Jonathan Meades is an entertaining but opinionated English writer, whose 2 documentaries on Brutalism (“Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness – Concrete Poetry”) are available on Vimeo.
He starts off pointing out that tastes change, and that architecture shouldn’t always have to be “friendly” – we don’t expect that of landscapes, after all. We don’t expect films or sculpture to be always “pretty”.
An architect does not have to be a technician or a social worker, he/she can be a maker, an artist. An artist creates what they feel is necessary, what they feel did not previously exist.
After all, if you ask people what they would like a new housing development to look like, they will tend to choose something already familiar, rather than something new. [As Henry Ford, the mass producer of cars, said, if you ask people want they want, they will say “faster horses”.]
He then explains that the concrete architecture of the 1950s onwards grew out of a similar mood to the Victorian “new gothic” architecture of the 1860s, which was already being called grotesque as it was being built, but which then came back into fashion in the 1980s, even as it was being knocked down). That mood was aspirant, discordant, arbitrary, mongrel.
The other inspiration for was the recent past – the Second World War. Nazi Germany and the Allies built all kinds of different bunkers, observation posts and other military installations.
And there were earlier precedents – the “Cyclopian” buildings of the Mycenaeans in Greece 3500 years ago, large, uncut boulders, held up by the sheer weight of stone upon stone. The architects of the 1950s and 60s were also inspired by the buildings of the Incas in the Americas before Christopher Columbus, stern, massive, monumental, hardly decorated. At the beginning of the 20th century there was a fashion among many artists to throw off the traditions of the Renaissance and be inspired by such “primitive” cultures.
Architecture took a slightly different tack though, moving away from Primitivism and putting its faith in the technical. The “International style” emerged, with flat roofs, lots of glass, white. Concrete was modern (although actually used as far back as the Romans, but in the 19th century predominantly for engineering), even if the buildings of the 1930s were often brick rendered to look like concrete. The ideal building was not only a machine, but it appeared to have been designed by a machine.
The term brutalism was supposedly the mocking coinage of a Swedish architect Apslund about a house built of industrial brick. Brutalism caught on when British architects visited Scandinavia, initially always prefaced by “new”, although there was never an old or original brutalism! It was adopted by Alison and Peter Smithson almost as a badge of defiance. The Smithsons were “manifesto people, doggedly avant garde, eagerly self publicizing”.
To begin with, it wasn’t a particular style – the Smithsons’ schools were certainly modern but not particularly what we would not consider Brutalist. But the very word Brutalism became laden with further associations, for example Jean Dubuffet’s “art bru”, drawing on the disturbing work of psychiatric patients. Secondly, Brutalism also linked to “breton bru”, raw concrete, the stuff of bunkers, a material which would be considered “harsh and unaccommodating” by a public that apparently “craved the solaces of thatch, pitched roofs, winking dormers, wicket gates, bogus beams, lichenous sandstone and prettiness. Not beauty, just prettiness.”
Third, most pertinently, brutalism suggested brutality, physical threats and violence.
Meades contends that when it comes to concrete, it has become a matter of “snobbery”. The Royal Liver building in Liverpool is made of early reinforced concrete, but made to look like stone. And you would think its potential as a sculptural medium but would make it an obvious material for buildings.
Meades also notes how there was something else going on in the 1950s and 1960s – the Cold war. The libraries and shopping malls and hotels and car parks of both of the Soviet bloc and the Free world were reminiscent of Second World War bunkers, precisely because there was still a war going on. And it was a reaction against “monochromatic smoothness, lightness of touch, restraints of good manners” of International modernism – look at what LeCorbusier started to do, he led the “savage reaction against what he himself had invented and seen replicated the world over”.
Meades compares “pretty” with “sublime”, in the manner of philosopher Edmund Burke – the two are mutually exclusive. Mountains, screaming wind, ruggedness, infinity, darkness are sublime. And can be terrifying. Sublimity and terror are found in pylons, dams, oil refineries, cooling towers, chimneys.
These structures reflect Mankind challenging the gods, lording it over nature. Look at Unite d’habitation by LeCorbusier in Marseille – its size, vision, outrageousness caused it to capture the imagination of architects the world over. As happens now too, some people called it the Maison of fada (madness), people claiming to speak on behalf of the ordinary people of Marseille, “encourage hard working families and other invented demographics to militate against the unfamiliar simply because it is unfamiliar”.
