Another Brick in the Wall

Bricks

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.
—Pink Floyd, The Wall

Food rationing continued into the 1950s. The meat ration was cut further in 1949, and butchers grumbled that they needed not scales, but a tape measure.
—Christopher Hudson, “The (not so) bad old days”, 2007³

New Brutalism was born out of the postwar culture of “austerity Britain”, subjected to what historian Tony Judt describes as the “unprecedented conditions of restraint and voluntary penury”, with “almost everything either rationed or simply unavailable.”⁴ Steel was rationed, but there were still plenty of bricks. Indeed, despite fuel shortages, brick production reached prewar levels by 1954 and continued to grow until the early 1970s. In this context, the “rough poetry” of Brutalism was a feature of necessity, of the demand to “make do” with whatever materials were available.

The British were proud of their bricks. In a 1940 advertisement for the most popular of bricks, the Accrington Brick and Tile Company showed a bomb landing harmlessly on their “Nori” (“Iron”) brick, which could resist a crushing load of 1028.8 tons per square foot.⁵ Indeed, part of Churchill’s charisma as a wartime leader, and afterwards of his folksy image in retirement, was his passion for bricklaying: “Each afternoon, we’d spend a couple of hours together, laying bricks”, his grandson was to recollect. “If anyone had asked me what my grandfather did, I’d have said: ‘He’s a bricklayer.’”⁶

But the British were also slightly embarrassed by their bricks; they were a little too much of a reminder of the working-class streets of Midland industrial towns, not part of the establishment—as in the sobriquet “Redbrick universities” used to distinguish local and regional foundations from Oxbridge and London. As Stirling noted regarding his and James Gowan’s 1967 housing project at Preston with its local brick and vernacular forms, “I suppose some would think them too Victorian.”⁷ But it was this very ambiguity that allowed for the fighting words of the Angry Young Men—their novels, films, and plays celebrating the resilience, camaraderie, and sometimes upward mobility of working-class culture. It was in some sympathy with this sentiment, though not as politically charged, that New Brutalism adopted its materialism and attitude toward the matter-of-fact use of brick and steel. It was not accidental either, as Banham reminded his readers much later, that the rubric “New Brutalism” was “claimed particularly by an English team of Redbrick extraction—Alison and Peter Smithson.”⁸

The Term

Peter Smithson, the founder of the New Brutalism…
— Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, 1966

The accepted genealogy of New Brutalism credits Peter (or more probably Alison) Smithson with using the term for the first time in 1953 upon the occasion of the publication of their design for a house in Soho in Architectural Design; from there it was taken up by Reyner Banham in his appreciation of their Hunstanton Secondary School in the Architectural Review of March 1954; and the term was finally given theoretical credibility by Banham’s article “The New Brutalism” in the Architectural Review of December 1955. There are, however, alternative memories of this semantic history. Peter Smithson thought the term came from his colleague and friend Eduardo Paolozzi, who had taken it from Jean Dubuffet’s art brut. Georges Candilis, probably paraphrasing Sigfried Giedion, thought it came from the conjunction of Peter Smithson’s nickname, “Brutus”, and Alison’s own name: “Brutalism, yes of course. It was our slogan. The term has to be taken in the sense of directness, truthfulness, no concessions. I remember writing: ‘You have to be direct and brute.’… We used to say: Smithson=Brutus (Peter’s nickname) plus Alison.”⁹ Banham, not to be outdone, added another twist, noting in his entry on “Brutalism” for the Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture of 1964 that it was a friend of the Smithsons, Guy Oddie, who was “the first person to utter the phrase in the early summer of 1954”, despite the fact that this directly contradicted Peter Smithson’s own use of the term in print a year before.¹⁰

As late as 1956, the origins of the term were still giving rise to what the photographer of the vernacular tradition Eric de Maré called “a subject for academic research.”¹¹ In 1950, the Swedish journal Bygg-Mastaren (Build the next few years) had published a special issue on the work of the architect Gunnar Asplund with an English summary that used the term “Neo-Brutalist.”¹² De Maré wrote to the Architectural Review summarizing a letter he had received from Asplund’s son Hans, explaining how the term had arisen in Sweden. Hans, it seems, had coined it in jest to characterize a house design by Edman and Holm, and had shared his comment with three English architects, Michael Ventris, Oliver Cox, and Graeme Shankland, who brought the words back to England, where they “had spread like wildfire”, and had “somewhat surprisingly” been adopted by “a certain faction of young English architects.”¹³ Hans Asplund apparently took “no pride” in this invention as a self-described “Paleo-Sentimentalist.”¹⁴ Thus a term that was apparently invented to repudiate Swedish modern, and its importation to Britain, had in fact been invented by the Swedes. Banham’s riposte to this idea was belated and followed the orthodoxy of art-historical terminology. “‘Neo-Brutalist,’” he stated in his summing up of the movement, “is not the same as ‘The New Brutalism’… ‘Neo-Brutalist’ is a stylistic label, like Neo-Classic or Neo-Gothic, whereas ‘The New Brutalism,’” the privileged users of which were, he concluded predictably, Alison and Peter Smithson, was “an ethic, not an aesthetic.”¹⁵

Arrival

With Colville Place, New Brutalism is announced.
—Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, 2001

In 1953, two years after the Festival of Britain failed to launch the country on a new phase of optimism (with its cozy images of house and home furnished decorously in Swedish modern, set in a rural utopia of hay carts and traditional crafts, all supported by a shining vision of rebuilt industry), and two years before the alternative future staged at the This Is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Smithsons published a project for a small house in Architectural Design.¹⁶ Modest in the extreme, with its load-bearing brick party walls and exposed concrete floor beams on front and rear facades, the project inherited the already five-year preoccupation with neo-Palladian geometry: the facades were controlled by regulating lines, the plan was nearly square, and the internal divisions were equally geometricized. But the interest of the design did not lie in this survival (Peter Smithson was later to declare the Palladian movement over by 1948) but rather in the use of materials specified for the builder:

