How Brutalism Became Both a Utopian Dream and a Dystopian Meme

W hen the Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer presented his Brutalist masterpiece as the new Whitney Museum of American Art in 1966, it was met in equal measure with applause and skepticism – a reputation it has carried with it ever since. As Sotheby’s prepares to reopen the Breuer building on November 8, the moment is right to reflect on the iconic, controversial building, and to reconsider the movement, forever a subject of public discourse, it is often seen to exemplify.

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Brutalism, prior to the 2010s, was a historical term referring specifically to a postwar modernist submovement within Great Britain. Think of the Robin Hood Gardens housing complex or the Barbican Centre in London: large-scale projects proposed by idealistic architects optimistic about the potential of social democracy. Today the phrase “Brutalism” is applied to any building made primarily of reinforced concrete or, frankly, any building with a vaguely threatening, science-fictional aura. Corporate glass buildings – such as Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Pyramids in Indianapolis, IN – are Brutalist because they are menacing. Housing blocks around the world are Brutalist just because they are dense and built with the cheapest and most abundant structural materials available at the time of construction. Even the 2024 film The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet, depicts as its chosen architecture an ahistorical pastiche of Tadao Ando’s work and the International Style. In a time when Brutalism means anything – and usually anything one doesn’t like – what relevance does the term retain today?

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Not only did Brutalism come by its name in unclear, apocryphal and retroactive ways, today’s connotations of war-torn, post-apocalyptic landscapes were also present from its inception. The canonical architects of the era, the young Alison and Peter Smithson, came from a generation of architects simultaneously inspired by the International Style modernists (such as Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) and traumatized by the Second World War. They rejected the earlier, more aesthetically conservative New Humanist school of British architecture, wherein common vernacular forms merged with an interest in classical proportions and social-democratic populism. Retaining their progressive politics, they believed that the city should serve as an aggregator; that modern architecture was a socially mediating force; that a new politics could be born that championed art, healthcare and education in innovative, dynamic structures. The Smithsons and their contemporaries became increasingly interested in new forms and scale engendered by mass council housing, as well as the possible avenues for expression in both construction methods and materials, notably bêton brut – raw concrete.

The term Brutalism did not, however, originally come from the French. According to critic Reyner Banham, it stemmed from a joke made by a handful of Swedish architects that later got passed around the Architectural Association and the Architect’s Department of the London County Council, where the Smithsons were employed. Rather than rejecting such an ugly word, the young architects embraced it. They even used other concurrent events in art, such as the work of the photographer Nigel Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, to substantiate it retroactively. The historian Kenneth Frampton described Henderson’s 1953 exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art”:

The original Brutalist buildings, such as the Smithsons’ Hunstanton School, were more traditionally modernist than the buildings with which the movement would later become associated, including Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower or Rodney Gordon’s Trinity Square car park, Gateshead, both in England. This association between material rawness, postwar trauma and an emerging individualist mass culture – which would ultimately undermine the social goal of housing estates such as the Smithsons’ most famous offering, Robin Hood Gardens in East London – all persist in present contemporary conversations around Brutalism. What is old is always new again.

Brutalism was always a beleaguered movement, in part because of its use in public housing, civic buildings and university campuses – in other words, its connection with the state. Paul Rudolph’s sumptuous, cubist Orange County Government Center in Goshen, NY was, unfortunately for its prospects, the Department of Motor Vehicles. The attack on the public sector that began in the 1970s had fatal consequences for Brutalism, whose casualties number in the hundreds of buildings. And yet, by that time, Brutalism’s unique qualities had, along with other constituent submovements such as High Tech and Structuralism, already dissolved into the Mannerist slurry best articulated by the term Late Modernism.

This more accurate phrase is often used interchangeably with Brutalism, and it’s a matter of stylistic pedantry to disentangle them. At any rate, Late Modernism was championed by the architectural historian Charles Jencks as a catch-all for a number of submovements. Embodying all of the messy contradictions, complexities and problematic executions of the whole modernism era, it became an instant bugbear of an emerging and belligerent Postmodernism. As Jencks espoused in his book Late-Modern Architecture (1980), what made the Late Modern movements (including Brutalism) so striking, if not outwardly Mannerist, was “the tendency to shock by discontinuity, by newness, by being a self-sufficient, avant-garde statement cut off from traditional architecture.” While these buildings were often denigrated as ugly, they were also appreciated for their sheer weirdness.

