An outline of the assigned reading that includes thesis of the reading, 3-5 critical points and your assessment of the effectiveness of the reading

[Excerpt from the Skyline] Author(s): Lewis Mumford Reviewed work(s): Source: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 15, No. 3, What Is Happening to Modern Architecture?: A Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art (Spring, 1948), p. 2 Published by: The Museum of Modern Art Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058108 . Accessed: 19/09/2012 13:57

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A symposium for architects was held in the Auditorium of the Museum of Modem Art on the evening of February 11, 1948. The discussion was based on an excerpt from the

Skyline by Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker, October 11, 1947, which follows:* Meanwhile, new winds are beginning to blow, and presently they may hit even backward old New York. The very critics, such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who twenty years ago were identifying the "modern" in architecture with Cubism in painting and with a general glorification of the mechanical and the impersonal and aesthetically puritanic have become advocates of the personalism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Certainly Le Corbusier's dictum of the twenties-that the modern house is a machine for living in-has become old hat. The modern accent is on living, not on the machine. (This change must hit hardest those academic American modernists who imitated Le Corbusi'-r and Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, as their fathers imitated the reigning lights of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.) Sigfried Giedion, once a leader of the mechanical rigorists, has come out for the monumental and the symbolic, and among the younger people an inclination to play with the "feeling" elements in design-with color, texture, even painting and sculpture-has become insuppres- sible. "Functionalism," writes a rather pained critic in a recent issue of the Architectural Review of London, "the only real aesthetic faith to which the modern architect could lay claim in the inter-war years, is now, if not re- pudiated, certainly called into question … by those who were formerly its most illustrious supporters."

We are bound to hear more of this development dur- ing the next decade, but I am not alarmed by the pros- pect. What was called functionalism was a one-sided interpretation of function, and it was an interpretation that Louis Sullivan, who popularized the slogan "Form follows function," never subscribed to. The rigorists placed the mechanical functions of a building above its human functions; they neglected the feelings, the senti- ments, and the interests of the person who was to occupy it. Instead of regarding engineering as a foundation for form, they treated it as an end. This kind of archi- tectural onesidedness was not confined to the more arid practitioners. Frank Lloyd Wright, it is said, once turned upon a client-let's call him John Smith-who had added a few pleasant rugs and comfortable Aalto chairs to Mr. Wright's furnishings, and exclaimed,

*(By permission copyright 1947, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)

"You have ruined this place completely, and you have disgraced me. This is no longer a Frank Lloyd Wright house. It is a John Smith house now."

Well, it was time that some of our architects re- membered the non-mechanical and non-formal elements in architecture, and that they remembered what a building says as well as what it does. A house, as the Uruguayan architect Julio Vilamaj6 has put it, should be as personal as one's clothes and should fit the family life just as well. This is not a new doctrine in the United States. People like Bernhard Maybeck and William Wilson Wurster, in California, always practiced it, and they took good care that their houses did not resemble factories or museums. So I don't propose to join the solemn gentlemen who, aware of this natural reaction against a sterile and abstract modernism, are predicting a return to the graceful stereotypes of the eighteenth century. Rather, I look for the continued spread, to every part of the country, of that native and humane form of modernism one might call the Bay Region style, a free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life on the Coast. That style took root about fifty years ago in Berkeley, California, in the early work of John Galen Howard and Maybeek, and by now, on the Coast, it is simply taken for granted; no one out there is foolish enough to imagine that there is any other proper way of building in our time. The style is actually a product of the meeting of Oriental and Occidental architectural traditions, and it is far more truly a universal style than the so-called inter- national style of the nineteen-thirties, since it permits regional adaptations and modifications. Some of the best examples of this at once native and universal tradi- tion are being built in New England. The change that is now going on in both Europe and America means only that modern architecture is past its adolescent period, with its quixotic purities, its awkward self-conscious- ness, its assertive dogmatism. The good young archi- tects today are familiar enough with the machine and its products and processes to take them for granted, and so they are ready to relax and enjoy themselves a little. That will be better for all of us.

LEWIS MUMFORD

The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1948: Vol. XV, No. 3

Photograph credits: Cover, Roy Stevens; page 8, Roger Sturtevant; page 10, Ezra Stoller; page 12, Victor Keppler; page 15, Roy Stevens;

page 17, G. E. Kidder Smith; p. 18, G. E. Kidder Smith; page 19, Roy Stevens.

