There are a number of people that still hold on to “Brutalist” as a way to describe these things but local critics and newspaper people have started to use it in their writing, which is nice to see.

MARK PASNIK: There’s the legacy of Brutalism being such a negative term. It begins the conversation with negativity about these buildings, and this falls into the misreading of them as harsh, Stalinist, or some other kind of monstrous, mean architecture. The name plays into that mischaracterization that’s grown around a lot of them. I think “Heroic’” is a better title for what their actual aspirations were. The architects had a real sense of optimism. They were developing architecture for the civic realm. They believed in democracy and high aspirations.

On the one hand, Brutalism encourages a misreading. On the other hand, I think it’s historically inaccurate for the work that is in our book. The term grows out of a British tradition and was applied to many of these buildings but all of the architects we spoke with in the book would say that’s not what they thought their work should be called. They believed in some of the aspirations of Brutalism but they didn’t believe that their work was Brutalist. That was surprising.

Our own creation of the term “Heroic” grows out of a two-fold interest. One is in the Smithsons, the British architects who are partly attributed with creating the term. The book that they wrote as a call to arms to return to the aspirations of early modernism was called The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, so “heroic” was being used by the originators of Brutalism as a call to arms to return to the basic principles of modernity.

Later, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used it as a negative term. They contrasted what they called the “heroic and original,” against the “ugly and ordinary.” They always used Paul Rudolph projects to indicate the former while arguing architects should pursue the latter, an everyday kind of architecture that grew into the postmodern movement.

For us, “Heroic” has this kind of duality—it’s an aspiring term but there’s also a critique in it. If you think of ancient Greek heroes, they have an achilles heel and I think that fits well with this work because it’s aspiring to a lot but it also had a sense of hubris and maybe failure within its aspirations.

What were people calling these buildings when they were new?

MP: A lot of them talked about “New Monumentality.” I don’t think they would call themselves Brutalists or New Monumentalists or anything like that. I think they were just “modern architects,” but they were seeking a monumentality out of the modern vocabulary that hadn’t existed. A lot of them were constructing the work to be post-Miesian, post-International Style, which was lightweight and repeated—oftentimes glass and steel—and had a corporate image by that time. I think they were looking for a different kind of language that would reflect civic society. For them, concrete was a way to get at that monumentality, that permanence, all the kinds of things that weren’t associated with the International style.

What made Boston so ripe for a concrete architecture boom?

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