Disclosure: I am a big fan of brutalism. I had no idea that there was stuff like this in Paris. I'm almost tempted to go out and tour it - it's beautiful.
In Britain, where I live, there is a general tendency to view older buildings as nicer buildings. Generally this is because only the stuff that's nice enough to keep/protect ends up surviving. This leads me to wonder what will we choose to keep from the 20th century. Which buildings will still be standing in 2500?
Buildings like those in the article make me sad. They are currently in horrifically poor condition after decades of neglect. On top of that, they are very unfashionable, brutalism seemingly suffering a similar fate in France to the UK: association with low-quality housing projects, a mid-century utopia that quickly became a dystopia. In London I am surrounded by treasured buildings nearly all of which had to fight against demolition at some point - for example the gothic hotel at St Pancras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pancras_Renaissance_London.... I wonder, if we hung on to them for long enough for the associations to dissipate, would we come to treasure them?
St Pancras was saved by the advocacy of (among others) the poet John Betjeman. Who will stand up for the Brutalists?
It's unfashionable to argue that there are timeless principles of aesthetics, but I believe that Brutalism is inherently in violation of them. Concrete brut is not a visually appealing medium like brick, stone or wood, especially once it's been weathered for a bit. And people prefer adorned surfaces to huge flat stark unadorned ones.
> people prefer adorned surfaces to huge flat stark unadorned ones
Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface. Building materials all go in and out of fashion - this is not about concrete.
What I love about brutalism is that the forms of the buildings are totally different to anything that came before them. Concrete freed architects - allowing them to build 'floating' buildings on thin stilts, huge overhangs and flying walkways and bridges. Now of course, more freedom is not always a good thing. I am not an advocate for every brutalist building - many are terrible, but there are some (like the ones in the article) that are gems, and should be preserved for the wonderful things they are.
In general, if we look out of the eyes of a pedestrian entering or leaving one of the depicted estates (pick an estate at random, and pick the moment at which we look out at random) chances are fairly high that there will be hardly anything in our visual field to draw our "involuntary attention".
If I'm sitting in a library or something and 5 feet away is a wall of unfinished concrete, that can be a pleasant experience because there tends to be a lot of irregularities in the surface (and I don't share grandparent's dislike of unfinished concrete) but there was a temptation in the brutalist movement to require pedestrians to walk along or near blank walls 100s of feet long, and that certainly can be an alienating feeling, just like for example being in the middle of a vast frozen lake can be an alienating experience.
These look like entrances into the Soylent Green factory, where the old people in the pictures are about to get turned into food. Wretched, unfriendly, unlivable public spaces.
I can find you a similarly sized blank area of wall on any building, including St Pancras. Sure, it'll have denser tiling (bricks instead of concrete tiles), but as far as I'm concerned there's a similar amount of overall visual stimulus in a blank brick wall.
These buildings are beautiful in a sci-fi utiopia/dystopia sort of way.
The problem I have with them is they are profoundly not human scaled. They are enormous monuments, not livable community. They are the antithesis of the medieval urban center of Paris and other European cities, where everything is walkable.
This is not a matter of scale. Is a large city "human scaled"? It's hard to separate Brutalism from its socialistic underpinning. The brutalist monument is centrally planned, whereas the medieval urban center grows anarchically and organically around the community.
The built environment of a large city is made up of neighborhoods, individual blocks, individual buildings... all of which can absolutely be human scale, even at fairly high density.
I reckon people have always had this criticism. The scale of 'human scale' has always needed to go up as there are more humans on the planet. Just as bricks gave a leap in the sizes of buildings that could be constructed cheaply over wood, concrete/steel is the latest step-change in how big we can build. There are plenty of tall buildings that work, and plenty that don't, and the architectural style isn't a direct factor. I think you'll probably find socio-economic factors play a far greater role in whether a community 'works' or not.
The first image is from Les Espaces d’Abraxas. It's a small area (600m by 600m) which combines apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, green spaces, and even a lake. It's definitely meant to be walkable.
The bad thing about brutalism is that while (unfinished)concrete gave architects flexibility in design and allowed themselves to explore new forms, what it actually allowed was cheapness.
The problem with brutalist buildings is not so much the unfinished raw concrete aesthetic or the imposing stature, etc., it's that this new concrete building technique allowed them to build cheaply without much thought to anything else like livability, use of public spaces, connection with surroundings, upgradability, etc.
Even the cookie cutter tile-clad midrises of china are better suited to human habitation than most brutalist estates because these tileclad midrises are weaved perfectly into the fabric of the cities they rise in.
Grey floor, grey pillars, grey ceiling. Slight intrusion of toothpaste/fake verdigris green. There isn't so much as a poster.
I'll grant that the first two are pretty good: concrete castles. The first one in particular has a slight Art Deco sensibility to the windows. The third is horrendous; it's hard to tell whether the decor was meant to be like that or whether bits of it have fallen off. All the round windows are weeping black drip lines below them.
#6 Les Espaces d’Abraxas again has a bunch of features cribbed from other styles: classical columns. #18 at the same site has a triumphal arch!
Finally at "Cité du Parc et cité Maurice-Thorez" we're back to inhospitable pointy angles, but with foliage growing among them in a post-apocalyptic manner.
Yeah those are quite good looking buildings. But I wonder how much of what makes them look beautiful is the fusion of previous architecture movements with the construction techniques of brutalism and how much of it is pure brutalism?
I like brutalism too. But preservation is kind of a sign (IMO) that things have gone wrong. You only have to preserve buildings if people don't want them or if they are not economical.