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Boston City Hall [figure 1] Vilified on completion as “a giant concrete harmonica” a “pigeon cage” or

better, an “Aztec gas station”. At the very least it was, and still is, with most so– called Brutalist buildings characterized as unwelcoming, cold, ugly, with poor lighting, ineffective heating, and having a labyrinthine layout.

By contrast, the architectural community was more or less ecstatic, at least for a few years: Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote, “what has been gained is a notable achievement in the creation and control of urban space, and in the uses of monumentality and humanity in the best pattern of great city building. Old and New Boston are joined through an act of urban design that relates directly to the quality of the city and its life”. Donlyn Lyndon wrote in the Boston Globe that “Boston City Hall carries an authority that results from the clarity, articulation, and intensity of imagination with which it has been formed”. Ar- chitectural historian Douglass Shand–Tucci, author of Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–2000, called City Hall “one of America’s foremost landmarks” and

“arguably the great building of twentieth century Boston”. Ada Louise Huxtable noted “the architectural gap, or abyss, as it exists between those who design and those who use the 20th century’s buildings”.

Birmingham Central Library [figure 2] This building was built by John Madin (1924–2012), one of Birmingham’s

often unappreciated master architects of the second half of the 20th century, between the mid–60s and 1974, as part of a large civic centre scheme on the newly created Paradise Circus site. Originally planned to be built alongside the library was a School of Music, Drama Centre, Athletic Institute, Offices, Shops, Public House, a Car Park with 500 spaces and a bus interchange. The collection of civic buildings was all to be connected by high level walkways and the net- work of galleries which bridge the roads. According to Madin, it was designed with the inspiration of Leslie Martin’s Law Library at Oxford, and of course, Boston City Hall. Prince Charles famously described the library as “looking more like a place for burning books, than keeping them”. It will, as you know, soon be torn down in favor of a new library building by Mecanoo architects—an undeni- ably good contemporary structure, that in the place of its “austere” forebear

Even today, while a portion of the architectural community might be supportive, the general public remains convinced that these, often mega–structural and urban planning related structures, are both

unredeemably ugly (to use one of John Allan’s terms) and worthy only of be- ing torn down. John Allan made the point that we cannot any more use our own aesthetic and professional criteria to argue for their preservation—energy, economic, and political considerations demand to be fore–fronted—and Mark Pasnik’s coalition in Boston has tried to re–frame the debate by re–naming the style—not “Brutalism” but “Heroic Modernism”. I don’t want to rehearse these arguments again, but rather to speak about this undeniably unfortunate word

“Brutalism”. John Allan, in his response to the session on the Tugendhat restora- tion, made the point that Modernism for many was received in photographs and that it was essential to unravel the “mythic” status of photographic Modernism. I will briefly try to unravel the equally mythic status of a word—“Brutalism”. I turn first to the dictionary definitions as quoted in that repository of the com- mon wisdom Wikipedia: “Brutalism” is, according to the dictionary, a commonly accepted term for a particular style of architecture dominant in the 60s: “a style of Modern architecture, primarily in the 60s, emphasizing heavy, monumental, stark concrete forms and raw surfaces” (McGraw–Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction, 2003, McGraw–Hill); “term applied to the architectural style of exposed rough concrete and large Modernist block forms, which flourished in the 60s and 70s and which derived from the architecture of Le Corbusier”. (The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art, 2002, Oxford University Press); “term coined (1953) to describe Le Corbusier’s use of monumental, sculptural shapes and raw, unfinished molded concrete, an approach that represented a departure from International Style” (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, 1994–2010, Ency- clopædia Britannica). Readers are referred to Louis Kahn, Denys Lasdun, and James Stirling. In these senses the term is generally applied to a wide range of buildings, and not necessarily just to British buildings, that include to give just a few examples which without expanding upon this evening I would just note have all been the object of public dislike if not animosity more or less from the outset, and that all are nearing, according to their owners, public or private, the end of their useful life.

