october no 136 spring 2011 the new brutalism 1

8/16/2019 October No 136 Spring 2011 the New Brutalism 1

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Introduction

ALEX KITNICK

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 3–6. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“New Brutalism” remains a tricky term for the student of postwar art andarchitecture, both too specific and too general. On the one hand, it is associated

with a small number of writings and projects carried out by a group of archi-tects, artists, and critics in 1950s London. Alison and Peter Smithson first usedthe term to describe a residential project in Soho that was to be characterizedby a “warehouse” aesthetic and unfinished surfaces, and, in a famous 1955 essay,Reyner Banham wrote that the movement’s three primary characteristics were“Memorability as an Image,” “Clear exhibition of Structure,” and “Valuation of Material ‘as found.’” 1 Despite having been granted these attributes, however, orperhaps because of the way they lend themselves to both oversimplification(unfinished surfaces) and open-ended abstraction (“Memorability as anImage”), Brutalism is often employed today as nothing more than a vague epi-thet lobbed at vast expanses of postwar institutional building; its associations

with art practice are, more frequent ly than not , left out entirely. The purpose of dedicating this issue to New Brutalism, then, is both to reconsider its theses andto reevaluate its work and writings, while at the same time amending and sup-plementing earlier histories of the moment, which have emphasized the popaspects of the work. 2 In doing so, we hope to recapture something of New Brutalism’s latent critical potential.

As Theo Crosby wrote in the January 1955 issue of Architectural Design , New Brutalism positioned itself against the “contemporary”—“its veneer of ‘modern’

1. Alison and Peter Smithson, “House in Soho, London,” Architectural Design (December 1953), p.342; and Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118 (December 1955), pp. 354–61,both of which are reprinted in this issue. Banham later expanded his essay in The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), which, while enlarging his canon to include otherexamples of European and Japanese architecture, also had the effect of obscuring what was at stake in hisoriginal use of the term.2. See “The Independent Group,” ed. Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October 94(Fall 2000). See also the recently collected essays in Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds.,Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).


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details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti.” 3 “Contemporary,” in this moment,functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism, a modernismalready liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style, a look, anda scenario for up-to-date living. Against this degradation, New Brutalism sought to

return to the first lessons of the modern movement, which led to a close study andrigorous evaluation of its key architects—Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in par-ticular. Such attention paid to history, however, did not lead to rote repetition; infact, it enabled a revision. Instead of embracing the automobile as object type, forexample, as Le Corbusier had done in his seminal Vers une Architecture (1923), theSmithsons imagined the machine as a means of production, embracing it as a forcethat might actually produce architecture. 4 To this end, and to show architecture’saffiliation with the processes of industry, they used building materials as they foundthem. Steel and brick were incorporated as they were, with traces of productionupon them, their industrial nature kept intact. (The vicissitudes of brick in New Brutalist discourse are taken up here by Anthony Vidler. 5)

To a large extent, this interest in the “as found” translated into a preoccu-pation with questions of surface. Just as Le Corbusier embraced the patterns cre-ated by the rough wooden formwork on the exteriors of his concrete pilot i at theUnité d’Habitation in Marseille (1947–52) so did the Smithsons show thescratch marks and scuffs that went into the making of their own buildings, suchas their school at Hunstanton (1949–53). 6 Eduardo Paolozzi, too, in his bronzesculpture of the late 1950s, built up figures of hollow men that appear to becomprised solely of surface incident, with bits of rubbish and scrap caught likeflies in lesions of wax (this process is detailed by Ben Highmore in his contribu-tion 7). Similarly, the architect and typographer Edward Wright (recovered for us

here by Craig Buckley 8) found text to be part and parcel of the surface—or bet-ter yet, the texture—of architecture. Indeed, New Brutalism sought to capture amultiplicity of things within its envelope; one of its notable characteristics is thefantastic list of heterogeneous matter that it aimed to absorb. If New Brutalist art and architecture influenced each other, the Smithsons said in a 1954 inter-

view, they are “equally and mysteriously influenced by industr ial techniques, thecinema, supersonic flight, African villages, and old tin cans.” 9 Engaging a simi-larly diverse inventory of material, Nigel Henderson “made photograms usingdebris from bomb sites (though soon almost anything would do, bottles, ice,

3. [Theo Crosby,] “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design (January 1955), p. 1; reprinted inthis volume.4. Of course, Le Corbusier also investigated various mechanical methods of manufacture, ascan be seen in his Maison Domino (1915) as well as in his conception of the house as a machine à habiter . In the end though, Le Corbusier’s machine was a better oiled one than the Smithsons desired.5. “Another Brick in the Wall,” pp. 105–32.6. Such qualities are quite apparent in the photographs of the project taken by Nigel Henderson.7. “‘Image-breaking, God-making’: Paolozzi’s Brutalism,” pp. 87–104.8. “Graphic Constructions: The Experimental Typography of Edward Wright,” pp. 156–81.9. Bill Cowburn and Michael Pearson, “Art in Architecture,” 244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 2 (Winter 1954), p. 20; reprinted in this volume.


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elastic bands, negatives).” 10 In 1953, Henderson, Paolozzi, and the Smithsonsput forth an even wider constellation of specimens in their exhibition Parallel of Life and Art , which featured photographs of everything from mud flats to bicyclecrashes, and which sought to disclose some of the sources that they understood

to be affecting their practices. In New Brutalism, then, the concrete reality of both art and architecture were understood to be fundamentally connected to a world of mediated images, as well as a sundry assortment of cast-off things.Indeed, New Brutalism took as its task the communication of this heteroge-neous world to the postwar subject, drawing together a vast array of dispersedeffects into a consolidated—and perhaps comprehensible—form. For Banham,it did this via the “memorability” of the “images” it produced—whether in theform of a building, sculpture, or photograph. Not yet postmodern pictures, New Brutalist images lodged in the brain because they had something thing-likeabout them. The New Brutalist image was not abstract but visceral. Banhamonce referred to them as “concrete images—images that can carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of novelty and technology,” and deliverthem to the beholding subject (this is the subject of my own contribution). 11

If New Brutalism in both its artistic and architectural incarnations sought toincorporate the diversity of the world, to compress it and forge it into an image, it also sought to extend outwards, to make plain the systems of circulation and commu-nication that structure life—and it is here that its concerns become more explicitly architectural, if no less artistic (this point is developed by Hadas Steiner in hertext 12). New Brutalism consistently positioned itself in terms of wider environmentsand ecologies, taking particular interest in patterns of connection. Such a concern isevident in the Smithsons’ early studies of village footpaths and the sociability of the

working class street . Banham’s attention to the topological pathways of theSmithsons’ unrealized Sheffield University project (1953) gets to this point as well, asdo Nigel Henderson’s “stressed” photographs of street life, and the scattered blocksof Paolozzi’s designs for playgrounds. If the figure of the child was central to postwarBritish culture at large, connoting a fresh start and new life, New Brutalism valued it for offering a qualitatively different way of seeing. As Jean Piaget demonstrated at this time, children see topologically, and in channeling this view, New Brutalismbegan to move beyond the inherited geometries of Renaissance perspective into aspatial order characterized by affinity and spontaneity.

If the child served as a first guide for the New Brutalists, even more important was the new culture of communication they saw before them. (If children presentedone model of looking and seeing, the culture of phones and cars offered yet another. Or, to put it slightly differently, children’s vision provided a primitive

New Brutalism: Introduction 5

10. “Notes towards a chronology based on conversations with the artist,” in Nigel Henderson: Paintings Collages and Photographs (London: Anthony d’Offay, 1977), n.p.11. Reyner Banham, “This Is Tomorrow,” Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 186–88;reprinted in this volume.12. “Life at the Threshold,” pp. 133–55.


