| 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? |
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.