Part 1 – Defining Brutalism

Lecture Summary:

Brutalism is one of the most controversial – yet misunderstood – architectural movements of the 20th century. Its very name has become a term of abuse and opprobrium, as a result of the etymological closeness of the word ‘brutal’ with the French ‘brut’ meaning raw, as in raw concrete (béton brut). As arguably the only truly global architectural style, the already many different manifestations of Brutalism have been joined today in countless books, blogs and social media feeds by a slew of others – geometric, moody and photographed in black and white – that stretch any definition to breaking point. Perhaps the only workable definition of Brutalism is that one borrowed from United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart test for obscenity: ‘I know it when I see it’. This lecture, however, suggests otherwise.

Surveying examples of Brutalism from every continent, the lecture proposes a definition of Brutalism not in terms of singularity, but as duality, or rather a series of dualities. Beginning with Reyner Banham’s famous dichotomy of ‘ethic or aesthetic’, the lecture considers the ways Brutalism oscillates between the global and the local; how it frequently pointed to the future but was also deeply embedded in the architecture past; it synthesis of the hand-crafted and machine-built; and how exists in both visceral material form and as image. This duality was, the lecture suggests, both Brutalism’s greatest strength, its driving animated force, but also its downfall. Where Brutalism attempted the heroic reconciliation of the contradictions that had begun to fatally undermine the modern movement, the Postmodernists simply revelled in them. Nevertheless, despite its flaws and contradictions, Brutalism still stands as powerful evidence of architecture’s ability to remake the world – an ability, this lecture contends, we now need more than ever.

Speaker: Owen Hopkins

Biography

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