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| McPherson Square station in Washington DC. Getty Images |
Mies van der Rohe was born first, in 1886, in Aachen, Germany.
Le Corbusier arrived the following year, and 250 miles to the south, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
Mies went on to become the godfather of the steel-and-glass international style and Corbu, enamored with the possibilities of concrete, essentially created brutalism.
And the greatest rivalry in the history of architecture has begun.
Le Corbusier’s brutalism took an early lead, not least because of concrete’s cost advantage: it is cheap and abundant, the second most consumed material in the world, after water.
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| New York’s Park Avenue in front of the landmark Seagram Building. |
Yet by the 1960s, it was the international style that was in the ascendant. Mies had given New York City the Seagram Building.
A new international phenomenon emerged: the modern skyline, comprising buildings that aspired to float – effortlessly, impossibly – upwards, in a reverie of light and transparency. And this was the golden future.
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| Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is hailed as a great design |
Meanwhile, the 99% found themselves raising families in suburban concrete housing estates that were direct descendants of Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, or housing unit, in Marseille.
Brutalism, in the public mind, became the architecture of a forgotten underclass: windswept plazas, crumbling concrete, ugly dystopian soullessness. Far from being something to aspire to, it was something to escape from. The name didn’t help: even though it derives from the French béton brut, for raw concrete, it still connotes brutality.
The story, however, does not end there.
The international style evolved, and not well, deservedly or not, is bearing the brunt of the global backlash against rising inequality at all levels of society.
The openness and transparency ostensibly espoused by the architectural vernacular fool no one: these “residences” are sealed off from their neighborhoods, shiny bubbles of wealth and privilege invariably protected from their less salubrious neighbors by multiple layers of security.
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| Boston - City Hall Plaza. Getty Images |
Thus was the stage set for the resurgence of brutalism. You can’t put a brutalist building in a gold lame party dress: raw concrete is raw concrete. It’s down-to-earth, honest, unpretentious, egalitarian.
Unlike steel and glass, concrete has terroir: the reddish concrete of Boston, for instance, looks and feels very different from the fine-grained concrete of Japan. You take the local rock, bind it with cement and water, and there you have your concrete. Its very nature is local rather than blandly international.
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| Peter Eisenman’s holocaust memorial in Berlin |
Great brutalist buildings, it turns out, have soul, in a way that antiseptic glass curtain walls never will. And they have undeniable power, too. Consider Peter Eisenman’s haunting holocaust memorial in Berlin: it would be unthinkable in anything but concrete.
Source: Concrete jungle: why brutalist architecture is back in style
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