The Brutalists | Owen Hopkins
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Owen Hopkins: My name is Owen Hopkins. My book is called The Brutalists: Brutalism's Best Architects, and it brings together 200 of the most interesting Brutalist architects from across the world, starting way back in the 1930s and coming right up to the present, but with a big focus on the '60s and '70s.
Suzy Chase: For years, Brutalism was shunned by popular opinion, widely perceived as architecture so manifestly bad, so obviously against natural human scale values and aesthetics, that it was barely architecture at all. Where dissenters existed, they were confined to a small circle of eccentrics, enthusiasts, and contrarians, who seemingly reveled in their admiration of something so obviously beyond the pale. I have never even considered the fact that this was in a category of architecture until I had Hilton Carter on my show. He's a plant stylist here in the United States and he adores Brutalist architecture with what he calls "the perfect balance of hard and soft and warm and cold." So what is the current popular opinion of Brutalism in 2023?
Owen Hopkins: Well, that's the essential question really. The fact that this book exists indicates that there is an appetite and a widespread interest in Brutalism. I mean, that's certainly been born out over the last decade or so. There's been a proliferation of books, but also prints, mugs, key rings, Brutalist models, and a whole host of social media accounts dedicated to Brutalism. But at the same time, alongside this revival of interest in Brutalism and this new generation of enthusiasts that have appeared, there are still vast sways of opinion that still hate it, that still see it as the antithesis of what architecture could or should be. And in some ways that negative response has even hardened in recent years. So during the 1980s and 1990s, popular opinion about Brutalism was almost universally negative. I'd say now it's polarized. And one of the things that I find so fascinating about the style is the way it is so incredibly polarizing. There are people who love it, and there are people for whom, as your introduction said, it's not even architecture at all. It's so far beyond the pale.
Suzy Chase: When did the style emerge?
Owen Hopkins: There are multiple Brutalism's, and that's one of the things I try to tease out in the introduction, and it's obviously reflected in the massive range of architects that are included in the following pages. But Brutalism is usually considered to have emerged in the 1950s, as an English thing then called the New Brutalism. The actual word itself has nothing to do with being brutal, although it's often seen in those terms given the nature of some of the buildings. It derives from the French béton brut, which literally translates as raw concrete. And it emerged in England through the work of a group of architects, but also artists, filmmakers, writers, critics that were attempting to reformulate modernism, something that had emerged in the 1920s, but rethinking the direction of modernism after the Second World War in light of mass culture, the advent of TV, and color magazines.
What role could architecture play in this world, that could not ignore these changes in popular culture but embrace them, but in a way that doesn't mean giving up the modernist principles of architecture being this tool for improving the world? One can pinpoint Brutalism's origins, but at the same time it sprung up in lots of different places and very much was the architecture that manifested the zeitgeist of the '50s, '60s and '70s in Europe, in the US, South America, across the world.
Suzy Chase: So you talk in the book about the idea that architecture itself might affect meaningful social change. Can you chat just a little bit about that?
Owen Hopkins: The vast majority of Brutalist buildings are social housing. And Brutalism, I guess, picked up the mantle of the sort of first generation modernism of Le Corbusier, who imagined these great cities planned along regular lines and these great grids for these preformed towers. Brutalism took that ambition but was ostensibly more interested in the city as found. It was less interested in the blank slate that Le Corbusier wanted to build his city on, and was certainly in the kind of new Brutalism manifestations, was deeply interested in how Brutalist buildings could draw from the sort of materiality, the patterns of use, that existed in cities.
In practice it didn't always reflect that, or actually quite rarely reflected that and found form in large social housing estates, which in a very practical sense were providing new decent habitation for literally millions of people across the world. At a time when, certainly speaking from the British point of view, a lot of people were still living in really rundown houses with no central heating, with outdoor toilets and problems with damp. Suddenly entering this new world that Brutalist housing specifically offered was an extraordinary and profound change. And what Brutalist architects often did was to use architecture as a way of manifesting this new world.
Suzy Chase: When I think about Brutalism, I have a vision, an image in my mind, but as I was reading this book, I kept trying to figure out how the Hunstanton School in Norwich, England fits the Brutalist description, since it's steel framed. And that brings me to the question posed by critic Reyner Banham, is that how you pronounce his name?
