Style

Brutalist architecture

249 buildings

Brutalist architecture uses exposed, unpainted concrete or brick, as an ethic of honest materials as much as a look. Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined the word nybrutalism for a brick house in Uppsala designed in 1950. Alison Smithson first printed "new brutalism" in 1953, and the critic Reyner Banham used it in a 1955 essay to name both an ethic and a style. The name is often traced to béton brut, Le Corbusier's phrase for his rough concrete. The style spread around the world, and its popularity began to fall in the late 1970s.

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Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952) is often cited as the style's first inspiration: a vertical neighbourhood of duplex flats served by internal streets. Park Hill in Sheffield (1961) takes those streets outside as wide concrete decks that follow the slope. Boston City Hall (1968) is an inverted ziggurat whose form shows the city government's work from outside. The Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi (1973) sets a cylindrical tower beside a conical-roofed hall. The Barbican Centre in London (1982) buries an arts centre below a podium of walkways, lakes and bush-hammered towers.

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