Lectures: 2026

2026 Webinar Lecture Series

The Brutalist Revolution

January – April 2026

Following three successful webinar series on Palladianism in Britain (2022), Interwar Architecture in Britain (2023), the Development of Social Housing in the United Kingdom (2024), and the Architecture of Transport in Britain (2025), BALT’s 2026 webinar series will focus on Brutalism: Architecture, Urbanism, and Representation.

The series opens by redefining Brutalism beyond cliché, examining its ethical, aesthetic and global contradictions, before turning to the radical ways Brutalist architects reshaped the post-war city. It then explores how Brutalism has been seen, photographed and reinterpreted through changing visual cultures, and concludes by confronting the movement’s legacy in an age of environmental crisis. With lectures by Owen Hopkins, Otto Saumarez Smith, Valeria Carullo and Barnabas Calder, this series offers a critical and timely reappraisal of one of the most influential architectural movements of the twentieth century.

All webinars will take place via Zoom. A link will be emailed to all those who register a week before and the day of the event.

The British Architectural Library Trust (BALT) is an independent American non-profit organization founded in 2013 in support of the Library and Collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects (the RIBA), the foremost architectural library in the world.