Owen Hopkins: Reyner Banham.
Suzy Chase: Reyner Banham. "Is Brutalist an ethic or aesthetic?"
Owen Hopkins: Well, that's the fundamental question. So he was one of those founders, I suppose, of new Brutalism in England in the 1950s. He wrote a famous article in the architectural review in 1955, which kind of codified it and then a subsequent book a decade later. And he identified that the Hunstanton school you mentioned, by Alison and Peter Smithson, as a landmark Brutalist project, but as you say, it's steel and glass, almost a Miesian architectural language. Looking at the projects that Mies was doing in the Chicago at the time, the IIT in particular, but for Banham, it was this archetypal Brutalist project because it embodied this truth. This almost radical truth, there was no attempt to hide the fact that this was steel or glass. It was what you saw was essentially what you got in the building. And that was generally much easier to do with concrete because concrete is this material that it can be both an external surface and also provide the structure.
But for Banham, the Hunstanton school really manifests this in a very clear way, perhaps because it was an exception, which kind of proved the rule. And this question of whether it's an aesthetic or an ethic is a really fascinating one. Because of course the answer is both. New Brutalism was imbued with this radical spirit of how architecture could transform the world and architects being very much leaders of that process. But at the same time, the buildings that they created were not just simple products of this ethical or idealistic position, they reflected it through aesthetics. So it's impossible really to separate the two. And I think that's one of the fascinating things about Brutalism and as I explore it in the introduction of the book, is how it takes competing, ostensibly opposed or sort of paradoxical positions and brings them together. So yeah, that ethic or aesthetic question I think is always a little bit of a red herring because of course the answer is Brutalism is very much both.
Suzy Chase: Brutalists made the future real, showed us the future was here and pushed a futuristic idea to its limits by cutting edge engineering. I'd love for you to describe Zvi Hecker's city hall in Israel and how do you think his time growing up in Krakow and Samarkand can in Uzbekistan influenced his style?
Owen Hopkins: That city hall is an extraordinary building. It's almost impossible to describe. It's a sort of array of intersecting geometries. It's got ostensibly this familiar Brutalist building form, which is the inverted ziggurat. And one sees that in countless examples from the city library in Birmingham in the UK to Boston City Hall. But here it's taken several steps further than it's usually seen with this repeating diamond pattern on the outside. And then a super structure that emerges from what at ground level appears as a flat roof, although it's not flat. These extraordinary kinds of geometric forms that sort of protrude out, that you could only really do in raw concrete. I mean, you could do them other things in this pattern with steel, but the sort of things that emerge very much from the particularities of that material.
Where this design came from, to what extent it reflects Hecker's time in Krakow or in Uzbekistan for example, is really impossible to say. It is always one of the sort of fundamental questions with architects is how their early experiences growing up in certain places manifest later on in their architecture. Sometimes it's very, very clear, very obvious, very direct, but on other occasions it's very hard to draw these comparisons. Most architects tend to resist these direct lines or lineages. They like to see their ideas as wholly original.
Suzy Chase: I'd love for you to chat a bit about Agustín Hernández Navarro's praxis home in Mexico. And I seem to associate Brutalism with colder climates and I am not sure why, but this home is fantastic and it looks like it's growing right up out of the mountain.
Owen Hopkins: Yeah, it really does. So when I had started doing the book, I hadn't quite appreciated how much Brutalist architecture that there is in South America and in Central America. I obviously was familiar, being from the UK, with the European Brutalism, US Brutalism, the Brutalism that happened in the Soviet block, in Japan. And I was conscious that yes, it was big in South America, but I hadn't realized quite how big. And there, it's used as a way of creating architecture that was decidedly modern, but at the same time has this ability to draw from pre-Columbian architecture in its massive sort of monumentality, to some extent in its materiality. This particular example, it certainly has the monumentality that one associates with the architecture of pre-Columbian civilizations, as you say, it juts out from a slope into a valley and emerges.
