New Brutalism

And the Architecture of the welfare state :

England 1949 – 59.

AR 8602 Dr. K. S. Rakesh

History of Contemporary
Architecture
Professor, San Academy of Architecture, Coimbatore
• After the Second World War Britain possessed neither the material resources nor
the necessary cultural assurance to justify any form of monumental expression,
since in architecture, as in other matters, Britain was in the final stages of
relinquishing her imperial identity.

• A great deal of reconstruction work was executed, which was largely modeled on
the official architecture of Sweden's long-established Welfare State, which
comprised an architecture of shallow-pitched roofs, brick walls, vertically boarded
spandrels and squarish wood-framed picture windows, the latter either left bare or
painted white.

This so-called “people's detailing” became, with local additions, the received
vocabulary of the left-wing architects of the London County Council ( LCC ).
• The gratifying populism was rejected outright by Alison and Peter
Smithson, the initial proponents of the Brutalist ethos.
• The Brutalists responded to the challenge of “people's detailing” by
making a direct reference to the socio­anthropological roots of popular
culture.

• This anthropological aestheticism brought the Smithsons into contact

in the early 1950s with the remarkable personalities of the
photographer Nigel Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi,
from both of whom Brutalism derived much of its existential
character.

• The Smithsons followed their early success with a sequence of highly

original competition entries
• The underlying ethos of the original Brutalist sensibility first came to
public notice with the exhibits at -

1. The 'Parallel of Life and Art' exhibition staged at the Institute of

Contemporary Arts, London, in 1953.

This show comprised a didactic collection of photographs assembled and

annotated by Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons.
Many of these images “offered scenes of violence and distorted or anti-
aesthetic views of the human figure”.
There was something decidedly existential about an exhibition that insisted,
on viewing the world as a landscape laid waste by war, decay and disease -
beneath whose ashen layers one could still find traces of life, albeit
microscopic, pulsating within the ruins.
2. “This Is Tomorrow”, a show staged in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

The Smithsons, once again in collaboration with Henderson and Paolozzi,

designed a symbolic temenos - a metaphorical shed in an equally metaphorical
backyard.

The distant past and the immediate future fused into one.

Thus the shed was furnished not only with an old wheel and a toy aeroplane but also
with a television set. In brief, within a decayed and ravaged (i.e. bombed out) urban
fabric, the “affluence” of a mobile consumerism was already being envisaged, and
moreover welcomed, as the life substance of a new industrial vernacular.
 Richard Hamilton's ironic
collage for this exhibition, entitled
Just what is it that makes today's
homes so different, so appealing,
not only inaugurated Pop culture
but also crystallized the domestic
image of the Brutalist sensibility.

The Smithsons' “House

of the Future”, exhibited at the
Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition
in 1956, was evidently intended as
the ideal home for Hamilton's
muscle-bound “punch-bag” natural
man and his curvaceous
companion.
House of the Future: Ideal Home Exhibition 1956
 Bru·talism
 
 NOUN:
An architectural style of the mid-20th century characterized by massive or monolithic forms,
usually of poured concrete and typically unrelieved by exterior decoration.

• Up to the mid-1950s, truth to materials remained an essential precept of Brutalist

architecture, manifesting itself initially in an obsessive concern for the expressive
articulation of mechanical and structural elements, as in the Smithsons' Hunstanton
school.
 built projects
Robin Hood Gardens housing
The Economist Building, London,
complex, Poplar, East London,
completed 1964
completed 1972

Garden building, St Hilda's

College, Oxford (1968)
built projects
Their built projects include:

Smithdon High School, Hunstanton, Norfolk (1949–1954; a Grade II* listed building)

The House of the Future exhibition (at the 1956 Ideal Home Show)

Sugden House, Watford

The Economist Building, Piccadilly, London (1959–1965)

Garden building, St Hilda's College, Oxford (1968)

Private house extension for Lord Kennet, Bayswater, London, 1968

Robin Hood Gardens housing complex, Poplar, East London (1969–1972)

Buildings at the University of Bath, including the School of Architecture and Building
Engineering (1988)

The last project the Cantilever-Chair Museum of the Bauhaus design company TECTA in
Lauenfoerde / Germany
James Stirling
• By 1955 both William Howell and
James Stirling were part of a Brutalist
formation.

• The ultimate integration of the

British Brutalist aesthetic - the fusion
of its contradictory “formalist” and
“populist” aspects into a glass and
brick “vernacular” ­ came with the
works of Stirling and his partner
James Gowan in 1959, their
dormitory project for Selwyn College,
Cambridge, and their Engineering
Building for Leicester University.