I had a flying visit to our nation’s capital last week and whilst dashing between appointments I walked across Waterloo Bridge (gotta get those steps in…plus the Tube was stiflingly hot!!) I took in the fantastic view down the Thames and made my way past the plethora of Brutalism that is the National Theatre, The Hayward Gallery and Royal Festival Hall and it roused that question in me which comes up from time to time…do I actually like Brutalist architecture?
At the risk of sounding like a Wikipedia entry, I guess I should explain Brutalism a little in case you’re not familiar. The term Brutalism was derived from the Swedish phrase nybrutalism meaning ‘new brutalism’ and was first used by British architect Alison Smithson when describing plans for the as-yet unbuilt Soho House designed by her and her husband Peter Smithson in 1953. The style was developed by architects such as the Smithson’s and the firm Chamberlain, Powell & Bon but there’s no doubt it was descended from the earlier Modernist movement. Brutalist buildings are usually constructed with recurring modular elements and use materials such as concrete, brick, glass, steel, and timber left in their raw form. Due to its low cost, raw concrete is most often used and left with rough surfaces featuring the ‘pattern’ of the wood shuttering from the forms for pouring the concrete. Examples of the style challenge traditional notions of what a building should look like with equal focus given to interior spaces as much as the exterior.
Anyway, back to my conflicting feelings! It occurs to me that I don’t mind Brutalism in large public buildings like the theatre, but I tend to dislike the swathes of 1960’s housing schemes up and down the country and I’m wondering why that is? Is it perhaps that there is a stigma attached to this type of housing; it’s almost certainly council or social housing – am I being a terrible snob and thinking it’s ‘good’ architecture when it’s something dedicated to the arts and ‘bad’ architecture when it’s homes? That doesn’t sound like me…overall, I think not! Is it because the lack of decoration works in a transitional space but less so where people require comfort and cosiness? Quite possibly. Clearly, I’d opened a can of worms and perhaps should’ve jumped on the Tube after all!
A couple of days into my pondering one of those lovely coincidences happened, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has been inviting in guest editors and this week happened to be a group of residents from an estate in Bristol who call themselves the Friendly Neighbours. Their edit concerned themselves with how we can build housing that puts community first. It was particularly poignant that the housing estate centre’s around a 1960’s high-rise block of flats, in the Brutalist style. One of the guest editors stated that they have “created a community in spite of the architecture not because of it”.
Le Corbusier is possibly the most famous proponent of the Modernist architecture movement, not least because he wrote widely on the subject and famously coined the phrase ‘a house is a machine for living in’ and herein lies the rub. If we reduce our built environment down to just the necessary functions, it seems to cease to function on a human level. We’re a species that requires connection to place and each other, Modernism and later, Brutalism, removes all cultural identity associated with bespoke handmade buildings, replacing them with mass-produced machine-made products – the same everywhere – the Ikea of architectural style perhaps? (please don’t write in, I LOVE Ikea as much as the next person… good design, sound sustainability principles, fabulous hot dogs etc etc.)
Going back to our friend Le Corbusier, when creating the L’Esprit Nouveau Pavillion, a house, he wrote, "is a cell within the body of a city. The cell is made up of the vital elements which are the mechanics of a house...Decorative art is antistandardizational. Our pavilion will contain only standard things created by industry in factories and mass-produced, objects truly of the style of today...”
And yet that isn’t the whole story of Brutalism, if we turn our gaze internally, the interiors are equally sparse in terms of decoration, but also of barriers. Thanks to the construction techniques, interiors are often open-plan and light-filled. Large windows and a lack of load-bearing walls mean that spaces can be used flexibly and allow uninterrupted views outside – actually creating a connection to place. This is an element of Brutalism that I do like and answers the question of why I like it in large public buildings more than in housing – inside the concrete facades are enormous sweeping spaces that create a sense of scale and awe and perhaps this is less successful on a smaller scale.
Brutalism wasn’t just an architectural style; it was also a philosophy on the architectural approach to design. The Smithson’s described the movement as ‘an ethic not an aesthetic’ wanting to create ‘honest’ and ‘functional’ buildings that accommodated their purpose. We also cannot forget that construction techniques allowed the mass production of much-needed social housing.
If we go back to the Friendly Neighbours, however, there was clearly something missing which has meant the legacy is thousands of people living in Modernist/Brutalist estates with no sense of community, and in a lot of cases, allowing crime and deprivation to thrive. In the case of the Dove Street flats in Bristol, the issue was obvious – not one communal space was designed into the estate. During the pandemic, the lack of external communal space kickstarted the revolution, as it were, and a gardening club was established. Where once there was fly tipping there is now a community garden, derelict garages are now a football pitch and neighbours talk to each other, commune with each other, and children play together.
So perhaps the reason I dislike the architectural style in housing hasn’t anything to do with the architecture’s aesthetic at all but more to do with what that style has come to represent; quality modern homes built for those in housing need on estates that should have created wonderful new enclaves of communities in our cities that in reality produced places that feel separate and unfriendly; Le Corbusier’s “cells” reimagined into prison cells for the occupants. Or is that too dramatic? (I do have a tendency!)
The fact that in the not-too-distant past we had a social housing building program on a mass scale in and of itself seems remarkable to me. We need to be dramatic in the approach we take to social housing now more than ever if we’re going to address the housing crisis, so maybe we can learn from the pioneers of the Brutalist movement. Sustainability goes much further than green energy technology when it comes to housing and our homes. We as designers need to create spaces that not only function well but crucially are places where people actually want to live. Our housing estates need to foster community, allowing residents to forge connections with each other and the place they are in, that’s truly the only way to create sustainable buildings that stand the test of time. Perhaps no matter the aesthetic the place will then always look beautiful…
…now I’m just being an old romantic!