Late Modernism ended around the early 1980s, but it enjoyed a long afterlife in the aesthetic languages of science-fiction movies, which usually cast such buildings as the headquarters of supervillains. (After all, this was William Gibson’s Neuromancer era of dystopian fiction hyperfocused on evil, technologized nanny states.) I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall had a starring role as the lair in Robocop (1987). Blade Runner (1982) used the architecture of the transitional architect-developer John Portman. Star Wars borrowed the complex, speculative gestures of Metabolist and High Tech paper architecture. Rudolph’s now-demolished Elion-Hitchings building, which served as the headquarters for Burroughs Wellcome, was the set of the movie Brainstorm (1983). It is very likely that these mass-culture efforts, despite their mixed messages, kept Brutalism alive in the public consciousness, creating an entire generation nostalgic for the movement.

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Perhaps it is unsurprising that when said generation reached maturity – and therefore purchasing power – Brutalism became a topic of renewed interest. For millennials on internet forums, image-aggregation sites such as Flickr and early social-media groups, Brutalism became a significant point of architectural discourse. It was in 2009, my freshman year of high school, when I first came across the endless threads and collections of images of and about Brutalist buildings on the SkyscraperCity forums, which I’d sought out after seeing the Goshen Government Complex on a family road trip. In the beginning, these threads were hundreds of pages long with such titles such as, “what is the ugliest building in your city???” I remember the heated arguments over aesthetics and usability that took place before a broader appreciation of the style emerged by the early 2010s. Brutalism, in those days, was still considered the butt of a joke: an expression of state power, a prop in science fiction.

Some of the most popular images on the forums of the late 2000s and early 2010s were true oddities from far-flung regions of the world, from Fumihiko Maki’s Hillside Terrace Complex in Tokyo to the National Assembly of Sudan designed by Cezar Lăzărescu and Gottfried Bohm’s postwar German churches. Others were sprawling complexes whose scale and form defied the imagination: Denys Lasdun’s ziggurat-like University of East Anglia, UK, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey’s highly articulated Simon Fraser University, Canada and its US counterpart, Paul Rudolph’s looming, tortoise-like campus for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

It seems clear to me in retrospect that there are two other reasons Brutalism thrived during the internet age. The first, of course, was September 11 – not only because its architectural victims fell under the Late Modern umbrella (though they were not Brutalist as such), reinforcing such architecture as synonymous with spectacle and violence. The attacks directly caused then-new digital newspapers to prioritize images over text, such that – violently, brutally – the web entered a visual era made possible by faster connections and cheaper file sharing.

Years later, the scene was set for the sculptural forms and stark lines of Brutalist buildings – their play of light and shadow, the graininess of their textures – to take over the lo-fi photography of the early Instagram era. Brutalist buildings especially lend themselves well to black-and-white photography, close-ups, abstractly framed shots and compositions that prioritize repetition. This made them easier to capture than many other buildings and particularly rewarding subjects for the army of amateur photographers who introduced new filtered aesthetics either to imitate the look of film or to create new digital artifacts using features like HDR. Throughout the 2010s, as architectural photography exploded in popularity on new photo-sharing sites, a number of coffee table books related to Brutalism, such as This Brutal World (2016) and Concrete Concept (2016), made their way into the twee coffeeshops and indie bookstores of the time.

This pivot to photography, however, was a bit of a poison pill. Brutalism’s superficial triumph betrayed what made it aesthetically interesting: by stripping it of its political and social contexts, these images flattened the movement into an abstracted array of iconic buildings and a few great (Alison notwithstanding) men. Architectural culture at the time similarly revolved around the archetypal and apolitical, as expressed in many athletic buildings designed by starchitects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, who captivated audiences through spectacular, swooping forms and by crafting surprising juxtapositions between buildings and the context of their physical sites.

