by Olha Romaniuk

Created on: December 15, 2008   Last Updated: July 31, 2011

Brutalist architecture often evokes a variety of strong responses, ranging from harsh criticism to skepticism to careful curiosity. Nowadays, it is rare to hear someone saying that they really enjoy the Brutalist style, because its bare, concrete, and imposing forms have passed their prime. One of the biggest criticisms of Brutalism is that it often appears too cold and inhuman.

Back in the 1950s through the 1970s, the momentum was firmly held by the fathers (father and mother, to be exact) of the Brutalist architecture - Peter and Alison Smithson - and supported by the favorable conditions of the post-World War II world. That is, the primary concerns of the construction were the inexpensive design methods, which often easily translated into the "honesty" of the materials and the straight-forward nature of building.

Not surprisingly, it is easy to trace the origins of Brutalism in the aesthetics and philosophy of Modernist architecture. The word Brutalism originates from the translation from French of "raw concrete", which was the primary material of choice, particularly favored by Le Corbusier. Used rather informally at the early stages of the emerging style, the term became an official description with critic Reynor Banham's title of his 1954 book "New Brutalism" to describe the new architectural aesthetic.

The angular geometries and the roughness of the unadorned concrete has been the striking feature that moved the Brutalist style away from its association with Modernistic simplicity of nonreferrential forms into a league of its own. Brutalism became more closely associated with a social Utopian ideology that rang especially appealing in the years that followed the destruction brought by the World War II. However, the failure of successful communities to form in the early low-income Brutalist structures decreased the appeal of the ideologies of the style, as many of them began to be seen as a failure.

In the late 1960s, Brutalism enjoyed a lot of support from the college campuses, as a lot of the architecture of this particular style was incorporated into the expansion plans of many campuses throughout the United States. The Yale Art and Architecture Building of 1958 by Paul Rudolph was one of such buildings and is often considered to be one of the most known examples of Brutalist architecture in the country. The building was made of ribbed, bush-hammered concrete and was praised widely, when it was first opened, by everyone from architectural critics to

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