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model of technological communication.) New Brutalism, as Peter Smithson madeclear in 1959, felt that architecture had to register such modes of communication inits very form. 13 Against the stand-alone buildings of what he and Alison would soondub the “heroic period of modern architecture,” they focused on what they called

“town planning” and what they would later refer to as “the space between.” 14 Today,this emphasis on communication in New Brutalism appears bound up with a shift toward a New Economy in which communication is valued over labor as traditionally defined. Equally important, however, is the Smithsons’ insistence that such “immater-ial” networks generate physical form. For them, everything solid did not simply melt into air; their work serves as an important counterpoint to so much architecturetoday in which site, scale, and place are thought to be increasingly irrelevant as longas an internet connection and large sums of capital are readily available. TheSmithsons’ stress on the material production of their buildings attests to a resistanceto utopian discourse of the “immaterial,” showing that physical labor and materialresources are central to architecture’s very possibility.

If the Smithsons heeded the call of communication, then, they also wanted toput it in its place. 15 In a 1959 interview, Peter Smithson criticized Eero Saarinen’sGeneral Motors Technical Center (1945–56) where, he said, communication hadbecome “an end in itself,” the building’s closed-circuit racetrack-like form function-ing as a literal road to nowhere. For the New Brutalists, as for Marshall McLuhan,media were messages, and it is precisely because they felt this way that they wanted topreserve certain media and the messages that inhere in them. 16 The question for theNew Brutalists, then, became how to communicate something through the din of “contemporary” noise, or, as they put it, how to “face up to a mass-production society,and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work”

within it. 17 Their brand of poetry, however, was not meant to redeem society, but rather to create something of value in a confrontation with it. Though some might call such a position nostalgic or reactionary, the problem of how to smuggle thelessons of the past into our present moment, and how to hold the various forces of the present moment in productive tension, is—or at least, should be—one of themost pressing concerns for architects, artists, and theorists practicing today.

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13. See Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, Jane B. Drew, E. Maxwell Fry, “Conversation onBrutalism,” Zodiac 4 (1959), pp. 73–81; reprinted in this volume.14. See Alison and Peter Smithson, “The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture,” Architectural

Design (December 1965). In a late interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Smithson affirmed hisinterest in what he called “the space between .” Peter Smithson and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Smithson Time: A Dialogue (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), p. 20.15. This, too, sets them apart from so many architects of the “interstitial” that we see today.16. For more on the Smithsons’ interest in McLuhan, see their 1962 drawings for an exhibitionproject tentatively titled “Extensions of Man” (done in conjunction with Lawrence Alloway and ReynerBanham) in Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: The Monacelli Press,2005), pp. 326–27.17. “The New Brutalism: Alison and Peter Smithson answer the crit icisms on the opposite page,”Architectural Design (April 1957), p. 113; reprinted in this volume.


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Cover of Architectural Review 14. October 1953.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/OCTO_a_00028&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=274&h=358


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Parallel of Life and Art

REYNER BANHAM

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 8–10. © Architectural Review , October 1953, pp. 259–61.

In his review of Parallel of Life and Art , Reyner Banham borrows a number of concepts from André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (1951; English translation 1953) , including photography’s archival powers and its ability to find common texture in unlike things.Where Malraux found photography empowering, however, Banham ultimately considers it to have a fundamentally alienating effect. —A.K.

The veracity of the camera is proverbial, but nearly all proverbs take a one-sided view of life. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but many of the camera’sstatements are stranger than truth itself. We tend to forget that every photographis an artifact, a document recording forever a momentary construction basedupon reality. Instantaneous, it mocks the monumental; timeless, it monumental-izes the grotesque.

In the strange photographic record of a ladies’ gymnasium of 1910 the cam-era’s unwinking eye, incapable of embarrassment or mirth, perpetuates an anthol-ogy of poses as unlikely as those in a Pollaiuolo engraving, in a geometrical settingas rigid as a Piero della Francesca. But in perpetuating what can have been nomore than a ludicrous and uncomfortable moment and presenting it to us with asurface texture that, after countless processes of reproduction and re-reproduc-tion, has become an autonomous entity on its own, this old graying photographfunctions almost as a symbol, an image, a work of art in its own right. It has so lit-tle, now, to do with the recording of any conceivable reality that it is hardly ren-dered any less, or more, probable by being turned upside down.

This extraordinary image is a photographic document of an event remoteboth in time and probability, and is one of a hundred such images of the visually inaccessible or improbable that have been assembled for the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Such documentation of theremote and unlikely is one of the greatest services that the camera has done forthe Western man and the Western artist, not only in the recording of works of art and architecture—the contents of André Malraux’s “Imaginary Museum”—but also in recording transient human occurrences like gymnasia and coronations,


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and in investigating worlds beyond human vision, as in ultra-microscopy orextreme-range astronomy.

But the photograph, being an artifact, applies its own laws of artifaction tothe material it documents, and discovers similarities and parallels between the

documentations, even where none exist between the objects and events recorded.Thus, between a head carved in porous whalebone by an Eskimo and the sectionof a plant stem from Thornton’s Vegetable Anatomy , there is no connection whatso-ever except their community of outline and surface texture (even matrix of alve-oles with symmetrically disposed roughly lenticular irruptions) in photographicreproduction. They come from societies and technologies almost unimaginably different, and yet to camera-eyed Western man the visual equivalence is unmistak-able and perfectly convincing.

This was an analogy of pure chance, but about others one may not be so dog-matic. Any equivalence between a painting by Jackson Pollock and the surface of aguillemot’s egg is certainly unconscious and probably coincidental, but we couldnever clear our minds of the suspicion that the visual education of Mr. Pollockcannot have been utterly innocent of the pictures of bird’s eggs—he is, after all, acamera-eyed Western artist.

But some of the analogies to which the camera draws attention are real, if sorecondite as to go unnoticed in everyday life. To most of us the typewriter is acompact instrument, snugly fitted into a neat case, which, with luck, is the work of a sensitive designer. But it could never have existed without a preliminary, longand fundamentally simple labor of classification of the parts of language, and theparts of its internal functions. It is only when we see it dismantled and the partsspread out in a classification of shape, so that we are forced to see a key to every

symbol, that we recognize its kinship with such elementary steps in classificationas the mediaeval clog-almanac with a symbol to every day.The organizers of this exhibition are obviously sensitive to many of the

implications of the camera. It is creating a new visual environment and they, withtheir hundred (literally) far-fetched images, have put before us those aspects of the enriched visual scene that they find most stimulating. But we should recognizethat if the camera has increased our visual riches, we are richer only in bills of credit, most of which cannot be cashed—there can be no direct visual apprehen-sion of scenes that have passed, or of those that exist only on the photographicplate of instruments like the electron microscope. The camera, with its strongmoral claims to truth and objectivity now over a century old, has established itsmanner of seeing as the common visual currency of our time, and we come tothink of the photographic experience as the equivalent of personal participation.But we should ask ourselves who would truly be richer—one who possessed pho-tographs of every surviving building of the classical world, or Sir John Soane, whohad measured every stone of the orders of the Colosseum and could quote itsintercolumnation even in his old age.

—Architectural Review 114 (October 1953), pp. 259–61.


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House in Soho, London

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 11. © Alison and Peter Smithson from Architectural Design, December 1953, p. 342.

In this statement on their project for a house in Soho, London, Alison and Peter Smithson first invoke New Brutalism by name. Their short definition, stressing the building’s lack of finishes and its exposition of structure, will go on to influence the theses that Banham attributes to the movement in his seminal essay two years later. The invocation of the termsshelter and envi-ronment is also significant.—A.K.

The attempt was made to build in Central London, and failed because of diffi-culty with adjoining owners. It seemed that a series of Trusts held the surroundingland (all bombed) but it turned out to be one man who intended to build kitchens tothe left, W.C.’s the right and restaurants to the rear—this contract was about to besigned after nine months’ work.

On the normal city site costing between 15s. and 25s. per sq. ft. one can appar-

ently do little different from the Georgian, but it was considered that a different internal order must be visualized. The air and sunlight of the attics in the daytimesuggests that living quarters should be up top, with the bathroom in the cool dimbasement.

It was decided to have no finishes at all internally—the building being a combi-nation of shelter and environment.

Bare concrete, brickwork, and wood. The difficulty of unceiled [sic] rooms wassatisfactorily overcome by the disposition of rooms which were also placed high up orlow down according to light-sunlight desired.

