It’s not about hating the past. Or the architecture of the past. If that were the case we would cheer on the destruction of Georgian, Edwardian, or Victorian buildings. It’s about hating brutalist buildings, ugly inhuman monstrosities that they are. Ironically the architects who promoted brutalism did in fact hate the far better architecture that proceeded them, and were happy to build wildly inappropriate eyesores with no regard to the past. We don’t owe them anything, but we do owe to posterity they elimination of most of their buildings.
Hi Eugene, you don’t buy the suggestion every era hates the period of architecture before it? There wasn’t much love for Victorian buildings in the early twentieth century, and *everyone* hated brutalism in the 1980s.
Portsmouth gave its opinion of The Tricorn Centre by spray painting and peeing on it. Such behaviour is normally criticised by others. Instead they cheered it on to hasten the Tricorn’s demise.
I actually think you *are* legion. I do get the criticisms of brutalism. I think most fans – like me – were kids in the 1960s/70s, and these buildings bring back some spooky memory, like modal jazz flute.
Good for the Prince, who took on the pompous and self-righteous architectural know-alls. Time has proved him largely correct, just as his views on organics are now mainstream.
Victorian buildings and even inter-war ones often look like someone has made an effort to please. There’ll be decorative stonework or ceramics; it looks like someone has opened their wallets to make it look attractive, to hold the eye. Maybe there were factories churning these elements out, but they often look bespoke. More recent work looks cheap and lazy in comparison.
Many ““ even most ““ people still loathe brutalism, not least because so many of its creators enjoyed living in their own handsome Georgian properties.
Many years ago I recall talking to one of the architects/planners of the soon to be built new town of Milton Keynes.
They lived in a charming oolitic limestone cottage in a nearby village, and certainly had no intention whatsoever of moving into their new creation, when it was completed!
But many of these brutalist (and sometimes not quite so brutalist) buildings from the 1960s/70s can be ‘repurposed’ to good effect, as the writer suggests. Look at Wibaut Straat in Amsterdam, a wide and quite ugly street/road leading out of the city. Over the last 10 to 15 years its many buildings of that era have been renovated as hotels and restaurants etc and the street is now hip and thriving. Those buildings offer big spaces for reception areas, bars and cafes. One of them even hosts fashion shows. With a little vision and imagination – granted, there is not much chance of that in local government in Britain – it can be done.
That’s true Fraser, I suppose. Concrete itself is not the problem. But to reclad a brutalist building is to change the architecture- since the idea was to expose the building materials, however ugly. Of all places to expose grey concrete, grey Britain was surely the worst.
Agree – and wrt the structure pictured, I would think that it was poor quality and cost a fortune to maintain and heat.
Andrew Harvey
3 years ago
Destroying Euston Station wasn’t tearing down the previous generation’s architecture — it was 130 years old at that point. Brutalist architects were simply showing complete contempt for history, culture, and context. There is no reason to keep the monstrosities they created. They were never meant to last.
Dave H
3 years ago
Brutalism is a uniquely ugly style in the main. I’m happy to concede that a lot of the current “glass towers everywhere” style is bland, but it’s better than structures which appear to have been designed to be oppressive and to make the individual feel small and insignificant.
Brutalist buildings aged very poorly, became streaked, stained grey hulks. They provided ample cover for criminal behaviour, even seemed to encourage it in their dreary-yet-stark spaces, and my enduring memory of many of them in city centres around the UK is that they smelled of urine as there was always a dark corner that got used as a lavatory.
It’s a style that should be, for the most part, consigned to the dustbin.
“Function as Form” as an architectural creed was a failure. I find it baffling that people protest their removal, seeking to condemn town centres across Britain to live with these grey-brown lumps in perpetuity.
Hi Dave, after Le Corbusier, the Smithsons etc, I think Brutalism moved well away from function as form. A lot of architects saw their work as scuptural and emotional.
