Brutalism gets a bad rap because people mimic the naive effect without understanding motive. It’s about not disguising how a simple thing was made. The first by-name brutalist structure was a house with one window topped by a solid steel I-beam. What fools saw was raw construction with no ornamentation. But what mattered was function without shame.
There is no reason the concrete walls in a stairwell have to be formed from flat least-effort boxes. You can put pretty patterns in the forms! You can sculpt and mass-produce whole reliefs! What makes it brutalism is not covering up the fact it’s a big slab of concrete. Don’t even hide the holes where you had to shove the slab out of the form. If you don’t like where they sit, in the pattern or the relief - make a better form. You can figure out how to integrate a few little circles and still be pretty.
The best examples in modernity might be “street furniture.” Curbs, signposts, telephone poles. Hard-wearing civic necessities that are obviously made of one piece of one material and maybe painted a solid color. But you know there’s a difference between ugly streets and pretty streets. It’s never because the pretty street covered up how everything was built. There’s no wooden slats over the sidewalk, pretending it’s a boardwalk. No terra-cotta pots around an in-ground bush. No faux cobblestone paint-job on the asphalt. Signposts are still a steel tube or a punched rail of sheet-metal; they’re just treated or painted often enough not to be half rust and all ugly.
So yeah, gaudy up those flat walls. Just not with any nonsense facade that makes them look like five-over-one gentrification rectangles.
Brutalism gets a bad rap because people mimic the naive effect without understanding motive. It’s about not disguising how a simple thing was made. The first by-name brutalist structure was a house with one window topped by a solid steel I-beam. What fools saw was raw construction with no ornamentation. But what mattered was function without shame.
There is no reason the concrete walls in a stairwell have to be formed from flat least-effort boxes. You can put pretty patterns in the forms! You can sculpt and mass-produce whole reliefs! What makes it brutalism is not covering up the fact it’s a big slab of concrete. Don’t even hide the holes where you had to shove the slab out of the form. If you don’t like where they sit, in the pattern or the relief - make a better form. You can figure out how to integrate a few little circles and still be pretty.
The best examples in modernity might be “street furniture.” Curbs, signposts, telephone poles. Hard-wearing civic necessities that are obviously made of one piece of one material and maybe painted a solid color. But you know there’s a difference between ugly streets and pretty streets. It’s never because the pretty street covered up how everything was built. There’s no wooden slats over the sidewalk, pretending it’s a boardwalk. No terra-cotta pots around an in-ground bush. No faux cobblestone paint-job on the asphalt. Signposts are still a steel tube or a punched rail of sheet-metal; they’re just treated or painted often enough not to be half rust and all ugly.
So yeah, gaudy up those flat walls. Just not with any nonsense facade that makes them look like five-over-one gentrification rectangles.