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Among the contenders for the Oscar for Best Picture this year is The Brutalist, a drama about a European architect dedicated to the principles of a movement known as brutalism. The movement traces its origins to the 1950s to a style of architecture that emerged in the United Kingdom. That style went on to spread around the world, embraced especially by postwar urban planners—eventually becoming hugely divisive among the public.
What is the political ethic of brutalist architecture? Why does it emphasize the use of concrete? And did public planners debase the architectural movement?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Brutalism is an aesthetic with very clear architectural principles, but its founders also claimed that the aesthetic was connected to a political worldview. What is that political ethic, and what is its connection with the underlying aesthetic?
Adam Tooze: The distinctive thing about brutalism is that it comes out of its epoch, its time. And, as you say, it’s a movement that acquired a label in the early 1950s and was a quite conscious effort by a group of young architects, initially in Europe, but then with notable exponents in the United States. And the conscious effort is to try to find a new form of modernism for the aftermath of World War II. So there was a sense that the original phase of modernism, the steel glass curtain walls, the sleek, streamlined version of modernism that had come out of the ’20s and ’30s—Le Corbusier gets his start in that period, Mies van der Rohe, all of the kind of classic names—had, to an extent, been problematized, cast into question by the shock of the war, by the destruction wrought, amongst other things, by Junkers aircraft produced in factories in the east of Germany shaped by Bauhaus architects. So there was a sense that there was a history that needed to be overcome and a moment that needed to be responded to, and that moment was tougher, it was rougher, it was more brutal, it was more self-conscious of the problems of the earlier phases of modernism. And we see this in painting, with Dubuffet and people like that painting in the aftermath of World War II in France, who spoke about an “art brut.” But if you think about in Britain, people like Francis Bacon or Giacometti’s concentration camp-like figures of the human body, there is this effort after World War II to kind of radicalize and question what it is, in fact, to be modern.
And the answer that the brutalists give is not to retreat to twee, arts and crafts, William Morris, early Frank Lloyd Wright, what’s sometimes called a new humanism, but to blast forward into an even more capacious style, a willingness to embrace the realities of the present. So they articulated this in a three-point program of brutalism: Buildings ought not to be obscure and difficult to read from the outside. There should be a clear exposure of the structure, so the structure that sustains the building should not be clad. It should not be obscured. If steel or concrete is holding the building up, then you should be able to see it. And it should be, in fact, a conscious embrace of those materials based on their intrinsic qualities.
Brutalism was an architecture that struggled with the history and the drama and violence of 20th-century history. In Europe, it’s literally building on the ruins of the war. And in the United States, on the ruins left by the urban crisis of the ’50s and ’60s. It’s an architecture of truth. So it’s a space that should reveal, as Louis Kahn puts it, how it was made. You don’t dress things up. It’s an architecture of objectivity, expressed by the use for which the construction is intended. So make the building look as though it means business. Use materials in an undressed form. That’s the principle of rigor. It should be transparent so that you can understand the logic of the building. And it should also convey an image. It should speak as a statement in the world. It’s an architecture which doesn’t pretend to be something other than it is.
So Banham, Reyner Banham, the British architectural theorist, described brutalist buildings as buildings in which you don’t take glass, brick, steel, and concrete and pretend that they’re something else. You let them be glass, brick, steel, and concrete. Water and electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall but are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes and manifest conduits. So it’s a sort of literalism; some people describe it as a warehouse aesthetic. It’s also a polemic. It’s brutal also in the sense that it doesn’t care—that it’s stubborn. It’s resistant. It’s in your face. It’s not pretending to offer you something other than what it is.
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The Wotrubakirche church in Vienna, Austria, designed by Fritz Wotruba.iStock photo
CA: Why is there such an emphasis on concrete in the brutalist movement—is that ultimately related to aesthetics or engineering principles or economics?
AT: The phrase itself, brutalism, has many different potential etymological origins, including obscure debates within the Communist Party branches of architecture in Europe in the ’40s and ’50s. But the most obvious reference is Le Corbusier, the great interwar French architect’s phrase that modernism involved confronting “Béton brut,” so the French term for exposed concrete, raw concrete, if you like.
Concrete is very, very strong under compression, but it’s not very good under tension. In other words, you can pull it apart, so you add steel to that, and then all of a sudden you have a material that is both heavily resistant to compression and also resistant under tension. And in the late 19th century, the techniques were worked out for steel reinforcing concrete. And that’s what then launches concrete on its trajectory in the 20th century.
But again, to invoke this distinction, the first wave of modernism used concrete but, to a degree, buried it in the building, hid it behind steel and glass curtain walls and things like that. What the brutalist architects do is to bring concrete to the fore and to celebrate it. And concrete has extraordinary virtues. It’s just a very fungible building material. It’s incredibly plastic. So you can bend it, you can pour it, you can shape remarkable shapes out of it. And when its surfaces are skillfully dressed, it can be beautiful, like an abstract painting can be beautiful. And all of these, I think, were the reasons that were really to the fore in creating a broadband acceptance of brutalism.