Bare concrete, brickwork and wood… Brickwork may suggest a blue or double burnt or colored painting; but the arbitrary use of color and texture was not conformed with, and common bricks with struck joints were intended. The bars and color variation have some sort of natural tension when laid by a good bricklayer.¹⁷

In their reported preamble to the builder’s specification, the Smithsons exhorted the “Constructor” to “refrain from any internal finishes wherever practicable.” The conclusion was that he should “aim at a high standard of basic construction as in a small warehouse.”¹⁸ If the house had been built, Smithson concluded, it would have been “the first exponent of the ‘new brutalism’ in England.”¹⁹

A house like a “small warehouse”: this suggests the stringent conditions of material supply and construction at the time, but also an emerging feeling that the formulas of the Modern Movement were outworn and unsuitable for the postwar British condition. This was a sense shared by many in postwar Europe, including Le Corbusier himself, whose wartime designs for emergency housing, the béton brut of the Unité, and the soon-to-be-completed Jaoul Houses, had demonstrated a turn towards the expression of materials. Indeed, while it might seem that the Soho house had been drawn up without knowledge of the Jaoul Houses (as published in the 1953 edition of Le Corbusier’s Œuvre Complète 1938-1946), there is every reason to believe, given the strong similarity of the Smithsons’ elevations to those of the first Jaoul project, that Peter Smithson had either seen them in a presentation at a CIAM meeting or, more likely, at Le Corbusier’s talk at the Independent Group in 1951 (or even in his subsequent visits to the RIBA and the Architectural Association in 1953).

But the small scale and reduced materials of the Soho house hardly justified the exuberant (if certainly ironic) comments the following year in Architectural Review by a correspondent named Kenneth Scott and apparently mailed from Accra.²⁰ His eulogy refers somewhat puzzlingly (given that their only building to date was the incomplete Hunstanton), to the Smithsons’ “buildings”, “their houses”, and a “feeling characteristic of all their work”, a feeling “of being in touch with the very nature of which the building is a part.” The house in Soho was, he wrote, “one of the artists’ highest poetic achievements”, every part of which seemed “in balance with the essential brutality of man.” His formal analysis of the spare cubic plan was equally hyperbolic:

The plan alone reveals that reciprocal tension between inside and outside is the main theme of the structure. The walls seem placed along the lines of protean energy. They are concentrations of solid matter, emitting beams of force according to the nature of the various materials; they seem to extend their power into the enclosing shell of the house, thus determining the positive unity of the interior. The inner space, without definite stops or tangibly enclosed areas, is given identity as a void and definite unity by the way the wall masses are placed, the juncture of weight and energy creating concentrated space with a rich variety of expression. Everything in the interior that meets the eye is coordinated—air, light, glass, the dynamic, tense horizontal planes in ceiling and floor, create a sense of space at once definitive and infinite. Within everything contributes to the balance of space, equilibrium embodied in greater and lesser volumes, reestablishing a sense of intimate brutality at the very moment of participation in surrounding nature.²¹

His final reference to the “surrounding nature” (the row houses of Colville Place?) that “contributed to the architectural effect” concerned the geometry of the house “dominat[ing] the turbulence of the setting”: “The artists wanted to identify and immerse their work in this setting, selecting the most challenging site in an act of will testing the supreme power of their genius to which it always seems possible to dominate brutality, re-integrating it in the creation of new geometrized matter.”²²

One is tempted to conclude that Scott’s letter, rather than supportive of the new movement, is an elaborate send-up of the attempt to build such an imposing theory as New Brutalism on the basis of the spare small-scale drawings published in Architectural Design. This suspicion is confirmed by Richard Llewelyn-Davies in a letter to the editors of Architectural Review, pointing out that a full version of this letter had appeared in the 1953 Architects’ Year Book, but with the name of Frank Lloyd Wright appearing where those of the Smithsons had been substituted—a restitution that makes perfect sense of the letter. “Who is pulling whose legs?” asked Llewelyn-Davies, suggesting that the New Brutalism was better suited to the back cover of Punch magazine than a serious architectural journal.²³ Another correspondent, T. Mellor, similarly complained of the Review’s “attempt to entertain architects” with a “funny column” in its pages. “I hope this tendency will not go further”, he wrote, adding with male panic, “I dread the appearance of a special section for women architects or a page for architects’ children.”²⁴

More serious was the response of Architectural Association students to New Brutalism, as evinced in their reaction to a symposium on the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at which Peter Smithson spoke. As Hugh Pope, the organizer of the event at the AA, wrote, “Student feeling was running very strongly against the exhibition—the aesthetic source of the New Brutalism.” The students condemned the work as “shallow, eclectic, an example of the new Picturesque, and denying the spiritual in man.”²⁵

Indeed, the question of the picturesque was at the forefront of architectural debate in the early 1950s. It had emerged in an article in Architectural Review where Nikolaus Pevsner was responding to three talks on the BBC Third Program given by the art historian Basil Taylor, who had attacked the English picturesque, in Pevsner’s words, as an “imperfect vision.”²⁶ Pevsner, who was in the process of developing his BBC Reith Lectures on the “Englishness of English Art”, responded, asserting that the picturesque, far from being anti-modern, had deep implications for the free plan, the two having a “functional function” in common.²⁷ Pevsner’s association of the picturesque and the Corbusian free plan, and thence to the idea of “Townscape”, in turn inspired a caustic letter from the architect and theorist Alan Colquhoun, who argued that the picturesque was in fact opposed to the Modern Movement, as it forsook style for composition, leaving architecture open to an endless play of styles, whereas the Modern Movement had wanted to “discover the secret of style in itself.” If a building were to be assessed on compositional terms alone, as in the picturesque, Colquhoun suggested, it would be impossible to distinguish between a Palladio, a Lutyens, and a Le Corbusier. Rather, what was important was the intrinsic “content” of each work, a content “which escapes definition” in terms of any idea of a generalized picturesque, and which links each work to its age with precision:

Not to admit the didactic element in modern architecture is to make nonsense of it. But once this didactic element is admitted, no purely “visual” theory basing itself on the universal validity of forms independent of structure and function appears to be adequate. It is because this fact has been lost sight of that so much of Post War British architecture is effete and superficial.²⁸

In a culture profoundly steeped in these values, Banham and the Smithsons were bound to rebuff any association with the picturesque in order to forge a modernism that respected the early masters, Le Corbusier and Mies, and could be recognized as English at the same time.