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Brutalism merged the modernist ideal that architecture could be a force for betterment with the technocratic desire for daring forms. At its most inventive, it respected individuality even while recharging a nostalgia for the role of the building in everyday affairs. It’s fitting, then, that so many of its applications were public buildings; a diverse array of governments – from the benevolent and social democratic, to insidious security states, to imperial regimes in colonial and postcolonial nations – found in Brutalism a language through with they could convey their preferred vision of civic life.

Yet as these utopian (or dystopian) projects evolved, many Brutalist buildings fell victim to neglect and decline, leading to certain unfortunate fascinations among a generation whose memory of the state was more aestheticized than lived. The decaying Brutalist building became a fetish. Its role in Britain was not dissimilar to the “ruin porn” photographs of abandoned theaters in post-white-flight Detroit, photographs that erase – literally, from the history and the spaces themselves – the legacy of Black Americans. This fetishizing impulse, alongside the fraught and usually inaccurate tag of “Brutalism,” extended far beyond the capitalist West and into the former Socialist world, often with ham-fisted equivalencies between what were public buildings for housing, work or recreation and those in service of outright totalitarian regimes.

The “brutal” in Brutalism became colloquially severed from raw concrete, although many of the buildings were made of the stuff as well. Writer Owen Hatherley makes a particular case out of the photographer Jan Kempenaers’ photographs of Yugoslav monuments. Most of these spominiki, which took on the form of assembly halls, sculptures, land art and memorials, were built using local funds and in memory of citizens who either died fighting fascism or by its hand. In Kempenaers’ stark, black-and-white and very lonely photographs, they are instead decontextualized and Orientalized for the Western gaze, peppered with the claim that these “strange structures must have just been dropped onto these rural areas,” Hatherley writes, “most likely by the Big Man, the dictator, Tito himself.” Here, the cultural and historical link (specious or not) between Brutalism and the decayed or dystopian world once again makes an appearance.

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Despite a millennial obsession with a 20th century they never experienced, most of the major campaigns to preserve icons of the style have failed. Robin Hood Gardens – housing for dozens of families and the Smithsons’ most important building – was demolished beginning in 2017, when Brutalist fever was at its peak. Paul Rudolph’s Goshen Government Center was lobotomized by a horrific addition that same year, despite a 10-year preservation campaign that yours truly participated in as a 14-year-old; his irreplaceable Elion-Hitchings building was razed in 2021.

Some structures have endured, particularly those by Breuer – a cusp case in the modern versus Late Modern debate, who achieved a degree of celebrity after emigrating to the United States at the invitation of his mentor and Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius. Breuer’s celebrated building at 945 Madison Avenue, originally the Whitney Museum of American Art, now enters the care of Sotheby’s after years of serving as swing space for various cultural institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection. The Pirelli building in New Haven – which Breuer designed with Robert F. Gatie – reopened as a chic hotel, in 2022, named Hotel Marcel. Other Brutalist icons, like Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower and the Barbican Centre by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, survived to see new days as popular art spaces and high-end real estate.

Brutalism retains all of its contradictory semantic and historical baggage. Though the internet made it more beloved by a younger set, Brutalism-mania has begun to pass as the photographic websites and apps that fostered its vogue give way to short-form video content, a format less rewarding to static subjects like architecture. Brutalism as a metonym for the state remains alive and well, and the movement remains a prominent target for criticism, especially from Anglophone conservatives who see it as the antithesis of their preferred Neoclassical architecture. It continues to be mistakenly portrayed in mass culture, and maintains its appeal in science fiction – intentionally or not, buildings on the planet Ferrix in the newly released Star Wars spin-off series Andor bear a tremendous resemblance to the later brick-based work of the Late Modern architect Edvard Ravnikar.

In my view, however, the main reason why the movement remains so relevant and so resonant is simple: Brutalism expands the formal and organizational limits of what architecture can do, and it does so for the benefit of those who use it.

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_{Banner photo from the Marcel Breuer papers, 1920-86, via Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art / Marc and Evelyne Bernheim.}