Brutalism is the most misunderstood style in the history of American architecture. The name sounds like a description of the buildings' effect on their users, but it is not. It comes from béton brut — raw concrete — a phrase associated with Le Corbusier, who used it to describe the exposed concrete surfaces of his postwar buildings.
What Brutalism Is
Brutalism is a style characterized by the honest expression of materials and structure. Brutalist buildings show you what they are made of. The concrete is not covered with cladding. The structural elements — the columns, the beams, the load-bearing walls — are visible. The mechanical systems are sometimes exposed as well.
This is a philosophical position as much as an aesthetic one. The Brutalists believed that architecture should be honest about its means of construction. A building that hides its structure behind decorative cladding is, in this view, a kind of lie. A building that shows its structure is telling the truth.
The Brutalists believed that architecture should be honest about its means of construction. A building that hides its structure is, in this view, a kind of lie.
Where It Came From
Brutalism emerged in Britain in the early 1950s, associated with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson and the critic Reyner Banham. It spread to the United States in the late 1950s and became the dominant idiom for civic and institutional buildings through the 1960s and 1970s.
In the United States, Brutalism was the style of ambition. Universities built Brutalist libraries and science buildings. Cities built Brutalist city halls and courthouses. The federal government built Brutalist office buildings. These were expensive buildings, carefully designed, intended to project institutional confidence.
Why It Is Hated
Brutalism is hated for several reasons, some legitimate and some not. The legitimate reasons: concrete is difficult to maintain, and many Brutalist buildings have been allowed to deteriorate. Stained, cracked concrete is genuinely unpleasant. Some Brutalist buildings were badly designed, with poor circulation, inadequate natural light, and hostile relationships to the street.
The illegitimate reasons: Brutalism is associated with the institutions that built it — universities, governments, housing authorities — and when those institutions fell into disrepute, their buildings fell with them. The style became a symbol of failed modernist utopianism, of the hubris of the postwar welfare state. This is not a judgment about architecture. It is a judgment about politics.
The Preservation Argument
The case for preserving Brutalist buildings rests on several arguments. The first is irreplaceability: these buildings cannot be rebuilt. The skills, the materials, the institutional will to build that way no longer exist. Once they are gone, they are gone.
The second argument is quality. The best Brutalist buildings are genuinely great architecture. Paul Rudolph's Yale Art and Architecture Building. Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum. Gordon Bunshaft's Hirshhorn Museum. These are buildings that reward careful attention, that have a spatial complexity and a material richness that most contemporary architecture lacks.
The third argument is historical. Brutalism was the dominant architectural style of a significant period in American history. Demolishing Brutalist buildings is not just an aesthetic loss. It is an erasure of the physical record of a particular moment in American civic life.