Brickwork may suggest a blue or double burnt or colored pointing; but thearbitrary use of color and texture was not conformed with, and common bricks withstruck joints were intended. The bars and color variation have some sort of naturaltension when laid by a good bricklayer.

In fact, had this been built it would have been the first exponent of the “new brutalism” in England, as the preamble to the specification shows: “ It is our intention in this building to have the structure exposed entirely, without internal finishes wherever practicable.The Constructor should aim at a high standard of basic construction as in a small warehouse .”

—Architectural Design (December 1953), p. 342.


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Some Notes on Architecture


OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 12–14. © Alison and Peter Smithson from 244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 1, Summer 1954, p. 4.

Only a few months after the publication of their Soho project, the Smithsons announce their interest in Le Corbusier’s use ofbéton brut in his Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. In so doing, they effectively posit the existence of two Le Corbusiers: an “academic” practitioner of high modern architecture and a more expressionistic variant preoccupied with the possibilities of poured concrete. Their goal is to find a postwar humanist architecture, disregarding in this search a number of other strains of modernism, including the posthumanist dimensions of the Bauhaus and De Stijl. In addition to Le Corbusier, the Smithsons also take inspira- tion from art practice, embracing Jackson Pollock’s work and reproducing one of his paintings in Parallel of Life and Art .—A.K.

With the complet ion of the Pavillon Suisse [sic], modern architecturebecame academic. 1

With the completion of the Unité, life has returned. 2In the béton brut of the Unité a new human architecture has been born.Technique is seen once more as a tool: the machine as means.

A new humanism has been born.The dead hand of De Stijl can be lifted from our backs.Cezanne [sic] can be seen as a boring painter of little importance.Perhaps even Pollock is more important. Who can say?

All we know is what moves us now.This day.

January 23, 1954. We of the ’50s have no one to look up to in our own country, and there is no

climate of enthusiasm in which architecture can flower.This magazine should aim to create such a climate of enthusiasm.

1. The Pavilion Suissé, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, was completed in 1932 at the Cité International Universitaire in Paris—Ed.2. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, France, was completed in 1952—Ed.


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Discuss real architecture, Paestum, Sunion, the Villa Adriana, Prenestina,Seaton Delaval, Vezelay, and that by real architects to-day, the younger ones suchas Moretti or Rudolph, 3 as well as Corbu and Mies.

Establish real standards.

Don’t worry about architectural education.Don’t be taken in by the Wiemar [sic] Fallacy. 4 Architecture and urbanism are problems of significant organization. Utter

complexity made lucid.It is more important to fail magnificently than to achieve mediocrity.

—244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architectureand Planning Society 1 (Summer 1954), p. 4.

3. Luigi Moretti (1907–1973) and Paul Rudolph (1918–1997)—Ed.4. A reference to the Bauhaus, which was located in Weimar between 1919 and 1925—Ed.


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But why are the shuttering marks on the Unité an essential part of it when the art works (modular men, steel, glazed screens, etc.) are sotrivial? It is because the architecture is complete without them. They are there because Le Corbusier is chasing yesterday’s dream when

today’s reality is already there. Architecture, painting, and sculptureare manifestations of life, satisfying real needs; of man and not of eachother. They influence each in a poetic way, but are equally and mysteri-ously influenced by industrial techniques, the cinema, supersonicflight, African villages, and old tin cans.

—244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architectureand Planning Society 2 (Winter 1954), p. 20.


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Parallel of Life and Art:Indications of a New Visual Order*

NIGEL HENDERSON, EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, AND ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 7.

The exhibitionParallel of Life and Art opened on September 11, 1953, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Consisting of 122 photographic enlargements edited by Nigel Henderson, Ronald Jenkins, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson, it explored how reproductive technologies affect the terms of cultural production. The architectural histo- rian and critic Reyner Banham would later refer to the exhibition as a “locus classicus” of the New Brutalist movement.—A.K.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In this exhibition an encyclopedic range of material from past and present isbrought together through the medium of the camera which is used as recorder,reporter, and scientific investigator. As a recorder of nature objects, works of art,

architecture and technics; as reporter of human events the images of which some-times come to have a power of expression and plastic organization analogous tothe symbol in art; and as scientific investigator extending the visual scale andrange, by use of enlargements, X-rays, wide-angle lens, high-speed and aerial pho-tography.

The editors of this exhibition, Nigel Henderson, photographer, EduardoPaolozzi, sculptor, Peter and Alison Smithson, A/A.R.I.B.A. architects, and Ronald

Jenkins, A.C.G.I. engineer, have selected more than a hundred images of signifi-cance for them. These have been ranged in categories suggested by the material

which underline a common visual denominator independent of the field from which the image is taken. There is no single claim in this procedure. No water-tight scientific or philosophical system is demonstrated.

In short it forms a poetic-lyrical order where images create a series of cross-relationships.

— August 31, 1953

* ICA Archives, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.5.1.2.


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The New Brutalism

THEO CROSBY

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 17–18. © Theo Crosby, from Architectural Design 1955, p. 1.

By 1955, New Brutalism had become a frequent topic of conversation in English architectural circles thanks, in large part, to the construction and publication of the Smithsons’ school at Hunstanton. Here Theo Crosby frames New Brutalism in terms of a re-evaluation of modernism and an evocation of Japanese architecture.—A.K.

When I hear the word contemporary, I reach for my revolver.X.B.

In 1954, a new and long overdue explosion took place in architectural the-ory. For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing thecoinage of M. le Corbusier and had created a style—“Contemporary”—easily rec-ognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of “modern”details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti. The reaction appeared at

last in the shape of the Hunstanton School (by Alison and Peter Smithson) anillustration of the “New Brutalism.” The name is new; the method, a re-evalua-tion of those advanced buildings of the 1920s and ’30s whose lessons (becauseof a few plaster cracks) have been forgotten. As well as this, there are certainlessons in the formal use of proportion (from Professor Wittkower) and arespect for the sensuous use of each material (from the Japanese). Naturally, atheory which takes the props from the generally accepted and easily produced“Contemporary,” has generated a lot of opposition. All over the country wehave been asked to explain the new message. In the hope of provoking as many readers as possible to think more deeply about the form and purpose of theirart, we asked the Smithsons as the prophets of the new movement, to supply adefinition or statement, which, somewhat edited, appears below.

Our belief that the New Brutalism is the only possible development for this moment from the Modern Movement, stems not only from theknowledge that Le Corbusier is one of its practitioners (starting with the“béton brût ” of the Unité), but because fundamentally both movements


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have used as their yardstick Japanese architecture—its underlyingidea, principles, and spirit.

Japanese Architecture seduced the generation spanning 1900, produc-

ing in Frank Lloyd Wright, the open plan and an odd sort of construct-ed decoration; in Le Corbusier, the purist aesthetic—the slidingscreens, continuous space, the power of white and earth colors; inMies, the structure and the screen as absolutes. Through Japanese

Architecture, the longings of the generation of Garnier and Behrens 1found FORM.

But for the Japanese their FORM was only part of a general conceptionof life, a sort of reverence for the natural world and, from that, for thematerials of the built world. 2

It is this reverence for materials—a realization of the affinity which canbe established between building and man—which is at the root of theso-called New Brutalism.

It has been mooted that the Hunstanton School, which probably owesas much to the existence of Japanese Architecture as to Mies, is the first realization of the New Brutalism in England.

This particular handling of Materials, not in the craft sense of Frank

Lloyd Wright but in intellectual appraisal, has been ever present in theModern Movement, as indeed familiars of the early German architectshave been prompt to remind us. 3

What is new about the New Brutalism among Movements is that it findsits closest affinities, not in a past architectural style, but in peasant dwelling forms. It has nothing to do with craft. We see architecture asthe direct result of a way of life.

1954 has been a key year. It has seen American advertising equal Dada in itsimpact of overlaid imagery; that automotive masterpiece, the Cadillac convertible,

parallel-with-the-ground (four elevations) classic box on wheels; the start of a new way of thinking by CIAM; the revaluation of the work of Gropius; the repaintingof the Villa at Garches?

—Architectural Design (January 1955), p. 1.

