What Was The New Brutalism Really About - Essay Example

Running Head: What was "The New Brutalism" What was "The New Brutalism" really about Raw concrete Frank functionalism Or gritty social realism [Name of the writer] [Name of the institution] What was "The New Brutalism" really about Raw concrete Frank functionalism Or gritty social realism The reason for the continued urgency is an apparently never-ending schism between how the general public perceive the after-effects f Brutalism, and the immovable conviction by architects that this period was their heyday. For architects, this was both the last time the profession could transform the everyday lives f the many on a concerted scale; and also the last time a style had social and political purpose, imbued with architectural integrity. As for the public, they just hate it. The fall-out persists into this century. Before the public can give any large-scale commitment again to architects, a line f mutual understanding has to be drawn under the circumstances which generated the styles and forms f this period. The picturesque architecture f the 1940s and early 1950s is currently enjoying new interest. Its most well-known example is the buildings f the Festival f Britain. This was a national festival put on six years after the end f war, in 1951, which temporarily occupied the area f the South Bank f the Thames directly opposite London's West End. It is considered against the once again popular Ealing comedy, Passport to Pimlico. The Festival buildings embody what's been seen either as a happy marriage or an abominable birth. They are the result f the fusion between two apparently opposed traditions: the rigours f international modernism and the English picturesque tradition, a tradition which implies design first and foremost in terms f the composition f a series f visual pictures.1 In film, there was a broad, and perhaps equally popular equivalent: the Ealing comedy. These quintessentially English films emanated from the Ealing Studio in west London, and were at their best in this period. They epitomise the spirit f post-war Britain and London in particular: a hybrid world where there was a simultaneous longing for radical change and tangible continuity. As if to express this strange contradiction, the comedies feature gangs f lovable robbers, charming and funny murderers and, in the case f Passport to Pimlico, sensible and conventional anarchists. Both architecture and film began to go markedly out f fashion in the second post-war decade. They were replaced with monochrome, and supposedly true-to-life genres: Brutalism's parallel was Britain's version f the New Wave in cinema.2 Angstridden, alienated loners replace chirpy communities. Remorseless realism replaces happy endings. This is both an exploration f parallels between their aesthetics and their preoccupations, and an attempt to cast insight from architecture on cinema and vice versa. The idea f the hybrid is the opposite f the pure. The hybrid straddles two or more classes; its edges are unclear, and difficult to delineate, to draw a line around. The hybrid doesn't have an identifiable, categorisable form. The hybrid obscures the possibility f its reduction to an original set f parts or classes. The hybrid transgresses the edges f established forms. The pure and the hybrid polarise the two tendencies in British post-war architecture. And these two tendencies can be personified in two iconic buildings, the Skylon and Hunstanton School. The Skylon (Figure 1) was a vertical structure built for the Festival f Britain in 1950, and designed by two competition-winning architectural students, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya. Hunstanton School, another competition winner designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, was one f the first Brutalist buildings completed six years late, and crucial to Brutalism's identification as a new and challenging style (Figure 2). The presentation drawing shows the Skylon as part f a picturesque composition complete with moody sky, passing boat and Victorian railway bridge. It also shows that it is meant to be experienced as seamless. Skylon was clad in steel panelling but the edges between components are suppressed, the line between distinct constructional parts fuzzed. The structure connecting the Skylon to the ground is similarly made invisible. The structure seems to float intangibly: the point at its bottom end means it can never sit on the ground like a structure that could be categorised as 'tower'. Skylon, like its equally popular post-war namesake, Nylon, is a hybrid. By contrast, Hunstanton is pure. While it completely lacks what became the Brutalist tag, uncovered concrete, Hunstanton is a textbook f the characteristics behind the idea f this most self-conscious f styles. Hunstanton declares the distinct categories f its construction throughout. The edge is clearly underlined between brick panel and steel frame. It is equally clear that the frame not the bricks holds the building up. The purity f its form, expressed by the parts that make up the building, is as transparent from inside as it is from outside (Figure 3). No attempt is made to cover up any edge, or obscure any category. In this interpretation, Brutalism defends borders; it upholds the unpolluted and pure against the hybrid characteristics f the Festival Style. The problem, though, as ever, is how to relate these specifically visual aspects f architecture to broader social and political ideas, that is, the context for these two markedly different ways f making buildings. Mary Douglas herself establishes terms which cross over from the material to the social. She characterises four varieties f social 'pollution', all associated with defence f the border. They are threats to external boundaries; threats to internal lines within a social system; threats to margins f the lines defining a social system; and the fourth variety is 'danger from internal contradiction, when some f the basic postulates are denied by other basic postulates, so that at certain points the system seems to be at war with itself'.3 All these kinds f social pollution described directly threaten the coherent delineation f a particular community, its defining edges and rules. They can be used to understand perceived threats to the architectural community itself after the end f the second world war, and to characterise those threats as a battle f the pure versus the hybrid. The architectural historian and critic, Reyner Banham, is acknowledged as the official chronicler f Brutalism. He himself along with Alison and Peter Smithson was a member f the self-styled Independent Group, an avant-garde f artists and architects, formed in London in 1952. They originated both the idea and the term 'Brutalism'. It is from the activities and concerns f the