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

“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 dour precursor to the colorful signs of a permissive postmodernism. Now a half-century past the height of its popularity, a new generation has taken interest in Brutalism’s fate. Alexander Clement’s Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture, the essay collection Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, and Owen Hatherley’s A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain are emblematic of this resurgence in interest. Ranging from a textbook-style history to a critically nuanced compendium to a manifesto-like travelogue, these accounts betray a longing for a historical moment when architecture took an ambitious—and often antagonistic—role in relation to society, and seek to position this moment in relation to the present day.In Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture, Alexander Clement offers up a catalog of architectural projects that have all been characterized as Brutalist, ranging from Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon’s massive and vertiginous Barbican Centre (1952–82) to Denys Lasdun’s expansive and angular East Anglia University (1970). He also pays visits to less typically Brutalist projects, including J. Seymour Harris Partnership’s dynamic and ornamental Queensgate Market in Huddersfield (1970) and Basil Spence’s contextual and red-brick Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall (1977). Investigating a range of buildings from those cast in concrete to those hedging toward more traditionally English materials and contexts, Clement focuses on Brutalist tendencies rather than on any identification the projects’ architects may have had with Brutalism itself. Being a label that belonged primarily to the Smithsons, such a tack makes sense for a contextual-historical project; a great number of architects identified and disidentified with the term in turn, and a proper mapping of Brutalist connections is definitely a subject of interest. Though it had certain aesthetic tenets, Brutalism was perhaps most distinguished by its ethics. Where Reyner Banham stressed its “as found” materials, its clear plans, and its powerful images, he also used the term, much like Crosby, as a “program” or “banner,” “a brick-bat flung in the public’s face.” Its impetus was to reform society—to pick up the pieces of a bombed and austere England and use them to create new and equitable constructions that might counter the powerful images of plenty coming over from America.Seeing Brutalism’s salient feature as simply its “modernity,” Clement loses sight of Brutalism’s adversarial ethos, rather imagining it as a helpful, albeit frequently maligned, descriptor for much mid-twentieth century building in England. He breaks Brutalism into three stages—Early (1945–60), Massive (1960–75), and Transitional (1975–85)—but the categories are left vague and unsubstantiated with little sense of import given to them. As the book’s subtitle suggests, postwar British architecture for Clement is Brutalism whereas in reality, Brutalism was simply one strain of what happened in the postwar situation, and it also traveled well beyond the British Isles. While offering an interesting catalog of buildings from the period and including a number of architects that deserve considerably more academic attention (such as early Lasdun and Goldfinger), the conflation causes Clement’s book to lose focus. Concentrating entirely on built projects, moreover, Brutalism offers a rather skewed picture of a movement that often existed most provocatively on paper. When Banham wrote his eponymous and declamatory essay in the December 1955 issue of the Architectural Review, he was not convinced that a truly Brutalist building had yet been built. He took it upon himself to retrofit the Smithsons’s School at Hunstanton (1949–54) to fit the bill. Banham saw later unbuilt projects by the Smithsons, such as their housing project at Golden Lane (1952–53), as most appropriate to its mandate. Indeed, these projects would fit in perfectly well in Clement’s book, which organizes its chapters typologically into “Civic Building,” “Educational Building,” “Commercial Building,” “Building for Leisure and Entertainment,” “Ecclesiastical Building,” and “Social and Private Housing.” A building’s ethics, perhaps, are best witnessed in its type, and Brutalism, first and foremost, stood for a kind of collectivism—a meeting up and sharing of resources. Le Corbusier’s Unité in Marseilles did not simply inspire with its béton brut, but with its societal ambitions as well.Though not included in its title, Brutalism preoccupies much of the recent essay collection Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, edited by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, which examines a period reaching roughly from the end of World War II through the end of the Vietnam War and, occasionally, up to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In her foreword, Beatriz Colomina persuasively reads Brutalism as deeply haunted by the postwar situation, seeing its emphasis on the “as found,” for example, as evidence of its status as an architecture of aftermath. Though it focuses primarily on England, the book moves beyond Britain to Brutalist manifestations in New Zealand and Brazil, and to later postmodernist interventions in Europe and the U.S. Richard Williams’s essay on the work of the Leninist-Brutalist João Batista Vilanova Artigas and his FAU-USP project in São Paulo (1961–69), a hulking concrete volume hovering over spindly legs, is particularly evocative in its discussion