Alone chunk of brutalism cropping up in a crowded street or isolated rural site is one thing. But for a truly overwhelming experience – epic landscape rather than architectural novelty – let’s revisit some of the most forward-thinking places in the world, Chandigarh and Brasília – entire cities of brutalist innovation.
We visited Chandigarh, in passing, on our whirlwind global tour. But how did this symphony of raw concrete and artistic audacity actually come about? India was in the midst of post-independence partition and Lahore, the previous capital of the Indian Punjab, had become part of Pakistan. A new capital for the Punjab was needed and so Chandigarh was founded, situated at the foothills of the Himalayas on flat and fertile land. An original master plan from American architect and planner Mayer and his partner, Nowicki had been developed in 1949, but further plans were discontinued on the death of Nowicki in a plane crash. When Le Corbusier inherited the project, in 1950, he grasped the opportunity to develop a new master plan on a grand scale. And, unlike his city designs of the 1920s, this time the results would actually be built. Here was his chance to show off in the most modern style of the age, one he had pioneered at Marseilles. So many grand and important buildings to create: Punjab and Haryana High Court, the Secretariat Building, the Palace of Assembly, and the university. Being Le Corbusier, he drafted in the most able person he could think of to design them all – himself.
Are there advantages to planning a city all at once, rather than seeing it evolve over centuries? Well, there are the needs and effects of new technology to bear in mind. Take the car, for example. By the mid-20th century, traffic was sending town planners into a tailspin. Road accidents were reaching appalling levels in big cities, and streets were becoming choked with cars. And so, when given the chance to create new towns, planners chose to separate pedestrians from cars as much as possible and to make sure that streets were broad enough to accommodate the predicted traffic. And so in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier planned for the car in building the city around huge roads. Yet the predicted influx of cars was slow to come, and so for years it was largely cyclists who made use of those broad boulevards. Today, as car ownership has boomed in the region, the roads are finally paying off.
In Chandigarh you can see the ghosts of Le Corbusier’s earlier plans for Paris. This modern city of government contained pedestrianized sectors, wide highways, parks, lakes and grand structures creating a monumental sense of place at its heart. The architecture is quite something. The Secretariat Building (1953–62) would be imposing enough by itself. It takes on Le Corbusier’s irregular grid construction, and expands and exaggerates those sculptural details – extrusions, curves and diagonals – that break the rigidity. From certain points you can see right through it, and at others you can even walk, cycle or drive right through from one side to the other. Purpose built for the serious amount of paperwork being shifted about from floor to floor, a network of long ramps connects the levels of the building. You could get footsore travelling around this place.
We’ve already explored Le Corbusier’s colourful and playful Palace of Assembly (1953–63) on our world tour, in Chapter 7. It is perhaps most notable for the outsize moulded vents and services on the roof, which have been cartooned out of all proportion and break the surface like a whale. Exaggerating the air vents and lift shafts, using them as an excuse to break free of the conventions of polite functionalism and to create decorative forms that are integral to the structure itself, is a classic brutalist ploy. In contrast, there’s the High Court (1952–56), presenting a delicate study of lace and arch in raw concrete. Pillars and panels of bright red, blue and yellow sit beneath a sturdy grey umbrella and the complex, deeply shadowed curved shapes are reflected in nearby water. This neat trick makes the heavy structure seem lighter than air, and is one that’s repeated in grand architecture all over the city.
Light and shadow is Le Corbusier’s game in Chandigarh, just as it had been at Marseilles. Projecting frames and concrete sun-guards keeps direct light off hidden surfaces so that while the sun produces a gleaming white-grey sheen on the rough concrete, shadows create cooler, mysterious spaces for people to walk, work, explore and relax in. Light permeates the buildings in shards and glimpses, both indirect and mysterious. Today, new development surrounds the carefully planned centre, threatening to overwhelm the space and the relationships between buildings. As a place to live it seems popular with the locals, and is notably prosperous and cosmopolitan. With a population of around one million, it’s regarded as India’s most well-maintained city, and its careful planning has created a rather calm, leisurely way of life.
The Barbican, London, UK.
Architects: Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.
