New Brutalism was a 1950s’, mainly British, architectural

movement that asserted the primacy of the functionalist

principles in services, materials, and structure. Anything

that distracted from or disguised these was rejected. In

its austere and inelegant rectilinearity, with plumbing,

electric and other services exposed, and ‘cosmetic’

treatments eschewed, New Brutalism probably repre-

sents the extreme case of functionalism. Immediately

following the destruction of World War II, it undoubtedly

had a certain attractiveness to public authorities looking

for economical means of rebuilding – New Brutalist

buildings were very basic. Creating infrastructure for the

new welfare state was another pressing need of the time.

For those who actually had to live in the new blocks of

flats or work in the schools and hospitals, though, the

attractiveness was less easy to discern. Prefabricated

wall, roof, and window units often failed the basic

requirement of being draught- and water-tight. Initial

savings here often proved costly in the long term. Less

than entirely successful technically, the mass-housing

projects generally also proved less than successful

socially. With some notable exceptions (the Roehamp-

ton Housing Estate in London seeming to be one), they

often left tenants feeling isolated and depressed within

their own homes, the “deck-street” corridors, lifts, and

stairways hostile and frequently vandalised spaces.

New Brutalism was led by Alison and Peter Smithson,

Jack Lynn, and Ivor Smith. Also associated with it were

Denys Lasdun and James Stirling.

British architecture, an overview Hugh Pearman, architectural critic of the London Sunday

Times, is worth quoting at some length when, on the eve of

the 21st century, he offers the following overview of British

architecture.

What, would you say, was a quintessentially British

approach to architecture? An approach that is original to

this country, that emerged here, rather than being an

import from Renaissance Europe or ancient Greece or

modern America? In the last century, there have been just

two significant British contributions to world architecture.

These are the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th

century, and the high-tech school of the late 20th. Both

have roots stretching back down the centuries. Looking in

opposite directions, they represent our Janus-like attitude

to architecture. Yin and yang, the country cottage vs the

Crystal Palace.

At a time when architecture is becoming an increasing-

ly public affair, with virtually every city in the kingdom

planning to open an architecture centre of gallery of one

kind or another, it is highly relevant to consider why British

architecture is more internationally influential now than it

has been since the heyday of Edwardian country-house

building. Arts and crafts architecture originated with the

architects George Devey and Philip Webb, and became

famous with Webb’s Red House for William Morris in

1859. This was a built manifesto of Morris’s repugnance

for the machine-made future indicated by the Great Exhib-

ition of 1851 in Joseph Paxton’s (high-tech) Crystal Pal-

ace. The style was taken to sublime heights by others,

most notably the young Edwin Lutyens before he got too

monumental. When the German cultural diplomat

Hermann Muthesius wrote his famous account, Das Eng-

lische Haus (the English House), in 1905, he was record-

ing a phenomenon of global importance.

Fig. 1 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–

54. Reproduced from V. M. Lampugnani (general editor), The

Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Architecture,

1963; London, 1986 edition, p. 247.

A discernibly British architecture then vanished. Two

world wars and the rise of the “international style” of mod-

ernism, accelerated by the arrival of émigré architects,

mostly from Germany, in Britain and America, blew that

cosy old world apart. In the frenzied post-war reconstruc-

tion, British architects were busy copying others.

The tide began to turn in 1960. Exactly a century after

the Red House, James Stirling and James Gowan built

their superb, mechanistic glass and red brick engineering

building at Leicester University [see Fig. 9]. It was as

knowing an assemblage of earlier 20th-century styles as

the Red House had been of romanticised vernacular past,

but Leicester also simultaneously recalled and anticipated

something else: the architectural potential of virtuoso

structural engineering…

Pearman goes on to describe the rise of the High-tech move-

ment in Britain, led by Richard Rogers and Norman Foster,

and then continues:

…The arts and crafts tradition survives, now informed by

the alternative tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright in America,

Alvar Aalto in Finland and Hans Scharoun in Germany.

The backbone of British architecture today, however, is

the tradition of the high tech.

It is a venerable tradition. Of course, the Crystal

Palace of 1851. Of course, the great Victorian train sheds.

Of course, the 1844 palm house at Kew by the engineer

Richard Turner and the architect Decimus Burton – the

finest glass and iron building in the land. Certainly, some

of the muscular late Georgian warehouses and factories.