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Learning to Love Brutalism

The following keynote lecture was presented at the 12th International docomomo Conference that took place in Espoo, Finland, this past August 2012. The author began his lecture thanking the Chair of docomomo International, Ana Tostões, and all docomomo members and friends

who have done so much to ensure that the now historical heritage of Modernism might be saved for the future. Following the stimulating talks of John Allan and Mark Pasnik, he entered what for many in this field was a territory that was at least ambiguous if not impossible to accept: that the so–called Brutalist buildings of the period 1960 to the late 70s would one day be the urgent object of attention for those interested in preservation and conservation.

By Anthony Vidler

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will provide a “world–class new Library […] a ‘people’s palace’ for people of all ages, offering the diverse communities across the city and beyond a library to truly be proud of”.

London South Bank Arts Centre [figure 3] Even Charles Jencks tried to defend this structure in his review for Architec-

tural Review in 1978, against the charge leveled by nearly half of 550 engineers surveyed as ‘Britain’s Ugliest Building’ (Daily Mail, October 1967); qualified by the press variously as ‘quasi–fortified’, ‘neo–Antheap’, ‘mini–Ziggats’, bunker’, or what I think of as the very best that British journalism can have ever come up with ‘an army of centipedes carrying off the dried carcass of a broken turtle.’ The fate of the South Bank is yet undecided—perhaps, like that of Boston City Hall only in limbo by reason of the recession.

Charles Jencks in his argument for the South Bank development, admitted that to the eyes of a rationalist these attacks were partially justified: no ap- parent structural logic, no underlying coherence, no visual logic to explain the functional logic”, a “confusion of shapes and ambiguity of forms—all in exposed concrete—with dark apparently useless space beneath circulation deck; chang- es of level stairs turn inward; no provision for daytime activity—in short as far as the always anti–elitist public is concerned, just one more post–war cultural ghetto”. Yet there was, he insisted, a sensible answer to each of these objec- tions: “the architects were not trying to create a building in any conventional sense but rather a sequence of extended places and events along a route. And where they were trying for a building, it was probably intended to be conven- tionally ugly”.

In other words, the architects of the South Bank were deliberately trying for something other than either the traditional classical monument or the already traditional anonymous International Style Modernism of corporate usage. The true ancestor of the South Bank, Jencks argued, is the Brutalist work of the Smithsons. Sheffield University scheme of 1953 was “the first really blunt ex- pression of a non–building, organized around non–formal principles by means of a circulation deck”. The Berlin Haupstadt competition scheme was “open aesthetic for the open society”, “a loose, polycentered arrangement which is

organized as a series of fixed places on a route for movement, as well as an ad hoc arrangement of elements.”

How did this movement come into being? (I will call it a movement for the moment, although as we shall see, as a movement with an ethic rather than an aesthetic sense since it was severely restricted in its adherents).

‘The New Brutalism’ was a term invented by Reyner Banham in concert with Alison and Peter Smithson in 1953–55. Later, following irate letters from Hans Asplund, Banham admitted that ‘Brutalism’ as a term had originated in Sweden in the form ‘Neo–Brutalism’ but defended ‘New Brutalism’ as entirely different, as composed of a mash–up of two Gallicisms: Art Brut and Béton Brut. The first one referred to Jean Dubuffet and later Edouardo Paolozzi, and the sec- ond one to the concrete work of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. There were, inevitably, other memories of this semantic history. Peter Smithson thought the term came from his colleague and friend Eduardo Paolozzi, who had taken it from Dubuffet’s Art brut. Georges Candilis, probably paraphrasing Sigfried Giedion, thought it came from the conjunction of Peter Smithson’s nickname, “Brutus” and Alison’s own name: “Brutalism, yes of course. It was our slogan. The term has to be taken in the sense of directness, truthfulness, no concessions. I remember writing: ‘You have to be direct and brute’ […] We used to say: Smithson=Brutus (Peter’s nickname) plus Alison”. Banham, not to be outdone, added another twist, noting in his entry on “Brutalism” for the Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture that it was a friend of the Smithsons, Guy Oddie, who was “the first person to utter the phrase in the early summer of 1954”—despite the fact that this directly contradicted Peter Smithson’s own use of the term in print the year before.

