‘New Brutalism’, ‘Topology’ and ‘Image’: some remarks on the architectural debates in England around 1950

Abstract

In his renowned essay on ‘The New Brutalism’ in 1955, Reyner Banham defined as one of its main characteristics the notion of ‘image’. He further asserted that only ‘conceptual’ things might be considered to be ‘image-makers’. He cited paintings by Jackson Pollock, the Lever Building, the 1954 Cadillac Cabrio, the roofscape of the Unité in Marseilles and photographs displayed in the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition as examples of contemporary ‘images’. This paper proposes to investigate the notion of ‘image’ propounded by Banham and to assess its importance, in particular for the architectural debate of its time. The first section explores how Reyner Banham undertook an operative re-interpretation of contemporary methodology in the fields of new art history and architectural theory (Panofsky, Wittkower), which used the term ‘image’ as an expression of ‘conceptual’ thinking. The second considers in detail how Banham applied the characteristics of these contemporary notions of ‘image’ (informal, topological, etc.) to architecture. The third and final section seeks to demonstrate that Banham's claim to a contemporary ‘image’ for the artistic and architectural production of his time, and the examples he cites to this end, cannot be subsumed merely as a desire for formal renewal but must be understood as the expression of a major conceptual shift in architectural theory, one that was profoundly influenced by scientific literature of the postwar period (Law Whyte, Waddington, Medawar, etc.).