Review: The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 and The Brutalist Playground

Abstract

The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 Tate Britain, London 24 November 2014–4 October 2015 The Brutalist Playground Royal Institute of British Architects, London 10 June–16 August 2015 Brutalism has never entirely been out of fashion since Reyner Banham published The New Brutalism in 1966, but the term has become trendy again in the past five years as most of the movement's iconic buildings in Britain have been swept away.1 When eighteen years ago I began work on my own book Space, Hope and Brutalism (published in September 2015), I did not expect to catch the crest of a wave.2 Yet what does Brutalism actually mean? Banham's book coincided with the generation of great concrete housing blocks and shopping centers, to which the label stuck. But the initial New Brutalism (the adjective is important) was a more discrete movement of architects and artists who looked at the sources of art in nature, at basic geometries, and believed in expressing building materials and structure as naturally as possible, whether in timber, brick, steel, or concrete. One can see parallels in the work of Aldo van Eyck, himself inspired by artists, and even Louis Kahn, but the term New Brutalism is wholly British—although the movement's revival has been led largely by historians from abroad. The Tate exhibition focused on collaborations among sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, photographer Nigel Henderson, engineer Ronald Jenkins, and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. While much of its content had been picked over since the major exhibition on the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1991, including a small retrospective on the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA …