to look back to an era of muscular, public-minded development. MoMA’s recent “Latin America in Construction, 1955-1980” show reminded architects and a lay audience alike of the masterpieces of this ­forward-looking, confident era, such as Lina Bo Bardi’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo, with its glass facade sandwiched between two enormous slices of raw concrete, suspended impossibly high off a plaza by swollen red staples. In 2014, the British critic Jonathan Meades produced a combative reconsideration of Brutalism in a two-part television documentary for the BBC, putting the style back into the mainstream of welfare-cutting Britain.

...

What was and still is appealing about Brutalism is that it had a kind of purity to it. For their first large project, a school in Hunstanton, and in subsequent projects, such as the Economist building in central London, the Smithsons went back to the lessons of the modern masters, to Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier: to build transparently, cleanly and truthfully. “Whatever has been said about honest use of materials,” Banham wrote in a 1955 article, “most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel.” The Smithsons’ project at Hunstanton, by contrast, “appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact made of glass, brick, steel and concrete.” ... Still, Brutalism wasn’t fully popular with a broad public, whose members were never convinced that awe-inspiring concrete dourness was what society was truly missing, and it ultimately depended on the good will of sympathetic planners. Once politics turned against the welfare state in the 1980s, Brutalism was doomed. Budgets were gutted; public housing lost its funding; the market came to dictate development. The delirious, pink-granite fantasies of postmodernist office towers rose to loom over the gray Brutalist housing projects, left to molder and decay. All buildings require upkeep, and in a sense the deliberate neglect of Brutalism had the same effect that starving public bureaucracies did.

But the renewed interest in the movement has yet to produce any meaningful change in the culture of what gets built and how.