In South America, Brasília seems at first a much smaller proposition, with over 200,000 people living in the city centre. Yet more than two million have made their home in the surrounding region. The new Brazilian capital city was planned out by Lúcio Costa in 1956, with the work of designing many of the great edifices given to the country’s pioneering architect, Oscar Niemeyer. Situated on a high plain, the city is a modernist fantasia. Niemeyer’s vision was quite distinct from Le Corbusier’s and, in many cases, the buildings in Brasília display more structural daring than those of Chandigarh, and rather less rawness. Take the National Congress (1960–64), with its slender twin towers, linked like a massive capital H. Flanked on one side by the dome of the senate and on the other by the bowl of the lower house, here are simple bold shapes used on a monumental scale: or two gigantic cereal boxes and a couple of bowls.
In contrast, the Alvorada Palace (1957–8), the president’s lakeside home, is a simple long, three-storey box. What could have been a classic International Style grid is enclosed behind the oscilloscope rhythms of the struts that swoop along the façade. They hold the glass box within, like the setting for its delicate jewel. Similar ideas lay behind the structure of the High Court, again a glass box encased behind elegantly faceted pillars. If this were Chandigarh the concrete would be more muscular, the structure heavier, the surface rougher. Instead, Niemeyer’s pillars and struts are like the delicate flowing lines of handwriting or, as he saw it, artistic responses to the female body writ large. The National Theatre (1960–66) is a more obviously brutal structure, which from the outside is a truncated concrete pyramid covered in complex square hieroglyphs, with skylights illuminating an indoor garden.
Much of Brasília’s centre today is made up of more conventional modern office buildings, making the city a mixture of the truly great and the decidedly average. An odd thing about the centre is its lack of typical Brazilian informal street life, leading to critics to dub this federal capital a giant campus. Authentic street life is instead found in the outskirts – in the satellite towns and favelas where the majority live, where the nation’s busy, social streets are recreated and where poverty remains hidden from view of the beauty of the centre.
Many older conurbations have their fair share of brutalist concrete landscapes as well: New Haven and Boston in the United States and São Paulo in Brazil, for example. Historic cities such as Paris or Berlin also contain sizeable post-war districts. In London there are numerous examples of brutalism, but the most concentrated dose is the Barbican (1959–82). This complex of flats, houses, schools, music conservatoire and drama school, underground station, lake, theatres, art galleries, cinemas, hotels and restaurants was masterminded by what we might think of as a resolutely brutalist architectural practice, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. Not that they would have agreed. An architect I interviewed from the practice called the term ‘silly’. The multilevel concrete ‘highwalks’ take you away from the chaotic ancient sprawl of the city and into a surprisingly calm, enclosed space.
The joke is that everyone gets lost in the Barbican. So complex is its geography that yellow lines are painted on the walkways, to guide visitors to their destination. As anyone who lives in a city knows, it’s easy to get lost anywhere, but perhaps the homogeneity of the Barbican’s structure disorients people more than usual. And so it’s curious that one of the great criticisms of modernism, by the likes of that charismatic enabler of gentrification, Jane Jacobs, has been that modernism provides an oversimplistic environment for people, one which they grew quickly bored with and rebelled against. Both Brasília and Chandigarh suffered in their early days from a surfeit of space, but this isn’t the case with the Barbican’s concrete city within a city. It’s a great example of how complexity and changes of tone and scale can be used in a cohesive way to create different feelings and environments within a unified whole. I find the Barbican a beautiful protective place, and the only part of the old city where the ancient Roman and medieval walls feel as if they have been extended and their spirit built into the new London. The expensive rough concrete finish imparts a sense of age – of prehistory, almost – to the precinct. Fragments of ruined medieval brick and the reconstructed St Giles Cripplegate Church of 1394 add a startling feeling of ancient ghosts penetrating our modern world. You are surrounded with different textures, rhythms and shapes, a mixture of dark brick and tile, rough pale concrete and smooth white roofing. For me, walking through the public spaces throughout the estate feels welcoming and alive. Being in the Barbican makes me wish more places were like this – well maintained, beautifully thought out, constantly stimulating and yet assuredly themselves. If getting lost were always as interesting as it is in the Barbican, then modern life would be far more pleasurable.