Laura Creighton
3 years ago
The Arts and Crafts movement saw the creation of beautiful things, including buildings, as a shared egalitarian undertaking — part and parcel of building a fairer, kinder world. The Brutalist movement saw the creation of ugly things as the necessary honest expression of life’s nastiness. A single ugly building, terrifying in its ugliness can serve as a sort of social protest. A whole district of them, in every city and town on earth, just shows how socialist realist and anti-bourgeois architecture can really take off when the bourgeois capitalists get a hold of it and discover that is cheap to build.
Adam Buckland
3 years ago
As someone has grown up near Preston, I can guarantee the author that nobody I have ever met likes the monstrosity that is the bus station. In my experience support for it has tended to come from people living in other parts of the country who have never seen the eyesore in person
To be fair, the world is hardly chocka with attractive bus stations. At least Preston’s stands out!
Mark Corby
3 years ago
At the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40) we had about 55 Great Churches, that is Churches of about 300 feet and more in length, and covering roughly 28,000 square feet upwards.
Today perhaps 23 survive.The impetus for destruction was venal, not aesthetic or even religious.
Sadly your fine Augustinian Abbey (now, belatedly Cathedral) was in the process of major rebuild in 1540, and thus does not qualify.
By rights Bristol should have had its own magnificent medieval Cathedral, but thanks to the blatant toadyism of Bishop Wolfstan of Worcester, after the Norman Conquest, Bristol remained in the Diocese of Worcester, until the reorganisation of 1540-1.
bearden
3 years ago
I think what is often forgotten is that Brutalism was hated when it went up (except by some architecture critics). It has remained hated by nearly everyone all during its long rain-stained existence (except for some architecture critics). Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian etc. buildings WERE liked by the society which produced them. That means that the chances of people liking them again after a few years is very high. But Brutalism – nah – those buildings just said “you there- human beings – you don’t matter at all.”
Simon Newman
3 years ago
Removing the Brutalist buildings of the 60s-70s is a very different matter from destroying attractive and functional buildings of earlier eras. As any fule kno.
Andrew D
3 years ago
Conservation is often driven by a (perfectly rational) fear that what might come afterwards will be far worse. That may be the case with Wrexham’s promised supermarket, though I suspect the new building will be banal rather than hideous, and probably equally ephemeral. I get Jonathan’s point about demolishing the recent past; it’s sometimes said we hate the things our fathers built and revere the things our grandfathers built. Like him, I belong to the generation that revolted against modernism and brutalism and embraced conservation in the 1970s and 80s, though he (like the late, sorely-missed Gavin Stamp) now seems to be a born-again brutalist. And I admit that such architecture often had a rigour and seriousness that is absent in the trashy games with cladding that often pass for architecture today. But look at the photo. Does the police station display any of the three elements identified by Vitruvius as necessary to good building: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (roughly translated as strength, utility and beauty)?
Vitruvius, that noble Roman, would certainly have agreed.
The tower appears to fallen to the north, had it, by accident fallen to the south, it would have taken the equally undistinguished Wrexham Memorial Hall.
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
In Bristol, heedlessly, the yahoos spray unlettered filth and their own DNA.
Repurposing may not be cost-effective. Not all office spaces can be converted to housing in any sensible way, and the result may not be as housing-dense as a new build could be.
So while I agree in principle, I don’t think it’s always a possibility. Especially in central London where the clamour for space and the race to build upwards is immense.
Well the Dutch generally seem to manage the process of repurposing very effectively (see my comment below).
Mark Corby
3 years ago
The irony is that rulers and residents of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decided that ‘brutalist’ Grenfell Tower (built 1974), was an aesthetic carbuncle, and that it somehow it had to be ‘beautified’.
Hence they inadvertently created a “towering inferno”, much to their everlasting disgrace.
Roger Inkpen
3 years ago
While I agree that we should make more effort to reuse buildings instead of knocking them down and starting again, this can have poor outcomes. In Portsmouth we have a number of empty office blocks that are being repurposed for housing. Because planning regs have been weakened you can convert them into what are effectively high-rise bedsits (the developers have a swankier name), merely by informing the planning committee – who have no say in how it is done. So we end up with tiny single room flats and shared facilities. And no thought to the impact on the surrounding area for parking, etc.
As to this weird structure – can it be called architecture? – why not replace it with something more practical? Those who want to save such buildings never seem to think: what did it replace? Probably some Victorian housing was there before – with residents shoved out so some ghastly housing scheme miles from the town centre!
