Review: Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture by Alexander Clement; Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors; A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley

Abstract

Alexander Clement. Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture . Wiltshire, England: The Crowood Press, 2011, 160 pp., 150 color illus. £19.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781847972309 Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors. Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 420 pp., 103 illus. incl. 76 in color. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300166187 Owen Hatherley. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain . London and New York: Verso Books, 2010, 369 pp., $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781844676514 “For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the coinage of M. le Corbusier and have created a style—‘Contemporary’—easily recognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of ‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti,” Theo Crosby wrote in a 1955 editorial on the New Brutalism.1 For Crosby, “contemporary” functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism—a modernism that had already been liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style for up-to-date living. As an antidote to such degradation, Crosby positioned New Brutalism as an archaeology of the modern movement that would include a rigorous reevaluation of its key architects—Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in particular—as well as a thorough reexamination of its programs and intents. New Brutalism, for example, would push modernism’s truth-to-materials rhetoric to its limit with its interest in the “as found” just as it would reaffirm the earlier movement’s commitment to housing and the social. Though Alison and Peter Smithson, the figureheads of New Brutalism along with the critic-historian Reyner Banham, first used the phrase in conjunction with their design for a single-family warehouse-like house for Soho, in the following years the term became most closely identified with institutional building, giving rise to schools, council flats, and city halls frequently cast of rough concrete. In an age of postwar reconstruction, Brutalism positioned itself as a new kind of civic language—more vernacular slang than received pronunciation—and in time more and more architects came to speak its language. As the word spread, however, the critical contours of Brutalism often lost their shape, and the term quickly transformed into yet another style. Indeed, Brutalism is often employed today as nothing more than a vague epithet lobbed at vast expanses of postwar institutional building—a …