Bricks-bats

Adopted as something between a slogan and a brick-bat flung in the public’s face, the New Brutalism ceased to be a label descriptive of a tendency common to modern architecture, and became instead a program, a banner.
—Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, 1955

Thus the launching of the term “New Brutalism” carried all the overtones of an elaborate fiction, a style-hoax visited on the unsuspecting establishment of British left-wing modernism. Banham himself had characterized it as an “attitude taken by certain younger English architects and artists, and known, half satirically, as the ‘New Brutalism,’” in a reaction “against the tendency to over refinement and dry academic-abstract geometries which lurk in the International Style.”²⁹ Some six months later, he finally—and retroactively—associated New Brutalism with a built example—the Smithsons’ Hunstanton Secondary School, designed in 1949 and completed in 1954. Banham’s commentary was preceded by a note from Philip Johnson, invited as the reigning Miesian at the time. Johnson admired the school but was less favorable toward the turn represented by the Smithsons, calling it “an Adolf Loos type of Anti-Design which they call the ‘New Brutalism’ (a phrase which is already being picked up by the Smithsons’ contemporaries to defend atrocities).”³⁰ In his editorial riposte, Banham took issue with this American diatribe against the new English architecture, affirming that “the architects themselves would certainly disagree with Mr. Johnson’s separation of Hunstanton from the New Brutalist canon, even though the term had not been coined when the school was designed”, and stirringly claiming that the whole issue devolved around the truthful display of materials: “It is this valuation of materials which has led to the appellation ‘New Brutalist,’ but it should now be clear that this is not merely a surface aesthetic of untrimmed edges and exposed services, but a radical philosophy reaching back to the first conception of the building.”³¹

Hunstanton, proclaimed Banham, was the real originator of the New Brutalist manner, despite its pre-dating the term. Referring to what he called “the New Brutalist canon” (as if one already existed), he opened his review of Hunstanton polemically enough with a section titled “Design principles.”³² First came a historical authorization for the building’s “radicalism”—an “obtrusive” radicalism but one “with clear English precedent”, including Robert Smythson’s Hardwick Hall (1590-97) and William Butterfield’s multi-colored brick church of All Saint’s Margaret Street (1859), two buildings that had recently become popular among architects and critics for their over-the-top use of classical and Gothic Revival languages respectively. Rowe and Stirling had both been struck by Hardwick Hall during their military service, while Pevsner cited it as a particularly good example of “English squareness and the predominance of large expanses of window” that “creates… a curiously modern, that is twentieth-century effect.”³³ Peter Smithson admired it for its systematic organization of heating needs; in his later “Conversations with Students”, he noted the spine of fireplaces that ran along the long gallery—“fuel found formal expression in the organization of the houses” according to winter and summer uses of coal.³⁴ Equally, critics from Ruskin to John Betjeman had championed All Saints for its revolutionary use of color. In the Smithsons’ circle these two buildings had become code words for a British fearlessness regarding architectural languages, pushing their potential for expression to the extreme.

But Banham could not allow Hunstanton to rest comfortably in the past, however radical, preferring to see the work in a direct line of descent from a certain axis of the Modem Movement—not perhaps the outer forms of this modernism, but rather its “inner mechanisms.” By this he meant not the already academicized rote of functionalism, nor the International Style in general, but the earlier sense of a fundamental disrespect for tradition, of “a peculiar ruthlessness” that the Smithsons found in Dada. This systematic refusal of “gentlemen’s agreements and routine solutions” led, in Banham’s eyes, to a special kind of formal order, one that insisted on “legibility”, a quality that would later inform his theory of the New Brutalist “image.” Thus the plan rejects what Banham calls “the loose order of the free-plan school”, for it is no longer “free” but rather instantly readable from all sides as “a block enfolding inner courts.” It is also, Banham submits, “free from the sentimentalism of Frank Lloyd Wright or the formalism of Mies van der Rohe.”³⁵

In this first attempt to define a canon for New Brutalism, Banham took the easy way out, basing his assessment on a use of materials that, without “pretty detailing and applied art-work”, represented themselves: “every element is truly what it appears to be, serving as necessary structure and necessary decoration.”³⁶ Anticipating his critique of the modernists as academic, and his espousal of state-of-the-art technology, Banham noted that the steelwork at Hunstanton had been one of the first postwar structures to have been designed according to a new theory of structural calculation called “Plastic Theory.” Plastic Theory was a means of calculating the behavior of welded steel structures that were not susceptible to more traditional elastic frame analysis. The theory had been pioneered before the war in Germany, and refined by Jacques Heyman at Brown University before coming to the Cambridge Engineering Laboratories to join the engineer J. F. Baker in 1946. The new method had only recently been admitted into the British building code in 1948, a year before the Smithsons had submitted their competition design. The Smithsons had made full use of Plastic Theory as “a stressing discipline”, which took into account the process of welding: “Both Plastic Theory and welding stem from a conception of steel as a unique material—not as a kind of abstract stiffness cut to length, but as a ductile, weldable substance with elastic and plastic limits, a surface, feel, and appearance of its own, to be appreciated and used as Queen Anne buildings used brick, or Regency engineers used stone.”³⁷

Finally, Banham turned to the nature of the brick infill panels used to stiffen the frame in Plastic Theory calculation; these contrasted visually with the glazing while providing internal blank walls for the classrooms. As with the entire structure, the brick walls “were conceived from the very first… as performing structurally, functionally, and decoratively as parts of an integrated structure.”³⁸ Plastic Theory, in this sense, forced a holistic integration of the building elements at the same time as demanding that “every structural and functional element” be visible. Such visibility, Banham concluded, “imposes an existential responsibility upon the architect for every brick laid, every joint welded, every panel offered up.” This, then, would be what Banham identified as the ethical side of New Brutalism. And directly from the ethical followed the special aesthetic of the movement: the “new aesthetic of materials” calls for every surface to be seen as delivered, with nothing covered up unless “structurally or functionally unavoidable.” For the historian Banham, this provided an immediate connection between his new Brutalists and the old modernist ones—the Dadaists, “who accepted their materials ‘as found,’” or Moholy-Nagy in his Bauhaus period.

