ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON: A THEORETICAL CONCEPT OF BRUTALISM

Abstract

The article illustrates the creative path of Alison and Peter Smithson, british architects of «brutalism». These architects gave substantiation in their theoretical essays and articles in which they explained their views and their architectural projects in the early 1950’s. The first Smithson’s realized project of the Hunstanton Secondary School, acquired the value of a manifesto. This building combined both the elements of traditional English architecture and the aesthetics of the «international style». The Golden Lane London City project was a series of «streets in the sky», uniting groups of apartments located above and below the level of the «street». The location of the residential blocks was determined by the topography of a particular place, or «context», and not by the geometric grid of the early modernist theory of planning. An illustration of the architectural program of the «New Brutalism» was the project The Upper Lawn Pavilion. In this project, the «frame» of Mies van der Rohe and the «free facade» of Le Corbusier was combine and transform. The Economist Plaza building complex was the next major Smithson’s project. It was centered around a plaza, that was a cross between the square and the transit zone, by which the architects sought to create a comfortable public space. Smithson’s, who were interested in new forms of social housing, created the Robin Hood Gardens complex in response to the concept of «Unité d’habitation» Le Corbusier. The idea of «streets in the sky» became a distinctive feature of their project, it suggested the presence of common balconies on every third floor that stretched across the entire building and were wide enough for walking and children’s games.As a result, the ideas that formed the theoretical basis of brutalism include the following: functionality, urbanism, courage of compositional solutions, reinforced concrete as the main building material, the principle of «honesty of the material», which denies any decoration of building materials. The aesthetics of brutalism is the simplicity of gross forms. These ideas influenced the further development of the architecture of the twentieth century, namely such areas as structuralism, metabolism and others.