But is it worth preserving?
In Birmingham, England, there’s a fight afoot to save some of the city’s most striking buildings from the wrecker’s hammer. The buildings’ defenders insist that current redevelopment plans are threatening a vital part of the U.K. city’s architectural heritage. This group may well be right (and their concern familiar from elsewhere), but the places they’re defending aren’t the most obvious pawns in a struggle over historic preservation.
None of the structures in question pre-date 1960, and all of them heavily feature concrete,that most reviled of building materials. That’s because Birmingham is the latest battleground in the worldwide debate over what is currently the 20th century’s most contested architectural style—Brutalism.
The Brutiful Birmingham Action Group (see what they did there?) is fighting an uphill struggle to preserve the city’s best examples of 1950s and ’60s concrete and glass minimalism. At present Birmingham still has a good number of these. Thanks to a severe pounding by the Luftwaffe, much of the historic fabric of this major industrial city was lost during World War II. This wanton destruction at least gave the city a clean slate that in some cases turned out to be a backhanded advantage. In the 1950s and ‘60s, areas of squalid, meanly constructed back-to-back row houses were replaced with modernist housing projects that offered far better living conditions.
Still, the new construction wasn’t all gold. Central Birmingham was scarred with pro-car planning in the post-war period, throttling the city core with a segregated highway-like beltway sometimes referred to as the “Concrete Collar.” Around this new asphalt noose rose a few buildings that were textbook examples of why Brutalism is still controversial. Birmingham’s New Street Station was a dystopian cavern that looked like it was built for mole people to huddle in after some cataclysm.
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