Black Dragon Press has shared a set of prints and a booklet on Brutalist architecture in London with illustrations by Thomas Danthony, complemented by text from "Fuck Yeah Brutalism" curator Michael Abrahamson. See Abrahamson's intro to the booklet reprinted below.
Brutalism is an unusually evocative word. Like the architecture for which it’s used as a descriptor, it can elicit a powerful, bodily discomfort or psychological repulsion. Standard dictionary definitions itemise the materials (exposed concrete, but also brick and block) and describe the physical character (forceful, unadorned, imposing) of this type of building, and would likely also mention the time frame during which it was the dominant tendency in architecture (from the late 1950s to the early 1970s).
Not bad as far as dictionaries go, but these capture neither the ethical convictions held by its architects, nor the intense sensory affects of the buildings themselves. Chopping up and remixing the many meanings of “brutal” and “-ism”, one might instead propose the following, more versatile and more forthright definition:
An architecture of principled but pathological hardness or discomfort, which makes no attempt to disguise its unpleasantness.