It's almost like a sort of spaceship form. It's this incredible stripped back geometry, massive angled cantilevers, this strip ribbon window. I mean it's a quite staggering creation that one could only really associate with Brutalism. I mean it's got that bravado in it that you find in so much Brutalism, that you can't think of any other architect working any other different period or in any other different style that would conceive a kind of double trapezoidal form that juts out over this ridge. I mean it is thrillingly sculptural. I mean it's quite extraordinary that the home would be manifested through these extraordinary visual language.
Suzy Chase: So as much as the architecture looked forward, it also looked back. An example is Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's Barbican Estate in London. What are the elements that remind us of days gone by?
Owen Hopkins: It's there in the very name. The Barbican is literally in medieval architecture, like a gate house on a castle or a fortress. And although this estate was incredibly radical in its design and modern with these three towers that emerge up with elevated walkways with lakes and waters, it's just an amazing configuration. There are many, many elements that seek to try to integrate this futuristic side with looking back, especially at medieval architecture. So there are lots of covered walkways where you are looking through these very narrow windows. Which are basically Brutalist versions of the windows that you find in medieval castles, that archers would stick their bows and arrows out so they could shoot down at marauding invaders while protected by the building. It's quite an extraordinary experience. And then these three massive concrete towers that I mentioned that are triangular in the plan, even now as London has become lately a sort of high rise city, at least in its urban center, these are still really distinctive landmarks.
They are sat on these massive columns, which are, in form, columns you would find in Romanesque architecture, in some of the great Romanesque cathedrals of Britain, like Durham's. Those massive, round, really pared back with these capitals that are inspired by loosely derivative sort of simplified versions of classical capitals. So it's this sort of fascinating thing of walking around this urban environment that's 1970s, but is also a manifesto on the future as it was imagined in the 1970s. But also there are these little moments, these fragments of looking back to the early history of architecture on that site and in the UK more broadly.
Suzy Chase: So then we can go further down the rabbit hole and examine the philosophy that states that the universe and its various parts ought to be considered alive and naturally ordered as seen in Georges Adilon. Is that how you pronounce his name?
Owen Hopkins: Yeah, I suppose French accent on it. Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Oui, oui. Can you talk a bit about the Sainte-Marie Lyon school in France where art and architecture meet?
Owen Hopkins: This particular building is incredibly hard to categorize. It emerges from an existing, I think, late medieval building and it's this sort of alien addition onto the side, but yet at the same time it's weirdly in keeping with it. And this is a particular case in the book where it's shown in a black and white photograph so that the gray scale effect actually serves to unify it formally. In Adilon's work, he very much sought to blur art and architecture, and this is manifested in quite a lot of his architecture. But he was trained initially as a painter, was very interested in post-war, modernist abstract painting. And this is really sort of manifested in his architecture, which is very much sort of buildings as sculpture in a sense. But also buildings that almost bypass sculptures, this kind of alchemical process of taking two-dimensional, making it three-dimensional, suddenly imbues it with all this sort of extraordinary energy.
But as I say, the most dramatic bit is this protrusion from the school's historic building, which is this swirling mass of forms and structures and shapes. It has a kind of organic quality. There's a sort of petrified element to it, of an organic form that's been fossilized over millions of years. That's imbued with this weight and a pressure and a history that emerges from this historic building in a way that is alien. But because it is imbued with this almost sort of primal force, there's a sense that almost that the situation is reversed, in a sense. And adding on has created something that appears to massively predate what was there. And perhaps it's the more obviously architectural elements of pitched roofs and it's turrets and it's rounded windows. It's a building that is powerful but extremely enigmatic at the same time.
Suzy Chase: And then we move on to the volcanic architecture of Fernando Menis with the Holy Redeemer Church in the Canary Islands, comprised of four massive volumes. I am so curious about this form.
Owen Hopkins: He was born in Tenerife, Canary Islands, and like all the Canary Islands, it's a volcanic island. And the volcanic landscape very much defines Tenerife on the coast. And his work very much emerges from its landscape. It's massive, it's geological, it's imbued with these sorts of rough materiality. But then he works the forms so there are moments of delicacy, so it is as if these geological forms have emerged from the ground. But then you've had the work of human craftsmanship. This church appears like it's always been there. The rest of the neighborhood that surrounds it has actually grown up around this church. It's architecture that's sort of born from the landscape in the most extraordinary way.
