I can't agree with this. There's nothing about brutalism that means it prevents humans 'blossoming' or 'prospering', whatever that means. The focus of a lot of brutalist architecture was on functionality – that is, discarding the pomp and frivolity of some older architecture – and making them more focused around the actual functional needs of humans.
The problem is that the brutalist movement, at least in the UK, overlapped with the poor construction methods of the 50s and 60s and economic realignment that resulted in brutalist social housing projects. In the long term, extreme under-investment in maintenance of these projects means that they deteriorate into uninhabitable hellholes.
But there are exceptions - the Barbican estate in London, which is as brutalist as it gets, is a great example of how this sort of architecture can work when properly funded and maintained.
> There's nothing about brutalism that means it prevents humans 'blossoming' or 'prospering', whatever that means. The focus of a lot of brutalist architecture was on functionality – that is, discarding the pomp and frivolity of some older architecture – and making them more focused around the actual functional needs of humans.
That focus on functional needs is precisely why Brutalism prevents human prospering: man doesn't just have rational, functional needs, but also emotional ones. That 'pomp' and 'frivolity' is actually far from pompous or frivolous: it satisfies the emotions and exalts the spirit.
A Brutalist approach to food would be to redirect all agricultural output to producing Soylent; a Brutalist approach to clothing would be for everyone, male and female, to wear a Mao suit in identical colours and fabrics, in varying weights to account for temperature; a Brutalist approach to poetry would be a rhyming dictionary.
> But there are exceptions - the Barbican estate in London, which is as brutalist as it gets, is a great example of how this sort of architecture can work when properly funded and maintained.
What's remarkable to me is that anyone ever thought that these eyesores were attractive. The only possible explanation is a kind of mental illness brought on by the catastrophic destruction and dehumanisation of the World Wars. Witness the post-WWI art scene, in which the beauty and form of Art Nouveau were replaced by the horror and ugliness of surrealism and expressionism (Art Deco, with its clean lines, purity and colour, can be seen as a striving to preserve or restore some small piece of beauty in a world gone mad).
making them more focused around the actual functional needs of humans
This often failed really badly, much worse than other schools of architecture. The unpopular Brutalist buildings are not just aesthetically hostile but have poor "UX".
I'd say 'sometimes' rather than 'often'. But the underlying reason for this is still the same – cheap construction, poor maintenance. And of course those are the unpopular buildings. But there's nothing inherent to brutalism that means buildings have to be constructed like that.
My favourite examples of this kind of thing are the 'New Towns' in the UK. These were build in the late 40s through to the mid 60s to deal with overspill from cities. Towns like Cumbernauld and Livingston in Scotland were designed to be very human-focused – easy to walk through, segregated road systems, distinct districts with local services, central civic centres and so on. A genuinely utopian vision of the future, in some respects.
The problem is that shoddy construction and poor maintenance made living conditions unacceptable. Demographic changes and the mass overspill from cities made for less cohesive communities – segregated underpasses for example became sites of violent crime.
I think that in most cases the reasons for certain brutalist developments being unpopular is down to causes distinct from the architecture – and I think it's a mistake to conflate the issues. Though it does explain the unpopularity.
I think blaming this on cheap construction and poor maintenance (true as it may be) is missing the mark.
Blaming it on brutalism is also, IMO, missing the mark.
The core blame here lies in the fact that these complexes are built in the style of the Radiant City, which encouraged monolithic buildings surrounded by "parkland" and public spaces. It was imagined as a utopian balance between urban and rural - everyone living in a tower would have ready access to ample public space.
In reality of course these projects are largely defined by their emptiness, and these public spaces unused (and consequently, unsafe). The shoddy construction and maintenance surely didn't help, but IMO was not the root of the problem - we have seen more traditionally built communities fall into disrepair but never reach the level of isolation and segregation we see in these buildings.
It's just coincidence that brutalism reached its popular height along with Radiant City urban planning.
More importantly, even though brutalism has fallen out of vogue, Radiant Cities have not - most new American urban cores (particularly in the Midwest/West) are built around this philosophy still, and the net result has been the gutting of once tight-knit neighborhoods and replacing them with soaring towers and empty sidewalks (see: Belltown in Seattle). Brutalism may be gone, but 50 years from now someone will write another article about this exact phenomenon, with glass-clad apartment buildings in their place.
>The focus of a lot of brutalist architecture was on functionality – that is, discarding the pomp and frivolity of some older architecture – and making them more focused around the actual functional needs of humans.
I disagree with this, based somewhat on personal experience. While modern architecture did away with ornament in the name of "functionality", but that is a misnomer. Whether a building is functional ought to be judged by it's layout, not by ornament; by ergonomics, not aesthetics.
I live in Brasilia, which I once saw described as "something out of a bad science fiction movie". And I can say there's nothing more annoying than trying to navigate through any public building, as they try to compensate their lack of ornament by being over-sized and obtuse. And though this particular experience is my own, I don't it would be hard to find similar examples of how hard navigating in any modernist design (building, neighborhood, town) can be - another poster mentioned Moscow. It's no wonder that the the period between the 1960s and 1970s is also the nadir of urban planning, with widespread use of single-use zoning and awkward car-centric planning.
Consider why the term applied to the style is brutalism, and how people behave when in "brutal" surroundings. Contrast with, say, the arts and crafts architectural style (see Frank Lloyd Wright) which is comparable (stark, concrete) yet differs in a way which garners a broad enthusiastic following and is considered inspirational.
The reason the term is 'brutalism' is because it's derived from the French béton brut – i.e. raw concrete. I'm not a French speaker, but I understand that the implications in that language aren't quite the same as in English.
Wikipedia disagrees with that:
"The term "brutalism" was originally coined by the Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Göth in Uppsala, designed in 1949 by his contemporaries Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm.[citation needed] He originally used the Swedish-language term nybrutalism (new brutalism), which was picked up by a group of visiting English architects, including Michael Ventris. In England, the term was further adopted by architects Alison and Peter Smithson.[3][4] The term gained wide currency when the British architectural historian Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, to characterise a somewhat recently established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in Europe.[4]"
The problem is that the brutalist movement, at least in the UK, overlapped with the poor construction methods of the 50s and 60s and economic realignment that resulted in brutalist social housing projects. In the long term, extreme under-investment in maintenance of these projects means that they deteriorate into uninhabitable hellholes.
But there are exceptions - the Barbican estate in London, which is as brutalist as it gets, is a great example of how this sort of architecture can work when properly funded and maintained.