And yeah, a new Lidl with parking might not make the place any more attractive, but at least it’ll be easier to knock down and start again should it no longer be needed,
J Roberts
3 years ago
There must be truth in the intention to build a new world after the destruction caused by WW2 and seeing an opportunity to erase memories of a by gone era and associated disdain – but some of these monuments/buildings must be left as a marker in history and something to reflect upon. We live in an era where we are quick to see the world through modern eyes and once something is destroyed it’s gone forever. Growing up in Portsmouth in the 80s/90s the Tricorn was such a building- hated! But was also part of the city…
Josh Cook
3 years ago
Very good article – I’m surprised how little architectural criticism makes it into the public conversation, given how important it is to our lives.
David J
3 years ago
The apogee of Brutalism is surely to be seen in the remains of the Atlantic Wall, built by the Nazi regime. It was entirely relevant to build such military structures from solid concrete. I cannot say the same for defacing our towns and cities without care, courtesy, or relevance to their surroundings or history.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
so if the statues, buildings, and memorials are demolished, the events can be forgotten, too, right? If you’re going to have a memory hole….
David Uzzaman
3 years ago
I love old buildings but by old I mean three hundred years plus. There are many more recently built buildings that deserve to survive but also a huge number that don’t. The Victorian evangelical movement built a lot of very big churches that were ambitious and never filled even at the time they are now mostly white elephants which consume fortunes just to keep the roofs on. The old buildings we love are survivors of a much larger number that served their purpose when they were built but have been pulled down either because they became a liability to maintain or because someone wanted to build something else on the site. We shouldn’t be prisoners of our past.
Warren Alexander
3 years ago
A few years ago I was at a lecture in Oxford given by Frank Gehry. He was asked how he felt the first time one of his buildings was demolished. He replied that it was no longer suitable for use as it was not practical or economically viable to install the sort of technology required by business, so it had to be knocked down.
It’s not about hating the past. Or the architecture of the past. If that were the case we would cheer on the destruction of Georgian, Edwardian, or Victorian buildings. It’s about hating brutalist buildings, ugly inhuman monstrosities that they are. Ironically the architects who promoted brutalism did in fact hate the far better architecture that proceeded them, and were happy to build wildly inappropriate eyesores with no regard to the past. We don’t owe them anything, but we do owe to posterity they elimination of most of their buildings.
Hi Eugene, you don’t buy the suggestion every era hates the period of architecture before it? There wasn’t much love for Victorian buildings in the early twentieth century, and *everyone* hated brutalism in the 1980s.
Fair point.
But, we were wrong about Victorian architecture and right about brutalism.
OMG Prince Charles is posting on unherd under a pseudonym!
Portsmouth gave its opinion of The Tricorn Centre by spray painting and peeing on it. Such behaviour is normally criticised by others. Instead they cheered it on to hasten the Tricorn’s demise.
Oddly enough there are still people who mourn its passing.
What was a shopping centre with car park on top – is now a car park at the ground level – with nothing else!
It is worse than you think – I am not Charles.
We are legion.
I actually think you *are* legion. I do get the criticisms of brutalism. I think most fans – like me – were kids in the 1960s/70s, and these buildings bring back some spooky memory, like modal jazz flute.
” like modal jazz flute.”
I don’t remember that!
Maybe it is a blessing.
Good for the Prince, who took on the pompous and self-righteous architectural know-alls. Time has proved him largely correct, just as his views on organics are now mainstream.
Don’t agree with Prince Charles about much if anything but I do agree with him regarding ugly architecture from the 70s onward.
Victorian buildings and even inter-war ones often look like someone has made an effort to please. There’ll be decorative stonework or ceramics; it looks like someone has opened their wallets to make it look attractive, to hold the eye. Maybe there were factories churning these elements out, but they often look bespoke. More recent work looks cheap and lazy in comparison.
Many ““ even most ““ people still loathe brutalism, not least because so many of its creators enjoyed living in their own handsome Georgian properties.
Many years ago I recall talking to one of the architects/planners of the soon to be built new town of Milton Keynes.
