Can We Live with Brutalism?
by Steve Rugare
CUDC Quarterly, 3:1 - Winter, 2003

Among respondents to the UDC’s survey about the CSU campus, a common complaint was, "too cold, too much concrete." This is a typical reaction to the heavy, colorless buildings that dominate the campus core. These were built in the 1960s and typify a style historians call "brutalism."

Hearing that word, many people today might reply, "You can say that again!" However, the term’s origins aren’t that straightforward. It actually has a dual origin. In The New Brutalism (1966) Reyner Banham claims that it was derived from the visage of architect Peter Smithson, who looked like an ancient Roman bust of Brutus. He also suggests that the term was used to describe a particularly moralistic stance in post-war British design culture, not necessarily a particular style.

For American purposes the other origin is more relevant. This goes back to modernist hero Le Corbusier, whose post-war buildings feature a highly sculptural treatment of bare reinforced concrete (beton brut). Indeed, the brutalism that dominated during the American campus building boom of the 1960s often echoes his work. Concrete and other rough textured materials are used to give mass to structural elements, and the scale of facade elements and structural members is gigantic, sometimes crushingly so. In the American version there is often a marked tendency toward reviving the symmetry and proportions of pre-modernist classicism in order to create "monumental" effects.

Unfortunately, the results are often far from sublime. Where there is drama and poetry in the work of Corbusier and a few others, most of the brutalist institutional buildings that litter the American landscape are merely grey and clunky, sometimes downright nightmarish. Brutalism was not only difficult to do well, it was almost uniquely susceptible to being done badly.

Having lived with so much of this stuff, it’s understandable that people have learned to fear concrete, and that terms like "friendly" and "human-scale" are now constantly used to sell new designs (even when they don’t apply). Perhaps, though, our quest for comfort has led us to undervalue the spatial experiences the brutalists sought to provide. It’s worth giving this some thought, because our large brutalist legacy isn’t going anywhere. Architects implementing plans like the UDC’s for CSU will have to find a way to make brutalist ideas valid, while remedying their worst defects.