The Unexpectedly Tropical

History of Brutalism
Long associated with European cities, the style has plenty of history in other parts of the world,
too. In Brazil, it reached a surprising apotheosis.

By Michael Snyder
Aug. 15, 2019

Last October, the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was nearing 90, was
interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País about his six-decade career. By then, Mendes da
Rocha — whose buildings include São Paulo’s subterranean sculpture museum, Museu Brasileiro
da Escultura e Ecologia (MuBE), completed in 1995, with its 197-foot stretch of gravity-defying
concrete that spans the open plaza, and the levitating concrete disk of the city’s Paulistano Athletic
Club Gymnasium, built in 1957 — had been canonized as not only the most important living
architect in Brazil, or perhaps in all of Latin America, but also as the world’s most significant
practitioner of Brutalism — a word, ironically, that he has always disavowed. “Ask an intellectual
what they mean by Brutalism, and the majority won’t know,” Mendes da Rocha told the reporter.
“Brutalism is nothing.”

The term “Brutalism” has never been well liked among architects, nor well defined among the
critics who invented it. Beginning in the 1940s, builders in Europe and the United States began
turning away from high Modernism in favor of what the Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion and the
American architect Louis Kahn referred to as a New Monumentality: a muscular architecture that
“conveys the feeling of its eternity,” as Kahn put it in his 1944 essay “Monumentality.” Near the end
of that decade, the French-Swiss Modernist Le Corbusier began building monolithic structures in
raw concrete — béton brut, in French, one of the sources for the word “Brutalism.” In 1949, the
Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined the term nybrutalism, which the British journalist Reyner
Banham popularized in a 1955 essay called “The New Brutalism,” in which he used the blocky
brick-and-steel Hunstanton School, built in 1954 in the county of Norfolk, England, by the
architects Peter and Alison Smithson, as a case study. “One can see what Hunstanton is made of,
and how it works,” he wrote, “and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces.”
Banham’s New Brutalist buildings, in other words, extended the functional logic of Modernism,
leaving surfaces untreated and joints, seams and pipes exposed, privileging transparency over
proportion and style. Where Modernism was poised and polite, often incorporating white plaster
and walls that concealed the buildings’ internal logic, Brutalism evolved into something bold and
confrontational, its heavy, rugged forms forged of inexpensive industrial materials that disguised
nothing at all.

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Having emerged in the early 20th century from the Bauhaus, the German school that lived at the
intersection of art and technology, Modernism was a well-established movement that
corresponded to other advances in art, music and literature: a way of building that was intended to
express the conditions of the machine age as eloquently as, say, Virginia Woolf’s novels — but by
the 1940s, the aesthetic was being called superficial, anodyne and placeless. In a 1959 interview,
Peter Smithson described Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s iconic 1929 house on the outskirts of Paris,
with its white walls and ribbon windows, as “a single object, turned out on a lathe,” whereas the
rising Brutalist buildings were being composed of disparate machine-made objects stacked,
stitched and cleaved together. While Modernism expressed a blithe faith in its own power to
manifest the future, Brutalism — a term that exists only in architecture — would look like work.
Image
The concrete brick entryway to
the home of the Japanese-Brazilian
sculptor and painter Tomie Ohtake,
which was constructed in three
phases since 1966 by her son, the
architect Ruy Ohtake, who
primarily used concrete
beams.CreditTodd Hido

DESPITE MENDES DA ROCHA’S distaste for the term, it’s hard to avoid when discussing the
blank concrete facade of his Casa Millán, built in 1970 for the gallerist Fernando Millán in the São
Paulo suburb of Morumbi. Currently owned by the art dealer Eduardo Leme, the house is a dim
gray womb packed with contemporary art (an exploded 2009 chair by the Mexican artist Damian
Ortega, light boxes from 2008 by the British artist David Batchelor) and midcentury furniture by
Brazilian masters such as Jorge Zalszupin and Percival Lafer, like a bomb shelter stocked with
cultural provisions for an uncertain future. The structure’s two curved surfaces — an undulating
wall separating the main house from the kitchen and carport and a dramatically bent staircase, its
underside ridged like a newly paved road — seem almost grudging, as if to emphasize the
unbending resolve of the building’s right angles. The 6,997-square-foot house stands at street level
but feels subterranean, a lair carved from the city’s underbelly, with sun entering through skylights
striated by concrete beams, like giant sewer grates. “Fundamentally, the question of architecture is
not the isolated building but the city,” Mendes da Rocha told me when we met at his studio in an
undistinguished São Paulo high-rise in February. “A house is always a public space.” That idea
mirrors comments made by the architect Alison Smithson in 1959 about Brutalism: “Even if you
had only a little house to do it, [the building] somehow had to imply the whole system of town
building. ...”

