a2as-hart--support-8992.pdf
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New Brutalism was a 1950s’, mainly British, architectural
movement that asserted the primacy of the functionalist
principles in services, materials, and structure. Anything
that distracted from or disguised these was rejected. In
its austere and inelegant rectilinearity, with plumbing,
electric and other services exposed, and ‘cosmetic’
treatments eschewed, New Brutalism probably repre-
sents the extreme case of functionalism. Immediately
following the destruction of World War II, it undoubtedly
had a certain attractiveness to public authorities looking
for economical means of rebuilding – New Brutalist
buildings were very basic. Creating infrastructure for the
new welfare state was another pressing need of the time.
For those who actually had to live in the new blocks of
flats or work in the schools and hospitals, though, the
attractiveness was less easy to discern. Prefabricated
wall, roof, and window units often failed the basic
requirement of being draught- and water-tight. Initial
savings here often proved costly in the long term. Less
than entirely successful technically, the mass-housing
projects generally also proved less than successful
socially. With some notable exceptions (the Roehamp-
ton Housing Estate in London seeming to be one), they
often left tenants feeling isolated and depressed within
their own homes, the “deck-street” corridors, lifts, and
stairways hostile and frequently vandalised spaces.
New Brutalism was led by Alison and Peter Smithson,
Jack Lynn, and Ivor Smith. Also associated with it were
Denys Lasdun and James Stirling.
British architecture, an overview Hugh Pearman, architectural critic of the London Sunday
Times, is worth quoting at some length when, on the eve of
the 21st century, he offers the following overview of British
architecture.
What, would you say, was a quintessentially British
approach to architecture? An approach that is original to
this country, that emerged here, rather than being an
import from Renaissance Europe or ancient Greece or
modern America? In the last century, there have been just
two significant British contributions to world architecture.
These are the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th
century, and the high-tech school of the late 20th. Both
have roots stretching back down the centuries. Looking in
opposite directions, they represent our Janus-like attitude
to architecture. Yin and yang, the country cottage vs the
Crystal Palace.
At a time when architecture is becoming an increasing-
ly public affair, with virtually every city in the kingdom
planning to open an architecture centre of gallery of one
kind or another, it is highly relevant to consider why British
architecture is more internationally influential now than it
has been since the heyday of Edwardian country-house
building. Arts and crafts architecture originated with the
architects George Devey and Philip Webb, and became
famous with Webb’s Red House for William Morris in
1859. This was a built manifesto of Morris’s repugnance
for the machine-made future indicated by the Great Exhib-
ition of 1851 in Joseph Paxton’s (high-tech) Crystal Pal-
ace. The style was taken to sublime heights by others,
most notably the young Edwin Lutyens before he got too
monumental. When the German cultural diplomat
Hermann Muthesius wrote his famous account, Das Eng-
lische Haus (the English House), in 1905, he was record-
ing a phenomenon of global importance.
Fig. 1 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–
54. Reproduced from V. M. Lampugnani (general editor), The
Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Architecture,
1963; London, 1986 edition, p. 247.
A discernibly British architecture then vanished. Two
world wars and the rise of the “international style” of mod-
ernism, accelerated by the arrival of émigré architects,
mostly from Germany, in Britain and America, blew that
cosy old world apart. In the frenzied post-war reconstruc-
tion, British architects were busy copying others.
The tide began to turn in 1960. Exactly a century after
the Red House, James Stirling and James Gowan built
their superb, mechanistic glass and red brick engineering
building at Leicester University [see Fig. 9]. It was as
knowing an assemblage of earlier 20th-century styles as
the Red House had been of romanticised vernacular past,
but Leicester also simultaneously recalled and anticipated
something else: the architectural potential of virtuoso
structural engineering…
Pearman goes on to describe the rise of the High-tech move-
ment in Britain, led by Richard Rogers and Norman Foster,
and then continues:
…The arts and crafts tradition survives, now informed by
the alternative tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright in America,
Alvar Aalto in Finland and Hans Scharoun in Germany.
The backbone of British architecture today, however, is
the tradition of the high tech.
It is a venerable tradition. Of course, the Crystal
Palace of 1851. Of course, the great Victorian train sheds.
