Brutalism gives off a whiff of the industrial, even when that’s not its primary goal. Why dress up swanky corporate offices as factories? There seems to be a kind of macho myth-making to it, of white-collar worker playing blue collar, living the Bruce Springsteen dream in roughly powerful buildings that act a giant plaid shirt, dressing up pen pushing as factory labour.

If brutalism is as controversial as its critics claim, you’d think it would have been commercial poison. After all, it goes against the norms of contemporary corporate architecture, which tend either towards the anonymous or the self-described ‘iconic’. Instead, from factories to high-end offices and shops, the corporate adoption of brutalism as a style was widespread and enthusiastic. Yes, there were instances where the raw lack of cladding often was an accidental solution, forced by cost restraints or expedience. But the ability to create varied, complex and bespoke forms was particularly attractive for the construction of both corporate and industrial commercial sites – from office HQs to factories, hangars, water towers and laboratories.

And so the landmarks of post-war capitalism are often brutalist. Take IM Pei’s headquarters for the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation Centre in downtown Singapore (1975–76). Nicknamed The Calculator, this outlandish monolithic tower looks like a keypad embedded in the centre of a smooth grey pebble. It’s a digital Rosetta Stone. The engineer of this and so many other modernist structures, Ove Arup, helped work out how the calculator’s buttons – those office floors – could be cantilevered some six metres (around 20 feet) from the smooth concrete surface of the tower. The result is pleasingly eccentric, displaying the requisite wilfulness and ingenuity needed to create any successful hunk of brutalism.

Centre Point, London, UK.

Architect: Richard Seifert.

Much as the thought annoys me personally, brutalism might just be the perfect vehicle for freemasons, combining the necessary bombastic effect and cave-like furtiveness: statement architecture that keeps you at arm’s length. Sydney Masonic Centre (1973–79) might have been a classic glass box if it hadn’t been for the design tricks that play with our ideas of how an office block might function. Designed by Joseland Gilling, this 25-storey office block is immense, and makes you wonder, just what is it they do up there? It takes the traditional tower and podium idea of earlier schemes, but articulates it with such concrete flash and daring that this bastion of covert capitalism also manages to seem a little subversive. The tower is cantilevered above the podium, and stabs into it like God’s own pencil, scrawling His name on a secretive deal or two.

Marcel Breuer brought the weight of his ingenuity to a formidable problem: how to combine an office block, a research facility and a warehouse for the Armstrong Rubber Company in New Haven (1968–70). Bring on those trademark precast concrete panels and recessed windows. But that wasn’t the most significant decision; his solution for the needs of the business was ingenious. From one end what looks like a simple slab block has actually been split in two, with the tower hovering above the low-rise – a kind of magic trick – the top suspended by two massive piers at the end of the building. The warehouse and research facility occupy the bottom section, with the offices separated into the tower above. It’s a visual gag, but of the sort we might expect from post-modern pranksters such as Rem Koolhaas and his holey CCTV Tower in Beijing, rather than a student of the Bauhaus. But still, here it is, a robust 1960s room divider with a hole punched through the middle: the perfect place to display a glass-blown fish, a fat lava pot or some colourfully dyed food.

As with a number of these examples, Centre Point (1963–66), that Central London landmark by the great George Marsh, working for Richard Seifert, isn’t strictly brutalist. Yes, it is made from faceted concrete panels and has plenty of sculptural dash, but the basic elements of the design – podium, 33-storey tower, fountains and railed walkways – are pure International Style. Yet there’s something about the way it evolved in the design stage that made Centre Point edge away from the clean Mies grid of Seifert’s earlier tower projects, and towards a more faceted Breuer-type design. The chunky Y-shaped columns that make up the structure create a honeycomb pattern. They stand in heavy relief from the windows, a gesture that creates a much more visually engaging structure than the light glass and steel box that Seifert’s team had originally envisaged. Perhaps, then, this is accidental brutalism. It’s worth remembering that these were structures created for a pre-digital age. If a company used computers at all, these might be in one almighty block in the basement – a brutalist edifice in their own right. Technology in the mid-60s was just as likely to mean typewriters and adding machines, and computers themselves used punch cards and spools of magnetic tape. With its concrete grid, Centre Point has the look of a scaled-up analogue computer.

Many of the big names in brutalist architecture were drawn to corporate projects; they offered prestige and, perhaps more importantly, a hefty fee. Paul Rudolph produced many, one such example being Endo Pharmacutical Laboratories (1960–64) in Long Island, New York. Like Centre Point, in truth it’s not strictly brutalist, combining poured concrete, steel frame and masonry. Unlike the polished surface of Seifert’s tower, however, here the concrete is extremely rough. Rudolph had a thing for the muddy impurity of primitive and textural concrete, and rarely opted for a smooth or finely modelled appearance. Here he employs his special ‘roping’ technique to give a characteristic corduroy surface detail. The finished building is as quirky as they come: a long, low pizza box of a structure, with a basic squareness that’s at odds with the many fluid circular forms of its constituent parts. Rows of tubular moldings sit between the windows on the top floor and protrude above the roofline, like streamlined battlements. Triangular, ‘Toblerone packet’ corridors are narrower at the top than the bottom. Functions jut and protrude from the shell wherever necessary, as if the concrete has leaked and pooled to form ancillary structures. It is certainly the most playful design for a pharmaceutical plant you could imagine – a symphony of cylinders and circles bursting out of a modest low box.

Shopping malls were also good candidates for brutalism. The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth (1963–66) was one of the most exciting designs of its time. Designed by Rodney Gordon for Owen Luder Associates, the centre was an attempt to provide a new shopping district, flats, pubs, nightclubs and market under cover, with its own car park, in an area on the edge of the town centre surrounded by older shops. Gordon’s modelling was bold to the point of delirium, like a geometric toy puzzle rendered in concrete. But it was also a bold statement for the city, in an attempt to create something better than the bland Arndale Centre ‘American-style’ shopping malls that were springing up across the country. Flaws in construction and maintenance eventually caught up with it and this hopeful, space-age structure was demolished in the early 2000s, leaving its many fans bereft.