30 Pics That Perfectly Sum Up Brutalist Architecture, As Shared On This Online Page (New Pics)

The Socialist Modernism page is an initiative developed by BACU – Birou pentru Artă şi Cercetare Urbană (Bureau for Art and Urban Research). It's an architectural heritage protection community based in Romania. As already mentioned, their goal is to protect built heritage and research within the former Eastern Bloc. Their focus is on the buildings erected between 1955 and 1991.

"We are dealing with the protection/monitoring/research/preservation of the current state of those cities," the group writes on its website. That includes buildings, monuments, parks, squares, entire districts, and green areas.

They describe the process of their work too: "In the first phase of this project, we will concentrate on the analysis/research/study." The second phase will involve the education of local authorities and inhabitants of those protected areas. They seek the protection of brutalist buildings through legislation.

If you go to the Modernist Socialism website, you can find an interactive map. It shows brutalist buildings from all over the world that architects, urban planners, art historians, and activists have submitted to the project.

Although the website's mission statement focuses on former Soviet Union countries, the map also includes buildings from other continents.

Some entries are more or less what you'd expect, The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Cuba, for example. But there are other interesting examples, too. The Geisel Library of the University of California in San Diego might be a more surprising listing.

The origins of the term 'brutalism' come from the French language. 'Béton brut' means 'raw concrete,' referring to the material most architects and designers of the movement used. Brutalism came into prominence in the '50s and '60s. Art historians characterize it as simple, block-like forms and constructions from raw concrete.

There's another theory of how brutalism came to be. New Brutalism, to be exact. Peter Smithson, one of the pioneers of British brutalism, apparently resembled the emperor Brutus. His nickname was Brutus, and people thus theorize that's where the name for the style came from.

It's true that, often, people either love or hate brutalist architecture. Usually, it's because the style lacks ornaments and colors. It's like a blank canvas, and the buildings look unfinished, in a way. But Urban Learners Director Andy Costa says that it's a "misnomer that brutalist buildings have no articulation."

"They're really full of texture and life," the architecture and development consultant went on to say in his interview with BBC Front Row. He also spoke about the reasons why so many buildings from that time in Britain and Eastern Europe had the brutalist style. "Concrete was cheap, [and] energy was cheap at the time," he simply said. "It was a very affordable material."

However, cost practicality is not the only quality of brutalism. There's also a philosophical aspect. "It wasn't rendered or covered brick. It didn't present itself as something better than it actually was," Costa added. "There's real honesty about that. And the philosophers and critics of that time taught about that ethic of architecture being accessible buildings."

Catherine Croft, Director of the Twentieth Century Society, spoke to BBC Front Row about how brutalism was a response to modernism. "People felt it got a bit too staged, too boring, and a bit too bland."

Because the majority of brutalist buildings are in former socialist states, people assume that there are socialist principles behind the style itself. We only need to look at what types of buildings these were: mostly residential.

But Croft gives examples of commercial buildings in Britain as evidence that brutalist buildings are always socialist. There are many car parks and shopping centers of this style, she says. One of them is the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth. "There was nothing socially ambitious about those," Croft says. "They were designed to make money."