The left-wing side of brutalism was preoccupied with social housing and therefore very interested in the question of cost, pushing toward prefabricated concrete construction. This approach was taken to its ultimate limit in things like the East German program of Plattenbau, which were really like Lego buildings.
And I think the ultimate exponents of brutalism would say, it’s simultaneously aesthetic engineering and economic logics which drive here, and political logics as well. And that is why this is so much of the moment that we’re at right now, that in this material, we see the convergence of these different forces in play.
The Geisel Library at the University of California-San Diego, designed by William Pereira.iStock photo
CA: Did the brutalist concept become debased through its widespread adoption, specifically by public planning authorities? Much of the brutalist architecture they commissioned has been torn down after proving unpopular or dysfunctional. Were the public planners motivated by different ideas than the architects we’ve been discussing?
AT: Yeah. I mean, I think anyone who looks seriously into the history of brutalism does face this question of debasement. It’s kind of a self-referential, paradoxical phrase, almost like, you know, the brutalization of a brutalism is something that we have to account for. So if you think of World War II as a modernist experiment, and the destruction it has created in its wake is now a call to rebuild, how do you rebuild in the face of the fact that the first generation of modernism had been complicit in the utter violence of the century, right? There’s few things more modern, after all, than a strategic bombing campaign which had laid waste to much of Europe and Asia.
And so the Smithsons in particular, who built the icons of brutalism in Britain in the early 1950s, talk about the need to develop a pavement politics, a doorstep philosophy, a sidewalk architecture. They construct their buildings so as to enable in three dimensions the world of community life that previously played out in densely packed tenement housing in the dock areas of London. One of the reasons why they want to celebrate material is so as to be able to incorporate what they call found materials, in other words, go to the construction site and see what’s there. The spirit of their architectural thinking is communal, and it is that of pop art of the same period, right? Don’t pretend that you have to go to the museum to see art. Think about the way in which the world that we are in continuously produces aesthetic objects which are not the same as oil paintings, but themselves are worthy of attention and are in some senses the only authentic system that we have.
And so something happens to this project and it gets flipped in a really dramatic way. And one simple thing to say about it is it gets Americanized. And in America it intersects with the forces of really large-scale capitalism, the grand projects of urban redevelopment, and an intensity of urban crisis in much of the United States like nowhere else in the developed world, which then creates cities like the one that you and I know quite well, New Haven, which is stamped with these brutalist projects. I mean, Rudolph’s car park in downtown New Haven is an object that I will never forget the impact of. It’s really as though a kind of undulating concrete foot has been stamped into the middle of 19th- and early 20th-century urban space. It’s staggering in its violence.
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A boxy apartment building over a green hill. - Robin Hood Gardens in London. David Cowlard/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images
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Circular gardens and a pond inside a brutalist building. - The Barbican in London. iStock photo
CA: There’s a rediscovery of this movement underway now, but have the underlying ethical ideas that we’ve been talking about been abandoned along the way?
AT: Yes, I think they’ve been abandoned and literally demolished. There’s a very strong contrast, a stark contrast between two brutalist icons in London. The Robin Hood estate, one of the last of Smithson’s brutalist commissions, was a classic brutalist experiment in public housing. It was put into an East London area, a popular neighborhood of East London, which was formerly Docklands. It was a major hub of inward migration from the Caribbean and South Asia. And almost immediately after its completion in 1972, it runs into the urban crisis in the United Kingdom. The declinist narrative, the shortfalls in public spending, it becomes increasingly derelict. By the early 2000s, there are plans afoot for its demolition. In the 2010s, the demolition then really begins in earnest. The Victoria and Albert Museum manages to save a nine-meter-square section of the building, including an entire apartment complex, for one of the great fine arts collections of world museums. And the building was demolished, I think, more or less completely last year.
By contrast, the Barbican center, which many people will know from visits to London, has at various points housed the Royal Shakespeare Company. It has a library complex, a school, auditoriums, an art gallery. Completed in 1982 into the heyday of Thatcherism in the middle of the City of London, during some of the greatest agglomeration of wealth, certainly in Europe, indeed in the entire world. Its apartments were never affordable for regular low-income tenants. If anyone wants to see brutalism on display as its visionaries no doubt imagined it, you should go to see the Barbican complex because it’s a vision of large-scale, monumental, modern building. You know, if I try and visualize what, I didn’t know, Aztec temple construction looks like with hanging gardens and water gardens, to my mind it looks a little bit like the Barbican. And a top-floor penthouse apartment there with four bedrooms just sold for over $4 million.
So that, I think, gives you an idea of the divergence that you could see within this same aesthetic paradigm. You would say both were social housing projects realized in different parts of London under the same aesthetic imprint with radically divergent fates.