Significantly, this originating thesis of brutalism was not conceived through the medium of concrete, but through the steel and panel system construction of the Smithson’s 1954 Hunstanton School in Norfolk. It was developed through the production of imagery, in relation to exhibitions produced by the Independent Group, principally, The Parallel of Art and Life , 1953, which included the work of photographer Nigel Henderson. Rather than functioning as the basis of an architectural movement, ‘The New Brutalism’ article is better understood as a discursive vehicle for Banham’s broader project of cultural criticism at that time – a temporary scaffolding erected in episodic activities of journal criticism and discarded when the focus of Banham’s critical allegiances shifted. That said, one can extract from Banham a set of working principles for identifying brutalist buildings: memorability, the ruthlessness of the spatial system as image (the clarity of a building’s visual identity, and formal legibility as a programme); a clear exhibition of structure; materials as found . Active within this set of values is a propensity toward primitive or essential material expression, drawing influence from the use of beton brut (raw concrete) in the later works of Le Corbusier, as well as from
examples of Art Brut and Arte Povera. The Australian architectural historian John Macarthur makes the point that Banham’s articles in this period were published within the wider frame of a set of editorial campaigns in The Architectural Review from the 1930s onwards championing, through diverse and sometimes contradictory forms of expression, the revival of the eighteenth-century aesthetic category of the picturesque as the basis of a renewed urban aesthetic of dynamic contradistinctions. Banham’s declared stance was to reject The Architectural Review ’s concerns for the picturesque as a parochial reaction to modernity. Macarthur, on the other hand, refers us to a broader understanding of the spectrum of the picturesque as inclusive of a theory of ugliness and disgust, a longer philosophical reflection on material aesthetics to which brutalism can quite plausibly be understood to be an extension. Within the context of this programme of aesthetic reflection on the tensions between new forms of post war modernity and, broadly speaking, Romanticism, Macarthur defines brutalism as a form of ‘hard picturesque, which is aesthetically challenging, as opposed to a soft and facile picturesque which panders to familiar sentiments’.
One would have to concede that with the arrival of projects like the Brutalist Map series, and the abundant appreciation of brutalist architecture on social media, its status as ‘hard’ aesthetic is itself transitioning, or has already transitioned toward something more familiar, and that brutalism has lost its shock value, its inherent material and aesthetic force of critique as an antithesis to dominant, ‘soft’, aesthetic sensibilities. This signals a moment in which we can re-look and reassess the impact of the work of the period and, importantly, to begin a process of more acute differentiation within the common categorisation of brutalism, through acts of return, reflection and re-presentation. Within our documentation of Paris and acts of return we re-propose and reposition the material values of the ‘as found’ and the ‘hard’. We explore authored and anonymous urban formations with equal interest, and look to differentiate a hard from a soft brutalism – pockets of the hard picturesque persisting or reconfiguring within the recognised or authored sites of the architectural itinerary. The work of Nigel Henderson provides a useful bridge between brutalism as an ambition for reductive rigor within material and architectonic expression and that of its manifestation as urban observation and representation. The historian Andrew Higgott proposes that the brutalist values in Henderson’s photography have to do with the recording of an ‘authentic inhabitation’ of the city, the witnessing of its incident and patterns of life. While we should be wary of the photograph as a means to access sociological truths, Henderson’s photography provides a useful point of convergence for many of the complex cultural vectors of the time, in the way it channels older picturesque, Surrealist and Dadaist concerns, alongside the emergence of pop culture and a new socio-political awareness of its urban subject matter. It emphasises a heightened material awareness of the city as a space of accretion and contingency. Henderson’s concerns parallel those of the Smithsons in their complex reflections on the social and environmental implications of the ‘as found’ sensibility, which continued into the 1990s and across the spectrum of their built, written and graphic production.
‘Peter Samuels’, 1951. Photograph by Nigel Henderson (1917-85) copyright Tate, London 2019
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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