B rutalism is a truly international architectural movement – you could spend a lot of money globetrotting to try to catch sight of every notable example. Local variants – Metabolism in Japan, Carioca in Brazil – expand the reach and vernacular of brutalism across cultures too. Like the jet engine, steel reinforced concrete is a modern technology that has been embraced everywhere. Just as we can look up anywhere in the world and see contrails from planes, we can also catch glimpses of rough concrete structures on our travels, if rather less often. Brutalism has proved exceptionally useful as a tool of progress. In some countries it has been an aid to post-war reconstruction, in others a central pillar in the creation of entire new towns and cities.
Some cities are stuffed full of brutalist buildings, created in the white heat of that post-war moment. Chandigarh, an entire city planned by Le Corbusier, and Brasília, Niemeyer’s great project (with Lúcio Costa) stand as extraordinary examples, so strange they seem almost like proof of alien landings in our recent past. We will revisit them later. And there are the rebuilds of old settlements too – Boston, say, or Glasgow – where the interruptive use of concrete is a big talking point. But while most conurbations will have some rough-hewn monoliths in evidence, they are not as ubiquitous as you might think. Even so, you can find examples in the most surprising of places. And that’s often the thrill of appreciating any form of architecture – discovering and then exploring a remarkable edifice you didn’t even know was there. So let me invite you onto my private jet, and we’ll take a quick tour of some of the places you really must visit.
Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh, India.
Architect: Le Corbusier.
We land first at Belfast to check out one of the great modern buildings of Northern Ireland. Some of the most interesting brutalist projects have been museums and galleries, and one of the best is the Ulster Museum extension (1962–71) by Francis Pym, his only major project. The exterior is covered with Tetris-like cubist extrusions, giving an uncompromisingly modernist feel to the otherwise neoclassical façade of the museum – I think it complements it rather beautifully, but others have disagreed. This project wasn’t a happy experience for Pym, who found all of the subsequent controversy around the building rather draining. He resigned before the project was finished, didn’t attend the opening, and subsequently became an Anglican priest.
Never mind, time to get back on the plane. We’re off to Lyon now. Unlike the reticent cool of the International Style, brutalism loves showing off. And because of this extravagant attitude, it often makes for excitingly designed stadiums and assembly halls. Take the Auditorium Maurice Ravel, Lyon (1972–75), designed by Charles Delfante and Henri Pottier, for example. This scallop-shaped concrete structure is certainly one of the most eye-catching landmarks in this high-rise modernist district. There is something of the landed spaceship about the auditorium – imagine The Day the Earth Stood Still but without the robot. Well used and much loved, it is the centre of the arts for a whole community.
Now it’s a short hop on our plane to Holland, to take in the Aula at Delft University of Technology (1959–66). This contains a large auditorium and four lecture halls and was designed by celebrated Rotterdam firm Van den Broek & Bakema. The majestic cantilevered structure thoroughly embraces the absurdist possibilities of brutalism, and rises like a ship in dry dock from the campus landscape. In fact, students the world over are familiar with raw concrete architecture, enthusiastically commissioned by universities and colleges, both old and new.
Even showier is religious brutalism, and there’s loads of that about. Come on, we’ll get off the plane at Berlin to visit Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (1959–63). A strange hybrid, this, being a kind of concrete rocket set beside the ruined remains of the old bombed tower – sci-fi meets fantasy. This post-war concrete structure, shadowing the older ruin, was designed by Egon Eiermann. Its walls are perforated with intense blue stained glass designed by Gabriel Loire. The resulting hybrid is like a nurse guiding a patient, or a child supporting its aged parent. Now if we make a quick hop across to Switzerland, we can see a rather more straightforwardly raw construction, the Holy Cross Church in Chur, (1967–69). Designed by Walter Förderer, it’s as extravagant a series of forms as you could wish to see. This church combines the deep seriousness of a fortress with the playful polygonal interlocking shapes of a molecule diagram. The wood-shuttered concrete throughout and the extensive use of wood on the inside, together with the curious spaces these polygons create, makes for a spectacular cave system rather than a conventional church interior. This ability to create unique voids and volumes is one of the greatest attributes of brutalism, and has resulted in a legacy of fearless icons of abstraction. Traditional glass box modernism, meanwhile, was rather more constrained by the search for the perfect symmetrical curtain wall, the ‘floatiest’ tower, or the ‘glossiest’ podium. In brutalism sometimes even finding the windows can be a challenge. Don’t get lost now!
