As many know, brutalism derives its name from béton brut, the French name for raw concrete, and not from brutality, though it is difficult to think of any architectural style more brutal than the brutalism. If you asked people to design deliberately brutal architecture, brutalism is what you would get.
I have a small library of picture books on the subject, all of them laudatory, though to most people the photographs in them would be sufficient evidence of the aesthetic catastrophe that brutalism inflicted on cities and their inhabitants everywhere it was tried. One is inclined to say, on looking at the photographs, res ipsa loquitur, but evidently this is not so. There is nothing so obvious that it cannot be denied.
My attitude to brutalism is like my attitude to snakes: I am horrified but fascinated. In the case of brutalism, the questions that run through my mind like a refrain are: How was this ever possible? Who allowed it and why? What cultural, social, educational, and psychological pathology accounts for it? When people claim to approve of it, even to love it, what is going through their minds? Do they see with their eyes, or through the lens of some bizarre and gimcrack abstractions?
Recently, like a masochist, I bought two picture books, Brutalist Paris and Brutalist Italy by Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, and Roberto Conte and Stefano Parego, respectively, in part because I could scarcely believe my eyes. The former had a text of some length, the latter only three pages, but, as one has come to expect from the writing of architects or architectural critics (Wilson is an architectural historian at a British school of architecture), length does not equate to greater enlightenment. The words are like a shifting fog though which meaning may occasionally be glimpsed, only to disappear again soon after.
What is particularly painful about these books, but also exceptionally instructive, is that both Paris and Italy are heirs to what may be the greatest architectural heritage in the world. The contrast, then—the complete absence of taste and judgment—that these books illustrate beyond all possible refutation, when just around the corner, so to speak, there is a treasury of architectural genius, is all the more stark and terrible. One feels that this is not just architectural, but civilizational, collapse.
Yet I repeat: these books do not set out to appall but to attract. I think part of the attraction (for those attracted) is the obvious connection of this architecture to totalitarianism, which many intellectuals long for, whether they admit it openly or not. In one of his lucid passages, Wilson tells us of brutalism:
Another vital part of the equation that contributed to the level of endeavour, innovation, and critique within the architecture of the period was the involvement of a potent, leftist politics in the urbanism of the 1960s and ’70s, and, indeed, the monetary power of the French Communist Party. Most importantly, this translated into local governance in the form of communist-led departments and municipalities of outer Paris . . . which reached a peak of communist control in the mid 1970s. . . . Many of the architects employed were themselves communist party members.
Wilson also mentions, without apparent discomfort or embarrassment, that some of the French architects were impressed and influenced by the Atlantic Wall, concrete blockhouses and bunkers constructed by the Nazis to keep the Allies out.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—as you take the drive from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the City of Light. There may be uglier townscapes in the world, but not many.
The Le Corbusier Foundation, which works to promote the architect’s memory and works, barely touches on this side of his life, relegating his Vichy role to an “extended stay” in the town.
Just don’t mention the war, as Basil Fawlty would say.
Unless you’re talking with Dr. Dalrymple, of course: Le Corbusier: Liar, Cheat, Thief, and Plagiarist. “Like Hitler, Jeanneret [Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Corbusier’s real name — Ed] wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence. One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.”