But high tech goes back further still into the national

consciousness. The shimmering glass and water wall of

[Nicolas Grimshaw’s British Pavilion at Expo 93 in Seville]

recalls the shimmering glass facades of the Elizabethan

“prodigy houses” associated with the architect Robert

Smythson, such as Longleat, Hardwick and Wollaton. The

asymmetrical and structurally daring work of the medieval

gothic builders and their Victorian revivalists form a clear

ancestry to Roger’s Channel 4. Indeed, much medieval

stonework, dressed to incredibly precise tolerances,

Related Study Notes

20400

Architecture and technical

innovation in the machine

age

20445

Frank Lloyd Wright

20513

Le Corbusier

20521

De Stijl

20522

Bauhaus

20527

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

20543

Scandinavian design in the

20th century

30710

Abstract Expressionist

painting

30820

Modernism and

Postmodernism

40620

Utility and Festival Style

design

40644

Pop design

In the text, a symbol refers

to these Study Notes

40415

New Brutalism

by

Dr John W Nixon

1/4 40415u.doc: first published 2004; revised 2007 CCEA GCE HISTORY OF ART

makes a lot of what passes for high tech look very crude,

mere industrial chic. The oldest precursor of Foster’s

Stansted airport I have yet encountered – a room that

plays very similar tricks with light, volume and repeated

delicate structure – is even pre-gothic. Go to the Norman

Galilee Chapel in Durham cathedral with its slender Rom-

anesque arches and you realise how long we have been

living with this approach to building.

Naturally, both high-tech and arts and crafts styles

developed in the consciousness of movements elsewhere

in the world… None of this alters the fact that our twin

traditions have grown up with us as a nation. One – high

tech – has always been the tradition of those who push

the boundaries of what is possible, who are consciously

experimenting with the new. The other – arts and crafts –

was a formalising of what is termed “vernacular” building,

the supposedly natural and unselfconscious built forms of

the land as they evolved over time, using local handicrafts

and materials. The British have proved very good at both

of these...

Given the technologists’ love of fine craftsmanship and

exquisite details, it becomes increasingly clear that these

apparent polar opposites are the necessary two sides of

the same coin…1

New Brutalism’s context and influences Britain’s biggest collective enterprise at the start of the 1950s

was building the infrastructure of a welfare state. Just as

Swedish social policy was seen as a model within establish-

ment circles, so also was Scandinavian architecture and

design, with its ‘humanised’ version of Modernism.

Fig. 2 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–

54. Reproduced from Edward Lucie-Smith, Visual Arts in the 20th

Century, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1996, ISBN 1-85669-

090-3, p. 220.

Reacting against this, New Brutalist architects favoured

Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier for the clarity, integrity

and grand scale of their designs, and their open presentation

of structures and materials. Mies was admired primarily for

his exposure of structural steel framing; Le Corbusier for his

monumental and unadorned use of concrete in the later

works. His Unité d’Habitation apartment block, 1945–52, and

Maisons Jaoul, 1952–6, for instance, were admired for their

‘brutally’ direct treatment of function, form and finish – his

concrete finishes tended to be what the French called béton

brut, the patterning of the rough timber shuttering left “raw”.

However, Mies’ work quickly proved too concerned with

aesthetics for the Smithsons and their circle, too much a

concession to establishment tastes. New Brutalist buildings

exposed basic structures and building materials, as Mies

would do, but went beyond this to wilfully expose also

service runs (plumbing, electrics, etc) normally disguised or

concealed. And just as all materials were used ‘as found’,

untouched by cosmetic finishes (blockwork, for instance,

being left unplastered), so also they tended to work largely

with the pre-existing site, rather than imposing preconceived

or external design solutions upon it – something they did

1 Hugh Pearman, “Two sides of the same coin”, Culture section, The Sunday Times, London. Published c. 1998; other details unavailable.

have in common with the Scandinavians.

Artistic connections New Brutalism’s focus on crude or ‘raw’ fundamentals can be

related to developments in other arts about this time, among

Fig. 3 Jean Dubuffet, The Cow with the Subtile Nose, 1954.

Reproduced from Amy Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements,

an Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art, Thames and Hudson,

London, 2002, p. 175.

these: the art brut (raw art) or ‘anti-art’ of Jean Dubuffet

(1901–85), the ‘drip-painting’ Abstract Expressionism of

Jackson Pollock (1919–56), the ‘junk’ sculpture of Eduardo

Paolozzi (b. Edinburgh 1924), and even the Pop art collages

of Richard Hamilton (b. London 1922).

