[squeed]

I don't disagree with you, but I think there's a further criticism of Brutalist architecture that's worth mentioning. Brutalism does indeed try to value functionality over decoration, but I feel it misses the mark in that regard, giving up too much in exchange for too little.

Reinforced concrete is not the wonder-material it was initially thought to be. It needs plenty of maintenance; it needs to be painted and guarded against water; and it is very very hard to make watertight window junctions.

A critical part of a building that is "functional" is that it's able to change and be altered as needed. No matter how brilliant your programming and research, needs will change. And then you're looking at years of noisy jackhammering and drilling to put a door, conduit, etc.

So if concrete is no everlasting maintenance-free wood, is the physical inflexibility worth it?

[peterclary]

Most brutalist architecture is explicitly not painted; the point is to leave the concrete "raw". "Brutalism" comes from "Beton Brut" or "raw concrete". If it's painted, it's just a concrete building, not a Brutalist building.

It's interesting you should mention flexibility, because 1-3 Willow Road, Hampstead, UK is an interesting example of flexibility. The internal walls are almost all wooden and designed to be folded back, allowing for a very flexible day-to-day use of the space.

On the other hand, the B.A.T. Building in Woking, UK is a large Brutalist building and a friend who used to work there told me that it was indeed an absolute nightmare for running conduit. Wifi didn't work because all the walls were thick reinforced concrete, but it was also built (he said) without room for raised floors or suspended ceilings. They had to drill through those thick walls.

So it all comes down to how you use concrete and where.

Wood is hardly maintenance-free. It also needs painting/sealing and guarding against water. There have also been some spectacular problems where people have tried to do things with wood which should have been done with steel (the fiasco with timber Legoland Windsor Hotel and the emergency reinforcements to support its pool spring to mind).

You sound like you have some experience in construction?

[squeed]

Oh, I totally agree with you; flexibility in design is not intrinsic to Brutalist or non-Brutalist buildings.

I don't have direct experience in construction, but in a past life I worked in two academic IT departments; it always pays to be good friends with the facilities people in that world. Plus, my more direct co-workers were the ones who needed to run conduit from point A to B. So I have some direct second-hand experience and plenty of bar-stories. American Universities almost always have one or two Brutalist piles lying around, and my experience was no exception.

I was really surprised to learn how much maintenance concrete needs; it cost at least half as much as wood averaged over the life of the building. Acid rain is nasty, rebar rusts and causes spalling, penetrations such as conduit quickly leak. When I said painting concrete, I really meant treating and coating to preserve the material. So, now you have to pay almost as much to maintain this structure - then you get a request to install a new exterior security camera, or run some cat5 to the ceiling for an AP, or add a door between labs, and what would be a one-day job in a wood- or steel-framed building is a week-long torture session of drilling.

Of course concrete isn't evil - it clearly makes the modern world possible! And there are some successful Brutalist buildings. But the Brutalist fetishization of it certainly has not stood the test of time.

Another specific Brutalist feature - particularly espoused by Louis Kahn (not exactly a Brutalist but close enough) - was that the building services, e.g. HVAC ducts and the like, should just be exposed. In his mind, it was awkward and sort of dishonest to try and hide them, so don't bother. As a nerd, I appreciate this sort of transparency, but the poor conduit jockeys were tortured by this. The consequences are subtle: instead of risers and service ducts, each individual conduit is visible and has its own penetration when crossing a wall. Which means: more drilling when you need a new EMT run.

Anyways, this is just a series of war stories. People like to joke that software "engineers" are not real engineers, and this is absolutely true. However, I think experienced software developers have a good sense of just how hard it can be to predict future use and tend to design with that in mind. It has been my personal experience that even experienced architects have not gotten the same feedback cycle, so the facilities department has to bust out the Boschhammer again and again.

[peterclary]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Richard Rogers has applied an even more extreme philosophy on some of his buildings (I'm thinking specifically the Pompidou Centre and the Lloyds building) where he put all the HVAC ducts etc. on the outside...

In the UK, the National Trust did a series of tours across Brutalist buildings a year or two ago, and I was lucky enough to get on three of them: the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, the University of East Anglia, and throughout and behind the scenes at the Southbank Centre. Very interesting to see how the building designs and materials have stood up (or not) to the test of time.

As I understand it, the problem with "concrete cancer" as they call it is more likely to happen with some concrete mixes than others. It particularly affects a lot of Modern and Art Deco buildings in the UK from the 30s. I expect it depends on the climate too.

I digress badly, but if you're not already familiar with them you might enjoy Frank Lloyd Wright's Textile Block houses, such as the Ennis House and La Miniatura.

[chippy]

I was about the post about how Brutalism originated about it being raw material and not brutal appearance.

How would the raw concrete metaphor relate to UX / Web design?

I think possibly by not using CSS for layout, only basic styling. Having tables with exposed default cell borders, having headers being browser default sizes, only using system fonts.

[mollusk]

>How would the raw concrete metaphor relate to UX / Web design?

I'd say it would be making the page look like bare HTML. Black on white typography. Blue anchor links. Monospace fonts (or arguably default serif font would be more raw).

[masukomi]

agreed. the "brutalist websites" linked on that page aren't brutalist at all. they're just the same crap we were producing in 1995 before we knew what we were doing or had any good tools. They are almost all completely devoid of the simple practicality of brutalist architecture.

[hatsunearu]

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

This is what i'd call brutalist.

[baybal2]

Is it a thing with with Californians that they prefer to not to plaster over bricks?

[lmkg]

Any brick you see on a building in California is ornamental to begin with. Brick turns to liquid during an earthquake, so it can't be used as a load-bearing component anywhere with seismic activity.

[throwanem]

Not just Californians, I should think; it's rarely done here in Baltimore, too. Not sure if it's the aesthetic or the maintenance drawbacks that primarily prevent it.

[foolrush]

I love the tongue in cheek site. Cracked me up.

Brutalism is peak Late Modernism in the sense that it is the complete exorcising of cultural symbology via ornamentation.

The timing of Brutalism isn't coincidental; it actively marched lock step with late industrialization. The need for an engine of commerce needs specialisation and parts that work with ultra efficiency in the machine. No need for the baggage of cultural nuance nor ecclectic individuality.

Not a surprise that the busted up ideological polemic of "form" vs. "function" takes its dark roots in this era.

[tpm]

Brutalism created its own symbols, through the simple and massive presence of concrete that cannot be ignored. Also concrete by itself quickly stopped being the most effective building material.

On the other hand, the International Style, emerging at about the same time, now that's completely devoid of cultural symbols.

[mbrock]

Interesting connection for people interested in design patterns:

> At the University of Oregon campus, outrage and vocal distaste for Brutalism led, in part, to the hiring of Christopher Alexander and the initiation of The Oregon Experiment in the late 1970s. This led to the development of Alexander's A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.

[Meai]

That's a great point, I think a brutalist data entry website would be a giant table of input boxes without labels, only hover over text. Something like that, where it looks efficient... but in reality it's kinda ugly and a pain to use and it would benefit greatly from just a tad more UI friendliness, but they value purity over functionality.

[NoGravitas]

Ah, disagree. I think a brutalist data entry website would be a straight-down-the-page list of unadorned, unstyled form fields. The labels would be there, and would have proper for= attributes, but would be unstyled.

[Meai]

yeah maybe, it was a little over the top I guess. I was thinking of a brutalist building with seemingly 2 meter thick walls and tiny slits for windows and it seemed to be barely useful for actual living, so that's why I exaggerated with the website analogy

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/%E6%95%B...