This article is an independent version of the article published in this issue of DOK Architecture Magazine. You can access the entire magazine via this link:
Brutalism, as an act of creating spaces with radical honesty, has never placed beauty or aesthetics before purpose and goals. Its origins lie in a chaotic world that nourishes all living things. Governments wanted to protect their people with the simplest solutions.
One of the clearest early examples, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, was a concrete giant built not for luxury but for survival. It was not beautiful in the conventional sense. It was not soft. However, it offered dignity in the form of shelter in a Europe still covered in ashes.
Unité d’Habitation, France 1952 Le Corbusier
Designers did not want to use design as an escape from the reality of a building and began to realize that its beauty actually came from its originality and character.
Alison and Peter Smithson —contributors to the definition of the New Brutalism movement— believed that buildings should reflect the raw reality of society. For them, simplifying architecture was not minimalism. It was an act of resistance.
Brutalism exposed all the pain hidden beneath wallpaper, ornate furniture, spacious but soulless rooms, epic handmade paintings, and underlying hypocrisy.
The appearance of a brutalist building today tells us very little about the original design process behind it. We need to look back at the post-war world to understand the real quest behind the choice of béton brut. Derived from the French term béton brut, meaning “raw concrete,” this style was never about finishing or perfection.
This was about disclosure. The structure on display. The reality beyond the surface.
When you are in a position where the decisions you make affect not only yourself but also millions of followers, you must be ruthlessly honest and even harsh in order to fulfill your duty to save everyone from damnation.
The fact that brutalist buildings represent reality and honesty explains why this style became mainstream. These buildings were designed to protect the lives of those living inside them and at the same time allow people to change them as they wished.
Brutalism was not a desperate movement. It was a disciplined presentation. It was a structure built with the belief that people would fill it with warmth.
And think of this as a blank canvas with many advantages.
The European lifestyle encourages going out and spending days outdoors for work, meeting friends, or being an active member of the community at a café or concert.
However, this logic quickly falls apart, because people do not only need houses to rest.
We need roots. If we think of home as a place we go to sleep and leave in the morning, we would never have left the caves or would still be living in tents.
Your home should be a place that inspires you to get up every morning. It should give you hope and faith in a better future for everything you love.
In a way, Brutalism gave us a cave, as if we were restarting our evolution, and saved us from building cathedrals. From a designer’s perspective, this may seem like an exciting opportunity to have a home designed specifically for your needs. However, if we consider the lives of people at that time, we can clearly understand the reactions that arose. People were on the brink of technological innovation in a rapidly changing world. Within a few decades, they were witnessing progress that had taken centuries to achieve.
The same situation applies to information disseminated via the Internet.
And then the real collapse happened.
There was no way to quickly transfer information.
There was no plan.
Millions of people were now living in a world they could not even imagine, in buildings they no longer understood.
They were lost between their childhood in the early 1900s and the “modern” days in which they could not participate.
Subsequently, millions of homes began to experience maintenance problems and poor workmanship.
The authorities ignored these blind spots. Until they could no longer be ignored.
There was crime at the heart of the building, and it was starting to rot from the inside out.
Trellick Tower, England 1972 Ernő Goldfinger
Nowhere has this been felt more keenly than at London’s Trellick Tower. Designed by Ernő Goldfinger, the building was once a symbol of egalitarian housing. However, poor maintenance, isolation, and sensationalist media coverage have turned it into a national scapegoat.
When people realized that they were living a harder life than their families, they began to feel pain. They were not progressing; they were struggling to survive in concrete cages. This situation drove people to rebellion and pushed the press to challenge the idea that they had to endure pain in order to live another day in this world.
When all beliefs and struggles began to emerge, we saw the real reason behind the concrete choice.
It provided us with shelter. It ensured the survival of humanity for a longer period of time.
He clearly stated that every soul has the right to live in this cruel world.
It showed us that we can be strong but ugly.
It showed us that we can be honest and simple. It showed us that life is not lived within walls, but in meals, in mourning, in the moments that walls hold.
It showed us that it is a shell that allows us to be free and hopeful.
While doing all this, he also protected society.
Let’s look at Brutalism from today’s perspective and discuss what we have learned from it.
It’s pretty clear that we love creating concrete buildings that require almost no maintenance.
However, as technology advances faster than ever, we have begun to prefer the new over the reliable.
The life we live today can be seen in similar ways all over the world. Without considering the cultural background of societies, it has become more widespread and similar. Even though no one owns a single suit, minimalism has developed in this context.
At its core, it encourages creating multiple functions in designs, but this creates a gap between what the typical end user wants and what you want.
Because it dictates how you will listen, sit, sleep, create, eat, watch, and use in a single form.
Minimalism was a genuine quest for the reality that life takes place within spaces and between people. The aim was to create a space where our moments could be lived in silence.
From this perspective, it has a very similar goal to Brutalism. Both sought to be a means rather than an end to a satisfying life.
However, at some point, both styles ceased to be tools and became aesthetic. They were created to serve us, but we began to serve them.
Source: Friends
As time passed, our expectations of architecture changed and we adapted architecture to our needs. However, when we try to satisfy a lifestyle that is not in line with our values, we lose sight of what we are really looking for.
Brutalism gave us a blank canvas that we can fill with our colorful lives.
We should not be surprised that living a black-and-white life and “thinking” in a Brutalist building leads to depression. We blame inanimate objects or walls for our most valuable problems.
Perhaps the real problem is not the buildings, but our lives that have become standardized, uniform, and devoid of color and unique nuances.