Suzy Chase: In your opinion, what is the most iconic Brutalist building in the world?
Owen Hopkins: I could give you an answer for every day of the year perhaps, but I would pick something that is, or was, because it no longer exists, close to home. And that's the Trinity Square Car Park in Gateshead in the northeast of England. And the Trinity Square Car Park towered over the town of Gateshead. Was an extraordinary local landmark. It had a shopping center at the base in typical Brutalist fashion, split onto multiple levels. It was almost like a kind of mega structure. And then its core was this multi-story car park that was manifesting in just the most sort of rugged, stripped back, typically Brutalist way. And it was extremely controversial.
A lot of people really, really hated it. And it was sadly demolished just over a decade ago and replaced by a series of buildings, which I think probably are more functional. It now works rather better as a sort of shopping district. But it's one of those buildings that perhaps if it had survived another decade, it may not have been knocked down. The taste might have turned just enough and it might have survived, have found a way to be reinvented. But sadly it went and it's now this kind of ghostly presence.
Suzy Chase: Generally the people who own the home decorate it with furnishings that harmonize with the exterior. I wonder about decorating a Brutalist style residence. Could you please talk a little bit about the interior decorating aspect of it?
Owen Hopkins: That's a really interesting question. Some Brutalist architects treated, particularly private houses, almost as a total work of art and their design extended to the interior treatment and particular choice of materials and even the choice of furniture. And many other Brutalist buildings, social housing, you are just left with flats that you get to furnish however you want it. A few years ago I had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, of going to Balfron Tower, which is an Ernö Goldfinger tower block in East London. For various reasons one of the flats had been temporarily taken over by the National Trust, the heritage organization in the UK, which runs most of the country houses and castles and things. And they'd taken over one of the flats. And they had commissioned the designer Wayne Hemingway and his daughter Tilly to deck it out, in furnishings that would have been popular when the building was completed in the sort of mid 1960s.
And it really was this extraordinary experience of stepping into this world. It was sort of familiar but also incredibly distant, with the G Plan furniture and these shag pile rugs and posters of the Beatles up on the wall and these sorts of iconic 1960s lampshades and things like that. But what it kind of ignored though was the fact this was social housing. The people moving in would unlikely have been able to afford to buy wholly new 1960s furniture to deck out their beautiful new flats. So in reality, there probably would be a few things that were very much 1960s, but a lot of it would've been probably still like 1930s stuff, some Victorian stuff as well. So it really would've had a bit of a sort of mishmash of different types of furniture in this flat for this reason. And so it was interesting therefore that what was presented was a bit of a fiction, an enticing one, but a fiction nonetheless. The reality would've been much more eclectic, purely as a result of just the practicality and the means of the people occupying it.
Suzy Chase: You're an architectural writer and curator and also the director of the Farrell Centre at New Castle University, a brand new public center for architecture and cities. So I'd love to hear a little bit about this and when does it open?
Owen Hopkins: We are opening to the public on the 22nd of April, and the rationale behind the center is to create a place where local people can go to find out about their city, it's past and it's present. And in the process get a stake in shaping its future. It emerges from the belief that architecture and planning should not be things that happen behind closed doors, but that the public voice is absolutely central to them. To creating places that people want to live in, that people feel happy living in, that they feel they have a sense of ownership. And we'll be looking to sort of achieve this through a whole variety of different ways. We'll be running exhibition programs that connect local issues and situations to concerns and themes that have regional, national, global significance as well.
Architecture has this ability to obviously be intensely local, but also connect to this much broader realm of ideas and situations, which we'll really be trying to tease out. And then alongside that, we'll be running a whole range of live programs or talks, round table meetings, workshops for schools and families, kids, but also offering our spaces to other groups, other people in the local community whose missions intersect with ours, who have similar agendas.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Owen Hopkins: So my website is owenhopkins.co.uk. I'm on Twitter intermittently at Owen_Hopkins and on Instagram at OwenHopkins, all one word.
Suzy Chase: This has been so fascinating. I got lost in this book. I cannot thank you enough for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Owen Hopkins: It's a great pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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