 Cover shows image of concrete, Barbican, London
The New Materiality in Brutalism
Not only identity but also material became prime concerns of a new avant-garde in 1950s Britain. Material (rather than the neutral ‘stuff’ of modernism, which as long as it looked modern was modern) seen as expressing the specific, resonating with life and memory and reifying the particular. It is this which is at the heart of ‘Brutalism’, the term which not only articulates the Smithsons’ approach but that of a discourse developed in Britain in the 1950s. Traces of human activity, as seen in Nigel Henderson’s powerful photographs of urban dereliction in bombed East London, or fossil-fragments in the roach-bed limestone of the Smithsons’ Economist Building, or in the primal material form of the Cobb in Lyme Regis, described as a ‘Parthenon’ of this tradition by de Cronin Hastings. Material informing both surface and form: the Brutalist stance also drawing attention to the ordinary, the everyday, that which had hitherto been unvalued. Setting out as a consciously radical position—and an alternative to the humane (and in their eyes compromised) 'New Empiricism' earlier championed by Architectural Review —Brutalism looked back to the origins of European Modernism and took a firm line, emphasizing 'raw' materials and the clarity of structural elements. As the Smithsons later put it: ‘the woodness of wood, the sandiness of sand.’ The Smithsons' strictures on honesty of form and materials were very pervasive, seen in other Independent Group work and also mirrored in one of the consistent campaigns of the AR, that of championing the ‘Functional Tradition’. Reyner Banham's influential 1955 article The New Brutalism (AR December 1955 pp355-361) was a highly perceptive discussion which introduced his definition of Brutalism: 'Memorability as image, clear exhibition of structure, valuation of materials as found', Banham argues that ’what moves the New Brutalist is the thing itself, in its totality, with all its overtones of human association.’ Memory permeating material- which could be site-specific, or could be culturally specific, or could be formed as response to an aspect of the brief. In an existential sense- the haptic rather than the visual is made the dominant sensation. In a 1959 interview (Zodiac 4 p69) Alison Smithson argued that modern building before them was ‘not built of real materials at all but some sort of processed material such as Kraft cheese: we turned back to wood and concrete, glass and steel, all the materials which you can really get hold of’. The Smithsons’ Soho House project had been published in AD in December 1953: referring to it as the first expression of ’the new Brutalism’, Peter Smithson wrote: ‘It was decided to have no finishes at all internally- the building to be a combination of shelter and environment. Bare concrete, brickwork and wood… our intention to have the structure exposed entirely.’ This re-working of the London terraced house, however modest as a project, indeed manifested a new value to domestic space, primal rather than primitive. Its occupants (it was intended for themselves) would have lived in a series of rigorously formed spaces, simultaneously modern and archetypal. As Kenneth Scott’s contemporary response to it said: ‘Someone has said that the Smithsons build caves for men rather than houses. This idea comes from the feeling that one gets inside their buildings, of being in touch with the very nature of which the building is a part.’(Architectural Review April 1954 p 274). The concern with authenticity of material and form could be embodied in a small and understated urban building. |
 Economist Building Plaza, London: Alison and Peter Smithson 1964
Through the early 1950s their concern for authentic materials developed into larger enquiry about the authentic, which owed much to the artists they knew, as well as a possibly second-hand appreciation of existentialist thought. Nigel Henderson’s relationship to the Smithsons was formative, both in terms of their social understanding which they did acknowledge, and in their materiality which they didn’t, although Peter Smithson wrote much later about the power of the image which Henderson created. Kenneth Frampton is one of the few people to have acknowledged the decisive influence Henderson had on what he calls Brutalism’s existential character. Henderson was conscious of connections with Tapies and Dubuffet and the idea of art brut: his work was informed by Surrealism and he is far from the social documentarist which his Bethnal Green street photographs, used by the Smithsons in their CIAM grille of 1953 and again in the publication Uppercase 3(1960) have suggested. In London, he became, through his friendship with Paolozzi, involved with such projects as the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition, and later, again with Paolozzi, he worked on the signs of inhabitation of the Smithsons’ structure Patio and Pavilion in the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. Henderson lived in Bethnal Green, East London from 1945 to 1954 in an urban landscape still socially cohesive but physically shattered by wartime bombing. His wife Judith Henderson was engaged in an anthropological project, studying the life of east London, which his photographs were a counterpart of. Although the life of the streets remained a subject, it was the material of the streets themselves which was also a constant preoccupation: he took home mangled metal, wire, and other urban detritus. He wrote of his fascination with the material quality of what he found: ‘I feel happiest among discarded things, vituperative fragments, cast casually from life, with the fizz of vitality still about them. ’ The traces of time and human use transformed materiality: ‘A new boot is a fine monument to man, an artefact. A worn out boot traces his images with a heroic pathos and takes its part as a universal image-maker…Time works like an analytical chemist with its tinctures and titrations. It gives us intimations of the reality of things.’ (Uppercase 3 1960) Extract from The Shift to the Specific: the new Interpretation of materiality in Brutalism and the Functional Tradition in Mediating Modernism: architectural cultures in Britain Routledge 2007 |