of a project that mimics society’s instability and poverty. “One should not cover existing conflicting conflicts with an elegant mask, but expose them without fear,” Artigas declared in the mid-1960s, echoing Crosby’s rhetoric of an architecture that would strip back simply stylish façades. As this statement suggests, Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern is often quite vivid in its tracking of “the explosion of a resurgent adversarial modernism” (11). There are other moments, however, when the adversarial thrust of Brutalism enters through the back door, or rather, when the productive tension postwar modernism held with its historical moment is made evident through less overtly combative means. In “Streets in the Air: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Doorstep Philosophy,” for example, Ben Highmore finds the Smithsons’ unrealized Golden Lane project instructive for its convention and ambition, but also for its fatality and glamour. In lifting streets above the wreckage of postwar London and embedding them in buildings as exposed walkways, the Smithsons aimed to preserve a feeling of sociability in new construction while nevertheless staying true to the ruined ground around them. For Highmore, this fidelity to both past convention and the everyday is avant-garde in its own right since it gives equal weight to both the minute and monumental aspects of postwar life. Raised streets were a way of perpetuating a sense of belonging, and thus of maintaining identity—even as identity increasingly came to be associated with the idea of celebrity, as evidenced by the fact that the Smithsons used a famous photo of Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe as the typical couple that might promenade down their airborne streets.Moving from paper to built projects, Highmore turns at the end of his essay to Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s massive Park Hill complex in Sheffield (1961), which realized the streets-in-the-air model that Golden Lane only imagined. (Nicholas Bullock touches on Park Hill as well in his account of the socialist “dream” architecture of the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens versus the technocratic housing built to serve the needs of the socialist state elsewhere.) Park Hill’s subsequent fate as a public housing slum, and its most recent one as privatized dorm-style flats for creative professionals, demonstrates how quickly different populations can inhabit various architectural forms—how easily aesthetics and ethics can mix and match, in other words. Seeing architecture as inherently contingent on change, Mark Crinson examines James Stirling and James Gowan’s Expandable House (1957) in order to show another model of postwar architecture wrestling with the dictates of postwar culture. Conceived for the popular House and Garden magazine, the Expandable House revolved around a central core and was capable of adding quadrants as families expanded. Focusing on the family unit instead of the social class, the Expandable House offered a wry and perhaps sardonic take on a new culture of plenty, showing it to be subject to nearly Taylorist rhythms of construction rather than a self-motivated desiring culture of individualism. The latter half of Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern moves out of the moment of Brutalism and into the present. Michael Osman helpfully outlines Banham’s later interest in environments and ecology, for example, though he does not connect these concerns with Brutalism’s earlier interest in a networked topology. There are other moments when more genealogical thinking is in evidence, however, and it happens most often when the well-rehearsed categories of neo-avant-garde and postmodern are temporarily set aside. Simon Sadler, for example, provocatively coins the concept of “projective modernism” from Robert Somol’s idea of “projective practice” in order to imagine a strategy that tries to enthuse people about the possibilities of architecture rather than intervene directly in its construction. Among the precedents for such a practice, Sadler lists works by Stirling, Archigram, and Alison and Peter Smithson. Works of projective modernism, Sadler argues, can project the “unfinishable project of modernity” into the future in order to reflect on society’s poverty and possibilities at once (368).It is from this position of the present that Owen Hatherley begins A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, a tour of twelve English cities that weighs the effects of neoliberalism on Blairite Britain and is both projective and retrospective in turns. Combining one part J. B. Priestley’s English Journey and one part Pevsner guide with a shot of J. G. Ballard, Hatherley offers strikingly vivid tours of well-known locations such as Manchester and Cambridge, along with less frequently visited areas such as Milton Keynes and The West Riding, to take the temperature of today’s political-architectural climate. Comparing it to the postwar situation, he forces a confrontation between current attempts at regeneration and earlier efforts at reconstruction. In Hatherley’s eyes, the regeneration of England’s postindustrial cities—spearheaded by the privatization of council flats and the museumification of former mills and factories—has come hand-in-hand with an architectural style characterized by cheap cladding and wavy curves that he refers to as “pseudomodernism,” a style “every bit as appropriate to Blairism as Postmodernism was to Thatcherism and well-meaning technocratic Modernism to the postwar compromise” (xiii). These pseudomodernist buildings form the “new