New Brutalism’s emergence There have been various accounts as to the emergence of

the term New Brutalism. It was possibly first used in Sweden,

about 1950, to describe the architecture of Bengt Edman and

Lennart Holm,2 although it is now mainly associated with a

body of British work that emerged about the same time.

Many see it as referring to late-period Le Corbusier, including

his recurring use of béton brut concrete finishes. V. M.

Lampugnani writes as follows:

New Brutalism gave conscious form to a mood that was

widespread among younger architects in the 1950s, but in

spite of the fact that it was [sic.] expressed a sentiment

that was felt in most parts of the Westernized world its

origins can be pinpointed in space and time with some

precision. Although Giedion was wrong in his etymology

(‘Brute + Alison’), he was right in identifying the Smithson

family as the source of the term – either Alison Smithson

or the Smithsons’ friend Guy Oddie (who used to call

Peter Smithson ‘Brutus’) was the first person to utter the

phrase ‘The New Brutalism’, some time in the early sum-

mer of 1954.

The basis was a mood of frustration brought on partly

by the difficulties of building, especially in Britain, after

World War II, and partly by disgust at the smugness of the

compromising elders who were still able to build because

they were well placed with the ‘Establishment’. The stylis-

tic preferences of these elders were known as ‘The New

Humanism’ by the political Left, ‘The New Empiricism’3 by

the political Right. The New Brutalism as a phrase was

intended as a mockery of both, but it drew attention to

certain attributes of the architecture admired or designed

by the Smithsons and their circle...

…Brutalism implied some sort of attempt to make

manifest the moral imperatives that were built into modern

architecture by the pioneers of the 19th century, and the

use of shutter-patterned concrete or exposed steelwork

was only a symptom of this intention. The fundamental

aim of Brutalism at all times was to find a structural, spa-

tial, organizational and material concept that was, in the

Smithsons’ eyes, ‘necessary’ in this metaphysical sense

2 See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, a Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985, p. 262. 3 Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience.

2/4 40415u.doc: first published 2004; revised 2007 CCEA GCE HISTORY OF ART

to some particular building, and then to express it with

complete honesty in a form that would be a unique and

memorable image…4

Perhaps adding to the sense of frustration Lampugnani

refers to was the fact that Britain at this time was withdrawing

from the last of its colonies.

Selected practitioners and works

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON New Brutalism’s first major building is generally taken to be

Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1949–54, by Alison Smithson

Fig. 4 Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton School, Norfolk, 1945–

51. Reproduced from David Watkin, A History of Western Architect-

ure, 1986; Laurence King Publishing, London, 3rd edition, 2000, ISBN

1-85669-227-2, p. 653.

(née Gill, b. Sheffield 1928) and her husband and architec-

tural partner Peter Smithson (b. Stockton-on-Tees, Co

Durham, 1923). The couple married in 1949 and worked

together from about 1950. Hunstanton School excited inter-

national interest for its extreme austerity of design. Parallels

were drawn with the American architect Louis Kahn’s Yale

University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1951–3.

Fig. 5 Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens Estate,

London, 1972. reproduced from Lampugnani, p. 308.

Other major works by the Smithsons include: the Golden

Lane housing, London, 1952; the Sheffield University

extension, 1953; and the Robin Hood Gardens estate,

London, 1972. Of the Golden Lane development, William J.

R. Curtis writes:

…Golden Lane… implied a criticism of the free-standing

block [such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation]. The

slabs were linked together in a linear way and disposed to

respond to the surrounding street patterns, while the inte-

rior street [as in the Unité] was brought to the edge of the

façade and repeated at every third level. The ‘street-deck’

was intended to encourage chance encounters, and was

a rather abstract attempt at restating traditional working-

class doorstep life in the air…5

LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL The Roehampton Housing Estate, London, 1952–9, occupies

a 130-acre site beside Richmond Park and was designed by

Fig. 6 London County Council, Roehampton Housing Estate,

London, 1952–9. Reproduced from Richard Weston, Modernism,

Phaidon, London, 1996, ISBN 0-7148-2879-3, p. 217.

the London County Council Architects’ Department. Le

Corbusier’s ‘radiant city’ concept and, in particular, his Unité

d’Habitation, 1946–52, are clear influences. The estate

comprises some 2,000 dwellings housing about 10,000

people in total. There are five 11-storey maisonette blocks,

fifteen 12-storey towers, and a range of 2-storey and 4-

4 V. M. Lampugnani (general editor), The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Architecture, 1988, p. 247. 5 William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture, Since 1900, 1982; Phaidon, London, 3rd edition, 1996, ISBN 0-7148-3356-8, p. 444.

storey terrace housing.