At the same time, prefabricated building systems started producing “a worldwide monotony… same panels, same windows, same paucity of imagination”.
Brutalist buildings forged on site, built from poured concrete, had the chance to be different, as they weren’t reliant on prefabricated components.
The overwhelming effect of Unite was “inspiration, to unshackle the imagination, and stretch the limits of the possible”. As a model for social housing, it didn’t work out so well when poorly copied. It was also “a springboard to a new sort of architectural invention”, particularly when it came to concrete.
Meades also says something interesting about nature. In the UK, mostly we see nature as something benign and romantic. That isn’t the whole story though, especially if you think of the extreme landscapes and weather of the uplands and coasts. Brutalism used natural forms, or tried to create buildings that were themselves natural forms. It invented new natural forms. “That’s what art does, it creates what was lacking”. He goes back to those bunkers that were a conscious or unconscious inspiration – they were routinely given dents and irregular surfaces in order to break up the shape of the building seen from the air, and texture was more important than colour (as all aerial photography was monochrome).
Going back to the idea of buildings as pretty, and pleasing to they eye – it doesn’t apply to Brutalism, because these architects, according to Meades, respected human kind as equals, “not to be spoken down to, not to be patronised, not to be treated like children. Remember, 50 years ago adults did not dress like children, they did not read children’s books, they did not enjoy a child’s diet”.
He also warns against trying to “read” architecture. It doesn’t have a language – “it does not speak to us… it requires no translation”. We stare, react, but whatever properties we may think it has are our projections on to it.
The Brutalists were out to rediscover the very essence of architecture. And unlike other art forms, hidden away in galleries and collections, this mission was very public. And perhaps unlike the generations that followed, the world was ready for it. They were excited by newness, and eager for change. Everything was new – nouvelle cuisine, new psychiatry (bin your medication), new university disciplines, churches and theatres in the round. Tomorrow’s transport would be magnetic levitation, we would emigrate to space colonies, we would never have to work because robots would do it for us.
So where did it all go wrong? Meades points out that creating buildings is a slow process, so by the time these new buildings appeared, mostly designed by middle aged architects who had fought in the war, you had the era of pop music, sweet, fluffy, easy on the ear. Not bebop jazz, Stockhausen or Berg. It was like parallel worlds. London had miniskirts, mods, hippies. At least, that was what was shown on the TV, even if it wasn’t life for most of its 7 million inhabitants.
So Brutalism quickly became “Dad’s architecture”. It was the architecture of the “establishment” – new universities, municipal libraries, galleries, hospitals. Every town grew a shopping centre, a bypass, underpasses. Not exactly fashionable.
And then, the whole idea of progress seemed to run aground. In the West there was a reaction to Mutually Assured Destruction through nuclear weapons, and the various nuclear meltdowns of Sellafield and Three Mile Island. In its place came a soup of mysticism and environmentalism, “small is beautiful” (EF Schumacher)- to which Meades’ reply is of course, “Big is sublime”.
So many of the best examples of Brutalism have already been destroyed without much fanfare or protest – the Trident in Gateshead, the Tricorn in Portsmouth, Basil Spence’s Hutchesontown flats in the Gorbals. The incredible cooling towers of Richborough, Sheffield (Tinsley), Retford.
People may say, “how much do cooling towers enhance the landscape, compared with what else we could do if we weren’t having to maintain the towers?” But we don’t suggest building on Stonehenge? And Meades argues that being old, even very old, isn’t the only thing of value. It’s like we’re embarrassed of the recent industrial past, afraid or impatient with buildings that are “awesome”, intellectual or difficult. The “values” of western culture seem to have become cosiness, comfort, instant comprehensibility.
In the same way, “delirious high Victorian monuments” were obliterated by the Georgians, who were all about modesty and dignity.
Meades compares the destruction of brutalist buildings (which has become almost an annihilation of an entire epoch of architecture) to burning books. It’s a form of censorship of the past. It’s the “revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur”, and “the destruction of the embarrassing evidence of a determined optimism, that made us more potent than we have become”.
But he finishes on an optimistic note – neo-brutalist buildings are appearing. Architects are again considering themselves artists, who lead, rather than follow, and do what artists ought to do – please themselves, create the unknown, and “assert mankind’s supremacy over the earth rather than cosy up to the inanimate”.