1. The architects Tony Garnier (1869–1948) and Peter Behrens (1868–1940)—Ed.2. The Japanese film Gate of Hell , showed houses, a monastery, and palace, in color for thefirst time.3. See Walter Segal’s letter in Architectural Design (February 1954).


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However, London architectural circles are a small field in which to conduct apolemic of any kind, and abuse must be directed at specific persons, rather thanclasses of persons, since there was rarely enough unanimity (except amongMarxists) to allow a class to coalesce. The New Brutalists at whom Marxist spite was

directed could be named and recognized—and so could their friends in otherarts. The term had no sooner got into public circulation than its meaning beganto narrow. Among the non-Marxist grouping there was no particular unity of pro-gram or intention, but there was a certain community of interests, a tendency tolook toward Le Corbusier, and to be aware of something called le béton brut , toknow the quotation which appears at the head of this article and, in the case of the more sophisticated and aesthetically literate, to know of the art brut of JeanDubuffet and his connection in Paris. Words and ideas, personalities, and discon-tents chimed together and in a matter of weeks—long before the Third Programand the monthlies had got hold of the phrase—it had been appropriated as theirown, by their own desire and public consent, by two young architects, Alison andPeter Smithson.

The phrase had thus changed both its meaning and its usage. Adopted assomething between a slogan and brick-bat flung in the public’s face, the New Brutalism ceased to be a label descriptive of a tendency common to modern archi-tecture, and became instead a program, a banner, while retaining some—ratherrestricted—sense as a descriptive label. It is because it is both kinds of –ism at once that the New Brutalism eludes precise description, while remaining a livingforce in contemporary British architecture.

As a descriptive label it has two overlapping, but not identical, senses. Non-architecturally it describes the art of Dubuffet, some aspects of Jackson Pollock

and of Appel, and the burlap paintings of Alberto Burri—among foreign artists—and, say, Magda Cordell or Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson among Englishartists. With these last two, the Smithsons collected and hung the I.C.A. exhibitionParallel of Life and Art , which, though it probably preceded the coining of thephrase, is nevertheless regarded as a locus classicus of the movement. The moreinstructive aspects of this exhibition will be considered later: for the moment let us observe that many critics (and students at the Architectural Association) com-plained of the deliberate flouting of the traditional concepts of photographicbeauty, of a cult of ugliness, and “denying the spiritual in Man.” The tone of response to the New Brutalism existed even before hostile critics knew what to callit, and there was an awareness that the Smithsons were headed in a different direc-tion than most other architects in London.

Alison Smithson first claimed the words in public as her own in a descriptionof a project for a small house in Soho ( Architectural Design , November [sic] 1953)designed before the phrase existed, and previously tagged “The warehouse aes-thetic”—a very fair description of what the New Brutalism stood for in its first phase. Of this house, she wrote: “ . . . had this been built, it would have been the

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first exponent of the New Brutalism in England, as the preamble to the specifica-tion shows: ‘It is our intention in this building to have the structure exposedentirely, without interior [sic] finishes wherever practicable. The contractorshould aim at a high standard of basic construction, as in a small warehouse.’”

The publication of this project led to an extensive and often hilarious correspon-dence in various periodicals through the summer of 1954, a correspondence which wandered further and further from its original point because most writers were in fact discussing either the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art , or the (as yet)unpublished school at Hunstanton. When this was finally published ( Architectural Review , September 1954) the discussion took a sharper and less humorous tone,for here in three-dimensional and photographic reality, and in the classic ModernMovement materials of concrete, steel, and glass, was the Smithsons’ only complet-ed building. The phrase “The New Brutalism” was immediately applied to it,though it had been designed in the spring of 1950, long before even the house inSoho, but the Brutalists themselves have accepted this appellation, and it hasbecome the tag for Hunstanton wherever the building has been discussed.

Hunstanton, and the house in Soho, can serve as the points of architecturalreference by which The New Brutalism in architecture may be defined. What arethe visible and identifiable characteristics of these two structures? Both have for-mal, axial plans—Hunstanton, in fact, has something like true bi-axial symmetry,and the small Gymnasium block alongside the school is a kind of exemplar in lit-tle of just how formal the complete scheme was to have been—and this formality is immediately legible from without. Both exhibit their basic structure, and bothmake a point of exhibiting their materials—in fact, this emphasis on basic struc-ture is so obsessive that many superficial critics have taken this to be the whole of

New Brutalist Architecture. Admittedly, this emphasis on basic structure is impor-tant, even if it is not the whole story, and what has caused Hunstanton to lodge inthe public’s gullet is the fact that it is almost unique among modern buildings inbeing made of what it appears to be made of. Whatever has been said about hon-est use of materials, most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash orpatent glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel. Hunstanton appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact made of glass, brick,steel, and concrete. Water and electricity do not come out of unexplained holes inthe wall, but are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes and manifest con-duits. One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works, and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces.

The ruthless adherence to one of the basic moral imperatives of the ModernMovement—honesty in structure and material—has precipitated a situation to

which only the pen of Ibsen could do justice. The mass of moderate architects,hommes moyens sensuels , have found their accepted practices for waiving therequirements of the conscience-code suddenly called in question; they have beenput rudely on the spot, and they have not liked the experience. Of course, it is not

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just the building itself which has precipitated this situation, it is the things theBrutalists have said and done as well, but, as with the infected Spa in An Enemy of the People , the play of personalities focuses around a physical object.

The qualities of that object may be summarized as follows: 1, Formal legibili-ty of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials for theirinherent qualities “as found.” This summary can be used to answer the question:

Are there other New Brutalist buildings besides Hunstanton? It is interesting tonote that such a summary of qualities could be made to describe Marseilles,Promontory and Lakeshore apartments, General Motors Technical Center, muchrecent Dutch work, and several projects by younger English architects affiliated toCIAM. But, with the possible exception of Marseilles, the Brutalists would proba-bly reject most of these buildings from the canon, and so must we, for all thesestructures exhibit an excess of suaviter in modo , even if there is plenty fortiter in re about them. In the last resort what characterizes the New Brutalism in architec-ture as in painting is precisely its brutality, its je-m’en-foutisme , its bloody-minded-ness. Only one other building conspicuously carries these qualities in the way that Hunstanton does, and that is Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Center. Here is a building


Page of illustrations for Reyner Banham’s “The New Brutalism.”

Architectural Review 118 . 1955.



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Consolazione at Todi, a painting by Jackson Pollock, the Lever Building, the 1954Cadillac convertible, the roofscape of the Unité at Marseilles, any of the hundredphotographs in Parallel of Life and Art . “Image” seems to be a word that describesanything or nothing. Ultimately, however, it means something which is visually

valuable, but not necessar ily by the standards of classical aesthet ics. WhereThomas Aquinas supposed beauty to be quod visum placet (that which seen, pleas-es), 2 image may be defined as quod visum perturbat —that which seen, affects theemotions, a situation which could subsume the pleasure caused by beauty, but isnot normally taken to do so, for the New Brutalists’ interests in image are com-monly regarded, by many of themselves as well as their critics, as being anti-art, orat any rate anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word. But what isequally as important as the specific kind of response, is the nature of its cause.

What pleased St. Thomas was an abstract quality, beauty—what moves a New Brutalist is the thing itself, in its totality, and with all its overtones of human asso-ciation. These ideas of course lie close to the general body of anti-Academic aes-thetics currently in circulation, though they are not to be identified exactly withMichel Tapié’s concept of un Art Autre ,3 even though that concept covers many Continental Brutalists as well as Eduardo Paolozzi.

Nevertheless this concept of Image is common to all aspects of The New Brutalism in England, but the manner in which it works out in architectural practicehas some surprising twists to it. Basically, it requires that the building should be animmediately apprehensible visual entity, and that the form grasped by the eye shouldbe confirmed by the experience of the building in use. Further, that this form shouldbe entirely proper to the functions and materials of the building, in their entirety.Such a relationship between structure, function, and form is the basic commonplace

of all good building of course, the demand that this form should be apprehensibleand memorable is the apical uncommonplace which makes good building into great architecture. The fact that this form-giving obligation has been so far forgotten that agreat deal of good building can be spoken of as if it were architecture, is a mark of aseriously decayed condition in English architectural standards. It has become tooeasy to get away with the assumption that if structure and function are served thenthe result must be architecture—so easy that the meaningless phrase “the conceptualbuilding” has been coined to defend the substandard architectural practices of theroutine-functionalists, as if “conceptual buildings” were something new, and some-thing faintly reprehensible in modern architecture.

