Brutalism

Brutalist buildings are made mainly of exposed concrete, left unpainted and unclad, often showing the grain of the wooden molds it was poured into. Some use exposed brick instead. Buildings are composed of large, angular blocks, with repeated units such as window bays or apartments visible on the facade, deep-set windows, and stair and elevator towers shown as separate masses. The name comes from béton brut, French for raw concrete, the finish Le Corbusier used.

Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1947-1952) holds 337 apartments in a 12-story concrete block raised on thick columns. In London, the Barbican Estate (1965-1976), by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, has about 2,000 flats, with concrete hammered by hand to give it a rough surface, and Denys Lasdun's National Theatre opened in 1976. Boston City Hall (dedicated 1969), by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles, has a brick base under concrete upper floors with projecting window hoods. Habitat 67 in Montreal, by Moshe Safdie, stacks precast concrete apartment units.

The Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined the word 'nybrutalism' (new brutalism) in 1950 for Villa Göth, a house in Uppsala, and British architects took up the term that year. Alison and Peter Smithson's Hunstanton School in Norfolk, completed in 1954, was the first finished 'New Brutalist' building, with its structure and services left exposed. The critic Reyner Banham described the movement in his 1955 essay The New Brutalism and in a 1966 book, connecting it to béton brut.

Brutalism was widely used from the late 1950s to the early 1980s for universities, government offices, theaters and public housing. Its decline began in the late 1970s, as the style became associated with urban decay and as concrete facades stained and rusted in damp climates. Since about 2015 it has drawn renewed attention through books and preservation campaigns. In Britain the National Theatre was given protected listed status in 1994 and the Barbican Estate in 2001.