I f the inspiration behind brutalism came from Le Corbusier and was codified by Peter and Alison Smithson, its practice came from a mixture of big brutes – the great names of the modernist era – along with some jobbing architects working for commercial and local authority practices, who were aiming for something a bit special. What, if anything, did they have in common? A desire for social justice? A search for artistic purity? An ideology? A need for cold, hard cash? Truth be told, their motivations were pretty varied, even if their combined work coalesced into something rich and strange.

The greatest rival to Le Corbusier’s crown as King Brutalist might have been the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer. His fondness for fluid curves in concrete created a whole new language in modernism. As a young man he had worked with Le Corbusier in Brazil. ‘From the outset,’ remarked the old crow, ‘Niemeyer knew how to give full freedom to the discoveries of modern architecture.’ Niemeyer’s long and productive life – he died aged 104 – also allowed him to take on a lot of projects. His take on working with concrete was to push the expressive and sculptural elements. Brasília, the new capital, would become his most inspiring canvas, and on it he produced masterpiece after masterpiece. National Congress Building, Supreme Court, Presidential Palace, National Theatre, Cathedral of Brasília, all products of his fertile, restless and sensuous imagination. ‘My work is not about “form follows function”,’ he proclaimed, ‘but “form follows beauty” or, even better, “form follows feminine”.’ As happy designing schools as he was the cradle of government, Niemeyer saw his architecture as something for everyone, not just an elite project for the few, or as quick mass housing for the poor. Brazil’s desire for rapid transformation matched his progressive politics and his ambition – at least until he, like the left-wing government that sponsored him and Brasília, fell from favour in the 1960s.

Another of the early greats was Bauhaus student and, later, lecturer, the Hungarian Marcel Breuer, whose brutalism is crystalline and classically tinged. Initially he was known for startlingly robust furniture design, much of which remains popular today. But it was his fascination with reinforced concrete and the flexibility it offered that led him to create his most remarkable objects. And he broke the purists rules: sometimes his architecture was built from bespoke parts, but he also designed prefabricated kits to use across multiple projects. Much as his furniture had looked sturdy enough to be architecture, a great deal of his architecture would look like furniture scaled up to immense size. These buildings were the coffee tables, room dividers and sideboards of the gods. He worked in the International Style for the Unesco Headquarters in Paris (1952–58), with its giant three-spoked check-in desk. By contrast, the startlingly blocky Whitney Art Gallery in New York (1963–66) is like a gigantic safe, keeping all of the precious artworks locked away. There’s even a single projecting window onto Madison Avenue that makes for a perfect combination dial. Then there were two masterpieces he created for IBM: a research centre on a rugged slope at La Gaude, France (1958–62) and another on the flat plain at Boca Raton, Florida (1968–74). Both are languid low-rise slabs suspended on tall Y-shaped columns that might be a couple of chaise longues for Godzilla. Breuer was ‘A Good Thing’: he was a progressive employer of women, had utopian ideas of creating a better world, and wasn’t afraid to go against the prevailing voices of the day. No head stuffed with concrete here.

Working on an epic scale was the obsession of American architect Paul Rudolph, the wizard of rough concrete. He’d studied under Breuer and Walter Gropius, and found his skill lay not just in the creation of single buildings but also in the dramatic sweep of urban planning, for which he was much in demand. A fan of the megastructure, many of his schemes are insanely complex, combining numerous different uses into single entities. Rather more contained is his rugged Yale Art and Architecture Building (1958–64). What better way to introduce a generation of architects to his favoured style than to design a brutalist school for them? Here, as in many of his works, he favoured a heavy, butch aesthetic over the poised weightlessness of the International Style. This is what people regard as the ‘massive’ era of brutalism, where all forms were exaggerated, working that ‘on steroids’ look. The building was smothered in tons of hand-bashed ribbed concrete, a finish familiar to fans of London Zoo’s Elephant House. This Rudolph speciality finish is everywhere, coating the colossal piers and pillars that form the structure, both inside and out. The heart of the building was an open atrium, with balconies allowing newcomers to look down on the older students at work, and at a colossal classical statue of Minerva. It’s a view creating both a sense of hierarchy and bustling openness. Fire broke out and gutted the Yale building in the late 1960s. No culprit was ever found. For the students, who are often blamed for the blaze, the massive form with its rigid social hierarchy had characterized the patrician and repressive university administration in the days of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam struggles. Know your place, it seemed to say. Perhaps they had their own view on the building’s place. Maybe it was a tragic accident, or some secret fault lay at its heart, waiting to erupt. Rudolph’s career is a curious one. Despite all his success at New Haven for Yale, fashion and the profession turned decisively against him. Like Hitchcock after The Birds he never managed to regain that success or preeminent position again. He died, aged 78, from one of the tragic consequences of all of that experimental construction, asbestos-induced cancer.

Yale Art and Architecture Building, New Haven, USA.

