M odern flats might have been the dream for many architects and citizens, but it’s amazing just how many official buildings also use the brutalist style to make an impact too. A trip around any city centre extensively rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s will make you wonder at how unadorned, challenging and sometimes downright crazy brutalism came to dominate midcentury civic architecture. From town halls to arts centres, churches to libraries, brutalism was the widespread choice of mild-seeming civic and religious bodies when commissioning new homes in the post-war period. It appears an unlikely option: grey, bulky, uncompromising and wearing its machine ethics on its sleeve. Yet, for local governments or religious communities wanting to make an impression as daring or forward thinking, it proved a stark contrast to the ornate Victoriana, serious-minded neo-Georgian or plush, playful Art Deco that had been the legacy of previous generations. Instead, this new wave of commissions would in some cases relish the rebellious edge of brutalism, in others retreat behind its massive blank façade. It’s no coincidence that town halls and churches were built in the same style as the mass housing schemes that were being constructed around the world. What better way to seem ‘one of the people’ than to echo the domestic style that was becoming familiar to millions. The ploy had varying results.

Architecture certainly didn’t come any more integrated with the local community than it did in the new towns springing up around the world. In Cumbernauld, Scotland, tartan suit-wearing eccentric Geoffrey Copcutt wanted to see if he could design a single megastructure to house everything that you might have found in a traditional town centre: shops, offices, cinemas, hotels, car parks, churches, penthouse flats, libraries and even a dual carriageway. Concrete was the perfect material with which to realize this ever-growing giant, although the tough Scottish climate would demand a particularly hard-wearing structure. That wasn’t what it got. Copcutt’s vision was never fully realized. This was partly due to poor construction by a company that went bust on the job and didn’t leave any plans indicating what they’d done, but it was also due to the architect’s intransigence. The sheer difficulty of combining so many different functions within one growing structure didn’t help. What remains of the central area today looks rather sad. Seen from afar it’s like a surrealist painter’s landscape cluttered with awkward composite objects, broken machinery and unidentifiable skeletons.

City halls were rather more achievable. In Communist East Germany architects Rudolf Weißer and Hubert Schiefelbein designed the City Hall of Chemnitz, built between 1968–73. While Weißer was the main architect, it’s fair to say that Schiefelbein’s work is what made the place so memorable. A decorative façade of geometric concrete tiles covers the entire structure, as if the entire behemoth has been caught in a particularly barnacled net. These days Chemnitz likes to think of itself as the ‘City of Modernity’, but when the City Hall was built the town went by a different name altogether: Karl-Marx-Stadt. Accordingly, a gigantic statue of Marx by Russian sculptor Lev Kerbel stands beside the building, reminding us of the strange twists of modern history. The City Hall is a wonderful monument to East German ingenuity, and an indication that progressive modernism was far from the preserve of the West.

A rather different Cold War-era city hall can be found in the very epitome of Western power, Boston, USA. In 1962, an architectural competition to find a design had been won by the firm of Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles. They had approached the challenge through using massed reinforced concrete rather the fashionable glass and steel of the day. The resulting City Hall (1963–68) has the feeling of an ancient classical structure, as a deliberate throwback to the beginnings of democracy and justice. It takes the form of a handsome reverse ziggurat, each floor more expansive than the last. Boxes protrude beneath this, breaking up the monumental façade, all of which is suspended on sturdy concrete pillars. From a distance, the whole building looks like the top portion of a Doric column chopped off, enlarged and pixellated. Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles also designed a tundra-like public plaza as part of the scheme, an attempt to merge the City Hall with the regular business of the people. The philosophy behind their winning entry was to combine public and private areas, with Kallmann explaining that, ‘We distrust and have reacted against an architecture that is absolute, uninvolved and abstract’. Instead they had been attracted by the lure of a heavy concrete structure, as a way of anchoring the modern citizen in something solid and unshakeable. They wanted to produce ‘a building that exists strongly and irrevocably, rather than an uncommitted abstract structure that could be any place and, therefore, like modern man – without identity or presence.’ Presence it certainly doesn’t lack, so much so that over the years this imposing hulk has been controversial, with critics and defenders caught in an ever-escalating series of skirmishes, like Bugs Bunny vs Yosemite Sam. Plans for demolition, which were once far advanced, have been cleverly countered by activists and heritage campaigners, and its future seems assured. Until the next time.