JACK LYNN AND IVOR SMITH In the large public housing development of Park Hill, Shef-

field, 1961, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, the topography of

Fig. 7 Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, Park Hill, Sheffield, 1961. Repro-

duced from Weston, p. 270.

the overall site and the topology of circulation systems within

the site were major factors in the design.6 The tops of

buildings across the site were kept level – connected by

‘street-decks’ and footbridges – but as the site itself undul-

ated, and was allowed to remain so, individual buildings

ranged from four up to fourteen storeys in height. The

development housed some 3,500.

John Donat and John Killick point out that the Park Hill

and similar developments have an almost forgotten prece-

dent:

Fig. 8 Denys Lasdun, The National Theatre, London, 1967–76.

Reproduced from Lampugnani, p. 134.

The idea of deck-access to housing had been pioneered,

some forty years before Park Hill was built, in [the Span-

gen housing development, 1919] in Holland designed by

Michael Brinkman. Here was a deck-street of reinforced

concrete, built before Le Corbusier had even started writ-

ing, which established one of the most significant histori-

cal precedents in modern architecture – although it wasn’t

‘discovered’ for nearly thirty years. Though not wearing

the trappings of the machine-aesthetic, it was far in ad-

vance, socially, of the Weissenhof Siedlung [Stuttgart,

1927; 20527] whose ‘advanced’ appearance attracted

so much international publicity eight years later.7

SIR DENYS LASDUN Sir Denys Lasdun (1914–2001) – knighted in 1976 – was

one of the most prominent of the New Brutalist architects,

best known for his large horizontal-slab buildings executed in

béton brut concrete. Among his works are: the Royal College

of Physicians, 1964, in London’s Regent Park; the European

Investment Bank, 1983, in Luxembourg; and the Royal

National Theatre, 1976, on London’s South Bank.

JAMES STIRLING James Stirling (1926–92) was reluctant to regard himself as

part of the New Brutalist movement but in the 1950s he did

Fig. 9 James Stirling and James Gowan, Engineering Department

Building, Leicester University, 1959–63; drawing. Reproduced from

Peter Gössel and Gabriel Leuthäuser, Architecture in the Twentieth

Century, Taschen, Cologne, 1991. ISBN 3-8228-0550-5, p. 297.

produce a number of buildings with at least Brutalist tenden-

cies. Among these are: the Ham Common housing develop-

ment, Richmond, Surrey, 1955–8; the Selwyn College dorm-

6 Topography is the description and analysis of a district or locality. Topology is the study of geometric forms under changing conditions. 7 John Donat and John Killick, “Architecture in the 20th Century”, Series 19, part 3, The History of Western Art, slide set, Visual Productions, Cheltenham, 1987, p. 29.

3/4 40415u.doc: first published 2004; revised 2007 CCEA GCE HISTORY OF ART

itory project, Cambridge, 1959; the Engineering Department

Building, Leicester University, 1959–63; and the History

Faculty Building, Cambridge University, 1964–7. The

influences of Le Corbusier and the late Georgian ware-

houses and factories of Stirling’s native city, Liverpool, can

also be discerned here. From 1956 to about 1962, it should

be noted, he worked in partnership with James Cowan.

A note of criticism David Watkin, the architectural historian, concludes his

comment on New Brutalism with the following remarks

concerning the Smithsons’ Hunstanton School and Stirling’s

History Faculty Building, Cambridge:

…The result will attract or repel according to one’s

aesthetic tastes, but what is irrefutable is that the building

was virtually unworkable from the start. Equal if not

greater problems have been caused by Stirling’s History

Faculty Building, Cambridge… Although it developed so

many faults, it still has many admirers who are fascinated

by its unconventional dynamics.8

8 David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture, 1986; Laurence King, London, 3rd edition, 2000, ISBN 1-85669-227-2, p. 652.

4/4 40415u.doc: first published 2004; revised 2007 CCEA GCE HISTORY OF ART