All great architecture has been “conceptual,” has been image-making—andthe idea that any great buildings, such as the Gothic Cathedrals, grew unconsciously


2. Paraphrasing Summa Theologica II (i) xxvii, I. The passage is normally rendered into Englishas “but that whose very apprehension pleases is called beautiful.”3. See his book of the same name, published in 1952. A closely analogous development is that of musique concrète , which uses “real sounds,” manipulated in a manner which resembles the manipula-tion of some of the photographs in Parallel , and does not concern itself with harmony or melody in any recognizable way.


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ate a coherent visual image by non-formal means emphasizing visible circulation,identifiable units of habitation, and fully validating the presence of human beingsas part of the total image—the perspectives had photographs of people pasted onto the drawings, so that the human presence almost overwhelmed the architec-

ture. But the Sheffield design went further even than this—and aformalismbecomes as positive a force in its composition as it does in a painting by Burri orPollock. Composition might seem pretty strong language for so apparently casual alayout, but this is clearly not an “unconceptual” design, and on examination it canbe shown to have a composition, but based not on the elementary rule-and-com-pass geometry which underlies most architectural composition, so much as anintuitive sense of topology. As a discipline of architecture topology has alwaysbeen present in a subordinate and unrecognized way—qualities of penetration,circulation, inside and out, have always been important, but elementary Platonicgeometry has been the master discipline. Now, in the Smithsons’ Sheffield project the roles are reversed, topology becomes the dominant and geometry becomesthe subordinate discipline. The “connectivity” of the circulation routes is flour-ished on the exterior and no attempt is made to give a geometrical form to thetotal scheme; large blocks of topologically similar spaces stand about the site withthe same graceless memorability as Martello towers or pit-head gear.

Such a dominance accorded to topology—in whose classifications a brick isthe same “shape” as a billiard ball (unpenetrated solid) and a teacup is the same“shape” as a gramophone record (continuous surface with one hole) is clearly analogous to the displacement of Tomistic “beauty” by Brutalist “Image,” 4 andSheffield remains the most consistent and extreme point reached by any Brutalists

in their search for Une Architecture Autre. It is not likely to displace Hunstanton inarchitectural discussions as the prime exemplar of the New Brutalism, but it is theonly building-design which fully matches up to the threat and promise of Parallel of Life and Art .

And it shows that the formal axiality of Hunstanton is not integral to New Brutalist architecture. Miesian or Wittkowerian geometry was only an ad hoc devicefor the realization of “Images,” and when Parallel of Life and Art had enabledBrutalists to define their relationship to the visual world in terms of somethingother than geometry, then formality was discarded. The definition of a New Brutalist building derived from Hunstanton and Yale Art Center, above, must be


4. This analogy could probably be rendered epistemologically strict—both beauty and geome-try, hitherto regarded as ultimate properties of the cosmos , now appear as linguistically refined specialcases of more generalized concepts—image and topology—which, though essentially primitive, havebeen reached only through immense sophistication. Once this state of sophistication has beenachieved, and the new concept digested, it suddenly appears so simple that it can be vulgarized with-out serious distortion, and for a handy back-entrance to topology without using the highly complexmathematics involved, the reader could not do better than acquire a copy of Astounding Science Fiction for July 1954.


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modified so as to exclude formality as a basic quality if it is to cover future develop-ments and should more properly read: 1, Memorability as an Image; 2, Clear exhi-bition of Structure; and 3, Valuation of Materials “as found.” Remembering that an Image is what affects the emotions, that structure, in its fullest sense, is the

relationship of parts, and that materials “as found” are raw materials, we have worked our way back to the quotation which headed this architecture “ L’architecture, c’est, avec des Matières Bruts, établir des rapports émouvants ,” but we have workedour way to this point through such an awareness of history and its uses that we seethat the New Brutalism, if it is architecture in the grand sense of Le Corbusier’sdefinition, is also architecture of our time and not of his, nor of Lubetkin’s, nor of the times of the Masters of the past. Even if it were true that the Brutalists speakonly to one another, the fact that they have stopped speaking to Mansart, toPalladio, and to Alberti would make the New Brutalism, even in its more privatesense, a major contribution to the architecture of today.

—Architectural Review 118 (December 1955), pp. 354–61.

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30 OCTOBER

Like everybody who has grown up with movies, newspapers, ads, Paolozzi hasa different frame of reference from most artists who assert their professional sta-tus precisely by excluding most of this ephemeral material from their art. What characterizes images drawn from this kind of material? They combine variety and

uniformity in a new way. The variety is the incredible extension of subject matter(literally everything can be given visual symbolic form now). The uniformity is inthe quantity of images which enables us to see connections between unlikes.Paolozzi seems to get both properties in his art: the head is a head, a planet, anasteroid, a stone, a blob under a microscope; it is big and small, one and many.

Any of these possibilities can enter his drawings and sculptures of heads without excluding others. The images are multi-evocative, not because of old-line surreal-ist incongruities but because of a new way of seeing wholes.

That Paolozzi’s conditions of perception are not those of orthodox fineartists is shown by his technique. He avoids, like the plague, not only the virtuosity of Reg Butler, but the competence of Henry Moore. His is committed to lay-usageof his materials, whether in the spluttering pen and stained paper of his drawingsor in the knobbly undifferentiated balls of his bronze heads. This appearance of casualness is essential to his art. He finds his images by making shapes. This con-cern with process, visible in his bronzes, drawings, and collages, culminates in hiscurrent sculpture in wax. These sheets can be bent in warm water, cut with a hot knife, and assembled with great flexibility. Exploitation of the physical propertiesof his material is characteristic of Paolozzi. He leaves it at an earlier stage thanthat at which the art user is accustomed to seeing it; it is “raw material” not “artist’smaterial.” It will be seen that a lay-usage of aesthetically unprocessed material andan iconology that has roots in all visual symbols rather than in the narrow sub-divi-

sion of fine art are logically related.The humanist ideal of the statistically rare, above average human body iscountered by Paolozzi. In his early work the question was: how little can a head bemade from? The answer involved random conglomerations of small shapes. Thequestion now is: how far can the disintegration of the head go without the headlosing its identity? The consuming interest of Paolozzi is with the physiologicaland psychological limits of man. These limits have been widened lately, with con-centration camps, exposure at sea, the pressure of -45 gravities. It is to find animage of man tough enough and generalized enough to stand up to this environ-ment that Paolozzi is working. 1 The glistening and corroded forms of Man Looking

1. It is interesting to compare these comments with Alloway’s review of a Dubuffet exhibitionheld at the ICA a year earlier: “He works with the human being on a level below that of differentiationby identity cards and grading by psychological tests. His human beings, like Michaux’s are tough, inter-changeable, and struggling.” Lawrence Alloway, “The Facts of the Matter and the Figures Involved,” Art News and Review (April 16, 1955), p. 2. Indeed, Alloway will write something almost identical onPaolozzi two years later: “The human image he creates is a figure that obstinately survives violence andchange. It is a human being below the level of dog tags, identity cards, telephone numbers, and street addresses.” Lawrence Alloway, “London Chronicle,” Art International 2 (December 1958–January 1959),pp. 36, 101—Ed.


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Up investigate the limits of the human image in a way that parallels the manhan-dling of the material he is using. Close to this aspect of his work are images fromhorror comics and science fiction: Alex Schomberg, a cover artist for Startling Stories , for example, depicts a man in a space-suit at a limit of existence, thehuman schema just this side of disintegration. Another phase of Paolozzi’s recent

work is concerned with man and technology. In Man with a Camera , for example,he symbolizes an aspect of the man and artifact relationship. The field work wasdone in Life and Fortune , but Paolozzi is not concerned with the increase in theoperator’s efficiency by means of this extension of the body. On the contrary, thecamera is not handled in a way that we read as efficient; it is a part of the features,and like them it is asymmetric and scatty. Paolozzi’s point seems to be that theclumsy, obdurate, exasperated humanity makes tools personal. The artifact givesin to the archaic nature of man. Man in a Motor Car , for example, a wax sculpture,belongs to the same phase.