Independent Group that he identifies the genesis f the style in his 1966 book The New Brutalism.4 For Banham, it's clear that what the profession understood as 'architecture' was under threat both from the Festival Style, and also from widespread local authority architecture f the immediate post-war years, 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 grouping. He goes on: "The younger generation, viewing these works, had the depressing sense that the drive was going out f Modern Architecture, its pure dogma being diluted by politicians and compromisers who had lost their intellectual nerve." The functionalist principles f modernist design were handed down from the European masters f the early years f the 20th century. These principles were, by the end f the 1930s, the established rules f architectural practice. Going back to Douglas, it was these rules - machine aesthetic and anti-decorative in appearance - which defined the internal lines, the borders, f architectural aesthetics as a system. And it is these rules, referred to by Banham as modern architecture's 'pure dogma', which were perceived as polluted and transgressed by the post-war hybrid style. It was not just the new style's literal transgression f pure modernist lines with 'elaborate woodwork detailing and freely picturesque grouping' that threatened professional purity. It was the very fact f the hybridity f this new, debased, modernist style. Douglas' statement that pollution threatens when there is 'danger from internal contradictionso thatthe system seems to be at war with itself' is particularly apposite here. Banham does not identify this as a problem f confrontation f one style with another. Rather, his concern is with the debasement f the identifying characteristics f modernism by the new style, which in the public mind was and continues to be associated with 'modern architecture'. The problem, in other words, is the hybrid. It's important that Banham places Brutalism's ruthless pursuit f 'honesty' in architecture in the tradition f the great modernist rule-makers. The morality that approved the raw concrete f the Unit (f Le Corbusier) could equally well approve the use that Mies van der Rohe had made f steel, glass and brick in the campus buildings at Illinois. Reflecting its 19th-century origins as an idea in the work f John Ruskin and others, architectural 'honesty' is characterised as not covering things up. In other words, the moral connotations f the 'honest' are directly transferred onto the architecture. True architecture is created out f a series f bold, and bald, statements f what material abuts what, what structure supports what. How the building is revealed to have been made is all important. So this is inevitably an aesthetic preoccupied with construction. It is above all at the junction between two building elements that the architect has the choice between an aesthetic f hiding, covering up how the building is put together, and one f revealing it. If we associate the idea f the honest with the pure, the characteristics f Brutalist architecture slip into place. These include the use f materials that can be called 'elemental' rather than hybrid, invented ones - as in concrete, and not plastic. It means the emphatic underlining f the identifiable origins f materials - as in never colouring painting or rendering over concrete. It means the accentuation f the undisguised edge to a building component, such as recessed joints between individual bricks. What is intriguing about this particular architectural aesthetic is that these are essentially arbitrary formal qualities, but they come not just to signify honesty, but to be understood as honest in and f themselves, the moral essence f honesty, as Ruskin himself would have argued. Banham, writing in The New Brutalism, conveys the feeling that the post-war decade is a period f political, as well as architectural, muddle, and indeed muddiness. The war-time experiences f the designers f the first new towns and the Festival f Britain 'had served to confuse their aims and blunt their intellectual attack'.5 In particular, Banham implicates the championing by the London County Council, which was the largest architectural practice in post-war Britain, f the decorated modernism he calls 'People's Detailing'. He intimates that the style was associated with the Communist caucus within its architect's department, and that it was seen as the equivalent to Socialist Realism, the Communist Party's officially sanctioned aesthetic at the time. This is the political context for the unprecedented vilification by Reyner Banham f the respected editor f Architectural Review, J.M. Richards, for his book on the English suburb, The Castles on the Ground.6 Banham calls the book "a specimen example f war-time home thoughts from abroad, a sentimental evocation (written in Cairo) f the virtues and less damaging vices f Victorian suburbiathis book in particular was regardedas a blank betrayal f everything that the Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for".7 The betrayal was personal. Before the war, Richards had been one f the most vociferous and influential f exponents f European modernism. The Castles on the Ground is a persuasive argument for an architecture f 'the animating spirit f popular sanction' - popular architecture, as we would now call it. Such an architecture should stand against both 'private connoisseurship and technological narcissism',8 and the notion f an avant-garde. And writing on the avant-garde, Richards says that: we can only progress democratically at a speed which does not outpace the slow growth f the public's understanding, in particular its assimilation f social and technical change. Notes 1. Contemporary commentators - for example, the 'New Empiricism' edition f the Architectural Review - acknowledged the hybrid styles debt to Swedish modernism. The argument here is that this so-called 'empirical' modernism was adopted because it was understood within an already established picturesque tradition. 2. '"the British New Wave". The phrase was coined in echo f the French nouvelle vogue f distinctive films f around the same time to refer to what was seen as an analogous breakthrough in the production f British film.' Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, (UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 117-18. 3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis f the Concepts f Pollution and Taboo, (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 122. 4. Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism, (London: The Architectural Press, 1966). 5. Banham, op. cit., p. 13. 6. J.M. Richards, The Castles on the Ground, (London: The Architectural Press, 1946). 7. Banham, op. cit., p. 13. 8. Richards, op. cit., p. 14. Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Read More