Brutalist Architecture - Brutalism Today

Brutalism Today

Although the Brutalist movement was largely dead by the mid-1980s, having largely given way to Structural Expressionism and Deconstructivism, it has experienced an updating of sorts in recent years. Many of the rougher aspects of the style have been softened in newer buildings, with concrete façades often being sandblasted to create a stone-like surface, covered in stucco, or composed of patterned, pre-cast elements. Modernist architects taking this approach in recent projects include Steven Ehrlich, Ricardo Legorreta, and Gin Wong. The firm of Victor Gruen and Associates has revamped the style for the many courthouse buildings it has been contracted to design. Architects from Latin America have been reviving the style on a smaller scale in recent years. Brutalism has recently experienced a major revival in Israel, due to the perceived sense of strength and security the style creates.

Even in Britain, where the style was most prevalent (and later the most reviled), a number of buildings recently (as of 2006) have appeared in an updated Brutalist style, including Solidspace's 1 Centaur Street in Lambeth, London, and Elder & Cannon's The Icon in Glasgow in Scotland. The 2005 Stirling Prize shortlist contained a number of buildings (most notably Zaha Hadid's BMW Central Building and the eventual winner, Enric Miralles' Scottish Parliament Building) featuring significant amounts of exposed concrete, something that would have been regarded as aesthetically unacceptable when the prize was inaugurated nine years previously.

There also has been a reappraisal of first-generation Brutalist architecture and a growing appreciation that dislike of the buildings often stems from poor maintenance and social problems resulting from poor management, rather than the designs themselves. In 2005 the British television channel Channel 4 ran a documentary, I Love Carbuncles, which placed the U.K.'s Brutalist legacy in a more positive light. Some Brutalist buildings have been granted listed status as historic and others, such as Gillespie, Kidd and Coia's St. Peter's Seminary, named by Prospect magazine's survey of architects as Scotland's greatest post-war building, have been the subject of conservation campaigns. The Twentieth Century Society has campaigned against the demolition of buildings such as the Tricorn Centre and Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park.