Originally Posted by
Snow
The reason I have asked you these things is that in this day of instagram tag aesthetics two people can no longer expect to be starting from the same playing field with concepts as, well, dodgy as brutalism is. The word definitions don't capture the problematic adequately. If by LeC's definition (which is not actually his definition LeC was many things but he wasn't stupid), everything with exposed concrete is brutalism, and you cram under one roof such a huge swath of contradictory architectural approaches you're basically defining nothing but material expression, one that has literally existed for hundreds of years and came into being literally with the advent of the modern architectural canon in the west.
The Smithsons draw attention to a concept of art brut - outsider art. Outsider art is something akin to naive art, for all extents and purposes the same thing. The brut here, you will note, is not used to denote something lacking in nuance, intelligence and emotional depth, but in a sense somewhat similar to the concept of the noble savage. It looks outside the canon, outside the academia and established norms, for answers to a very old but in the context of modern human living very new problem -life in a community.
Concrete is a fundamental building material. It is practically inescapable, and its characteristics are so convenient to humans one would almost think it was meant to be discovered and used in such a way by us. Exposed concrete was for the longest time a logical and natural answer to the challenges of large-scale building, and that's how the job works - if something is good for the job, it's good. You embrace it. At least until you know better.
What you'd call examples of brutalism in the UK have aged terribly, and they're the card people pull in most cases when aesthetics of exposed concrete are being discussed. Why is that? Two major interconnected reasons: the climate, and the hard fact that the people these buildings were built for simply couldn't afford the intense upkeep and stuff like extra insulation work that these buildings would require to look good in the longrun in shitty moist weather. Look at the examples in, say, India, or Brazil, or the Mediterranean regions of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They aged much better. Look at Montreal's Habitat 67, a giant, it looks good because it's posh af and also a monument and is being painstakingly renovated and kept in mint condition. Context.
In short, we don't really like the term brutalism. It misguides more than it explains, it's unfair to many great works of architecture, it's too generalizing and imprecise. And in this job, imprecision...is death!
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