I have no objection to preserving a few buildings, a few particularly interesting streets or city centers. But, I generally object to the common European policies of forces stasis. In any case, I think it also goes against the brutalist, modernist ethic or aesthetic. These buildings intended to be rational & practical. If we have to "preserve them," they've failed, to an extent.
*I'll also admit that I'm a fan of brutalism. These are beautiful (the photography too).
>Look through the images in the article and show me one huge, flat, unadorned surface. Building materials all go in and out of fashion - this is not about concrete.
It's about gargoyles. Once upon a time we knew that every great building had gargoyles, nowadays we don't seem to bother with anything that impressive...
Of the old buildings that survive, a higher proportion have gargoyles. See my above comment about only the nicer buildings surviving. Wandering around London in 1600 you'd probably see a similar proportion of buildings with gargoyles as you do now.
Newer buildings are still built with beautiful guttering and drainage systems, but since we have drains now, there is no need to build gargoyles to spew water onto the street.
I think the downfall of brutalism is that the architects were working on the wrong scale. Looking at these photos, some of these buildings look fantastic from afar, but the close up photos reveal the poor livability of the designs and materials. I know it's subjective, but I've just never felt welcomed by brutalism's buildings.
One of the more telling examples of that is a building near me, where the street-front vegetation is done in these huge concrete planters suspended by huge concrete pillars. Sure you can see if from a block over, but at street level, you can't. It's almost like they are holding it over your head to tease you.
If you like Brutalism, go to Washington DC and it's suburbs. I hate it with a passion, because having lived surrounded by it, I find it to be cold and uninviting, and utterly devoid of charm. Perhaps that's because it's always manifested in poorly scaled urban areas where the density isn't utilized properly for human scale activities.
Edit: OK, I think my definition of Brutalism vs. yours is far more conservative. The Parisian manifestation seems to be far more artistic.
Lived in a 1969 built high-rise, surrounded on all sides by other high-rises of the same design. Check out Crystal City in Arlington, VA. That's where I was living. The older buildings are all like that.
DC's metro stations are all the same way, and most of the federal buildings also.
As long as they don't preserve New St Andrew's House in Edinburgh - ghastly empty hideous thing that has been squatting in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities in the world like some rectilinear concrete tumour.
[NB Not to be confused with St Andrews House - which is really rather nice.]
Every time I'm coming into London, I point out the ugliness of Trellick tower. I've never met anyone who ever thought it was anything but ugly. To boot, there's another one quite similar to it in the East End.
IIR, that hotel is right next to a very forgettable brutalist national library who's only merit is having several treasures from older time periods in it.
When I first walked up to it, I wasn't sure if it was a public rec center, library, school or prison.
On the other side of that same hotel are several quite beautiful modern, non-brutalist buildings (like the station). My gut tells me that the Library won't last 30 more years before tear down, but the station and the hotel will make it long after.
For the content certainly. The architecture is lowest-bidder-public-building, like they make schools and public swimming pools out of. My wife rather aghast that the treasures inside would be housed in such an ugly box and talked about it for several days after we visited it.
I was also outraged by the listing until i went inside. It's rather good inside. It's a shame about the outside, but i suppose people spend more time inside buildings than outside them.
The Library, which has amazing, mind-blowing, content housed in a lousy building designed with the language of minimal-cost semi-temporary public buildings the Western World over.
It reminded me of my high school, which, the rumor was, was influenced architecturally by mid-20th century minimum security prison architecture.
It's not neglect. It is the fact that it is a piece of concrete. You are never going to make a massive piece of raw concrete look good even if you wash it every day.
I find it funny we like and encourage the ageing of certain building materials, but not others. How long will it be before we're finding ways to age concrete faster?
All that this affects is the texture and patina of the surface. What is it that makes particular patinas desirable and others not? I'd say it's entirely cultural, and cultural perceptions change.
Apart from it's not. Doesn't matter how many times you type it in this thread, it's still not going to be true. They were controversial when they were built, they look fugly and age so badly.
Brutalism scarred much of Britain's skylines. Here in Nottingham we have some truly disgusting looking buildings marring an otherwise nice skyline. The quicker they all get knocked down, the better.
It's Sheffield I feel most sorry for. They got their eye sore listed by idiots.
> How long will it be before we're finding ways to age concrete faster ?
Actually, the current trend is rather to prevent the aging... It seems that early designers and implementers of concrete construction believed that concrete is waterproof - it is not. Water percolates, rebar inflates from rust... It is necessary to inject anti-rust to stop the process and then coat the concrete with waterproofing - an expensive process to ensure the concrete's stability over time. Uncoated reinforced concrete exposed to rain is doomed.
In my opinion this is one of the most beautiful and influential architectural designs of the 20th century. I'm not saying it was constructed very well, but it is a thing of beauty!
I find it really ugly. It looks like a cheap and soulless copy of engraved cyclopean masonry buildings from antique south-east asia or precolumbian mesoamerica.
In Britain, where I live, there is a general tendency to view older buildings as nicer buildings. Generally this is because only the stuff that's nice enough to keep/protect ends up surviving. This leads me to wonder what will we choose to keep from the 20th century. Which buildings will still be standing in 2500?
Buildings like those in the article make me sad. They are currently in horrifically poor condition after decades of neglect. On top of that, they are very unfashionable, brutalism seemingly suffering a similar fate in France to the UK: association with low-quality housing projects, a mid-century utopia that quickly became a dystopia. In London I am surrounded by treasured buildings nearly all of which had to fight against demolition at some point - for example the gothic hotel at St Pancras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pancras_Renaissance_London.... I wonder, if we hung on to them for long enough for the associations to dissipate, would we come to treasure them?