It is this valuation of materials which has led to the appellation “New Brutalist”, but it should now be clear that this is not merely a surface aesthetic of untrimmed edges and exposed services, but a radical philosophy reaching back to the first conception of the building. In this sense this is probably the most truly modern building in England, fully accepting the moral load which the Modern Movement lays upon the architect’s shoulders. It does not ingratiate itself with cosmetic detailing, but, like it or dislike it, demands that we should make up our minds about it, and examine our consciences in the light of that decision.

In the light of this canonical statement, Banham’s late and slightly querulous subtitle to his book New Brutalism seems already to have been answered: “ethic or aesthetic” is a both/and.

For the record, all did not go well with the brick construction at Hunstanton. Fabricated out of yellow “gault” brick, the panels were too porous; an experimental nine-inch thick “garden wall” “cracked badly when subjected to the local conditions of frost after prolonged horizontally driven rain.”³⁹ Only when rebuilt with a different lime mortar mix were they considered acceptable.

Corb or Mies?

Confusingly, New Brutalism thus originated in a work that, for all intents and purposes, was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Jaoul Houses; yet its most significant exemplar was a building designed three years before that, and four years before the term itself was adopted, a building that was inspired in turn by the IIT Campus buildings of Mies. For good measure, the only sources first mentioned by the New Brutalists themselves in 1953 were De Stijl, Dada, and Cubism, adding the Unité d’Habitation (not the Jaoul Houses) and Japanese architecture in 1954. Mies was nowhere to be found and not mentioned again until Peter Smithson’s visit to Chicago in 1958. There, confronted by the actuality of the IIT Campus, he wrote home to Alison, lamenting Mies’ numerous “Miestakes” and the “shabbiness which mars the external definition”—“it’s potty to try and make a building which can get dirty well.”⁴⁰

Perhaps the tenuous relationship to Mies, and the direct one with Corbusier, was the result of the way they discovered them, the former through a book (Philip Johnson’s Mies van der Rohe published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1947) and a magazine (the January 3, 1946, issue of Architects’ Journal), the latter through immediate experience. The Architects’ Journal had published the celebrated corner perspective view of Mies’s Library and Administration Building in 1946, about which Alison responded that it was “quite incomprehensible why anyone should draw large a rolled-steel beam and stanchion and some brick joints.”⁴¹ Yet it was this very drawing that served as an iconic “source” for the publication of Hunstanton, directly inspiring the Smithsons’ own corner perspective view of 1950.⁴² Clearly, from 1949 to 1952 Mies was the preferred inspiration for the Smithsons. Peter’s discovery of Johnson’s book influenced his final project for the Royal Academy Schools in 1949, a design for the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where he used “English rolled-steel sections and the English scale, to extend the steel-frame and glass language of Mies van der Rohe.”⁴³ Alison’s thesis at the University of Durham for the design of a Royal Academy building on the South Bank, London, used a similar frame construction.

Theo Crosby, in his introduction to the Smithsons’s 1955 statement on New Brutalism in Architectural Design, added another ingredient, one also attested to by Banham—the influence of Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, a book that brought the discussion of proportional theory back into postwar British architecture.⁴⁴ As Wittkower noted in the last sentence, “the subject is again very much alive in the minds of young architects today, and they may very well evolve new and unexpected solutions to this ancient problem.”⁴⁵ The same year Peter Smithson wrote a powerful defense of Wittkower’s book against its negative reception among art historians; later he was to claim that “neo-Palladianism” had been very much alive in 1947-48, only to reject the idea as a “new academicism” with his adoption of the New Brutalist label. Banham noted that this brief movement had inspired the “square on the diagonal” roof plan of the Smithsons’ competition entry for the new Coventry Cathedra: in 1951. Indeed Banham later almost apologizes for the axial plan of Hunstanton as no real “fault” of the Smithsons, as much as it was a product of this neo-Palladian moment that they later overcame.⁴⁶ As for the influence of Japan, the reference was not so much to the contemporary monumentalist, reinforced-concrete work of Tange and his school as to the traditional Japanese sources of the early Modern Movement itself—the temple aesthetic that had inspired Wright, Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and Mies, among others, helping to produce such modernist notions and devices as the open plan, continuous space, sliding screens, and open structure, as well as respect for materials.

This confusion of sources is understandable in the context of the 1950s. As Hadas Steiner notes in this issue⁴⁷, New Brutalism was born out of a generational reaction to the orthodoxy of CIAM and the heavy influence of the “Masters of the Modern Movement”. As late as 1965, the cover of a special issue of Architectural Design, edited by Peter Smithson and chronicling the history of the Modern Movement from 1910 to 1937, carried a photograph of Le Corbusier and Mies in conversation, implying that these heroes were still omnipresent in the minds of the younger generation. Fig. 1 In the end it was the direct experience of the Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles, and its dramatic use of reinforced concrete shuttering, that won over the Smithsons from Mies to Corbusier.