As late as 1956, the origins of the term were still giving rise to what the photographer of the vernacular tradition, Eric de Maré, called “a subject for academic research”. In 1950 the Swedish journal Bygg–Mastaren (Build the next few years) had published a special issue on the work of the architect Gun- nar Asplund, with an English summary that used the term “Neo–Brutalist”.1 De Maré wrote to The Architectural Review summarizing a letter he had received from Gunnar Asplund’s son Hans, explaining how the term had arisen in Sweden. Hans, it seems, had coined the term in jest to characterize a house design by Ed-

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Figure 1. Boston City Hall, vilified on completion as “a giant concrete harmonica” a “pigeon cage,” or an “Aztec gas station.”

Figure 2. Birmingham Central Library, which has been torn down in favor of a new library building by Mecanoo architects.

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As Jim Stirling was to note regarding his and James Gowan’s re–housing at Preston “I suppose some would think them too Victorian”. But it was this very ambiguity that allowed for the fighting words of the “Angry Young Men”, their novels, films, and plays celebrating the resilience, comraderie, and sometime upward mobility of working–class culture. It was in some sympathy with this sentiment, though not as politically charged, that New Brutalism was able to adopt its rough materialism and attitude toward brick–and–steel culture. It was not accidental either, as Banham reminded his readers much later, that the ru- bric ‘New Brutalism’ was “claimed particularly by an English team of Redbrick extraction”.

The Brutalism word itself first appeared in print in a short text by Peter Smithson for Architectural Design in 1953, introducing the drawings for a house in “Soho” (which was not for Soho at all but a project for their own house in Colville Place) and claiming that, if it had been built, it would have been “the first exponent of the ‘new brutalism’ in England”. Modest in the extreme, with its load–bearing brick party walls and exposed concrete floor beams on front and rear façades, the project inherited the already five–year preoccupation with neo–Palladian geometry: the façades were controlled by regulating lines, the plan was nearly square, and the internal divisions were equally geometricized. But the interest of the design did not lie in this survival (Peter Smithson was later to declare the Palladian movement over by 1948) but rather in the use of materials specified for the builder:

Bare concrete, brickwork and wood…Brickwork may suggest a blue or double burnt or colored pointing; but the arbitrary use of color and texture was not conformed with, and common bricks with struck joints were intended. The bars and color variation have some sort of natural tension when laid by a good bricklayer.

Alison and Peter Smithson, “House in Soho, London”

Architectural Design, December 1953, 342.

In their preamble to the builder’s specification, the Smithsons exhorted the “Constructor” to “refrain from any internal finishes wherever practicable”. The conclusion was that he should “aim at a high standard of basic construction as in a small warehouse”.

A house like a small warehouse: this suggests the stringent conditions of material supply and construction at the time, but also an emerging sense that

man and Holm, and had shared his comment with two English architects, Shank- land and Cox, who brought the words back to England where “it had spread like wildfire” and had “somewhat surprisingly” been adopted by “a certain faction of young English architects”. Hans Asplund took “no pride” in this invention as a self–described “paleo–sentimentalist”. Thus, a term that was apparently invented to repudiate Swedish Modern, and its importation to Britain, has in fact been invented by the Swedes.

Banham’s riposte to this idea was belated and followed the orthodoxy of art–historical terminology. “‘Neo–Brutalist’” he stated in his summing up of the movement, “is not the same as ‘The New Brutalism’ […] ‘Neo–Brutalist’ is a stylistic label, like Neo–Classic or Neo–Gothic, whereas ‘The New Brutalism’”, the privileged users of which were, he concluded predictably, Alison and Peter Smithson, was “an ethic not an aesthetic”. In this context it is worth remarking that the word ‘brutalist’ as used by the friends of Hans Asplund was from the start “negative” while for Banham and the Smithsons, with their attempt to translate a “New” brutalism into an “ethic”, it was positive.

But as a British movement, the New Brutalism was born out of a particular context—that of postwar “austerity Britain”—it was a society of scarcity, sub- jected to what historian Tony Judt describes as the “unprecedented conditions of restraint and voluntary penury”, with “almost everything either rationed or simply unavailable”. But as far as building was concerned, and despite fuel shortages, bricks were in plentiful supply. Brick production reached prewar levels by 1954 and continued to grow until the early 70s.

