The film The Brutalist, which won three Academy Awards, centres on the efforts of fictional protagonist Laszlo Toth to realise a mammoth, bunker-like, concrete structure that will house a community centre in Pennsylvania.
A survivor of the Holocaust, Toth insists on the building’s overwhelming scale, starkly unadorned concrete surfaces and labyrinthine interior in order to create an architectural version of the designer’s own shattered, traumatised inner world. The near-maniacal drive to finish the work becomes an intensely personal project of overcoming his trauma.
Yet The Brutalist does not relay much about Brutalist architecture beyond its reflexive relationship to Toth. Drawings and photographs of real-life Brutalist buildings appear in several scenes as glimpses into Toth’s originality and style. But the structures come across as the progeny of one architect’s ego, while the philosophy behind Brutalism remains unexplained.
The actual story of Brutalism is so much more.
What you see is what you get
In my research, I have explored how architecture can embody values such as the common good and the human struggle for well-being. Specifically, my work explores how architecture after World War 2 presented a vision of a new world, one that could overcome decades of violence, exploitation and oppression.
Brutalism, which flourished from the 1950s until around 1980, is one style that has taught me a lot.
Brutalist buildings emphasise form using assemblies of monumental geometric shapes. While some critics find Brutalism’s heavy look and utilitarian use of materials such as concrete, brick and glass harsh, even ugly, there is a beautiful intent behind them.
Historian and critic Reyner Banham articulated Brutalism’s core ideas in a 1955 review of Peter and Alison Smith’s Hunstanton School, which was completed in 1954 in Norfolk, United Kingdom.
Banham latched on to the French term "beton brut" — "bare concrete" — to christen the emergent style. The architects at the forefront of what Banham termed "New Brutalism" were actually thwarting the overly theorised, self-referential modernism of the times. Their buildings, he explained, exhibited three simple traits: an easily visible interior plan, direct expression of structure, and building materials that were valued for their own traits.
In The Brutalist, Toth’s insistence on plain concrete, as well as Cararra marble for the community centre’s altar, captures the core of the philosophy. The materials used for Brutalist structures are not chosen as mere cladding, but as components that are essential to the building’s design. Their presence is an endorsement of their utility and beauty.
Some Brutalist buildings, such as the Hunstanton School, are made of brick instead of concrete. Others use stone. The goal is honest expression, not in-your-face experimentation.
Monuments to the masses
Beyond the devotion to the materials, plan and form of buildings, Brutalism often signified a devotion to social change.
Brutalism sought to upend pre-existing social hierarchies and divisions. Its staggering forms made monuments out of ordinary places frequented by ordinary people: homes, schools, libraries.
In the United States, public colleges and universities erected Brutalist structures to celebrate the expansion of higher education to the masses, thanks to the GI Bill. In a project led by Walter Netsch, the University of Illinois-Chicago wove together its buildings with concrete walkways leading to a central, outdoor amphitheatre. Harry Weese’s Forest Park Community College in St Louis consisted of long, monumental brick blocks that made the junior college appear as a temple.
Well-known, if not always well-loved, public buildings such as Boston City Hall, which was built in 1968, expressed faith in modern democracy, giving the majestic government buildings of the past a new look to signify a modern egalitarianism.
Other projects emphasised the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. The Neigh Dormitory at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi, was completed in 1970 by the firm of Black architect J. Max Bond jun. Architectural historian Brian Goldstein described it as "modernism as liberation".
Despite Brutalism’s social optimism, it is not without detractors. In 2014, Northwestern University demolished Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago despite pleas from preservationists. According to the university, the concrete construction made the building impossible to adapt for new laboratory space.
In Goshen, New York, county officials long viewed Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center as an ugly and unpleasant seat of government, and almost succeeded in having it demolished. The building has since been remodelled to cloak the Brutalist design.
New buildings for a new world
In the United Kingdom, cities faced damages from Nazi bombing during World War 2 as well as long-deferred upgrades to public housing. Brutalism was a key part of post-war housing recovery and expansion efforts.
Perhaps the most iconic Brutalist structure in the United Kingdom is Erno Goldfinger’s 31-storey Trellick Tower, a frequent setting for film and music videos.
That same year, Alison and Peter Smithson unveiled their massive apartment complex, Robin Hood Gardens, in London. With its hulking concrete forms and "streets in the sky" — wide, outdoor decks on each story that were meant to mimic street life and facilitate contact with neighbours — the project demonstrated that working-class people could not only have modern apartments, but also live in new ways. London’s massive, middle-class Barbican Estate, completed in 1982, created a small city within the city, replete with plazas, a waterway and iconic concrete and brick buildings.
The Swiss-French architect and artist known as Le Corbusier built the Convent at Sainte Marie de La Tourette in France in the 1950s with concrete shapes resembling cannons and machine-gun barrels in its walls.
In Paris, Georges-Henri Pingusson’s Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation, built in 1962, commemorates the lives of 200,000 victims of the Holocaust through an assemblage of stark, monolithic concrete forms.
While the Soviet Union’s 1950s and 1960s prefabricated concrete panel housing estates built under Premier Nikita Khruschev embody the Brutalist devotion to cost efficiency and social problem-solving, projects in the former Yugoslavia show how Brutalism could symbolise the rebirth of a people. Housing projects and commercial blocks in New Belgrade forged a new architecture for a new nation — and, in a sense, a new nationality.
And on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, run by a Nazi puppet regime, architect Bogdan Bogdanovic crafted perhaps the most optimistic acknowledgement of the will to overcome the 20th century’s darkest hours.
Where slave labour once made bricks, and thousands lost their lives, the designer crafted a massive concrete monument, completed in 1969. The stark form suggests a flower emerging from tortured soil but set upon thriving anyway.
To me, monuments like Bogdanovic’s show how Brutalism is the perfect style to convey the earnest hope that a new world is possible.
- Michael Allen is a visiting assistant professor of history, West Virginia University, adviser to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the US.