The Brick and the Billiard Ball

In the Smithsons’ Sheffield project… topology becomes the dominant and geometry becomes the subordinate discipline.
—Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, 1955

With the fervor of the newly converted, Banham now took up the cudgels for the term in what has become the classic article on New Brutalism.⁴⁸ On the index page of the Architectural Review, he applauded the emergence of the first postwar British avant-garde movement: “As Britain’s first native art movement since the systematic study of art history reached these islands, the New Brutalism needs to be seen in a double historical context—that of post-war architectural thought, and that of post-war historical writings on architecture.”⁴⁹

In 1953, on receiving his BA in art history from London University, Banham began research on his doctoral dissertation for Pevsner looking to fill in the historical gap between 1914, the end point of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement, and the development of modernism through the 1930s. He was particularly interested in Pevsner’s omissions, notably the Futurists and Expressionists; he also wanted to demystify the modernist cult of the machine hidden within academic forms, as opposed to the innovative use of the machine in truly modern ways. By 1954-55 Banham had rediscovered and written on Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” and Antonio Sant’Elia, published essays on “The Machine Aesthetic”, and reviewed the exhibitions Parallel of Life and Art and Richard Hamilton’s Man, Machine & Motion, a show for which he wrote the catalogue text. With his enthusiasm for modernist manifestos, it is easy to understand that he would have written his “New Brutalism” article both as a justification of this already formed movement (one capable of taking its place in the art-historical canon) and as a manifesto for a British architecture that could finally stand up to the challenge of the historical avant-gardes.

Writing first from the point of view of an art historian, Banham admitted that art history and its formal characterizations were partially responsible for “creating” the “Modern Movement”, adding that the importation of art history from Germany during the war had in turn influenced how architecture had been thought and practiced in Britain: “One cannot begin to study the New Brutalism without realizing how deeply the New Art-History has bitten into progressive English architectural thought, into teaching methods, into the common language of communication between architects and between architectural critics.”⁵⁰ This statement was clearly the self-conscious meditation of a Pevsner student deeply involved in writing his dissertation on the Modern Movement. Indeed, it was a mark of the rapidity with which modern architecture had become historicized according to art-historical categories that Banham felt bound to introduce the New Brutalism as an effect of art-historical writing.

On another level, Banham argued, the term “New Brutalism” was a polemical response to terms like “New Empiricism” and “New Humanism”, coined by Architectural Review to characterize Swedish modernism and British followers of the “William Morris Revival.”⁵¹ Banham here advanced a second argument for New Brutalism, one that this time was directly political, claiming that it was invented to counter those he characterized as “Communists” or “Marxists”, largely among the architects of the London County Council, devotees of “brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate)—picturesque detailing without picturesque planning.”⁵² Against the “soft” modernity of this group and its vilification of those who still believed in the “normal vocabulary of Modern Architecture”, he argued, some new approach, some “New X-ism”, was bound to emerge. Thus, from a “brick-bat thrown in the public’s face”, the term “New Brutalism” ceased to be a “label, a recognition tag” applied by art history, and became instead a “banner, a slogan, a policy adopted by a group of artists.”⁵³ And with the help of a few continental words—Le Corbusier’s béton brut, Dubuffet’s art brut—the Smithsons managed to capture the term “as their own, by their own desire and public consent.”⁵⁴

When he turned to the architectural definition of New Brutalism, however, Banham was reduced to characterizing it in extremely general terms: “1, Formal legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found.’”⁵⁵ These terms were so elastic, he admitted, that they could “be used to answer the question: Are there other New Brutalist buildings besides Hunstanton?” in the affirmative. Banham listed Le Corbusier’s Marseilles black, Mies’ Promontory and Lakeshore apartments in Chicago, Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center, the buildings of Aldo van Eyck in the Netherlands, and many others by architects associated with Team X, conceding immediately that the Smithsons themselves would reject most from their own New Brutalist canon. Only Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery of 1951-53 might survive the test, but even this was not quite “Brutalist”, since its inconsistent detailing could be construed as too “arty.”⁵⁶ This left Banham once more alone with Hunstanton. At this point, however, his argument made an unexpected swerve, introducing a fourth criterion entirely divorced from the inherent qualities of the object and related instead to its perceptual impact on the viewer: the aesthetic term “image”, or “the apprehensibility and coherence of the building as a visual entity.”

In introducing the notion of visual experience, Banham was now forced to tune his characterization carefully, for he had to guide New Brutalism toward a formal order that was neither academically symmetrical in the manner of the “New Palladianism” nor “picturesque” in the way that Pevsner had recently been interpreting Le Corbusier and the English functional tradition. The balancing act required was delicate, for the Architectural Review’s photographic representation of Hunstanton the year before, with its seven views taken as if on a walk around the building, had already transformed this otherwise symmetrical object into a quasi-picturesque experience.⁵⁷ Fig. 2 Thus for Banham the difference between a picturesque object and one experienced visually as a Brutalist object now hinged on the special meaning with which he endowed the word “image.”

The nature of the apprehended image had been much debated in English circles after the war.⁵⁸ The reception of Gestalt psychology had inspired research into the psychology of vision, buttressed by J. J. Gibson’s The Perception of the Visual World, itself strongly influenced by the author’s experience as a pilot.⁵⁹ There was also the work of E. H. Gombrich, as he developed between 1952 and 1956 the theories later published in Art and Illusion (1960). Further, Banham’s circle at the ICA was preoccupied with assessing the enormous expansion in advertising, product design, and consumerism in the United States, as well as its increasing impact in Britain. In the sense discussed in the lectures and discussions hosted by the Independent Group on “Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art”, the “image” referred to “something which is visually valuable, but not necessarily by the standards of classical aesthetics.”⁶⁰ For Banham, this definition would apply equally to the photographs exhibited in Parallel of Life and Art, a painting by Jackson Pollock, the roofscape of the Unité d’Habitation, and a 1954 Cadillac convertible; it was a definition that allowed him to “bridge the gap between the meaning of the term as applied to architecture and its meaning as applied to painting and sculpture.”⁶¹ In this way, Banham’s substitution of “image” for “beauty” (again, “something which is visually valuable, but not necessarily by the standards of classical aesthetics”) was parallel to the earlier substitution of the sublime for the beautiful by Edmund Burke, performed to encompass the terrifying within an expanded aesthetics.⁶² Already by 1954, Banham was exploring this notion of the image in an article on a film on Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in the Cornish landscape. “The introduction of these affective and highly emotive objects into the landscape alters values all around”, he wrote, listing the “lessons” that these objects can teach the architect about the relationships among the new, the time-worn, and the natural landscape.⁶³ Thus the “design and siting of any construction… must be considered as an abstract assembly of volumes in relationship to a landscape or townscape setting, and in relation to the possible and obligatory viewpoints from which it may be seen.”⁶⁴ In the film, this effect was the more striking as the object was experienced, “the form itself turning before the camera eye”, thus enhancing the “visual memorability of the screen image.”⁶⁵ Here, the transposition of the experience of a sculptural object in a landscape to the more general experience of the image of a building, may be seen the germ of the “image” idea that Banham applies first to Hunstanton, and then to the later projects of the Smithsons.