Yet despite the clear resonances with European-born Brutalism — the rigid geometry, the
cavernous interiors, the coffered ceilings and abundant concrete — Mendes da Rocha’s structures,
like many Brutalist-inflected buildings that thrived well into the 1980s throughout the equatorial
world, feel fundamentally different from their predecessors in cooler climates. From the 1950s to
the 1970s, while European nations reckoned with economic depression and the end of colonization,
the nations they had once oppressed emerged into a new prosperity (as seen in Latin America) or
else independence (as seen throughout Africa and Asia). Lacking a clear set of well-articulated
principles, Brutalist architecture has always taken different forms in different regions — consider
the Soviet functionalism of Eastern European housing projects compared to the rowhouse-like
Alexandra Road estate designed by Neave Brown in postwar London. In Brazil, Brutalism grew out
of the Modernist tradition, imported, according to the historian Kenneth Frampton, as early as
1928 by the Ukrainian émigré Gregori Warchavchik. The first great Brazilian Modernist was Lúcio
Costa, who grew up in Europe and returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1924 to study architecture, then
led a movement immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1943 exhibition “Brazil
Builds,” which traced the country’s building practices from the late 17th century into the early
1940s and cataloged a growing global fascination with innovative responses to the local climate. In
India, Cambodia and Singapore, which won their sovereignty between 1947 and 1965, local
designers adapted the rough concrete forms of internationally renowned architects like Le
Corbusier and the American Brutalist icon Paul Rudolph to their own cultural and climatic
contexts. And across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, newly established national governments in
countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Zambia invited foreign architects like Henri Chomette from
France and Jacek Chyrosz and Stanislaw Rymaszewski from Poland to create grand commercial
and public structures, such as 1978’s Hotel Independence in Dakar, Senegal, and 1960’s
International Trade Fair complex in Accra, Ghana — projects that announced these countries’
arrival on the global stage.

What these buildings shared, beyond an aesthetic — though they shared that, too, with their radical
porousness, their blunt geometric forms and their extensive use of raw concrete — was a
commitment to architecture as an instigator of progress. But in the tropics, Brutalism reached an
unexpected apotheosis: Infiltrated by lush plants and softened by humidity, buildings that looked
cold and imposing against London’s constant drizzle or Boston’s icy slush were transformed into
fecund, vital spaces. Concrete surfaces bloomed green with moss. The panels of glass necessary for
sealing rooms against the northern chill either disappeared or receded from view, encouraging
cross-ventilation while also protecting interior spaces from direct sun. The openness and
transparency that the Smithsons had pronounced became a practical reality in these humid
environments, both theoretically and literally: Built from inexpensive, readily available materials,
equatorial Brutalism was as accessible and functional as it was symbolically potent, resulting in
buildings that would define new societies growing around them like vines. Here, Brutalism wasn’t
only an architecture that shaped the future or confronted the past — it was an architecture of
freedom.
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Image
A wood-grain spiral concrete
staircase that leads to the five
bedrooms of Casa Millán, completed in
Cidade Jardim in 1970 by the
architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. The
table and chairs beneath it are
1960s-era designs by the Brazilian
midcentury Modernist Jorge
Zalszupin.CreditTodd Hido

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IN 1947, LE CORBUSIER began what many consider the world’s first Brutalist building, the Unité
d’Habitation housing project in Marseille, France. Built entirely from raw concrete, the Unité
marked Corbusier’s departure from the International Style’s glossy polish, with its reliance on flat
surfaces, modular forms and mass-produced materials. But one of the Unité’s most important
structural innovations — the use of concrete screens and louvers to protect the windows from the
sun, a technique called brise-soleil — had first been used a decade earlier in Rio. In 1936, the
education minister Gustavo Capanema invited Le Corbusier to Brazil to partner with Costa in
overseeing a consortium of local architects that included future Modernist luminaries such as
Affonso Reidy, Oscar Niemeyer and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who were
designing a new headquarters for Rio’s Ministry of Education and Health. Together, they conceived
a high Modernist masterpiece: an impeccably proportioned glass rectangle lifted on slender
columns over the street. The Brazilian architects on the team introduced an expressive rooftop
garden, panels of ceramic tiles painted with starfish and sea horses to frame the building’s
entrance and concrete fins and coverts to protect its northwest facade, an inexpensive way to keep
the interior cool in hot weather.

Within two decades, Le Corbusier had incorporated brise-soleil into five Unités across Europe and
throughout his expansive government complex in Chandigarh, India, founded in 1953 and still
perhaps the most ambitious Brutalist project on earth. From there, the technique traveled with Le
Corbusier’s colleagues Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who added it to college and school buildings
they designed in Ghana and Nigeria throughout the late 1950s. The work of Fry and Drew, who
were among the founders of the Department of Tropical Architecture at London’s Architectural
Association in 1954, went on to inspire the early buildings of the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey
Bawa before he turned to his now signature vernacular-inspired tropes like deep eaves and
verandas, which punctuate his light, graceful (and decidedly non-Brutalist) tropical Modernist
homes.

Brise-soleil and other Brutalist elements followed the same circulatory route as the progressive
politics of liberation. In his 1951 announcement for the design of Chandigarh, the current capital of
both Punjab and Haryana states, India’s then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described the
plans for the city as “symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past.”
Brutalism, as the newest and most daring school of contemporary architecture at the time —
suggesting both industrial modernity and a humanistic embrace of democratic principles such as
community and equality — soon became the physical lingua franca of his left-leaning government.
From the 1960s into the 1980s, Indian architects such as Kuldip Singh, Achyut Kanvinde, Raj
Rewal and Balkrishna Doshi (who won last year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize) used concrete the
color of the dust that coats Delhi’s ubiquitous flame-of-the-forest trees to build angular, futuristic
buildings. At Singh’s 1978 National Cooperative Development Corporation building, two legs
joined at the top stand over an open plaza, providing shade in New Delhi’s brutal summer heat.

Iconic Tropical Brutalist Buildings

9 Photos
View Slide Show›
Image

Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust,

Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles (2004.R.10

Le Corbusier’s influence reached Southeast Asia a few years later, in 1956, when the architect Vann
Molyvann, who’d studied under the master in Paris, returned to his newly independent homeland
of Cambodia. Like Nehru, King Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader, made architecture a
cornerstone of economic and cultural development. Over the next decades, Molyvann built a sports
complex, a theater, schools and government buildings that rendered the peaked towers of ancient
temples and the high gables of indigenous houses in reinforced concrete, incorporating the natural
ventilation and restrained ornamentation that defined the work of his teacher. At a state dinner in
1967, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who led the city-state from 1965, when the
country gained independence, until 1990, described what he and his family had seen on a visit to
Cambodia as “the architectural style, in steel and concrete, of what Angkor [Wat] had in sandstone
and laterite,” referencing the ninth- to 14th-century archaeological sites of the Khmer Empire. “The
buildings in Phnom Penh, although more functional, are no less monuments to Khmer creativity. It
was a lesson of what is possible, given a united people, led by a patriot of great verve and vitality.”
During his quarter century in power, Lee’s government commissioned overtly Brutalist projects:
The utilitarian concrete forms of 1976’s horseshoe-shaped Pearl Bank Apartments and the vivid
green-and-yellow block of 1973’s People’s Park Complex spoke to Singapore’s emerging prosperity.

As governments across Southeast Asia engaged local architects, many of them educated in the
West, most of the tropical Brutalist projects in sub-Saharan Africa were led by foreigners. In 1960,
Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, commissioned the Norwegian architect Karl Henrik
Nostvik to lead the design for Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Convention Center, with its
28-story concrete columnar tower and auditorium resembling a tightly closed lotus bud. In the
Ivory Coast, the Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri completed La Pyramide in 1973, an attempt to
adapt the port city of Abidjan’s covered markets into a modern high-rise. Today, the building sits
largely empty, but with its receding tiers of concrete hanging off a central column like the awnings
of street stalls, it remains a striking architectural landmark. These buildings’ forms varied widely
across the region depending on available materials, on the vestigial cultural influence of various
colonizers and on the political leanings of the new leaders, says the Swiss-based architect Manuel
Herz, whose 2015 book, “African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence,” examines
several Modernist buildings in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Zambia. In Ghana,
Herz says, the government of the socialist prime minister Kwame Nkrumah commissioned schools
and museums; across the border in the Ivory Coast, which allied itself more closely with
free-market capitalism, the most prominent Modernist projects were hotels, banks and other
private commissions. In South Africa, the apartheid state employed the style’s cold rationality as a
technocratic disguise for evil; according to the Scottish-Ghanaian scholar and architect Lesley
Lokko, the founder of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg,
Modernism and its offshoots are still considered suspect by some in that country today. Whatever
their political underpinnings, such buildings were “about Africa emerging out of centuries of, in a
sense, nonhistory, but it was still very much an elsewhere style,” she says.
Image
The art-filled living area of the
Ohtake House.CreditTodd Hido

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DESPITE THE AESTHETIC’S dispersion around the globe, no place indigenized Brutalism more
completely than São Paulo, which helps explain why Paulista architects like Mendes da Rocha
object so strongly to the word. “Brazil is a colonial nation: It began just a few centuries back,”
Mendes da Rocha says. “So we’re condemned to be modern, to be anticolonial, against occupation.”
For him and most of the city’s other architects, the term “Brutalism,” imported from the West,
constitutes a linguistic occupation.

And yet few places seem so obviously marked by the style. Though originally founded in the middle
of the 16th century as a Jesuit outpost within the country’s interior highlands, São Paulo didn’t
thrive economically until the rise of the South American coffee industry in the early 19th century.
Following the Great Depression in the United States, an important market for Brazilian beans, the
city’s coffee barons started selling their estates to be converted into apartment blocks. Residential
complexes like Rino Levi’s 1944 Prudência Apartment Building, with its entrance framed by
colorful Burle Marx-designed tiles, and the iconic sine curve of Niemeyer’s 1961 Edifício Copan,
defined the city’s early architectural boom years.