ruins” of Hatherley’s title; so cheaply fabricated that they are already falling into disrepair, these buildings simultaneously provide a contrast with the “true” ruins of Britain (its abbeys and castles) as well as with the often ruinous nature of Brutalist buildings themselves, with their unfinished surfaces often welcoming decay. If the historical pastiche characteristic of so much postmodern architecture rhymed rather neatly with the return-to-order “There Is No Alternative” rhetoric of Thatcher’s government, then pseudomodernism, like Blair’s administration, promises a new forward-looking society with spirited rooflines and energetic contortions. Despite these stylistic differences, Hatherley detects a continuity between post- and pseudomodernism; where the former relied on the trope of the “building as sign,” (or collection of signs), the latter imagines architecture as an “icon” or “logo”—“an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, strongly opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of ‘high’ Modernism, especially its Brutalist variant” (xxii). Instead of Hofs of housing, pseudomodernism delivers subprime Shards.Throughout New Ruins, Hatherley, like Crosby before him, invokes Brutalism as a rejoinder to the “contemporary;” for him, it is a militant modernism with plenty of battles left to fight.2 Of the three characteristics that Banham attributed to New Brutalism in his famous essay in the Architectural Review, the third point seems most applicable here: that New Brutalist buildings are characterized by their “Memorability as Image.” In contrast to the paradigms of “sign” and “icon,” New Brutalism’s interest in “image” points to a first form of its resistance. Taking as its task the communication of a heterogeneous world to the postwar subject, New Brutalism sought to draw together a vast array of dispersed effects into a consolidated—and perhaps comprehensible—form. (The 1953 exhibition Parallel of Life and Art, edited by Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, and the Smithsons, is emblematic in this regard.) For Banham, it did this via the “memorability” of the “images” it produced, though memorability should not be understood here in the same register as the tourist souvenir. Not yet postmodern pictures, New Brutalist images lodged in the brain because they had something visceral and thing-like about them. Banham once referred to them as “concrete images—images that carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of novelty and technology,” and deliver them to the beholding subject.3 What excites Hatherley most about Brutalist buildings is their monumental scale that seems to address complex societal questions head-on in megastructural form. On Lyons Israel Ellis’s social housing project, Wyndham Court in Southampton (1966), Hatherley writes: “It immediately evokes the cruise behemoths that sailed from the nearby port. A glorious concrete Cunard, impossible to ignore” (7). Like a cruise ship in a rough town, Brutalism possessed both grit and glamour in turn. “Brutalist architecture was Modernism’s angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style,” Hatherley writes, echoing Banham’s famous question as to whether New Brutalism was an ethic or aesthetic. “It was a political aesthetic,” Hatherley concludes, “an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people” (87). It is clearly Hatherley’s latent wish that such a political aesthetic might rise again.Brutalism always pegged itself to the scale of society, and the most debated Brutalist building in recent years, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens (1972), a building central to all these books, is based precisely on the way in which it construed the social—as comprised of classes in need of help rather than families in need of expansion. Currently in a miserable state, it was a popular newspaper topic a few years ago as battles about whether to list or demolish it raged on. In a 2009 New York Times article, Nicolai Ouroussoff was highly critical of it, writing of its impossible location and its dungeon-like corridors, while nevertheless asking for its renovation and cleaning.4 The stories about its disadvantageous location are held up as rather hollow, however, by the newly built towers popping up just across the street, and in contrast to such buildings, Robin Hood has a certain grandiosity about it: two massive slabs of stacked residences (a protective barrier against the expressway outside) embrace a massive swelling bump, which the Smithsons referred to as a “stress-free zone.” What, then, to do with Brutalism today? In opposition to renovation, one might invoke Stirling’s model of expandability on a grander scale or Sadler’s concept of projection. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Brutalism always based itself on a simultaneous logic of both incorporation and extension; conceiving itself as a kind of media architecture, it sought to bring things into it (“industrial techniques, the cinema, supersonic flight, African villages, and old tin cans,” the Smithsons once wrote) while at the time extending outward, arranging its forms so as to jibe not only with the waywardness of the village pathway and the working-class street but also, more abstractly, with the new paths of communication based on television, radio, and the motor car. Brutalism’s goal was to keep pace with contemporary life, not simply to mimic it, but to channel it—and at times, to reform it. Today as we evaluate the legacy of Brutalism and decide on its fate, we should remember it not simply as an historical movement but as a force inherently based on movement.