Yet the application of the idea of image to architecture in general, and to Hunstanton in particular, demanded more than a general sense of the word. According to Banham, it required not simply “that the building should be an immediately apprehensible entity” but that “the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the experience of the building in use.” Admitting that this might be a quality inherent in all great architecture, Banham shifted his argument to claim that New Brutalism’s “form” was, despite the unfortunate formality of Hunstanton, actually “aformal.” Here it was the Smithsons’ projects for Golden Lane housing and the Sheffield University competition, with their full deployment of collage to present a “coherent visual image” by “non-formal means”, that demonstrated the true “aformal” nature of the New Brutalism.

The introduction of “aformalism” now allowed Banham a further turn in his argument. For in his view, this quality was supported not by the academic geometries of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Palladianism, but by a radically new use of topology in the way a building related to its site and to its own structure. Here Banham was following the emerging interest in nongeometrical, topological description in the 1950s and ’60s, which artists and architects saw as a “model of the synthesis of aesthetics and science.”⁶⁶ In topological terms, formal properties could be described independently of size and shape, so that, in a familiar example, a teacup and a gramophone record would, despite differences in shape, have the same surface characteristics. For Banham the analogue was especially useful, as it allowed him to constitute the Brutalist image as one continuous whole from brick to building. Further, topology also allowed for the bridging of the gap between the traditional ideal of beauty and the Brutalist “image”, for in topological terms, as he wrote, “a brick is the same ‘shape’ as a billiard ball.”

From this premise, Banham extrapolated an idea of aformal composition that allowed him to advance a theory of Brutalism that rejected “elementary rule-and-compass geometry” in favor of an intuitive sense of composition, one that would, as in the Golden Lane housing project, “create a coherent visual image by non-formal means emphasizing visible circulation, identifiable units of habitation, and fully validating the presence of human beings as part of the total image—the perspectives had photographs of people pasted on to the drawings, so that the human presence almost overwhelmed the architecture.”⁶⁷ According to Banham, this concept was advanced even further in the Sheffield University project, such that the traditional roles of geometry and topology were reversed. Here

topology becomes the dominant and geometry becomes the subordinate discipline. The “connectivity” of the circulation routes is flourished on the exterior and no attempt is made to give a geometrical form to the total scheme; large blacks of topologically similar spaces stand about the site with the same graceless memorability as Martello towers or pit-head gear.⁶⁸

A year later, reviewing the exhibition This Is Tomorrow for Architectural Review, Banham appreciated the work of John Weeks and Adrian Heath, in which “structure was the totality of the exhibit”, as “a wall of standard bricks which were displaced or omitted to give it the plasticity and significance of an abstract sculpture.”⁶⁹ That these “bricks” were actually concrete blacks, only demonstrated the power of the brick as an icon of the New Brutalism to overshadow any other material.

More significantly, Banham was disappointed in the Smithsons’ exhibit Patio and Pavilion, designed with Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, that “showed the New Brutalists at their most submissive to traditional values” as they “stocked” their patio with “sculptures signifying the most time-honored of man’s activities and needs”—simply, in his terms, “a confirmation of accepted values and symbols.”⁷⁰ More “Brutalist” in spirit, by far, in Banham’s eyes, was the installation by John Voelcker, Richard Hamilton, and John McHale, with its “optical illusions, scale reversions, oblique structures, and fragmented images.”⁷¹ These contributed to return the viewer to comprehension of the fragmented images of sensory experience-images that resisted “classification by the geometrical disciplines by which most other exhibits were dominated.”⁷² In this sweeping repudiation of the original New Brutalism as “as found”, Banham finally confirmed his consecration of the topological image as the foundation for the New Brutalist identity.

Counter-Attack of the “Hard Cases”

Brutalism is becoming a European phenomenon, and characteristics would appear to be no plan, material finishes, enclosed space, less interior-exterior space punctuation, not necessarily a spatial structure, nor the expression of functionalism—frequently anti-technological.
—James Stirling, “The Black Notebook”, 1955⁷³