Of course, the 1844 palm house at Kew by the engineer
Richard Turner and the architect Decimus Burton – the
finest glass and iron building in the land. Certainly, some
of the muscular late Georgian warehouses and factories.
But high tech goes back further still into the national
consciousness. The shimmering glass and water wall of
[Nicolas Grimshaw’s British Pavilion at Expo 93 in Seville]
recalls the shimmering glass facades of the Elizabethan
“prodigy houses” associated with the architect Robert
Smythson, such as Longleat, Hardwick and Wollaton. The
asymmetrical and structurally daring work of the medieval
gothic builders and their Victorian revivalists form a clear
ancestry to Roger’s Channel 4. Indeed, much medieval
stonework, dressed to incredibly precise tolerances,
Related Study Notes
20400
Architecture and technical
innovation in the machine
age
20445
Frank Lloyd Wright
20513
Le Corbusier
20521
De Stijl
20522
Bauhaus
20527
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
20543
Scandinavian design in the
20th century
30710
Abstract Expressionist
painting
30820
Modernism and
Postmodernism
40620
Utility and Festival Style
design
40644
Pop design
In the text, a symbol refers
to these Study Notes
40415
New Brutalism
by
Dr John W Nixon
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makes a lot of what passes for high tech look very crude,
mere industrial chic. The oldest precursor of Foster’s
Stansted airport I have yet encountered – a room that
plays very similar tricks with light, volume and repeated
delicate structure – is even pre-gothic. Go to the Norman
Galilee Chapel in Durham cathedral with its slender Rom-
anesque arches and you realise how long we have been
living with this approach to building.
Naturally, both high-tech and arts and crafts styles
developed in the consciousness of movements elsewhere
in the world… None of this alters the fact that our twin
traditions have grown up with us as a nation. One – high
tech – has always been the tradition of those who push
the boundaries of what is possible, who are consciously
experimenting with the new. The other – arts and crafts –
was a formalising of what is termed “vernacular” building,
the supposedly natural and unselfconscious built forms of
the land as they evolved over time, using local handicrafts
and materials. The British have proved very good at both
of these...
Given the technologists’ love of fine craftsmanship and
exquisite details, it becomes increasingly clear that these
apparent polar opposites are the necessary two sides of
the same coin…1
New Brutalism’s context and influences Britain’s biggest collective enterprise at the start of the 1950s
was building the infrastructure of a welfare state. Just as
Swedish social policy was seen as a model within establish-
ment circles, so also was Scandinavian architecture and
design, with its ‘humanised’ version of Modernism.
Fig. 2 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–
54. Reproduced from Edward Lucie-Smith, Visual Arts in the 20th
Century, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1996, ISBN 1-85669-
090-3, p. 220.
Reacting against this, New Brutalist architects favoured
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier for the clarity, integrity
and grand scale of their designs, and their open presentation
of structures and materials. Mies was admired primarily for
his exposure of structural steel framing; Le Corbusier for his
monumental and unadorned use of concrete in the later
works. His Unité d’Habitation apartment block, 1945–52, and
Maisons Jaoul, 1952–6, for instance, were admired for their
‘brutally’ direct treatment of function, form and finish – his
concrete finishes tended to be what the French called béton
brut, the patterning of the rough timber shuttering left “raw”.
However, Mies’ work quickly proved too concerned with
aesthetics for the Smithsons and their circle, too much a
concession to establishment tastes. New Brutalist buildings
exposed basic structures and building materials, as Mies
would do, but went beyond this to wilfully expose also
service runs (plumbing, electrics, etc) normally disguised or
concealed. And just as all materials were used ‘as found’,
untouched by cosmetic finishes (blockwork, for instance,
being left unplastered), so also they tended to work largely
with the pre-existing site, rather than imposing preconceived
or external design solutions upon it – something they did
1 Hugh Pearman, “Two sides of the same coin”, Culture section, The Sunday Times, London. Published c. 1998; other details unavailable.
have in common with the Scandinavians.
Artistic connections New Brutalism’s focus on crude or ‘raw’ fundamentals can be
related to developments in other arts about this time, among
Fig. 3 Jean Dubuffet, The Cow with the Subtile Nose, 1954.