Now one more short flight, over to Milan. Here you will find another of those concrete university buildings, the Istituto Marchiondi, in a handsome Chandigarh-style design by Vittoriano Vigano. The external structural frame sits away from the main walls of the college, like a crate holding the interior within its protective grid. Within two years of its completion the concrete had stained badly, and as you can see, it has fallen into disrepair. The glass is broken, graffiti marks the walls, and there’s litter everywhere. Not much learning going on now, that’s for sure. But at least a protection order has been placed on the building, so it can eventually be restored. No, you can’t take bits of it home. Empty that bag at once!
Despite the ruin we have just seen, there is a solidity and permanence to a lot of massed concrete that makes it eminently suitable for the creation of government and official buildings. We’re off to one of the most famous brutalist edifices now, the former Ministry of Highways building (1973–75) in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Designed by George Chakhava and Zurab Jalaghania, this mesmerizing structure is an awesome engineering feat, stacking long horizontal units on top of each other at right angles, to form voids and projections. It’s a classic International Style office block, deconstructed and shuffled before your eyes by someone with the powers of Magneto from the X-Men. This leaves a large vertical three-dimensional grid – ‘hashtag brutalism’ at its purest. It has been beautifully restored and is now an essential on any brutalist tour worth its salt.
Many sports stadiums favoured rough concrete too. Take the Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports (1965–71) in Lithuania, by Eduardas Chlomauskas. This crashing wave of a building was constructed on the site of a former cemetery, and has played host to everything from basketball championships to pop concerts and political rallies. It’s now in a parlous state, graffiti-covered and abandoned, but there are at least plans to renovate it.
Come on, back to the plane, we need to get to Macedonia. We’re here to see the Post Office in Skopje (1974–89) with its rabbit’s ear projections and toy fort playfulness. It doesn’t look much now but back in the day, oh yes. Designed by Alvar Aalto protégé Janko Konstantinov, it certainly provided more fun than your average post office, especially with Borko Lazeski’s cubist murals on the inside. That’s until it was gutted by fire in January 2013, rumour has it just days after the insurance had run out. Lazeki’s irreplaceable murals were lost, and with them a positive representation of Macedonia’s turbulent Soviet-Bloc past. Come on, cheer up. We still have more to see.
We’re going for a long-haul flight this time, to the University of São Paulo, where pretty much everything is fascinating. The Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (1961–69) by João Vilanova Artigas and Carlos Cascaldi is a good example of large-scale planning. Here a heavyweight rough concrete box pins down a smaller lightweight glass one, like an unfair wrestling match between International Style and Brutalist. Light, twisted concrete columns hold up this hefty brute, their delicate origami appearance at odds with the uncompromisingly massive structure above. Inside is a social space full of movement and charm. Students are visible around you on every level, from this perspective seen as alien beings participating in a peculiarly civilized arcade game. The surprising lightness, openness and free flow comes from the decision to link each of the six floors with a system of continuous ramps. You should have brought your skateboard.
And now a trip north, to the Salk Institute in California (1959–65). This cunning Louis Kahn confection is a formal avenue of six-storey blocks, mirroring each other across the street. They are divided by a rill, whose continuing flow of water cascades down to fill a pool at one end, taking advantage of the natural steep topography of the site. So far, so Classical. But in the theatrical layout of the buildings, facing off each other as in an old one-horse town, there is also a strange sense of space-age Wild West. If you were to film a futuristic Western, the Salk Institute would make a perfect Mega-City Dodge, don’t you think? Regular protruding sections offer shade and shelter, blank windows and balconies overlook the strip. There are plenty of places for cowdroids to tether their hover-horses and fire their laser pistols in deadly duels. What a great Ray Harryhausen movie that would be, Clash of the Titans meets Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. No? Well, suit yourself.
We’re off to Nairobi now. The Kenyatta International Conference Centre (1967–73) is a bit of a wonder. Designed by local architect David Mutiso and Karl Henrik Nøstvik, from Denmark, it’s formed of three parts – a faceted, circular 28-storey tower in rough concrete; a rather less dramatic podium section, added to give extra space for World Bank meetings; and the assembly hall itself, the largest conference centre in East Africa, which nestles underground beneath a broad conical roof. This arrangement of parts is another trick of brutalist landscape design – placing large geometric forms in relation to each other to make a unified asymmetric statement. Mutiso calls his assembly hall a traditional African hut and the tower a phallic symbol. Fair enough. Left to run down for decades, the building is finally beginning to be looked after once more.
