A late phase of modernism that showed its structure and materials with raw directness (above all rough, board-marked concrete) in heavy, sculptural buildings for housing, universities and civic institutions.
The name joins Le Corbusier’s béton brut (concrete left raw from its formwork) with an English joke: Alison and Peter Smithson, whose school at Hunstanton (1949–54) exposed its steel frame, brick and services with severe honesty, were nicknamed the “New Brutalists”, and the critic Reyner Banham turned the tag into a movement in 1955. He defined it by the building’s memorability as an image, the clear exhibition of its structure, and the valuing of materials “as found”.
Its founding monument is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille (1947–52): a slab of 337 flats raised on massive sculpted pilotis, its concrete marked by the timber boards of the formwork, its façades a deep egg-crate of loggias and sun-breakers (brise-soleil), with a shopping street half-way up and a sculptural roof terrace. Le Corbusier’s later works (the chapel at Ronchamp, the monastery of La Tourette, the Capitol at Chandigarh) showed how expressive raw concrete could be.
In the 1950s–70s Brutalism became a worldwide language for the institutions of the welfare state and of newly independent nations: council housing (Park Hill in Sheffield, the Barbican in London), universities, theatres (the National Theatre in London), city halls (Boston), and parliament buildings. Its ideas included “streets in the sky”: wide access decks meant to recreate the sociability of the terrace street at height.
By the 1980s the style had become a byword for failed housing and harsh cities, and many of its buildings were demolished. Its reputation has since recovered: the best Brutalist buildings are now protected, admired for their ambition, their sculptural power and the public ideals they embodied.