Reproduced from Amy Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements,
an Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art, Thames and Hudson,
London, 2002, p. 175.
these: the art brut (raw art) or ‘anti-art’ of Jean Dubuffet
(1901–85), the ‘drip-painting’ Abstract Expressionism of
Jackson Pollock (1919–56), the ‘junk’ sculpture of Eduardo
Paolozzi (b. Edinburgh 1924), and even the Pop art collages
of Richard Hamilton (b. London 1922).
New Brutalism’s emergence There have been various accounts as to the emergence of
the term New Brutalism. It was possibly first used in Sweden,
about 1950, to describe the architecture of Bengt Edman and
Lennart Holm,2 although it is now mainly associated with a
body of British work that emerged about the same time.
Many see it as referring to late-period Le Corbusier, including
his recurring use of béton brut concrete finishes. V. M.
Lampugnani writes as follows:
New Brutalism gave conscious form to a mood that was
widespread among younger architects in the 1950s, but in
spite of the fact that it was [sic.] expressed a sentiment
that was felt in most parts of the Westernized world its
origins can be pinpointed in space and time with some
precision. Although Giedion was wrong in his etymology
(‘Brute + Alison’), he was right in identifying the Smithson
family as the source of the term – either Alison Smithson
or the Smithsons’ friend Guy Oddie (who used to call
Peter Smithson ‘Brutus’) was the first person to utter the
phrase ‘The New Brutalism’, some time in the early sum-
mer of 1954.
The basis was a mood of frustration brought on partly
by the difficulties of building, especially in Britain, after
World War II, and partly by disgust at the smugness of the
compromising elders who were still able to build because
they were well placed with the ‘Establishment’. The stylis-
tic preferences of these elders were known as ‘The New
Humanism’ by the political Left, ‘The New Empiricism’3 by
the political Right. The New Brutalism as a phrase was
intended as a mockery of both, but it drew attention to
certain attributes of the architecture admired or designed
by the Smithsons and their circle...
…Brutalism implied some sort of attempt to make
manifest the moral imperatives that were built into modern
architecture by the pioneers of the 19th century, and the
use of shutter-patterned concrete or exposed steelwork
was only a symptom of this intention. The fundamental
aim of Brutalism at all times was to find a structural, spa-
tial, organizational and material concept that was, in the
Smithsons’ eyes, ‘necessary’ in this metaphysical sense
2 See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, a Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, p. 262. 3 Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience.
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to some particular building, and then to express it with
complete honesty in a form that would be a unique and
memorable image…4
Perhaps adding to the sense of frustration Lampugnani
refers to was the fact that Britain at this time was withdrawing
from the last of its colonies.
Selected practitioners and works
ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON New Brutalism’s first major building is generally taken to be
Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–54, by Alison Smithson
Fig. 4 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1945–
51. Reproduced from David Watkin, A History of Western Architect-
ure, 1986; Laurence King Publishing, London, 3rd edition, 2000, ISBN
1-85669-227-2, p. 653.
(née Gill, b. Sheffield 1928) and her husband and architec-
tural partner Peter Smithson (b. Stockton-on-Tees, Co
Durham, 1923). The couple married in 1949 and worked
together from about 1950. Hunstanton School excited inter-
national interest for its extreme austerity of design. Parallels
were drawn with the American architect Louis Kahn’s Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1951–3.
Fig. 5 Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens Estate,
London, 1972. reproduced from Lampugnani, p. 308.
Other major works by the Smithsons include: the Golden
Lane housing, London, 1952; the Sheffield University
extension, 1953; and the Robin Hood Gardens estate,
London, 1972. Of the Golden Lane development, William J.
R. Curtis writes:
…Golden Lane… implied a criticism of the free-standing
block [such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation]. The
slabs were linked together in a linear way and disposed to
respond to the surrounding street patterns, while the inte-
rior street [as in the Unité] was brought to the edge of the
façade and repeated at every third level. The ‘street-deck’
was intended to encourage chance encounters, and was
a rather abstract attempt at restating traditional working-
class doorstep life in the air…5
LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL The Roehampton Housing Estate, London, 1952–9, occupies
a 130-acre site beside Richmond Park and was designed by
Fig. 6 London County Council, Roehampton Housing Estate,
London, 1952–9. Reproduced from Richard Weston, Modernism,
Phaidon, London, 1996, ISBN 0-7148-2879-3, p. 217.
the London County Council Architects’ Department. Le
Corbusier’s ‘radiant city’ concept and, in particular, his Unité
d’Habitation, 1946–52, are clear influences. The estate
comprises some 2,000 dwellings housing about 10,000
people in total. There are five 11-storey maisonette blocks,
fifteen 12-storey towers, and a range of 2-storey and 4-
4 V. M. Lampugnani (general editor), The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Architecture, 1988, p. 247. 5 William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture, Since 1900, 1982; Phaidon, London, 3rd edition, 1996, ISBN 0-7148-3356-8, p. 444.
storey terrace housing.