Of course, the British, from Georgian times, were very proud of their bricks. In a 1940 advertisement for the most popular of bricks, the Accrington Brick and Tile Company showed a bomb landing harmlessly on their ‘Nori’ (Iron) brick that resisted with a crushing load of 1028.8 tons per square foot (AR vol. LXXX- VII, nº 518, January 1940). Part of Churchill’s charisma as a wartime leader, and afterwards his folksy image in retirement, was his passion for bricklaying:

“each afternoon, we’d spend a couple of hours together, laying bricks. If anyone had asked me what my grandfather did, I’d have said: ‘he’s a bricklayer’”.

But the British were also slightly embarrassed by their bricks; they were a little too much of a reminder of the working–class streets of Midland industrial towns, not part of the establishment—as in the sobriquet “Red–brick Universi- ties” to distinguish local and regional foundations from Oxbridge and London.

Figure 3. London South Bank Arts Centre, qualified by the press as ‘quasi-fortified’, ‘neo-Antheap’, ‘mini-Ziggats’, bunker’, or ‘an army of centipedes carrying off the dried carcass of a broken turtle.’

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Learning to Love Brutalism docomomo 47 — 2012/2

This school, proclaimed Banham a year later in his seminal article “The New Brutalism” of 1955, was the real originator of the New Brutalist manner, despite its pre–dating the term. Thus Banham, having referred to what he called “the New Brutalist canon” as if one already existed, opened his review and descrip- tion of Hunstanton polemically enough, with a section entitled “Design principles..

Confusingly then, New Brutalism originated in a work that, for all intents and purposes, was inspired by Le Corbusier’s Jaoul Houses, yet its most significant exemplar was a building designed three years before that, and four years be- fore the term itself was adopted, a building that was inspired in turn by the IIT Campus buildings of Mies.

With the fervor of an art historian who had discovered a new movement that matched his favorite Modern one—Futurism—Banham now took up the cudgels for the term: “as Britain’s first native art movement since the systematic study of art history reached these islands, the New Brutalism needs to be seen in a double historical context—that of post–war architectural thought, and that of post–war historical writings on architecture”. It is a mark of the historicization of architectural styles that New Brutalism was introduced as an effect of art– historical writing, and as an art historian in–training Banham did not disappoint, taking care to define the origins of the term before characterizing its reach.

For Banham the term ‘New Brutalism’ was a natural response [natural?] to “New Empiricism” if not “New Humanism” and was a direct attack on what he called the Marxist/Communist cell in the LCC. Against the “soft” Modernism of this cell, something—a “New X–ism”—was bound to emerge. And with the help of a few continental words—Le Corbusier’s béton brut, Dubuffet’s art brut—the Smithsons managed to capture the term “as their own, by their own desire and public consent”.

It was indeed literally and figuratively a “brick–bat thrown in the public’s face”, a program, a banner”. But this banner was on closer inspection decid- edly vague. For in the end Banham is reduced to defining New Brutalism in extremely general terms as “1, Formal legibility of plan; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’”. In- deed, these are general enough that they “can be used to answer the question: Are there other New Brutalist buildings besides Hunstanton?” in the affirmative. Banham lists Le Corbusier’s Marseilles block, Mies’ Promontory and Lakeshore apartments, Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center, the Dutch work of Aldo van Eyck and the architects associated with Team X, only to admit im- mediately that New Brutalists (i.e. the Smithsons) would reject most of these from the canon. Only Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery of 1951–53 might survive the test, but even this not quite, since with its inconsistent detailing it could be construed as too “arty”. This leaves us alone once more with Hunstanton.

But the application of the idea to architecture, and to Hunstanton in particu- lar, demanded more than a general sense of the word. According to Banham, it required not simply “that the building should be an immediately apprehensible entity” but that “the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the experi- ence of the building in use”. New Brutalism’s “form” is actually “aformal”, (and this despite the apparent “formality” of Hunstanton which he admitted with a certain condescension, was not the Smithsons’ fault). Rather, it was the Golden Lane and Sheffield University competition entries, with their full deployment of collage to present a “coherent visual image” by “non–formal means” that evoked “aformalism as a positive force”. Here Banham brings in a surprisingly contemporary terms to characterize his new aformalism—“topology”—that al- lows for a new bridging of the g

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