Phaidon recently tapped architecture historian Owen Hopkins of Newcastle University in England to find his own way into the uniquely assertive architectural movement. The resulting book, The Brutalists, organizes more than 200 projects by their respective architects and rearranges those same projects into an easy-to-reference timeline. Familiar names like Le Corbusier and Zaha Hadid are given equal billing to lesser-known architects like Högna Sigurðardóttir and Igor Vasilevsky in an international survey filled with — as always for this subject — stark black-and-white photography.
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So many debates about Brutalism seem to come down to whether or not it’s a symbol of Western civilization’s decline. What do you wish people would understand about Brutalism that goes beyond such arguments?
There’s a way of thinking about Brutalism that embraces and in many ways depends on its paradoxes. It can be seen as being something that emerged in a particular place and time but is also a system-built, machine-built, industrialized, anonymous global phenomenon. And then there’s a Brutalism that is architecture at its most sculptural, almost handmade, one that looks back to human history and beyond. There are many examples of Brutalism that appear more futuristic than almost any other type of architectural style.
Its creators attempted to bring divergent forces together in some kind of synthesis where their buildings are almost creaking from the effort. Brutalism tried to identify Modernism’s contradictions and either resolve them or hold them in some tension, while Postmodernism simply embraced them.
It’s a style that needs to be consigned to history because it’s so energy intensive and generally representative of a different age. But I’m still compelled by the way its architects saw architecture as a way to change the world for the better. We don’t need to build any more Brutalist buildings, but the sense of ambition you see in them is something we quite urgently need.
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