JACK LYNN AND IVOR SMITH In the large public housing development of Park Hill, Shef-
field, 1961, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, the topography of
Fig. 7 Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, Park Hill, Sheffield, 1961. Repro-
duced from Weston, p. 270.
the overall site and the topology of circulation systems within
the site were major factors in the design.6 The tops of
buildings across the site were kept level – connected by
‘street-decks’ and footbridges – but as the site itself undul-
ated, and was allowed to remain so, individual buildings
ranged from four up to fourteen storeys in height. The
development housed some 3,500.
John Donat and John Killick point out that the Park Hill
and similar developments have an almost forgotten prece-
dent:
Fig. 8 Denys Lasdun, The National Theatre, London, 1967–76.
Reproduced from Lampugnani, p. 134.
The idea of deck-access to housing had been pioneered,
some forty years before Park Hill was built, in [the Span-
gen housing development, 1919] in Holland designed by
Michael Brinkman. Here was a deck-street of reinforced
concrete, built before Le Corbusier had even started writ-
ing, which established one of the most significant histori-
cal precedents in modern architecture – although it wasn’t
‘discovered’ for nearly thirty years. Though not wearing
the trappings of the machine-aesthetic, it was far in ad-
vance, socially, of the Weissenhof Siedlung [Stuttgart,
1927; 20527] whose ‘advanced’ appearance attracted
so much international publicity eight years later.7
SIR DENYS LASDUN Sir Denys Lasdun (1914–2001) – knighted in 1976 – was
one of the most prominent of the New Brutalist architects,
best known for his large horizontal-slab buildings executed in
béton brut concrete. Among his works are: the Royal College
of Physicians, 1964, in London’s Regent Park; the European
Investment Bank, 1983, in Luxembourg; and the Royal
National Theatre, 1976, on London’s South Bank.
JAMES STIRLING James Stirling (1926–92) was reluctant to regard himself as
part of the New Brutalist movement but in the 1950s he did
Fig. 9 James Stirling and James Gowan, Engineering Department
Building, Leicester University, 1959–63; drawing. Reproduced from
Peter Gössel and Gabriel Leuthäuser, Architecture in the Twentieth
Century, Taschen, Cologne, 1991. ISBN 3-8228-0550-5, p. 297.
produce a number of buildings with at least Brutalist tenden-
cies. Among these are: the Ham Common housing develop-
ment, Richmond, Surrey, 1955–8; the Selwyn College dorm-
6 Topography is the description and analysis of a district or locality. Topology is the study of geometric forms under changing conditions. 7 John Donat and John Killick, “Architecture in the 20th Century”, Series 19, part 3, The History of Western Art, slide set, Visual Productions, Cheltenham, 1987, p. 29.
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itory project, Cambridge, 1959; the Engineering Department
Building, Leicester University, 1959–63; and the History
Faculty Building, Cambridge University, 1964–7. The
influences of Le Corbusier and the late Georgian ware-
houses and factories of Stirling’s native city, Liverpool, can
also be discerned here. From 1956 to about 1962, it should
be noted, he worked in partnership with James Cowan.
A note of criticism David Watkin, the architectural historian, concludes his
comment on New Brutalism with the following remarks
concerning the Smithsons’ Hunstanton School and Stirling’s
History Faculty Building, Cambridge:
…The result will attract or repel according to one’s
aesthetic tastes, but what is irrefutable is that the building
was virtually unworkable from the start. Equal if not
greater problems have been caused by Stirling’s History
Faculty Building, Cambridge… Although it developed so
many faults, it still has many admirers who are fascinated
by its unconventional dynamics.8
8 David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture, 1986; Laurence King, London, 3rd edition, 2000, ISBN 1-85669-227-2, p. 652.
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