Paolozzi’s work, then, shows a way in which the limits of art can be extendedeven as an image of man is being pushed to new limits. These two activities aresimultaneous, the media and the message being interrelated. For this stress onthe act of making and on a popular iconology Paolozzi can be connected with

Willem de Kooning in New York and Jean Dubuffet in Paris.—Architectural Design (April 1956), p. 133.

Eduardo Paolozzi 31

Eduardo Paolozzi. Man ina Motor Car. 1956.



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This Is Tomorrow. Installation views, Whitechapel Gallery. 1956.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/OCTO_a_00036&iName=master.img-001.jpg&w=286&h=205http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/OCTO_a_00036&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=286&h=286


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This Is Tomorrow

REYNER BANHAM

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 32–34. © Architectural Review, September 1956, pp. 186–88.

In this review of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, published just nine months after the appearance of his New Brutalism essay, Reyner Banham criticizes Henderson, Paolozzi, and the Smithsons’ Patio & Pavilion for its adherence to “tradit ional values,” championing instead the proto-Pop environment of Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker.Ringing a New Brutalist note in his conclusion, Banham says that despite these differences,both contributions ultimately deal with “concrete images.”—A.K.

The synthesis of the major arts is a consecrated theme in the ModernMovement, one of the shining abstractions that gather, halo-wise, about the headsof its Masters, though it has been left mostly to their followers to thrash out thepracticalities that stand between wish and achievement. The most used threshing-floor so far has been CIAM, but a new and most instructive one has been provided

lately by the exhibition, unfortunately labeled This Is Tomorrow , which continues at the Whitechapel Gallery until September 9.

Collaboration between practitioners of the different arts was its only pro-gram; its aesthetics were entirely permissive, and anything could, in theory, havebeen done. The results were inevitably diverse, but so were the premises from

which different groups of collaborator s worked. Even the idea of synthesis wasinterpreted, at one extreme, simply as a requirement to house or decorate oneanother’s work, and at the other extreme, as an invitation to smash all bound-aries between the arts, to treat them all as modes of communicating experiencefrom person to person, as the Holroyd-Alloway-del Renzio group did—modesthat could embrace all the available channels of human perception, as set out ina table, which appeared in the catalogue entry for the Voelcker-Hamilton-McHale section.

But even if the concept is as wide and fluid as this, practical considerationstend to reduce the means employed to a set of recognizable elements, classifiableunder the heads of Structure, Plasticity, Symbol, and Sign, even if pictures weremerely hung on a wall these four elements were all employed, if only accidentally.


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Some concepts of structure—geometry clothed in substance—proved to bethe basic, or unifying postulate of most groups’ offerings, and in one case, thepartnership of John Weeks and Adrian Heath, structure was the totality of theexhibit, a wall of standard bricks which were displaced or omitted to give it the

plasticity and symbolic significance of an abstract sculpture.More complex structure-sculptures were seen in the Catleugh-Thornton-Hull screen, but a note of ambiguity, more consciously exploited in other sections,appears in the composition of curved planes on which Peter Carter, Colin St. J.

Wilson, and Robert Adams collaborated. Normal scale-effects are reversed, andthat part which is large enough to admit a standing man is clearly sculptural infeeling, while the manifestly structural element beyond is sited and displayed likea free-standing statue.

This ambiguity was part of a general feeling of broken barriers and ques-tioned categories that constituted the most stimulating aspect of the whole exhibi-tion. And yet the technique of category-smashing could not be used as a basis forforming value-judgments about the exhibits. Thus, the Smithson-Henderson-Paolozzi contribution showed the New Brutalists at their most submissive to tradi-tional values. They erected a pavilion within a patio and stocked it with sculpturessignifying the most time-honored of man’s activities and needs. This was, in anexalted sense, a confirmation of accepted values and symbols.

Voelcker, Hamilton, and McHale, on the other hand, employed opt ical illu-sions, scale reversions, oblique structures and fragmented images to disrupt stockresponses, and put the viewer back on a tabula rasa of individual responsibility forhis own atomized sensory awareness of images of only local and contemporary sig-nificance. Yet, curiously, their section seemed to have more in common with that

of the New Brutalists than any other, and the clue to this kinship would appear tolie in the fact that neither relied on abstract concepts, but on concrete images—images that can carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of nov-elty and technology, but resist classification by the geometrical disciplines by

which most other exhibits were dominated.—Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 186–88.


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Editorial

MICHAEL PEARSON

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 35–36. © Michael Pearson from 244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 7, Winter 1956–7, p. 2.

In this brief editorial, Michael Pearson takes up a number of themes central to New Brutalism, including the use of topology, seen here in the work of Nigel Henderson and

Eduardo Paolozzi.— A.K.

Discussing basic architectural questions, Moholy-Nagy said, “Architecture will be brought to its fullest realization when the deepest knowledge of human lifeas a total event in the biological whole is available. One of its important compo-nents is the ordering of man in space, making space comprehensible by its articu-lation. The root of architecture lies in the mastery of the problem of space; itspractical development lies in technological advance.” 1

Space cannot be considered as an isolated quality but only relative to thepresence of man and the eye of the beholder. As one moves about in an environ-ment one receives a visual image of the experience, perhaps mentally appreciat-ing topological rather than metric properties in the same way that a child consid-ers qualities of closure, proximity, separation, and continuity before straight lines,angles, parallels, and regular forms. 2 The stressed photo above by NigelHenderson shows the relation of figures to the spatial complex of the street,

whose topological qualities are greatly heightened by the distortions, giving one a visual image of the whole scene.

The spatial systems of Radcliffe Square, Oxford, and Seaton Delaval conformto the Renaissance ideal of having one viewpoint—or a series along a clearly defined axis—derived from the discovery of perspective. […]

At the turn of the century the Cubists, and later the Futurists and De Stijl,evolved and developed a new conception of space which has been continually modified by succeeding generations. Consequently we now have a new set of prin-ciples from those of the Renaissance architect. Linear perspective is no longer a

1. László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947).2. Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1956).


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dominant factor and buildings and sculpture are not seen at their best just from aseries of fixed points on the main axes of the composition, but must be experi-enced from within their spatial complex. The school playground on the oppositepage, designed by Eduardo Paolozzi, shows how sculpture and building have

become more of an environment which one can and must experience from with-in. As one moves around one sees only facets of the scheme, rarely the whole;gradually building up an image of the environment in the mind.

[…]In these things, our terms of reference are becoming clear, and may become

as logically defined as those of the Renaissance.—244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture

and Planning Society 7 (Winter 1956–57), p. 2.

Eduardo Paolozzi. Design for a playground. 1956.



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This article has been cited by:


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The New Brutalism


OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 37. © Alison and Peter Smithson from Architectural Design , April 1957, p. 113.

This short text was the Smithsons’ contribution to “Thoughts in Progress,” a monthly discussion forum in Architectural Design , the April 1957 issue of which was dedicated to New Brutalism. It contains one of the Smithsons’ most famous comments about the movement—that it “tries to face up to a mass-production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.” Resisting the easy reduction of New Brutalism to techniques such as poured concrete, the Smithsons insist that their pro-

ject is fundamentally ethical in nature.—A.K.

If Academicism can be defined as yesterday’s answers to today’s problems,then obviously the objectives and aesthetic techniques of a real architecture (or areal art) must be in constant change. In the immediate postwar period it seemedimportant to show that architecture was still possible, and we determined to set against loose planning and form—abdication, a compact disciplined, architecture.

Simple objectives once achieved change the situation, and the techniquesused to achieve them become useless.

So new objectives are established.From individual buildings, disciplined on the whole by classical aesthetic

techniques, we moved on to an examination of the whole problem of human asso-ciations and the relationship that building and community has to them. From thisstudy has grown a completely new attitude and non-classical aesthetic.

Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take intoaccount Brutalism’s attempt to be objective about “reality”—the cultural objec-tives of society, its urges, and so on. Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-produc-tion society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces

which are at work.Up to now Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is

ethical.—Architectural Design 27 (April 1957), p. 113.


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Cover of Architectural Design . 1957.



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Conversation on Brutalism

ALISON SMITHSON, PETER SMITHSON, JANE B. DREW, E. MAXWELL FRY

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 38–46. © Mr. Peter Smithson, Mrs. Alison Smithson, Miss Jane B. Drew, Mr. E.Maxwell Fry fromZodiac 4, 1959, pp. 73–81.

In this “Conversation on Brutalism,” first published in the Italian architecture magazine Zodiac , Alison and Peter Smithson talk with the British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry.Of a slightly older generation than the Smithsons, Drew and Fry had designed a number of buildings for Le Corbusier’s project at Chandigarh, and would later complete other public works in colonial West Africa. In 1958, Drew organized the exhibitionLe Corbusier: ArchitecturePainting Sculpture Tapestries with Theo Crosby at the Building Centre in London.

This interview points to clichés that had already attached themselves to New Brutalism—“as found” materials, cast concrete, and the like—and shows the Smithsons insisting again that their project is ethical, not stylistic. Brutalism here (the “New” has been dropped, perhaps as a way of reclaiming the conversation from Banham) appears as an attitude, a way of pushing against a dominant culture, a mandate to be straightfor- ward and bold. “Communication” figures as an important keyword, as it does in

Alloway’s text above. In contrast to Eero Saarinen’s approach with his General Motors Technical Center (1945–56), Peter Smithson maintains that communication should not “become an end in itself.” (This interview is characterized by a number of grammatical eli- sions, which are retained here.)—A.K.

Mr. Smithson : The intention of the first period of modern architecture was that buildings should be machine like, and whether machine made or not, they should look machine made. As a reaction to the period of, say, 1936 to 1946,

when poetic machine work degenerated into superficial stylistic machine- work (in which the fundamentals were neglected), I think that one of thethings which interests one now is that a genuine aesthetic of machine build-ing technology should arise, and in some way this gets one involved in arather brutal approach. If a thing is really made of pre-cast elements, or con-crete blocks, the building has to reflect the way it was built with pre-cast elements or concrete block, and inevitably the building will not only have adifferent scale from an architecture that is conceived of as being a singleobject made by a machine, but it will be built at the scale of the genuine machine with which it was built . If you think back to the sort of key building of the


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1920s like the Garches House or the Savoye House, one feels that Le Corbusier was trying to make the whole building look as if it was being made by machine,as a single object , turned out on a lathe, colored-up and so on, and there is a dif-ference of attitude towards the machine involved here. In the first period I

think essentially there was poetry in the machine that had manifested itself inindustrial objects. That poetry was trying to be translated into architecturalterms. Naturally one now wants to make a poetic artifact for if there is nopoetic artifact we don’t have any architecture, but not make, as it were, anobject in the style of the machines, but made poetically through machines.

Mrs. Smithson : Therefore, if you considered yourself in the same tradition as theoriginal masters, and in that way reacting upon what we found things werein the 1940s, buildings which were built as if they were not made of realmaterial at all but some sort of processed material such as Kraft Cheese; weturned back to wood, and concrete, glass, and steel, all the materials which

you can really get hold of. And with these started working on the field of town buildings because it was obvious that it was no longer possible to breakthe situation with a few buildings of the caliber of Garches, but one had tobe thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got one houseto do (and this would never be as big as Garches), but even if you only had alittle house to do it somehow had to imply the whole system of town buildingby expressing it in itself (by its very smallness perhaps).

Mr. Fry : May I say that in the earliest days, an architect like Hans Scharoun repre-sented the kind of weak idea of the slick machine finish—you remembersome of his building, and how one revolted against the Einstein Tower in

which again the slick idea preceded all ideas of funct ion. People like Le

Corbusier represented the idea in its purist form, but it was nevertheless,(and I think it is true of all the people operating in the ’30s) that their ideasabout the industrial world, and machine aesthetic and so on (with whichthey had still not by any means come to grips) are as yet untested. Thoughthey had concrete, glass, and most of the materials available to play with,their ideas were still largely romantic in form, and what you are talkingthinks about town planning it is of some these ideas. [This structure of theoriginal sentence has been left intact—Ed.] One can talk about feelingmuch more easily than pure techniques because in the end we are alldirected by feelings—through architecture we propound feelings which arepicked up again. In the ’30s that was the way of looking at it.

Mr. Smithson : I am sure that it is relevant. Always one felt in Scharoun, for exam-ple, in the pictures that I knew of his work in the ’20s and ’30s that there wasa certain sort of expressionism about the machine. Well, I recently spent twodays in his office and he has now driven through that expression, but there isstill an element of play involved, based on a much more fundamental thing.He is building an extension to the Siemensstadt Siedlung, which in a funny sort of way is a history of the last forty years. We looked in his offices at a big


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plan of the Siemensstadt and it has the houses by Gropius in lines, and thespace is very anonymous and neutral. It was set up on the right angle—it washygienic and it had the neat kick of machine architecture, but in terms of external living space (that is the space in which you actually operate outside

the buildings) it is strictly anonymous. Well, what I think Scharoun is doingnow is something in the sort of way that our minds work in our generation,in that he says that the dwellings are not only dwelling units in themselves,but there is a possibility of putting them together in such a way that they make another extension of dwelling—they have a front and back, a serviceside and play side, and that the bigger unit with more bedrooms expressthemselves as bigger units with more bedrooms. The play of the architec-ture, the play of the spaces linked, creates at the level outside the dwelling as

well as inside, the spaces less anonymous and less geometric. This is really only a footnote on the progress of one man, but I think that the essentialethic of brutalism is in town building. What one about really is a revulsion of feeling from anonymous administrator laying down a master plan which may be on very good organizational principles, but when it actually comes tobuilding on the ground, it is the way the buildings themselves fit together andinteract with each other which creates the actual places in which you move,and have a feeling of identity or lack of identity. In consequence of this sort of way of thinking, in terms of direct responses of building to building, youtend to get buildings which are less (in the Renaissance sense) complete.One puts less value on the thing being symmetrical or cubic and more onthe fact that its particular geometry, builds up into a relationship with othergeometry not in a Camillo Sitte romantic way, but in a functional way; that

you read the building for what it is, and not for some idea that is constructedon it. One thinks in these terms that in a certain situation it might be neces-sary to be brutally direct to change the tempo of the quarter—you know we

were talking earlier of the Pirelli buildings.Mr. Fry : I think that Gropius is a good man in a sense. I regard him as a George

Stevenson, full of principles, but a bit like the Rocket, a bit ugly in some ways—I mean in the way the Rocket had the pr inciples although it took fifty more locos before principles were clothed in beauty.

Mrs. Smithson : Yes, I think that with Gropius you feel that he talks about prefabri-cation and module and everything, and yet in the housing schemes that T.A.C. have done for University Professors and Teachers and the like,they’re all polite little English/Swedish sort of things, instead of being these“things” that Gropius talks about. When all some to all, there is an absoluteevasion of technique, and a retreat.