In a long note on the state of contemporary art and architecture, developed for a discussion at the ICA, Stirling began to air his dissatisfaction with Brutalism as it had evolved from the purely English “New” version of the early 1950s to the more general style of the mid-1950s. As an example, he cited the recently completed house by André Wogenscky at Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, published in Architectural Design in November 1955.⁷⁴ The Wogenscky house was, in his terms, a betrayal of the rational and constructivist current in modernism that emphasized the “plastic (brutal)” use of materials without regard for spatial organization, structural consistency, and inside-out expansion. Stirling’s notes of 1955-56 thus reveal a distancing from both the English and the continental versions of Brutalism. In the same notebook, he drew diagrams tracing the checkered relations between technology and art through the previous century. Pessimistic about the future of a modern technological architecture in England (due to “peculiar social conscience”, “surplus of population, guilt complex, combined with a decline in wealth”), he was equally critical of the pseudo-technological stance of AA students turning out their “‘intuitive’ engineering diagrams in the name of architecture.”⁷⁵ His solution was to return to the traditional dichotomy between “classic” and “romantic” positions, immediately placing the Brutalists among the “romantics” for their love of the incomplete and imperfect, with Jacob Bakema’s own house in Rotterdam (published by Peter Smithson in Architectural Design in August 1954) taken as a primary example. Stirling pointed out the inconsistency of the design, where the rear wall seemed to be of poured concrete but was actually rendered wall-bearing brick, yet pierced by a horizontal slit window to make it look like a frame structure as at Le Corbusier’s Poissy, while the steel columns of the frame had no apparent connection to it. Sterling posited a final example, with reference to the projects submitted to CIAM X at Dubrovnik in 1956: the Smithsons’ farmhouse design (Bates Burrows Lea Farm). Interestingly enough, Stirling compared this “non-art”, romantic imperfectionism to the more “logical use of brick” in Le Corbusier’s Jaoul Houses—a characterization, based on the published drawings, that he would qualify on actually seeing the houses in the summers of 1954 and 1955.

Already in 1954-55, then, we see not simply a rivalry between two strong-minded architects in the small London circle around Banham, but also the beginnings of an alternative principle based on a renewed rationalism. This principle would be confirmed by Stirling’s visits to the Paris houses and to Ronchamp, where he found rationalism put into crisis by Le Corbusier’s apparently radical shift from the cool modernism of his Garches house to the rough North African vemacular of Jaoul, and thence to the total expressionism of Ronchamp. His well-known critique of the Jaoul Houses—as a vernacular out of place in a cosmopolitan capital, with its rough concrete and brickwork more appropriate to rural origins—has been exhaustively treated by Mark Crinson in an article that points directly to Stirling’s distance from the Brutalist Smithsons.⁷⁶ Certainly Stirling’s flats at Ham Common, designed in 1955-58, bear all the marks of his experience of Jaoul—horizontal concrete floor slabs separating brick load-bearing walls that, to all intents and purposes, are Brutalist in sensibility. But, as Crinson notes, the difference in handling materials here, with smooth concrete and well-laid bricks, “also acts as a kind of commentary on the Paris houses.” As Stirling commented on his visit to Jaoul, “by English standards the brickwork is poor”: “I don’t think Corb uses brickwork very intelligently.”⁷⁷ Stirling’s conclusion was that hard-finished, blue engineering bricks would have been more appropriate for a mature machine-age architecture.

It was thus no surprise that, when Banham reviewed the Flats at Ham Common in 1958, associating Stirling and Gowan directly to the New Brutalism, the architects responded immediately. “We do not consider ourselves ‘new brutalist,’” they stated bluntly and with hardly concealed animosity towards Banham’s art-historical appropriation: “‘New brutalist’ is a journalistic tag applied to some designers of architectural credit, in a morale-boosting attempt to sanctify a movement as ‘Britain’s contribution’ and to cover up for the poor showing of our postwar architecture.”⁷⁸ In a later article, “Afterthoughts on the Flats at Ham Common”, Stirling and Gowan, responding to the suggestion that the flats were “brutalist in design”, summed up their position:

The “new Brutalism”, a term which we used to regard on the one hand as a narrow interpretation of one aspect of architecture, specifically the use of materials and components ‘as found’—an already established attitude; and on the other hand, as a well-intentioned but over-patriotic attempt to elevate English architecture to an international status. But whatever the term might initially have meant it is clear from recent and repeated derisive journalistic asides, that it must now have created in the public eye an image of pretentiousness, artiness, and irresponsibility, and as such the continuation of its use can only be detrimental to modern architecture in this country.⁷⁹

As for the flats, they were, the architects stated, simply built according to the client’s low-cost specifications, with “simple and everyday materials”, and load-bearing brick walls “calculated structurally to get the maximum of window openings”, with recessed pointing to cast an “oblique shadow”, and the concrete floor beams “patterned by the formwork.” “We do not know”, they concluded ironically, “if this specification is in accord with the ‘new brutalism.’”⁸⁰

The Roundup

The New Brutalism eludes description.
—Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, 1955

Looking back eleven years later on the “movement” he had theorized in 1955, Banham decided not to reprint his “New Brutalism” article, deeming it not “truly representative of the state of the Brutalist movement at that important time in its evolution”, and revealing “only too clearly” his “attempt to father” some of his own “pet notions.”⁸¹ This self-critique reinforces the impression, fostered by his earlier editorial comment on Hunstanton, that if there was indeed a “New Brutalist” movement it was almost entirely of Banham’s own invention, supported by only one completed building.

The book itself was brief enough, no more than fifty pages of text, but these were supplemented by nearly two hundred illustrations of buildings and projects that, in Banham’s eyes, demonstrated that New Brutalism, beginning in England, had by 1966 become an almost worldwide phenomenon. Commissioned by the German art historian Jürgen Joedicke, in 1963, the book used the same terms Banham had employed for tracing the history of “theory and design in the first machine age.” Beginning with a definition of the term, Banham consecrated a long section on the necessary birth of Brutalism in the context of the 1950s. Indeed, the book is unabashedly partisan throughout. Still smarting from the violent polemics over architectural and urban reconstruction after 1945, Banham characterized the architects of the LCC as “Communist” (though he now admitted that this implied a “Marxist” and “social-realist” position more than any party affiliation). For Banham, the radical opposition of the Smithson generation was primary, trumping any political struggles reflecting the turn towards entente in the Soviet bloc with Khrushchev’s about-face. Scornful of Labor policy, and of a socialism of the “non-revolutionary left”, he made it evident that New Brutalism was a radical move par excellence, dismissing any social inheritance from Philip Webb’s “Red House” for William Morris (1859-60), so long an iconic symbol for the socialist movement in England.

