The National Theatre on London's Southbank was completed in 1976 (Getty) |
Post-war concrete
architecture was decried by many as ugly – but now Brutalist buildings are back
in fashion, writes Jonathan Glancey.
This peculiar name was a supposedly clever play on beton
brut, French for raw concrete, which in the hands of an artist-architect like
Le Corbusier, and especially under a Mediterranean sun, could be a strikingly
beautiful building material. So, Brutalists – the name conceived and
popularised by Reyner Banham, a determinedly hip and massively bearded English
architectural critic in the influential pages of the Architectural Review –
were meant to be a new breed of thrusting young architects who, while building
a post-war socialist utopia, would challenge the very foundations of what they
saw as the fey, bourgeois Modernism of the 1930s. And, even worse, of the
charming, reticent kind of new state-approved British architecture represented
by the Royal Festival Hall, centrepiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Rather ironically, the Royal Festival Hall has proven to be
one of the most popular of all post-war British buildings, its charm
appreciated by people of all walks of life, while Brutalist housing blocks and
art galleries were generally regarded – until quite recently – as dank,
dehumanising concrete monstrosities. Like all such labels, however, Brutalism
was soggy around the edges. Buildings like Sir Denys Lasdun’s imposing National
Theatre, rising in great concrete strata along London’s Southbank and completed
in 1976, was labelled Brutalist even though – despite sharing some basic
characteristics, like an extensive use of beton brut – it stood aloof
from any such categorisation, its architect ploughing his own particular
aesthetic furrow.
In fact, Lasdun’s centenary this month, focuses attention
anew on what exactly Brutalism was, why it was so prevalent in so many
countries, why it was so short lived and why, after a long period in the
critical doldrums, it has been nudged back up the critical ladder to link hands
with Modernism, Palladianism, Baroque and Art Nouveau.
This process has been going on since the early 1990s when
young architects, designers and painters began to delight in such denounced
buildings as Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, a terrifyingly brutal 31-storey
concrete housing block completed in 1972 that casts a monumental shadow over
what were once seen as the badlands, or bohemian hinterland, of west London. Living
in Trellick Tower became a badge of fashionable artistry even if long-term
residents held far more ambivalent views of this forceful high-rise housing
block.
Attach the block.
Most people – certainly in Britain – would have gone along
with the Prince of Wales at the time: he described the Brutalist Tricorn
shopping centre in Plymouth as a “mildewed lump of elephant droppings.” Designed
by Rodney Gordon of the Owen Luder Partnership, this had been one of the key
commercial developments of a city that had been brutally blitzed by the
Luftwaffe. Writing in the
Guardian, the critic and broadcaster Jonathan Meades claims that
“Gordon’s imagination was… fecund, rich, untrammelled. It was haunted by
Russian Constructivism, crusader castles, Levantine skylines. There are as many
ideas in a single Gordon building as there are in the entire careers of most
architects.” Meades felt that he was “in the presence of genius.”
And, yet, other observers would have noted that along with
so many other Brutalist “masterpieces” as London’s Hayward Gallery,
Birmingham’s Central Library and the Barco Law Building at the University of
Pittsburgh, as well as in the design of such lesser yet equally intriguing
buildings as the John Lewis department store in Aberdeen or Rodney Gordon’s own
Trinity Car Park, in Gateshead in the north of England (which played a special
guest star role in the compelling 1971 thriller Get Carter starring Michael
Caine), the Tricorn Centre also owed something to Nazi gun emplacements built
along the Atlantic coast of France. Created by the formidable Todt
Organisation, these were truly brutal buildings encountered by Allied troops in
1944.
Others, like the astonishing flak towers in Hamburg and
Vienna designed by Friedrich Tamms, an architect who did much to shape the
Atlantic Wall, resembled all too closely the art galleries and university
libraries of 1960s Britain. How odd that these should have informed a new
architecture for cities that had been carpet-bombed by Germany.
Shock of the new.
This unfortunate association alone made Brutalism widely
unpopular. There were other understandable reasons, too. Emerging in the era of
‘angry young men’, in literature, theatre, film and ‘musique concrète’, this
new architecture was meant to be shockingly new. It also coincided – indeed it
was often synonymous – with the radical reconstruction of city centres
worldwide where urban motorways, concrete underpasses and crass commercial
redevelopment went hand in brutally muscled hand. More than this, raw concrete
looked relentlessly glum under grey skies, stained all too readily in the rain
and, for whatever reason, appeared a natural target for even angrier young men,
and women, who sprayed the walls of Brutalist structures with graffiti.
The architects who made among the best use of beton
brut and brave new forms in damp, grey climates were those who saw new
opportunities to create exciting new skylines with new materials. The
roofscapes of the Barbican, a bravura housing development for the Corporation
of London designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon to fill a colossal bomb site
created by the Luftwaffe in 1941, are brilliant things, a kind of 1950s take on
the early 18th English Baroque architecture of John Vanbrugh and Nicholas
Hawksmoor. Beautifully built, the Barbican might have appeared brutal, yet it
was noble, it made reference to history and paid respect to Christopher Wren’s
nearby St Paul’s Cathedral and the medieval churches in its shadows. No wonder
it was listed in 2001, while more openly aggressive Brutalist buildings
including Plymouth’s Tricorn Centre were demolished.
Institutions like English Heritage have had an ambivalent
relationship with Brutalism, recommending the listing of some, like the
Barbican, Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate and the Moore Street electricity
substation, Sheffield by Jefferson Sheard Architects, while refusing others,
notably the Hayward Gallery, the Tricorn Centre and the Trinity car park. As Simon Thurley, chief executive of
English Heritage explained at the time of last year’s Brutal and Beautiful touring
exhibition, “Few areas of English Heritage’s work are as disputed… some still
view the buildings of the era as concrete monstrosities, others as fine
landmarks in the history of building design.”
Perhaps this helps explain why Sir Denys Lasdun, a distinguished
modern architect, who landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and who wanted to
create a bold new post-war architecture everyone might appreciate was keen to
stress that he was “not a Brutalist” even though he masteredbeton brut. Although
perhaps hard to believe today, Baroque and Gothic were once terms of derision
too. Will Brutalism finally come to outlive its wilfully controversial tag?
Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140828-why-brutal-is-beautiful
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire