Béton brut, defined
The term everyone reaches for and half of us misuse — it names the formwork's honesty, not the style's mood.
Tag
raw concrete
Béton brut — the material itself.
Posts
The smallest detail
I am as much interested in the smallest detail as in the whole structure.
— Marcel Breuer
Unité d'Habitation, Marseille
Eighteen floors on pilotis with a shopping street halfway up — the block that convinced everyone else to try.
Photo: Anapuig, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Forms assembled in the light
Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.
— Le Corbusier
Concrete in the rain
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.
Habitat 67, Montréal
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).