the map: a material itinerary
The map itself proposes a ‘coherent’ itinerary across diverse sites; its format neutralises the many contradictions in identification that the commission engendered. The application of the nomenclature of brutalism to a period of production spanning 30 years, across periods of changing material technologies and economies of labour, produces as many misalignments as compatibilities. Within a purely architectural pursuit of the ‘as-found’ the apprehension and expression of the conditions of the building site, the moment of assemblage, is paramount. It is the creation of a material expression at the intersection of labour and the medium of construction. Historian Adrian Forty provides a diverse discussion of the ‘discourse of concrete’ in the modern and late modern periods as a combination of the trace of both the ‘primitive and the sophisticated’ in the dialogue between engineering, or system, and its execution. The term beton brut itself derives originally from an item of correspondence by Le Corbusier and describes the material finish of his later works in the post-World War Two period, particularly the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. Whilst the notion of the material finish ‘as found’ has come to define brutalism within the current understanding of the canon, and even traced back to William Morris, craft revival and the authentic
expression of materials, it was more a product of the conditions of the building site – the fact that there were multiple contractors working on the Unité’s construction, with different levels of skill. A similar material discourse is in evidence at Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul in western Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine (1951 – the earliest building recorded on the Brutalist map). Here, within a ‘raw’ palette of materials, the trace of the making hand is discernible in the cementing of the brick joints, the working of the exposed sections of the concrete slab (producing an expression of the barrel roof profile and of the lower floor slabs on the end elevations, like a section cut). However, Forty notes that there is a level of contradiction between means and ends at the Maisons Jaoul in relation to materials, in that the brick work was executed by a skilled and experienced craftsman, but who was instructed to conduct the work with a loose hand; and that a less experienced contractor for the concrete made a particularly bad job of the first-floor concrete slab and then overcompensated with a very precise and crisp moulding of the roof slab. The loose hand of the skilled, the over-compensation of the less capable; a now largely indecipherable material and ideological dialogue between restraint and excess, across the professional classes of design and construction.
To journey in search of the brutalist architecture of Paris – and to follow the itinerary of the map – is to travel beyond the Parisian Périphérique in all directions, to the new town zones of the 1960s and 70s. Bobigny, Créteil, Ivry and parts of la Defense were the particular sites of our attention. The brutalist element of Parisian urbanism does not represent a simple shift in the style and materiality of the city’s renewal or extension – a brutalist strata within an accumulation of historical styles – but was also an attempt to manifest wholly new Parisian environments: satellite cities of a new, multi-polaire solution to urban growth. Examples of brutalism within the city centre are rare. The concrete, concertina-like conference building within Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s UNESCO complex (1958) is perhaps the most powerful example. This is, itself, disconnected from the surrounding historic city of the seventh arrondisement by the perimeter fencing and landscaping of UNESCO site, subject to a layered condition of cordon-sanitaire . The brutalist mapping of Paris (its making and subsequent retracing) requires a migration to new cities; journeys into enclaves of alternative urbanism, that, on one’s return to the centre, leave a dream- like impression on memory – the sense that one had ventured to a space of sufficient difference as to be of a parallel history to the present reality.
Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s UNESCO complex,1958
Le Corbusier’s l’Unité d’Habitation under construction.
Le Corbusier, Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly-sur- Seine,1954-56. Unpainted cast béton brut and roughly detailed brickwork.
Paul Bossard, les Bleuets, Creteil, in 1962
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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