Architecture moulded by brutalists to limitless forms

The Brutalists: Brutalism’s Best Architects is an elegantly designed tidy tome dedicated to a wide range of sculpturally expressive buildings broadly identified as Brutalist architecture. The book, in the words of its author, a UK-based writer and curator, Owen Hopkins, is “a polyphony of voices and approaches.” It is this extensive representation—the nearly 400-page anthology includes the works of 200 architects, many of which are teams and each is treated as an equal author with key biographical data provided—that sparked my enthusiasm about this publication. When I flipped through it, what immediately caught my attention was a range of names, both seminal and almost obscure from far-flung corners of the globe, all given seemingly equal importance. In fact, the book’s title deems all the featured architects as the “best.” This open-minded approach from the outset bewitches the author’s genuine intention to give everyone a fair-minded depiction, to see these architects and their works with a fresh and unbiased eye.

Almost all of the architects here are represented by a single building, while just seven masters have two buildings each. Among these few privileged practitioners are such familiar names as Louis Kahn, Marcel Breuer, Bertrand Goldberg, and I.M. Pei. The other three firms are Elizabeth & Gottfried Böhm; Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo & Briggs; and Zvi Hecker. Published by PHAIDON and released this month the new book appears to be bold, substantial, and all in all, quite authoritative. To state the obvious, all entries are depicted by black and white photography and there are no drawings, which, of course, would be helpful at least in some cases. This hints at the author’s intention to reach out to a non-professional audience. Most of the book’s protagonists are limited to just one page and a single photo of one building. This strict rule applies even to such famous names as Le Corbusier, Pier Luigi Nervi, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson, Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Arata Isozaki, and Herzog & de Meuron.

Many buildings are represented by two photos in a single spread and some are shown in up to five photos over two spreads. Studio Fuksas’s San Paolo Church and Parish Complex built in Umbria, Italy, in 2009, is depicted in five pages. At least one project, a private house, Casa Zicatela, designed by Ludwig Godefroy and built in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2015, is illustrated in six(!) photos. The architect was born and educated in France and set up his practice in Mexico City in 2011. His introspective project is eloquently arranged around several internal courtyards and constructed out of all-concrete surfaces. The architect’s work is a pleasant discovery for me personally. And that is exactly the point of the book—not merely to remind us of some of the usual suspects but to reveal lesser-known names, both from the past and now.

The earliest example cited in the book, a residential building by Lotte Cohn in Tel Aviv, is from 1936. Hopkins tells us that the architect was the youngest daughter in a family of seven. She became the first woman to graduate from the Royal Technical University in Berlin in 1916 before immigrating a few years later to the British Mandate of Palestine which would later become Israel. Her building—a four-story adaptation of modernist principles to the sunny Mediterranean climate—is quite isolated; the next oldest project is from 1952, Unité d'habitation in Marseille by Le Corbusier. By far most buildings gathered here are from the 1960s and 70s with the peak year in 1966 when 18 buildings were built, including Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York; IM Pei’s Mesa Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; and Kenzo Tange’s Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Centre in Japan. There are 20 buildings built already in the 21^st century, two of which were completed as late as 2016. These latest structures in the book are the Swiss National Museum Extension in Zurich by Christ & Gantenbein and the Church of Santa Josefina Bakhita in Granada, Spain, by Elisa Valero.

One important aspect of the album is its concise essay by Hopkins, the publication’s only author. Titled The Dualities of Brutalism, it clearly defines Brutalism as “a classic ‘late style,’ sitting somewhere between Modernism’s high point and its final unraveling in what became Postmodernism.” He aptly cites Brutalism’s characteristics by Reyner Banham in his The New Brutalism article from December 9, 1955, in Architectural Review as, “1, Memorability as an Image; 2, Clear exhibition of Structure; and 3, Valuation of Materials ‘as found.’” Banham also famously associated the movement with béton brut or raw concrete in French. But as the examples in the book demonstrate, concrete was not exclusive to many of the Brutalist examples.

What is particularly of interest in Hopkins’s essay is his yearning to clearly distinguish Brutalism from other styles—Modernism, Postmodernism, and High-Tech— that frame it but also share some common features. He finds that what really singled it out, “was the extent to which its mission rested not on ideology, not even on concrete, but on its attitude to energy. Brutalism was the architecture of the age of oil, reflecting whether consciously or not, the widely held assumption that oil would be cheap and plentiful in perpetuity.” He reminds us that this optimism ended with the 1973 oil crisis. In recent years, this is, of course, where lies the key criticism of this architecture—being highly energy intensive, both in how Brutalist buildings, particularly made of concrete, are constructed and run. In general, the use of concrete, the material which is the most energy-intensive, is no longer evaluated on aesthetic merits alone. Today, any building made of concrete is questioned whether another material could be used instead, entirely or, at least, in part, as a hybrid structure. 

Whether the brutalist buildings are really the most energy-intensive could be argued. Just think about the construction industry in the 1950s and 60s, when buildings were built largely locally, while now they are routinely assembled out of highly sophisticated and bespoke parts being produced all over the world to be then shipped to the site. Also, in the 1950s there was a belief not so much in the abundance of cheap oil but in the seemingly free and boundless energy supply promised by nuclear power’s potential. That overoptimistic utopian future never came. And to be sure, energy efficiency was not a big concern for Modernists either. Glass buildings by Mies or Johnson were designed to welcome both heat and cold with open arms. The AC, hidden somewhere above the ceiling, was supposed to adjust the indoor climate to the right level of comfort.

But what I find particularly vital in Hopkins’s text is his penetrating observation that “While architecture before the advent of Brutalism had largely been governed by systems—Classical, Gothic, even Modernist—Brutalists invented the architectural one-off, the building as pure sculpture.” Isn’t it true?! Of course, there are plenty of systems used by the Brutalists, mostly in housing projects, but buildings that are particularly creative in their forms are churches. They tend to express sculptural qualities more due to their greater emancipation from their function than other buildings. In the book, this type is beautifully demonstrated by such masters as Eladio Dieste (Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Uruguay, 1958), Pietro Belluchi (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco, USA, 1971), Marcel Breuer (Saint John’s Abbey Church, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA, 1961), and Fritz Wortuba (Church of the Most Holy Trinity, Vienna, Austria, 1976) to cite a few most prominent examples. Of course, starting from the late 1990s churches were replaced by museums as the most compelling building type. Museums have become new cathedrals of the 21^st century.

What I find notably refreshing in Hopkins’s book is that the entries, as much as they each add something about Brutalism, really focus on the architects themselves. How much do we really know about even our most celebrated architects’ personal details? What kind of environments did they grow up in? Why did they choose architecture as their professional pursuit? Was this discipline their first choice? How did their commissions come their way? What were their relations to other well-known architects? And, of course, relevant quotes. In the Harry & Penelope Seidler entry, which is the couple’s own house in Killara outside Sydney, built in 1967, Hopkins cited Penelope who justified the choice of the material for this Harry Seidler’s definitive mid-career manifesto project: “Concrete was the ideal: it’s tough, requires little maintenance, it provides good insulation and it can be molded to limitless forms.”

On a personal level, the book links many buildings and brings fond memories. The Killara House is a magical place I not only visited but stayed at as a guest for extended periods of time. Unité d'habitation was the project I analysed in my student days by building its representational basswood model, complete with a cage and all 337 apartments of 23 different layouts that insert into it; I still own numerous pieces of this fascinating puzzle of a building. A number of the buildings gathered in the book I visited were accompanied by good friends. Other acquaintances reside inside some of these apartment buildings and houses. And I interviewed at least a dozen of the architects gathered here. One of them, Igor Vasilevsky, the son of the Soviet Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky who became a defense minister shortly after World War II, was the architect of Druzhba (Friendship) Sanatorium built in Yalta in 1985 in Crimea, now annexed from Ukraine and unlawfully occupied by Russia. Perched over a hilly terrain right above the Black Sea the saw tooth edges of several disks of various diameters evoke the gears of a giant mechanism. The saw teeth are windows of elongated rooms that embrace each other along the circumferences of the disks. Together they rest on three massive cylindrical legs, each containing elevators and stairs within, while the amenities are situated in the building’s core, including a large indoor swimming pool hanging in its underbelly.     

The author’s ambition to give equal space to as many architects as possible, unfortunately, left many of the iconic buildings that we associate with Brutalism out of the picture. There are no buildings in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier. There is no La Tourette; no Ronchamp. Including only a single building by such masters as Gropius, Nervi, and Niemeyer, the book excluded many of their definitively Brutalist masterpieces. And to balance the selection with names that are less familiar the author did not include buildings by such masters as Jørn Utzon, Carlo Scarpa, Balkrishna Doshi, or this year’s Pritzker Prize winner David Chipperfield. Also, surprisingly, there is just one, and rather a petit project (Exhibition Pavilion, Jinhua Architecture Park, 2004) in China by Mexico City-based Tatiana Bilbao. This is despite the fact that China is known for its voracious appetite for concrete consumption and such local firms as Amateur Architecture Studio, Jiakun Architects, Atelier Deshaus, and Vector Architects are renowned for their Brutalist architecture. On the other hand, given that PHAIDON already published its encyclopedic Atlas of Brutalist Architecture in 2018 with the following reprint edition in 2020, which includes nearly 900 buildings by almost 800 architects, it is understandable that the new book on the same subject would need to have a new angle instead of trying too hard to be all-encompassing.

What I particularly find quite appealing in the new book by Owen Hopkins is that he pinpointed a number of recent examples of Brutalist architecture, hinting that perhaps Brutalism did not quite expire sometime in the last century but is still with us. Perhaps some of its best qualities could be picked up by contemporary architects to be explored in their work in exciting new ways. Architecture is a complex discipline and not all buildings can be simply categorized into periods and styles. Architects derive their inspiration from many diverse sources and precedents and that is the main message.