101–110 of 204 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The nomenclature is just wild... I totally agree. The described style has nothing to do with béton brut. Rather the opposite.
Indeed, wrong name. There is a "web brutalism", but it's not what he is describing.
> Brutalism is a 1950’s architectural trend that was abandoning all decorations, and creating brutally simple buildings made from concrete. They often weren’t even painted to emphasize their brutal nature. So big, brutal blocks of concrete. The word "brut" came from French "Béton brut" which means "raw concrete" — has nothing with how "brutal" we perceive it to be. There's lots of architecture articles covering this…
in that case, why it is called 'brutalism' instead of 'brutism' ? I'm not implying you are wrong, but probably it's the reason of confusion: * brutal - brutalism * brut - brutism
> The term Nybrutalism (New Brutalism)[16] was coined by the Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Göth, a modern brick home in Uppsala, designed in January 1950[9] by his contemporaries Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture#History
> Asplund's neologism caught on in Stockholm and was picked up by British architectural pilgrims to that city, among them Oliver Cox, Graeme Shankland and Michael Ventris, the decoder of Linear B (an ancient script seen as one of the great linguistic riddles). Although the epithet signified nothing, or maybe because it signified nothing, it was taken up as a slogan of defiance or something by arty young British architects, none artier than Alison and Peter Smithson and their representative on Earth, Reyner Banham, an architectural critic whose prose may cause all but the entirely insentient to wince.
* https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonatha...
Or Reyner Banham why he chose that name in his 1955 essay:
> They have created the idea of a Modern Movement – this was known even before Basil Taylor took up arms against false historicism – and beyond that they have offered a rough classification of the ‘isms’ which are the thumb-print of Modernity into two main types: One, like Cubism, is a label, a recognition tag, applied by critics and historians to a body of work which appears to have certain consistent principles running through it, whatever the relationship of the artists; the other, like Futurism, is a banner, a slogan, a policy consciously adopted by a group of artists, whatever the apparent similarity or dissimilarity of their products. And it is entirely characteristic of the New Brutalism – our first native art-movement since the New Art-History arrived here-that it should confound these categories and belong to both at once.
* https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/the-new-brutali...
It opens with an epigraph by Le Corbusier:
> L’Architecture, c’est, avec des matières bruts, ètablir des rapports émouvants’rnouvants.
(Architecture is, with raw materials, establishing moving and moving relationships.)
See also:
> Brutalism is a 1950’s architectural trend that was abandoning all decorations, and creating brutally simple buildings made from concrete. They often weren’t even painted to emphasize their brutal nature. So big, brutal blocks of concrete. The word "brut" came from French "Béton brut" which means "raw concrete" — has nothing with how "brutal" we perceive it to be. There's lots of architecture articles covering this…
But as a consequence of this style buildings have a brutal feel to it.
> Brutalism is a 1950’s architectural trend that was abandoning all decorations, and creating brutally simple buildings made from concrete. They often weren’t even painted to emphasize their brutal nature. So big, brutal blocks of concrete. The word "brut" came from French "Béton brut" which means "raw concrete" — has nothing with how "brutal" we perceive it to be. There's lots of architecture articles covering this…
in that case, why it is called 'brutalism' instead of 'brutism' ? I'm not implying you are wrong, but probably it's the reason of confusion: * brutal - brutalism * brut - brutism
I think it gives it a gravitas that is undeserved. This is better described as word95 or ms-bobism. The colours, the style is firmly rooted in the mid 90s graphic design style of liberated desktop publishing.
Brutalism was all about function over form, using concrete to make a space that is functional, large light and bright.
> Brutalism is a 1950’s architectural trend that was abandoning all decorations, and creating brutally simple buildings made from concrete. They often weren’t even painted to emphasize their brutal nature. So big, brutal blocks of concrete. The word "brut" came from French "Béton brut" which means "raw concrete" — has nothing with how "brutal" we perceive it to be. There's lots of architecture articles covering this…
So, I'm really not sure that we've gained anything by this "debunking".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sick of hearing this, it was obviously a double meaning from the start. They revelled in how brutal it was.
I'm no expert in architecture history, but I don't think it is so obvious. Le Corbusier's projects such as the Cité Radieuse or the Plan Voisin, which largely defined modernism, seem to me to be quite clearly the starting point of early brutalism, which didn't look all that brutal. Le Corbusier is also the source of the "béton brut" phrase, apparently.