Well, that is the difference I think between our approach and some of the very first masters, and yet the greatest masters are acting in the same way that we want to act—that is Le Corbusier and Scharoun and the people that one can still learn from, in the business of responsibility, that the building is

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the situation is, and how to work it out properly, and drops back into a for-mula of doing it which is a sort of lie—in a way it is a sort of ethical question,a thing being either plastic truth or this sort of evasion, or lie. In the early and late ’40s we were in a situation in England in which many things got

built which you felt were a lie, and a lot of ideas have been carried on inarchitecture well into the ’50s, when building programs became strictly a for-mula without anybody really thinking about whether, for example, the officeshould be there at all, rather than what shape the office should be. Just tofinish this note, it is an interesting experience to compare how we teach at the AA with the way they teach at IIT—undoubtedly the most direct schoolin America. They have a system. Mies says, “We don’t build well in the twenti-eth century—we must learn how to build well,” and so they say to theirstudents “you must learn to build a house well” whereas we start off by saying“should there be a house there at all?” There seems to me to be a world of difference. (If the answer is “yes, there should be a house there,” then it should bear a certain relationship to other things and we build well in theterms of present day technology). It is another evasion, just to learn to build,

without questioning why one should build and whether it should be there.Mrs. Smithson : Yes, part of our philosophy is that one must be ready to act in any

situation that presents itself, and act rightly. I think this ties up with thePirelli building and what Peter said earlier about acting brutally perhaps insome situations. At some spaces in the city all you can do is to make such astatement that [can] be seen perhaps from a long distance, or something sodifferent from the accepted that even though you can only instinctively feelthat it is right, and cannot actually prove it is right, that you hope by doing

this that other people will change in relation to it.[…]Mr. Smithson : I think that one always had the idea that the motor car should be

allowed everywhere, because it is an extension to oneself, but I noticed onthis last trip to America after I had over the excitement of the movement and noise and so on, that in Chicago the noise level is quite unbelievable—on the elevated railway there is one point on a station where the noise levelis just about 2 decibels below the pain threshold, and I found this time that one felt desperately in need of a sort of pool which noisy communicantsdidn’t enter, just for the sake of mental stability.

The whole town has got to be re-geared to the scale of the motor carmovement, but there would obviously have to be places where either the carspeed is reduced practically to zero, or the car is excluded completely. Totake a scattered Garden City and to drive the motor roads through it seemsto me to ignore the fact that the car is around at all. I mean you have theconventional housing estate now, a sort of Coventry, which turns its back onthe bypass that goes through it, but makes no other gesture towards themotor car other than turning its back on it, you know, is separated by a little



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green strip and all the backyards with their masses of concrete posts andlittle tatty huts and so on. I am not saying that one should not have a back

yard, but that one is getting the worst worlds, neither a Garden City nor atruly sort of motorized environment at a new scale where one can travel

and see at forty miles an hour sweetly, and at another scale sweetly experi-encing walking.[…]Mrs. Smithson : It is just that one feels that there should be visible expression in the

houses that the motor car has arrived.Mr. Fry : Although obviously out of the picture in point of the scale, I also felt in

Chicago on Lake Shore Drive with the avenues leading in, that this scene,magnificent in its way, and quite overpowering in its extent, neverthelesshad an element of triviality in it.

Mr. Smithson: It was already Paleolithic, it was already antiquated—it should bebombarded.

Mr. Fry : Yes, but what I am not clear about is with what is this to be replaced?Mrs. Smithson : I think it is falling on the architect to take up the traditional role of

the architect urbanist and that planners, in a way, are living in a little dream world somewhere between William Morris and Camillo Sitte, and they talk inthe conferences they keep having about Coventry and Harlow and they talkagain and again about them, unwilling to come out in bright reality and thehard world of these fast motor cars and the styling changes, and how peopleare really living with their television, and their appliances.

Mr. Fry : The Americans deal with their great highways and turnpikes at the scale of the car. At Chicago and New York they seem in one sense to be heroic and

then it seems to pass beyond human limits and becomes a kind of antway without sufficient relation to the scale of the human being.Mrs. Smithson : Yes, well I think there are two different things happening here—that

in America they are willing to take these big engineering chances—there is adifferent kind of man operating, whereas in Europe one is thrown back onthe architect having to take up the traditional role of the architect-urbanist because one is mainly a sort of cerebral character, a sort of ancient-worldman thinking it out.

Mr. Smithson : I think the interesting thing about the American civil engineer isthat he is a sort of king, capable of majestic feats, mass earth moving and soon, because the program is well set it is simple. They make a road from A toB and it is not complicated by much high-level thought as to what is happen-ing in the city or the region. But when they do the road they do it beautifully, and it has this heroic scale, but with a sort of irrelevance about it

when it connects to other things. At Detroit, for instance, communicationhas become an end in itself. Now, the European-Mies-van-der-Rohe sort of beauty thing is an intellectual-conceptual system in which all the parts fit together. When you get a building built on such principles, it is a heroic

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building in terms of human engineering, or whatever you like to call it, but constantly in America you find that when they build they fall back on a sort of antiquated humanism, you know, the Yamasaki sort of thing, which is asort of ivory object built in concrete, which somehow turns its back on

machine environment as if its impossible to come to terms with mechanizedenvironment, we can’t make it nice let’s fall back on the Renaissance or themedieval thing, so that you get from many of the young American architectsa total rejection of machine environment.

There are in America only two or three architects I know, such as LouisKahn or Charles Eames, who seriously think in terms of the present, how tobuild at a machine scale, the aesthetics of pre-cast concrete for instance, orthe programming of planning information.

Mr. Fry : . . . but, quite apart from Louis Kahn and Charles Eames, of course, youfind in New York and Chicago in quantity, buildings which are in fact built

with the machine technique to the end, and that they horrify by their excel-lence in the thing they set out to be, which is a shining machine product,and some of these places have no color even—the offices do pursue themachine technique to the end without artistry.

Miss Drew : Perhaps the most general blight one could talk about is the blight of the curtain wall, I mean the anonymous curtain wall which is gradually beinghung over large areas of London. It is absolute formula without feeling

which is perfect as a machine product but which no longer carries any kindof emotional quality.

Mr. Fry : What we are concerned with is what should significant building be underour circumstances?

Mr. Smithson : Well, one tends to merely contrast the possible thing with the thingthat is bad. It is no good restyling a building with curtain walling—you havegot to figure out if you have got a street that exists and say you have toredesign the block in it, is the street idea valid? Is the development of theoffices in that block to continue in the same way, or should the offices besomewhere else? If they should be there what form of office should it be? Youknow, it is a different thing to what it was in the nineteenth century for cer-tain. We are using now, tape recorders, information machines and so on,

which tend to give a regrouping of the function within offices. Should they bebuilt in a different way since the ways people work in offices is very different to

what it was 50 years ago? One does not have an anonymous mass of workersbut an egalitarian sort of society with an equal right to work, to walk out intheir lunch hour and so on, and a different pattern should result, rather thantaking the existing building and restyling it with patent glazing, while insidethe patent glazing is a nineteenth century office building with all the disadvan-tages and a sort of spiritual obsolescence. I am thinking of the big tower of offices—if they are not done with very great skill as in the Seagram building,

you have a strong feeling of cultural obsolescence—you are going to build a



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museum for people to live in a way that has already been done away with.Mr. Fry : I’d like to just start upon a new line, now, and to say that in arriving at a

new morality which is really what has happened—a new morality and a new feeling—for reasons which you very clearly explained, you arrive also at a

rejection of certain parts of the vocabulary which you don’t like, i.e. all slick-ness and so on. But there may be values there still because there may be val id mater ials for use. As immediately translated by younger men it becomes a very fierce morality which will only deal with London stock brickand bush hammered concrete, giving up other means of expression whichmight be valuable.

Mr. Smithson : It is a very good point. It is something where the horse’s mouth sim-ile comes in useful. There has been an awful lot of writing by people, andconstruction by other people assuming what we mean. A modern architect does not think of a theory then build it; you assemble your buildings and

your theories as you go along. The theory is evolved, a decision made five years ago will be a completely different decision from one made today. Thebusiness of materials “as found” does not imply a rejection of marble andplaster and stainless steel. Let’s face it, you can get a direct effect out of themost simple material. You can say a lot with simple things, you give even acertain elegance. We didn’t reject elegance per se but we were stuck, and arestill stuck in many ways, with the problem of the brick. I am obsessionally against the brick, you know, we think brick the antithesis of machine build-ing and yet for practical reasons we never have built in anything else. It is atragedy. When I was 19 I said I would never design or build anything in brickin all my life, and yet one is face to face in England in this northern climate

and in the middle belt of Europe with the fact that brick does the job. Youcannot argue with it, and therefore you know there is certain sort of com-mon sense in it. If common sense tells you that you have got to make somepoetic thing with brick, you make it with brick.

Mrs. Smithson : But a time is coming now for a further stand against being pushedtowards building in bricks, even if it means refusing a job

october no 136 spring 2011 the new brutalism 1

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