I f you have ever posted in a brutalist architecture fan group online, you’ll be aware of two tendencies. Firstly, there’s the purist, who wants to purge the group of mention of any structure that falls outside of a rigid definition of the topic. And then there’s the catholic, who wishes to claim all of the best bits of 20th-century design as brutal, regardless. Civil war generally ensues between these roundheads and cavaliers, and little is achieved. Yet outside of those closed communities, the way people generally bandy about the word brutalism you’d think it was a catch-all term for anything put up during the Cold War. Some people – say it softly – might even claim brutalism is just a school within the International Style, and a minor one at that. True, brutalism wasn’t even the dominant type of architecture in the mid-to-late-20th century. Back in the 1920s and 30s European tastemakers had been entranced by ‘weightless’ white box modernism – villas, health centres and pavilions floating on slender columns – in designs heavily influenced by the gleaming ocean liners of the day. And by the 1950s – well, not much had changed. This fastidious – but no longer provocative – style was still much in evidence, in places such as the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank – all long horizontal windows, white façades and pillars. And the International Style would go on to rival brutalism when it came to building the monumental, with town halls, office towers and even the UN Headquarters in New York encapsulating the formal grid and lighter-than-air theatrics of boxes on columns and podiums.

Across Scandinavia, the movement coalesced in a more unpretentious down-home style that became known as humanism. Here the detailing was charming, the lines clean and elegant, the forms often modest and functional. The most ubiquitous of these developments came from Sweden in the shape of the ‘point block’. Born in the mid-1940s, the point block was a sort of high-rise in which the elevators and stairs made up a central spine around which the flats clustered. Within 20 years this sort of tower was to become one of the most ubiquitous types of social housing around the world, whether in the projects of Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, or the Ang Mo Kio (AMK) flats in Singapore. The original idea, of the tower being part of an estate of high-rise flats, low-rise blocks and houses, was meant to add variety and human scale into planning and design, a field that became known in Britain as ‘townscape’. Scandinavian humanism and the cool lines of International Style chime most closely with our current obsession with vintage bric-a-brac and ‘mid-century modernism’ – the cute teak furniture, elegant blown glass, atomic-patterned fabrics and decorative ceramics so redolent of an optimistic, consumerist post-war age. Two of those point blocks in London – newly built Ronan Point, which partially collapsed in 1968 and newly refurbished Grenfell Tower, which burned in 2017 – now haunt all further discussion of them.

Castle Vale Estate, West Midlands, UK.

Building contractor: Bryant.

While the debate raged over style, philosophy and function, architects found themselves overtaken by events. A rather different player emerged in the 1940s that would end up responsible for the majority of mass housing projects around the world. This was system building, or construction via prefabricated flat-pack. The protagonists were engineers and construction companies, not architects. Sure, prefabrication had been tied up with modernism from the very beginning. Le Corbusier’s obsession with machines for living in extended to the machines that might create them. Production lines, such as those manufacturing cars, ships or aeroplanes, were a major achievement of modernity, and designers were keen to take advantage of them. But in the end it wouldn’t be the architects who broke through with production line buildings. Instead, it was a succession of construction companies, inventing prefabrication systems that they exported around the globe. France and Scandinavia led the way. Popularly used systems – Camus, Sectra and Tracoba – originated in France, while others – Skarne, Jespersen and Larsen-Nielsen (the system used to build Ronan Point) – came from Sweden and Denmark. Across the Communist bloc, a decree by Nikita Khruschev in 1957 led to an obsession with using a small number of systems to create blocks of flats of identical design stretching from Siberia to Poland.

These kits could be made in specialized factories, either on or off site, and the components bolted together by relatively unskilled labour, unlike the much slower processes of traditional construction techniques and exacting architect designs that required the services of skilled, experienced builders. The ‘off the peg’ prefabricated structures are the ones most commonly lumped in with brutalism, largely because most of the components were made from rough concrete. But on the whole, true brutalist edifices tended to be architect designed and use bespoke moulds and parts rather than the products of these mass-produced systems. Just because these are other types of modernism doesn’t mean we have to dismiss or row about them, as the architects of the day undoubtedly did. But, equally, we don’t have to love them either. These prefabricated systems were used to construct much of the fabric of our welfare states, which goes in their favour. But they were often hastily constructed and poorly assembled. I’ve written more extensively about the success or otherwise of these forms of architecture in my book Concretopia (2013).

International Style, humanist, prefabricated. Each approach has its merits, and I love many of the resulting buildings. Some brutalistas may sneer at the anguished post-war theatrics of Coventry Cathedral, where art and architecture entwine to produce a place of great spirituality and beauty. Meanwhile, the atomic age graphic devices of Mies van der Rohe make the city a cartoon. His steel and glass grids create a vista of two-dimensional planes among the three-dimensionality of all those 19th-century villas, terraces and skyscrapers. These lighter-than-air structures have none of the monumental heft of their raw concrete cousins. And don’t forget that those system-built towers and estates were once the most go-ahead way of housing people in an era of tremendous shortages, and so have a moral dimension that makes them captivating, despite attempts to compromise them.

Appreciating post-war modernism in all of its hues helps contextualize brutalism, where the dramatic sculptural bluntness often sits in glaring contrast to the mildness, functionalism and streamlined cool of other styles. Yet we still see those decades-old arguments played out on message boards and Facebook groups, where the factions are often less flexible than the architects of the day, many of whom worked across two or more of these styles, sometimes simultaneously. In order to love brutalism, you should attempt to embrace these and other contemporaneous approaches too because, like all great architecture, it makes most sense when seen in context rather than isolation.