They lived in a charming oolitic limestone cottage in a nearby village, and certainly had no intention whatsoever of moving into their new creation, when it was completed!
But many of these brutalist (and sometimes not quite so brutalist) buildings from the 1960s/70s can be ‘repurposed’ to good effect, as the writer suggests. Look at Wibaut Straat in Amsterdam, a wide and quite ugly street/road leading out of the city. Over the last 10 to 15 years its many buildings of that era have been renovated as hotels and restaurants etc and the street is now hip and thriving. Those buildings offer big spaces for reception areas, bars and cafes. One of them even hosts fashion shows. With a little vision and imagination – granted, there is not much chance of that in local government in Britain – it can be done.
That’s true Fraser, I suppose. Concrete itself is not the problem. But to reclad a brutalist building is to change the architecture- since the idea was to expose the building materials, however ugly. Of all places to expose grey concrete, grey Britain was surely the worst.
Agree – and wrt the structure pictured, I would think that it was poor quality and cost a fortune to maintain and heat.
Destroying Euston Station wasn’t tearing down the previous generation’s architecture — it was 130 years old at that point. Brutalist architects were simply showing complete contempt for history, culture, and context. There is no reason to keep the monstrosities they created. They were never meant to last.
Brutalism is a uniquely ugly style in the main. I’m happy to concede that a lot of the current “glass towers everywhere” style is bland, but it’s better than structures which appear to have been designed to be oppressive and to make the individual feel small and insignificant.
Brutalist buildings aged very poorly, became streaked, stained grey hulks. They provided ample cover for criminal behaviour, even seemed to encourage it in their dreary-yet-stark spaces, and my enduring memory of many of them in city centres around the UK is that they smelled of urine as there was always a dark corner that got used as a lavatory.
It’s a style that should be, for the most part, consigned to the dustbin.
“Function as Form” as an architectural creed was a failure. I find it baffling that people protest their removal, seeking to condemn town centres across Britain to live with these grey-brown lumps in perpetuity.
Hi Dave, after Le Corbusier, the Smithsons etc, I think Brutalism moved well away from function as form. A lot of architects saw their work as scuptural and emotional.
The Arts and Crafts movement saw the creation of beautiful things, including buildings, as a shared egalitarian undertaking — part and parcel of building a fairer, kinder world. The Brutalist movement saw the creation of ugly things as the necessary honest expression of life’s nastiness. A single ugly building, terrifying in its ugliness can serve as a sort of social protest. A whole district of them, in every city and town on earth, just shows how socialist realist and anti-bourgeois architecture can really take off when the bourgeois capitalists get a hold of it and discover that is cheap to build.
As someone has grown up near Preston, I can guarantee the author that nobody I have ever met likes the monstrosity that is the bus station. In my experience support for it has tended to come from people living in other parts of the country who have never seen the eyesore in person
To be fair, the world is hardly chocka with attractive bus stations. At least Preston’s stands out!
At the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40) we had about 55 Great Churches, that is Churches of about 300 feet and more in length, and covering roughly 28,000 square feet upwards.
Today perhaps 23 survive.The impetus for destruction was venal, not aesthetic or even religious.
Thanks, v interesting.
Sadly your fine Augustinian Abbey (now, belatedly Cathedral) was in the process of major rebuild in 1540, and thus does not qualify.
By rights Bristol should have had its own magnificent medieval Cathedral, but thanks to the blatant toadyism of Bishop Wolfstan of Worcester, after the Norman Conquest, Bristol remained in the Diocese of Worcester, until the reorganisation of 1540-1.
I think what is often forgotten is that Brutalism was hated when it went up (except by some architecture critics). It has remained hated by nearly everyone all during its long rain-stained existence (except for some architecture critics). Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian etc. buildings WERE liked by the society which produced them. That means that the chances of people liking them again after a few years is very high. But Brutalism – nah – those buildings just said “you there- human beings – you don’t matter at all.”
Removing the Brutalist buildings of the 60s-70s is a very different matter from destroying attractive and functional buildings of earlier eras. As any fule kno.
