Professional Documents
Culture Documents
NEW BRUTALISM
• After the Second World War Britain possessed neither the material resources nor the
necessary cultural assurance to justify any form of monumental expression, since in
architecture, as in other matters, Britain was in the final stages of relinquishing her
imperial identity.
• A great deal of reconstruction work was executed, which was largely modeled on
the official architecture of Sweden's long-established Welfare State, which
comprised an architecture of shallow-pitched roofs, brick walls, vertically boarded
spandrels and squarish wood-framed picture windows, the latter either left bare or
painted white.
This so-called “people's detailing” became, with local additions, the received
vocabulary of the left-wing architects of the London County Council ( LCC ).
• The gratifying populism was rejected outright by Alison and Peter Smithson, the initial
proponents of the Brutalist ethos.
• The Brutalists responded to the challenge of “people's detailing” by making a direct
reference to the socioanthropological roots of popular culture.
• This anthropological aestheticism brought the Smithsons into contact in the early
1950s with the remarkable personalities of the photographer Nigel Henderson and
the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, from both of whom Brutalism derived much of its
existential character.
• The Smithsons followed their early success with a sequence of highly original
competition entries
• The underlying ethos of the original Brutalist sensibility first came to public
notice with the exhibits at -
The distant past and the immediate future fused into one.
Thus the shed was furnished not only with an old wheel and a toy aeroplane but also
with a television set. In brief, within a decayed and ravaged (i.e. bombed out) urban
fabric, the “affluence” of a mobile consumerism was already being envisaged, and
moreover welcomed, as the life substance of a new industrial vernacular.
Richard Hamilton's ironic
collage for this exhibition, entitled
Just what is it that makes today's
homes so different, so appealing, not
only inaugurated Pop culture but
also crystallized the domestic image
of the Brutalist sensibility.