The Atlas of Brutalist Architecture (Phaidon, 2018) showcases béton brut in all its beguiling variations: the sublime (Marcel Breuer’s recently restored Whitney Museum of American Art, now the Met Breuer); the detested (the now-demolished Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, England, which Prince Charles likened to “a mildewed lump of elephant droppings”); and the potentially dubious (OMA’s Seattle Central Library, not often touted as an exemplar of Brutalism).
Taylor Crawford
Authored by Phaidon’s editors, and weighing in at 560 pages, the atlas is an exhaustive guide to this resurgent period of architecture, featuring 878 buildings from 102 countries. The black-and-white photographs that accompany the entries can be moody, dramatic, almost haunting: Moshe Safdie, FAIA’s Habitat 67 reflected in the St. Lawrence River; Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute foreshortened as it extends toward the horizon; John Lautner’s Sheats Goldstein House in the Hollywood Hills channeling 1960s California cool.
It’s easy to see why the revival of critical interest in Brutalism owes a partial debt to Instagram, which has proven to be a felicitous medium to showcase the surprising vibrancy of these buildings, one hashtag at a time, even if that vibrancy is captured in two dimensions—a fetishized ode to poured concrete.
The atlas is unexpectedly ambitious in its objectives, serving as a requiem for the buildings that have been lost; as a rallying cry to save the ones now under threat (each entry contains a condition assessment and lists any historical designations); and as a kind of travel guidebook, a reference for well-known and obscure projects alike. Perhaps the most ambitious aim is to demonstrate how a new generation of architects have been influenced by Brutalism’s weighty appeal, including Steven Holl, FAIA, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, and, more recently, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Alejandro Aravena, and Ensamble Studio. “These are just a few examples of the many contemporary architects who are continuing to create meaningful, sculptural, timeless buildings in the Brutalist tradition,” the editors write in the introduction. “Over time, as other ‘isms’ have come and gone, Brutalism has prevailed.”
That last bit may read like some overzealous Brutalism boosterism, and yet, to a surprising extent, many of the historic projects featured in these pages appear strikingly contemporary, at least at first blush. The effect is in fact timeless—and magical.
Taylor Crawford
Taylor Crawford
Taylor Crawford
Taylor Crawford