Conservation is often driven by a (perfectly rational) fear that what might come afterwards will be far worse. That may be the case with Wrexham’s promised supermarket, though I suspect the new building will be banal rather than hideous, and probably equally ephemeral. I get Jonathan’s point about demolishing the recent past; it’s sometimes said we hate the things our fathers built and revere the things our grandfathers built. Like him, I belong to the generation that revolted against modernism and brutalism and embraced conservation in the 1970s and 80s, though he (like the late, sorely-missed Gavin Stamp) now seems to be a born-again brutalist. And I admit that such architecture often had a rigour and seriousness that is absent in the trashy games with cladding that often pass for architecture today. But look at the photo. Does the police station display any of the three elements identified by Vitruvius as necessary to good building: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (roughly translated as strength, utility and beauty)?
Yes to one and two, definitely no to three.
So it rightly falls. To merit preservation a building has to meet all three criteria
Vitruvius, that noble Roman, would certainly have agreed.
The tower appears to fallen to the north, had it, by accident fallen to the south, it would have taken the equally undistinguished Wrexham Memorial Hall.
In Bristol, heedlessly, the yahoos spray
unlettered filth and their own DNA.
asdf
Repurposing may not be cost-effective. Not all office spaces can be converted to housing in any sensible way, and the result may not be as housing-dense as a new build could be.
So while I agree in principle, I don’t think it’s always a possibility. Especially in central London where the clamour for space and the race to build upwards is immense.
Well the Dutch generally seem to manage the process of repurposing very effectively (see my comment below).
The irony is that rulers and residents of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decided that ‘brutalist’ Grenfell Tower (built 1974), was an aesthetic carbuncle, and that it somehow it had to be ‘beautified’.
Hence they inadvertently created a “towering inferno”, much to their everlasting disgrace.
While I agree that we should make more effort to reuse buildings instead of knocking them down and starting again, this can have poor outcomes. In Portsmouth we have a number of empty office blocks that are being repurposed for housing. Because planning regs have been weakened you can convert them into what are effectively high-rise bedsits (the developers have a swankier name), merely by informing the planning committee – who have no say in how it is done. So we end up with tiny single room flats and shared facilities. And no thought to the impact on the surrounding area for parking, etc.
As to this weird structure – can it be called architecture? – why not replace it with something more practical? Those who want to save such buildings never seem to think: what did it replace? Probably some Victorian housing was there before – with residents shoved out so some ghastly housing scheme miles from the town centre!
And yeah, a new Lidl with parking might not make the place any more attractive, but at least it’ll be easier to knock down and start again should it no longer be needed,
There must be truth in the intention to build a new world after the destruction caused by WW2 and seeing an opportunity to erase memories of a by gone era and associated disdain – but some of these monuments/buildings must be left as a marker in history and something to reflect upon. We live in an era where we are quick to see the world through modern eyes and once something is destroyed it’s gone forever.
Growing up in Portsmouth in the 80s/90s the Tricorn was such a building- hated! But was also part of the city…
Very good article – I’m surprised how little architectural criticism makes it into the public conversation, given how important it is to our lives.
The apogee of Brutalism is surely to be seen in the remains of the Atlantic Wall, built by the Nazi regime. It was entirely relevant to build such military structures from solid concrete.
I cannot say the same for defacing our towns and cities without care, courtesy, or relevance to their surroundings or history.
so if the statues, buildings, and memorials are demolished, the events can be forgotten, too, right? If you’re going to have a memory hole….
I love old buildings but by old I mean three hundred years plus. There are many more recently built buildings that deserve to survive but also a huge number that don’t. The Victorian evangelical movement built a lot of very big churches that were ambitious and never filled even at the time they are now mostly white elephants which consume fortunes just to keep the roofs on. The old buildings we love are survivors of a much larger number that served their purpose when they were built but have been pulled down either because they became a liability to maintain or because someone wanted to build something else on the site. We shouldn’t be prisoners of our past.
A few years ago I was at a lecture in Oxford given by Frank Gehry. He was asked how he felt the first time one of his buildings was demolished. He replied that it was no longer suitable for use as it was not practical or economically viable to install the sort of technology required by business, so it had to be knocked down.