However, in dismissing the efforts of the New Humanists and the New Empiricists to develop a “style based on a sentimental regard for nineteenth century vernacular usages, with pitched roofs, brick or rendered walls, window-boxes, balconies, pretty paintwork, a tendency to elaborate woodwork detailing, and freely picturesque detailing on the ground”,⁸² Banham failed to confront the Brutalists’ own affection for the vernacular, such as the Smithson’s attachment to peasant architecture and their various experiments in popular idioms (e.g., their brick Sugden House with its council-house detailing and parodic window placements). In the end, the essential question was not about materials but about form—the strict and reduced forms of the Soho House countering the “soft” shallow pitched roofs of Aiton East Housing at Roehampton.

Banham was equally forceful in nominating Pevsner as the villain the Brutalists were bound to reject, both for his espousal of the picturesque and for his nostalgic appeal to the “Englishness of English art”; also suspect were the painters and sculptors, led by John Betjeman, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland, who saw England through the “fashionably morbid” lens of landscape and suburban values. Banham strongly repudiated any connections between the Angry Young Men of English literature and drama and the New Brutalists, decrying the “provincial” values of John Wain and Kingsley Amis, and claiming that the Brutalists were aiming a lot higher despite their “Redbrick” origins.⁸³ Here, however, he was carried away by the battles of the moment, for, though John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was not staged until 1956, three years after New Brutalism had emerged as a term, Leslie Paul’s autobiography Angry Young Man had been published in 1951, and Amis’s Lucky Jim in 1954, the very year of Hunstanton’s emergence as the sign of the movement. And not long afterwards, Stirling himself would refer to Lucky Jim as a source for the social message of his and Gowan’s housing at Preston. Perhaps the association between the “rough poetry” of the architects and the kitchen sink dramas of the Angries was not entirely without resonance.

The most remarkable feature of the book, however, was the spirited round-up of potential Brutalists, starting with Mies and Le Corbusier, continuing with Kahn, and moving from the Smithsons, Stirling, and Gowan, to a wide range of Scandinavian, Dutch, Japanese, and German architects. Nonetheless, for Banham, the movement remained fundamentally English; for example, he read Colin St. John Wilson’s addition to the School of Architecture at Cambridge as a “manifesto” building placing the “Cambridge School” led by Sir Leslie Martin at the center of Brutalist development. The Wilson addition was, in Banham’s words, a “fundamentally simple and workmanlike building”, with materials—brick, concrete and wood—that “dominate the visual aesthetic.” The book ends triumphantly with images of Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester University Engineering building (1959-63), a work by the two architects who had vehemently denied that they were Brutalists at all.

The Sad End

Thus the author who foster-fathered New Brutalism and without whom its message would never have spread even half as far as he proposes it did, finally kills it with his own hand on page 134 in the year 1963.
—Robin Boyd, “The Sad End of New Brutalism”, 1967⁸⁴

The responses to Banham’s elegy were less critical than wistful, less out to prove him wrong than to clarify the differences between what the Smithsons thought and did and what other architects bundled under the descriptive label had in common. For Robin Boyd, the common denominator among Tange, Paul Rudolph, Kahn, and the Smithsons was their “aggressive candor”, following as they did Le Corbusier’s lead as he rubbed “the smug taste of Parisians with rough, raw concrete.” Under this rubric, Boyd admitted, “all will look to be New Brutalist.”⁸⁵

But Banham’s attempt to see the English section of the movement “radiating influence out to at least three corners of the earth” was less an exercise in “bragging”, Boyd suggested, than a gesture leaving “a wistful, almost haunting sense of sadness.” Certainly, he argued, New Brutalism can be considered one of the most articulate of the postwar attempts to save modern architecture’s “original integrity and strength”, but “it cannot be inflated more than that.”⁸⁶ As an ethic it was valid, but as an aesthetic it was surprisingly timid (especially compared to Tange’s monumentalism). And if the criteria were inclusive of buildings stemming either from Jaoul or the Unité d’Habitation, then many had been left out of Banham’s roster—notably Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building at Yale and John Andrews’s Scarborough College, not to mention buildings in Latin America. Banham’s examples were, Boyd argued, so diverse in style that “one is led finally to the suspicion that the aesthetic of New Brutalism can be found in anything that was built by Alison and Peter Smithson, or in anything that in Dr. Banham’s opinion looks as though it might have been.” In the end the book remained an “oblique view of an episode in the life of the Smithson”, an episode that was over the moment they gained larger-scale commissions and no longer needed a slogan.⁸⁷ The Smithsons themselves were predictably offended that Banham had not consulted them in the writing of his book, and in their response to his review they complicated the search for origins of New Brutalism even further by claiming that its first monument was not by Le Corbusier or Mies but by Aalto in the rear façade of his MIT dormitory of 1947.

In his own review of Banham’s epilogue for New Brutalism, Robin Middleton, whose editorship at Architectural Design ensured that he had been privy to the gossip all along, reprised the movement with compassion and his usual dry wit. To write the history of such a recent movement displayed, he complained, “the great disadvantage of contemporary history that is too contemporary” especially because Banham, as historian, had himself been too active in the movement, attempting to record it as an innocent bystander, and therefore too easily forgetful of the private engagements, the “war of words”, that was “seething underground” as the young architects were fighting for “an architecture of ruthless integrity and social intent.” Agreeing with Boyd, Middleton finds that the movement was in the end a private one, a “Smithson Movement.” Nevertheless, as he concluded, the book “will bring tears to the eyes of old Brutalists.”⁸⁸

It was fitting that the last—or penultimate—words were spoken by Peter and Alison Smithson in a conversation with E. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew reprinted in this issue. In response to Fry’s observation that Brutalism signals “a very fierce morality which will only deal with London stock brick and bush hammered concrete”, Peter retorted: “I am obsessionally against the brick.”⁸⁹ Much later Alison would tie down the argument once and for all: “I still cannot face brickwork. On Tyneside I was surrounded with brickwork still being dirtied by industry.”⁹⁰

Bibliographie