SOS Brutalism is the first global survey of Brutalist architecture from the 1950s to ’70s, and is a rallying cry for preservation ...
SOS Brutalism A Global Survey was only recently published by Park Books, but already two of its featured projects have been destroyed. The 1972 Robin Hood Gardens, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, was demolished last fall in London; the 1972 Pragati Maidan, designed by Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj with a cast-in-place concrete lattice of triangular shapes, was torn down last April in New Delhi. Despite Brutalism’s new surgein popularity, the survival of the concrete-heavy architecture remains at risk.
The colossal book, available in English and German versions with over 700 pages of richly illustrated material, is published in conjunction with SOS BRUTALISM – Save the Concrete Monsters!, on view at Deutschen Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt. After the exhibition closes at DAM on April 2, it will travel to Architekturzentrum Wien, opening on May 3. Both the book and the exhibition represent the first global survey of Brutalist architecture from the 1950s to ’70s. They were developed from the online #SOSBrutalism campaign, a collaboration between DAM, Wüstenrot Foundation, and Uncube, that crowdsourced a database of over 1,000 projects across the world. (Hyperalleric covered its launch back in 2015.)
“In strong opposition to the modernism of the International Style, Brutalism was transformed locally as a bottom-up movement, in close relation to local culture and craftsmanship,” Oliver Elser, curator at DAM and one of the editors of SOS Brutalism, told Hyperallergic. “In many countries it was the architecture of independence and/or cultural and economical progress. This connection with politics is only visible through our global perspective.”
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