Brutally Honest: Thoughts on Brutalist Architecture

Out with the old, in with the new, ‘tis the eternal cycle; and architecture isn’t an exception. Over the years, Delhi has been adorned by several structures, all shifting and distorting into new styles, presentations and aesthetics; from the ornate medieval fortresses, to the not-so-peaceful introduction of various colonial elements, arriving eventually at the “sheesh mahal” modern day metropolis of today, where the white-collar executives rack record profits inside skyscrapers cocooned in glass, perhaps a rather old fashioned analogy for our technological dependence (or more precisely, dependence on glass screens). Wouldn’t anyone desire a tad bit more equality, for the common individual to walk into a public facility like a library or a university, and not be instantly unimpressed by the haphazard and lacklustre state of things, but be completely blown away by the handiwork of the architects? Well, in between the years spent after getting Independence till the LPG reforms, India, along with several nations, sought to combine utility, egalitarianism, and bold modernism to develop a truly striking and bold form of making functional structures– brutalism.

Brutalism? That sounds much closer to war and strife than just plain ol’ buildings but let me explain. If you ever roamed around Chanakyapuri, where all the snazzy embassy buildings are, you might find some tremendously eye-catching architecture to say the least. Case in point, the Polish embassy.

Designed by Witold Cęckiewicz in 1973, the building comes at your senses fast. Littered with open spaces, canopied by cluster of cuboids and held upon large pillars, it doesn’t seem like a far cry from what one might see at the set of a 70s sci-fi film. The only sort of decoration that one can find is rather the lack of decoration. The warm Delhi sunlight bathes the raw cement in a sepia-like comforting yellow haze, the skeletal framework allowing for intricate shadow play in the previously mentioned empty spaces. There’s no doubt that the building is of a bygone era, exuding some kind of an architectural analogue of the “old book smell”, but somehow, it still feels too ambitious to just stay settled with the present. No, this kind of architecture continuously looks towards the future, or perhaps a vintage image of the future, with dreams of flying cars and cures for cancer and time travel.

From the above example, we can easily jot down some rather crucial and definitive characteristics of brutalism, an architectural style which lays more emphasis on materials, textures and construction, leading to a very expressive take on the process of building structures. The architect rejects the maximalism of pre-modern forms and charges head on with minimalism, opting to strip buildings of any unnecessary decorative elements, presenting the materials as raw, e.g. concrete is left unpainted and exposed with a rough surface. As seen in the example before, the angularity is yet another core tenet of brutalism, with straight edges intersecting at various points. The form is the function, and the function is the form.

It emerged during the 1950s in the United Kingdom, a time of reconstructing the nation after the great structural losses dealt during the second World War. The term “brutalism” was first used by Alison Smithson in 1953 for an unexecuted project for a house in Colville Place, Soho, which took a lot of inspirations from arguably one of the most definitive modernist architects, Le Corbusier.

Perhaps that’s the reason why architectural historian Reyner Banham’s review in 1955 chose to incorporate terms like béton brut and art brut . The former literally translates to raw concrete, but it isn’t simply a matter of that only. Brutalism, as the name suggests, strives to achieve honesty by understanding the importance of every material used, and to present it in that manner, one which expresses them in a raw, unfiltered manner. It is an ode to the materials, being expressed honestly, stating "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material", and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand.”

In the United Kingdom, and then in more and more countries, brutalism was featured in the design of utilitarian, low-cost social housing influenced by socialist principles and soon spread to other regions around the world. Brutalist designs became most used in the design of institutional buildings, such as universities, libraries, courts, and city halls, a socialist outlook at architecture, which sadly met it’s demise with the fall of the USSR in 1991. Yet remnants of the that era are littered around the globe.

While conventional opinion still regards brutalism as a scourge on any city, with the reasons being cited including brutalism being too “cold”, “ugly”, “angular”, “bizarre”, or sometimes just too “communist/socialist”, some people do recognize these structures as part of not only the historical landscape of the region but a milestone in the cultural journey of the city. Thus, attempts at trying to preserve such buildings is being made actively, along with vying for an official status as a culturally important structure.