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The New Brutalism

Alison and Peter Smitshon

If Academicism can be defined as yesterday's answers to today's problems, then obviously the objectives and aesthetic techniques of a real architecture (or a real art) must be in constant change.  In the immediate postwar period to set against loose planning and form - abdication, a compact disciplined, architecture.

Simple objectives once achieved change the situation, and the techniques used to achieve them become useless.

So new objectives are established.

From individual buildings, disciplined on the whole by classical aesthetic techniques, we moved on to an examination of the whole problem of human associations and the relationship that building and community has to them.  From this study has grown a completely new attitude and a nonclassical aesthetic.

Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take into account Brutalism's attempt to be objective above "reality" - the cultural objectives of society, it urges, its techniques, and so on.  Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-produced society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.

Up to now Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is ethical.

Architectural Digest December 1953

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[fig 04] maybe he was here (sue me)

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Figures:

fig.01 - Marcel Breuer: Annunciation Priory of The Sisters of St. Benedict, Bismarck, North Dakota with graffiti

fig. 02 - Marcel Breuer: St. John's Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota with graffiti by OMA

fig.03 - Marcel Breuer: St. John's Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota with graffiti by Breuer

fig.04 - Marcel Breuer: The Whitney, New York, NY graffiti by Bansky?

fig. 05 - Louis Kahn - Alfred Newton Richards Medical Medical Research Building, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

fig. 06 - Louis Kahn - First Unitarian Church and School, Rochester, New York

fig. 07 - Louis Kahn - Kimball Art Museum and a B.I.G. Diagram overlay

fig. 08 - Louis Kahn - Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India with Mies van der Rohe qoute from [With Infinite Slowness Arises the Great Form]

fig. 09 - Louis Kahn - Alfred Newton Richards Medical Medical Research Building, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia with Louis Kahn qoute from Monumentality

fig. 10 - Marcel Breuer - HUD Building, Washington D.C.  shout out to Empathy Deficit; Archinect Sessions #96