Architect: Paul Rudolph.

In the Communist East, meet the modest brutalist, Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, one of Poland’s pioneering female modernists. She came to prominence with her Mezonetowiec (or maisonette block) at Kołłątaj in Wrocław (1955–58), much in the style of a scaled down – though still ambitious – Unité, containing 56 two-storey flats and a parade of shops on the ground floor. And indeed it was much admired by Le Corbusier. Then there was the Scientists’ House in Grunwaldzki Square (1958–60), which she designed for researchers from Wrocław University of Technology. This is more of a classic modernist slab block. Rough, corrugated concrete ran along the length of the structure – well, it did until renovations smoothed out the surface – and balconies project from the exterior with mid-century abandon. Enjoying her work, Grabowska-Hawrylak lived here, alongside hundreds of fellow residents, for 22 years. But she was best known for her towering landmarks at Plac Grunwaldzki, a series of complex and organic concrete high-rises in a district known locally as ‘Manhattan’. More on them later. Born in 1920, she is still going at time of writing – perhaps proof that her architecture is indeed good to live in.

Osaka-born Kenzō Tange was the restless brutalist. Like many of his peers, he combined the urges of an urban designer with the skill of a hugely creative architect. He was willing to turn the orthodoxy of modernism on its head, stating that ‘only the beautiful can be functional’. Like the majority of Japanese architects, he used concrete not in a rough, primitive way, like the Europeans or Americans, but took great pride in the crisp finish, the smooth shell, the perfection of the shuttering marks. He would go on to design some of the most varied and moving structures of the atomic age, from the studied stillness of Hiroshima Peace Garden (1949–55) to the almost Le Corbusian monumentality of the Imabari City Hall Complex (1957–59). There is the smooth perfection of his Kagawa Prefectural Government Office too (1954–58), whose regular, paperthin frame and calm surface detailing is kept unpolluted behind a tranquil moat. Cobbles and boulders beneath add a further element of mannered historical Japanese styling. These cool motifs contrast startlingly with the volcanic energy and thrusting gusto of another of his major projects, St Mary’s Cathedral, Tokyo (1960–64). Here the bell tower is a startling spike, a lightning bolt striking the ground beside the cathedral. Concrete is draped like fabric across the crossshaped structure of the church itself, and light cascades into the vast space through strips of stained glass like streams of lava. Perhaps most extravagant and expressive of all was his Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Centre in Kofu (1962–66). This massive, sturdy, power station-like structure is formed of 16 cylindrical towers, with voids in the centre intended to be filled in and added to as advances and changes dictated. The resulting building is an extravagant absurdity, like battling robots trapped forever in a deadly embrace. Even so, there is a spirituality to his work, a sense of building and individual in harmony. Another long-lived practitioner, Tange died aged 91.

Ieoh Ming Pei, more often known as IM Pei, is still going strong at the time of writing, aged 100 (what is it with these architects and long life?). He was born in Canton and then studied and established his career in the US. Interviewed in the Guardian in 2010 he remarked ‘It is good to learn from the ancients, I’m a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape. Today, we rush everything, but architecture is slow, and the landscapes it sits in even slower. It needs the time our political systems won’t allow.’ His calm, measured philosophy saw fruition in a great deal of monumental architecture, much of it brutalist in approach. His National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado (1961–67) is like an abstract group sculpture of figures peering and hunched, curious and hiding. The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse (1961–68) is if anything even more of a monumental presence, with great blank, cantilevered cuboids suspended and crowded together, spectacular spiral concrete stairs and coffered ceilings of rough concrete. There is both strange movement and calmness to his work, as if familiar shapes have been caught in transition and calcified over millennia. It’s easy to feel overawed by these grand forms, with the weight of history and ideas all around.

German architect Gottfried Böhm, the expressionist brutalist, is also still around, aged 97, at time of writing. His Pilgrimage Church, Neviges (1963–68) is one of the world’s most famous works of modern placemaking, where undulating forms snake up a slope to the foot of a massive crystalline church, made of rough concrete and perched on the hilltop. This is a concrete version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, an expressionist jewel that also sits within the brutalist canon for its collision of rough-hewn construction and in-your-face artistic daring. This is a building meant to impress and dwarf the individual, just as religious architecture has for thousands of years. Much as modern figurative art would not have been possible without the invention of photography, this is architecture seen through the gaze of the great modern artists – the cubists, futurists, expressionists and post-impressionists – and translated into concrete.

We have hundreds of architects to thank for the strange and varied brutalist legacy we have been left. For all the lazy talk of the sterility and blankness of modernism, the thing that links these buildings, and these architects, is strength of character. Anybody who thinks brutalism offers mere functionalism needs to stand and take in the personality of IM Pei’s vast buildings, rising from the landscape, or Oscar Niemeyer’s languid curves. These structures are every bit as awkward, bloody-minded and outrageous as the people who dreamed them up. And in some cases, as long-lived, too.