Notes on brutalism: photographs, quotes, and links about raw concrete, kept in one stream.
354 prefabricated boxes craned into a hillside village — the expo demonstration that became permanent housing because people refused to stop living in it.
Photo: Marc-André Desrosiers (Wikipedia Takes Montreal participant), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
— Le Corbusier
Podium gardens, a lake, three towers named for poets. A private city that took London thirty years to soften toward.
Photo: Daniel Case, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Rain is the test. Glass towers just get wet; concrete changes — it darkens in streaks, holds the water line for hours, grows moss in the board-marks. A brutalist building in the rain shows you its age like a face does, and the good ones are better for it. If you want to judge one fairly, refuse the sunny postcard. Go in November.
The service tower stands apart and bridges back every third floor; the gaps between are the whole composition.
Photo: Edwardx, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Concrete used for silence and light.
Cities in a single building.
Buildings people keep trying to demolish, and shouldn't.
Béton brut — the material itself.
The unrepentant concrete of postwar London.