Back on board for a couple of hours or so, and in Lusaka there’s the University of Zambia (1965–70). Designed by South African Julian Elliott, this challenging project was conceived the year after Zambia gained independence and was a great symbol of the new country. Elliott employs the fashionable ideas of the day: the multilevel decks of a megastructure, hosting the many different functions, from faculties to student housing. The result is surprisingly calm when compared to other post-war megastructures, such as the central area of Cumbernauld, a new town in Scotland made notorious by this outrageous piece of overreaching. The massive blank concrete facades and interlocking cuboids at the University of Zambia impart a sense of unity to this enormous project, and its lush green setting and generous outside space helps to soften Elliott’s uncompromising architectural vision. Parks and gardens, lakes and landscaping are as much a part of brutalist design as the raw concrete used in their construction. So many of these buildings are in landscapes that are home to fish, coots and ducks, trees, shrubs and grasses – as well, of course, to people.
Let’s pop over to India – well, actually, it’s a bit of a hike. Achyut Kanvinde’s Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (1959–66) combines a leggy concrete frame fleshed out with sturdy brick to create a series of exaggerated colonnades beside water. Not conventional brutalism, it’s true, but quite brilliant. Kanvinde embraces one of the most celebrated forms of the era, the top-heavy reverse ziggurat. This massed, regular design helps shade staff and students from the sun. (A similar device at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, in London’s Barbican, provides shelter from the rain.) Kanvinde studied under Walter Gropius, whose teaching seems to underpin the work of many of the brutalist generation. It’s certainly a rather formal setting for education – the building is a heavy reminder not to muck about.
At Chandigarh, the capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, there’s Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly (1953–63), another one of those mighty edifices. It is vastly more joyous than many parliament buildings, containing some stunning epic-scale murals in the most vivid colours, alongside fantastical concrete curves, coruscating pools of water and playful cut-throughs in the walls and pillars. The grid collides with something more fluid and rounded – the semi-circular gully of the crown looking like the horns of a gaur, the mighty Indian bison, with the whole edifice laid out like a giant animal skeleton. Here is the expressive nature of brutalism writ large – an artistic, rather than strictly rational, response to site and function.
Back on the plane, and now we’re at the Bangladesh National Parliament House, Dhaka (1961–82), designed by Louis Khan. Its long gestation was due in part to the fallout from the violent Bangladesh Liberation War, which halted work in 1971. This modernist citadel has immense geometic cut-throughs in the rough concrete walls, like a logic puzzle left behind by an extinct race of giants, and seems to rise as a mountain over the surrounding flat landscape. Approached via avenues of palm trees and surrounded by water reflecting Khan’s mystical symbols the whole building has a strange dream-like quality. What do you mean, you’ve got jet lag? Wake up, no time for that.
Time for another flight, to Pasay City in the Philippines. Here, on an equally immense scale, is the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1966–81), a grandstanding development, befitting its commissioner, Imelda Marcos, then wife of the Filipino dictator Ferdinand. Its author, Filipino architect Leandro Valencia Locsin, was best known for his cantilevered ‘floating’ projects, and the Cultural Center, overhanging Manila Bay, is a classic example. Locsin designed the Center, a complex of buildings, in several styles, including brutalist, there’s the pristine floating oblong of the Tanghalang Pambansa, or National Theatre; and the Philippine International Convention Center, in a Russian doll formation of smaller shapes being swallowed by larger ones. It’s certainly one of the harder to love monuments of post-war architecture – cool if you like Bond villain lairs, I suppose.
Our globetrotting is nearly over – last leg now. Private commissions to design offices gave designers an opportunity to depart from conventional glass box styling. CBC St Leonard’s Centre in Sydney (1972) is a crazy power station of a former bank, in the heart of cosmopolitan Crows Nest. It was designed by Geoff Malone of Kerr & Smith, responding to that moment when automation and computerization in banking was first becoming possible. Another one of those reverse ziggurats is wedged up on bloated concrete verticals. Lozenge-shaped and projecting windows break up the massive rough surfaces. It was originally furnished with all of the moulded plastic furniture you could ever wish to see, every bit as playful and fluid as the building itself. I absolutely adore this one, it’s quite the Thunderbirds dream. Today it seems a building in denial about how the world has actually turned out, like an amnesiac uncle lost on a high street.
Well that’s the end of our tour. You can find your own way home from here, I’m sure.
