Seeing as we’re doing brutalism discourse: The word “brutal” means bad! It has no positive connotations. It’s like satanism....
Seeing as we’re doing brutalism discourse:
The word “brutal” means bad! It has no positive connotations. It’s like satanism. It’s not exactly surprising that people think that your movement is “lets be bad on purpose” if you name yourself after a vice.
It just means “raw” in French, where it comes from. (Like brut champagne: unsweetened.)
Probably it’s a little more complicated than that. Le Corbusier talked about béton brut in 1952, but “brutalism” was coined by British architects, so it’s surely a deliberate pun on the word “brutal”.
Apparently the word had been used in conversation for a while before first getting committed to print, so it’s not known who coined it. The first appearance seems to be a short unsigned column in the April 1954 issue of Architectural Review, about a building designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. (I’ve seen suggested that the column was written by Alison and Peter too.)
The New Brutalism
Reactions against the tendency to over-refinement and dry academic-abstract geometries which lurk in the International Style have taken different form in different countries, but the most positive one so far, and the only one whose roots do not lie outside the Modern Movement, is the attitude taken by certain younger English architects and artists, and known, half satirically, as the New Brutalism. The term was first used in public to describe a small house project for a site in Soho. In the statement which accompanied this design he said: ‘It was decided to have no finishes at all internally, the building being a combination of shelter and environment. Bare brick, concrete and wood… . In fact, had this been built, it would have been the first exponent of the New Brutalism in England, as the preamble to the specification shows: “It is our intention in this building to have the structure exposed entirely, without internal finishes wherever practicable. The Contractor should aim at a high standard of basic construction, as in a small warehouse.”’.
[The column continues for a few paragraphs and quotes A&P’s manifesto: “It is necessary to create an architecture of reality.”]
So the connection to bare materials is noted, but so is the “satirical” effect.
The next appearance seems to be in an article by Philip Johnson in the September 1954 issue of Architectural Review, which discusses a public school at Hunstanton designed by Reyner Banham.
[…] a new aestethic of materials, which must be valued for the surfaces they have on delivery to the site—since paint is only used where structurally or functionally unavoidable—a valuation like that of the Dadaists, who accepted their materials ‘as found’, a valuation built into the Modern Movement by Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. It is the 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 first 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.
A year later, Banham himself wrote an extended article called “The New Brutalism”, in the December 1955 issue of Architectural Review, which turned the term into a more well-defined movement.
Notably, in these early sources it always appears as “New Brutalism”, not just “Brutalism”. Apparently this is a pun on “New Humanism”, which was another architectural movement that was influential in Britain in the late 1940s. The New Humanists also tried to make modern and functionalist buildings, but in the opinion of the brutalists they were too “bland” and “tame”—in particular, they painted their walls!
The New Humanist movement originated in Sweden, and according to at least one guy, so did the word Brutalism. There’s a letter to the editor in Architectural Review August 1956:
SIRS,—The origin of the New Brutalism (see your Article of last December) has become a subject for academic research, and you may be interested in the following letter which I have received from Hans Asplund, son of the late Gunnar Asplund: ‘In January, 1950, I shared offices with my esteemed colleagues Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. These architects were at the time designing a house in Uppsala. Judging from their drawings I called them, in a mildly sarcastic way, “Neo-Brutalists” (the Swedish word for New Brutalists). The following summer, at a jollification together with some English friends, among whom were Michael Ventris, Oliver Cox and Graeme Shankland, the term was mentioned again in a jocular fashion. When I visited the same friends in London last year they told me that they had brought the word with them to England, and that it had spread like wildfire, and that it had somewhat astoundingly been adopted by a certain faction of young English architects. […]
If we believe Asplund it would seem the French connection was an after-construction, and the word was a term of derision before it was adopted as a badge of pride. In any event, it was “half satirical” from the start.