Boston City Hall, Boston, USA.

Architects: Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles.

Like city halls, religious buildings have the job of attracting and housing a great number of people. The artistic verve, fearlessness and massive voids of brutalism appealed to the church as well. In Minnesota there’s a fine example: Saint John’s Abbey Church (1954–61), designed by Marcel Breuer as part of the university campus in Collegeville. The presiding Abbot, Baldwin Dworschak, wanted ‘a church which will be truly an architectural monument to the service of God.’ Breuer certainly provided that, with his audacious design, requiring tons of ‘in situ’ reinforced concrete, formed in moulds made by local carpenters. The finished edifice is awe-inspiring, with the bell tower a freestanding sculptural entity, like a sturdy radar dish on legs. Inside, a procession of parabolic arches supporting the roof creates a dramatic series of prosceniums, investing the body of the church with the appearance of a concertina. At one end the concrete has been perforated like a honeycomb, creating the frame for a wall of stained glass.

As we’ve seen with the Geisel Library, book depositories have also provided golden opportunities for brutalist architects, possibly because their size and the general need to minimize windows makes them suitable for the monumental raw concrete treatment. Take Zalman Aranne Central Library (1968–71), part of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel – another outrageous example. Externally and from the side or back it presents a rather inscrutable face to the world, as just a stepped series of concrete walls: impressive, for sure, but anonymous. But from the front or above an entirely different building emerges – one dominated by a cluster of roof lights. They sit on top like bubbles on the surface of dishwater. For the design team, Shulamit Nadler, Michael Nadler, Shmuel Bixon, Moshe Gil and Shimshon Amitai, the library was all about light. Keeping the windows to the top of the structure and channelling the light through galleries and internal spaces makes perfect sense, to avoid light damaging precious books and to allow for the maximum wall space for shelving. Inside the building, the hundred vaulted skylights allow sunlight to filter through to the many different levels and areas of the building. The concrete itself matches the texture of the surrounding Negev desert, while providing a fixed point in this ever-changing landscape, and the appearance of the building could be straight out of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune.

The shadiest brutalist civic structure I can think of is the headquarters of one of the world’s most secretive and powerful organizations: the FBI. The J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC (1969–75) had been designed back in the early 1960s by Charles F Murphy and Associates, with Stanislaw Z Gladych as the chief architect. It was a tough assignment, because there were many competing ideas of what it should be and how it should be done, and these conflicts created a series of expensive delays. The local authority had wanted a retail arcade as part of the structure but the FBI were, understandably, more keen on security, and thinking bombproof rather than boutique. Occupying an immense corner site, the design is complex, and was compromised from the start by FBI advisors and the General Services Administration – the government department who had commissioned it. The original massive concrete office structure is bested by another, squatter form, which sits above the block and overhangs on two sides, rudely mounting it over the heads of passing pedestrians. An appropriate metaphor perhaps. It was opened in 1975 by Gerald Ford, and contains everything from the labs, morgues and firing ranges you might expect to the printing plant, basketball courts and automobile repair shop you might not.

The J Edgar Hoover building has a citadel-like quality – sturdy and vast, and its rough shuttered concrete and bronze-tinted glass façades so blank as they gaze onto the street. As impregnablelooking as ever, these days everyone wants rid of this great Cold War fortress, its very stodginess seems to summon images of Watergateera corruption and secrecy, ghosts that still haunt politics today. But this is a building you can love – not for its beauty, and certainly not for the purity of its muddled shape, but instead for its symbolic value. Maybe, in its bold assertion of control, it doesn’t represent anything with which slippery modern politicians or FBI agents want to be associated. But its persistence as an unavoidable symbol of justice in the midst of the US capital city is a useful reminder of recent history. It encapsulates those craggy, jowly unelected fixers of the mid-1970s whose faces the concrete seems to conjure in mind, just as clearly as Mount Rushmore does the early presidents. The building is an evasive and unpalatable secret made monumental and uncomfortable. Brutalism as warning.