[1] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

That rawness, without too many attribute tags let alone CSS, is brutalist.

For instance, if a site didn't have a proper search function, but had a pretty logical URL scheme, you could often find what you need by trying a few permutations in the address bar. The limitations of the system meant web "designers" (I'm using that term loosely) had to build fairly organized and unintentionally "Brutalist" sites if they wanted to be used by any large number of people.

Hope that made sense, I'm still waiting for my coffee to kick in.

edit: I just checked it out on the wayback machine, I definitely like the old site better. Not as "pretty", but easier to navigate.

    body { max-width: 60ch; }

Brutalist on-demand radio streaming platform that I've build.

Recordings expire (overwritten) after one week.

So......something like this? http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/brutalist.html That can get recursive real fast.

Or theoretically this: https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/matrix/images/8/84/Matr... Harder to read, though, at least for people like me who don't have much experience.

Big empty space when you enter, no place to hang your coat.

Concrete stairs everywhere, nothing to soften your steps and slippery in the winter with even just a bit of snow outside. Wood stairs might absorb the some moisture and eventually rot, but they're easy to replace. When our stairs finally started cracking they just stayed cracked until the entire stairwell needed to be replaced.

Everything looked the same => easy to get lost and hard to get a true sense of the building.

Brutalism is the worst thing to happen to architecture. I don't understand why anyone would do it. The soft pastels, flowered windows, and charming, modest architectural flourishes of the old parts of European cities like Vilnius are so much more beautiful and human. Or even some modern Asian cities like Tokyo where things are bright and modern, without being depressing and harsh.

But, that discounts the thousands of buildings that were built and subsequently torn down because they failed by some metric. The style didn't make them failures; they just weren't good. Brutalist buildings are no exception, they're just more recent and so we have a lot more of the stinkers still standing.

And, we're living in a time where people value the past (even the recent-ish past) more than folks in previous generations. We venerate old buildings, maybe because the pace of destruction and rebuilding has accelerated beyond our comfort zone for change. So, it's likely that a lot of poorly conceived Brutalist architecture will live long enough to be hated. And, it also does seem to be the case that retrofitting Brutalist buildings to suit modern needs and tastes may be more difficult than previous kinds of architecture. The Grenfell tower is a tragic example of that (though one could reasonably argue that it didn't have to be that way...a little more money spent would have saved lives).

I don't know. I happen to be fond of a lot of Brutalist architecture. Not all of it. And, I recognize and agree with many of your points. But, I think there's a beauty to be found in the raw concrete, straight lines, cantilevered elements, etc. of the best Brutalist architecture. I like the design of those decades, in general, not just the buildings.

Buildings with flat roofs and piss poor drainage in the West of Scotland (rains a bit) are held up as timeless paragons of the style.

This tells me there is a massive disconnect between architects and normal people.

(EDIT: There is quite a lot of Brutalist stuff I like but there is a lot of shit decaying ruins that I'm repeatedly told are brilliant that are most certainly not)

Having spent time in quite a few 'iconic' Brutalist building, my experience is that they're frequently terrible. Impressive looking, but deeply unfriendly to their inhabitants. There's one where it sometimes rains indoors because the venting and vault-ceilings are so poorly executed. It's still lauded as great architecture.

Well, on the other end of the scale we have McMansions[0] - although part of the critiques[1] also feel like architect snobbery to me at times.

[0] http://mcmansionhell.com/

[1] http://mcmansionhell.com/101

1. Badly-designed and badly-built (as in, objectively not up to some verifiable standard) homes built with the look of better-built homes but none of the construction quality those homes have.

2. Houses built by the newly-rich on small lots, in contrast with the houses inherited by the old money on larger tracts of land.

The inevitable and, perhaps, deliberate conflation between the two senses is pure class warfare, of the "Established upper class striking against the newly arrived" sense.

If you have a different style of window in every fitting without a strong aesthetic tie then you've just raised the build and maintenance cost of the property for no reason except cargo cultism.

I have never been in, nor seen a brutalist building that looked good and was functional. They may exist, but all the examples in my home town (and there are many) are terrible buildings best left in the scrapheap of history.

The Brutalists were disingenuous in many ways.

You'll hear the trope "Oh 'Brutalism' doesn't mean the English word brutal, it's derived from the French 'Béton brut!'" absolutely everywhere in print and on the internet.

This is lazy journalism parroting a faux-profound claim, frequently repeated by people trying to look sophisticated. It's e.g. all over the Wiki article on Brutalism and is probably in 10 different comments downthread.

The British people who coined and popularized the term (Ventris and the Smithsons, mostly) were native English speakers and were perfectly aware of the connotations/double meaning of the word "brutal" when designing buildings that ordinary people think look like supervillain lairs. The "French etymology" claim is just a twee shibboleth for architectural-world pretension.

That said, this site is hilarious.

I do agree that Brutalism can look oppressive, but it doesn't have to. The Barbican in London is a wonderful estate, with highly sought-after apartments.

I live in an old house with low ceilings and doorways I have to duck through, so the Barbican headroom seems comparatively luxurious.

Well, may be because qualities like these:

> beautiful and human

aren't considered to be good and desirable in architecture by everyone.

Brutalism is totalitarian architecture.

Not particularly. There were some brutalist buildings put up in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and early 1980s [1] - but it absolutely was not a predominant architectural style, nothing at all comparable to brutalism's reign in the UK.

For example, an apartment building in Moscow [2] is notable just for being one of the very few examples of brutalist residential architecture in a city full of non-brutalist apartment buildings.

[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Брутализм#.D0.91.D1.80.D1.83.D... [2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дом_авиаторов_на_Беговой_улице

Personally, I love brutalism especially because of how impersonal, cold and unnatural it is. It's not about balance of power, but rather the inner emotional feeling and comfort.

At least in Brazil, the biggest name in Brutalism, Oscar Niemeyer, who brought us atrocities such as the Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro [1] and the whole shitstorm called Brasilia, has always been an avid communist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro_Cathedral#/medi...

Cost. You don't have to pay for and manage pesky craftsmen with their finicky details. Fabricate some concrete slabs in a factory, ship them to site and hoist them into place and you're done.

At the very least the art-deco guys tried to find some compromise with form, and Bauhaus did emphasise function at all costs.

Brutalism for its own sake reminds me of the dudes who hear the trope "nice guys finish last" and then go about acting the scoundrel just cause they think the opposite might be true. Maybe they get a few "wins" here and there but romantically, and to all practical intents and purposes it's a dead end.

That is not true. They went for a new blend of usefulness, looks and manufacturability. The look was just new and different (although similar to some precursors: De Stijl and some Russian constructivism), it wasn't ignored at all. Today, many things seem to be cargo-culted Bauhaus designs with many of the good aspects removed. Not all buildings with "simple" shapes look good.

But that's not what brutalism in a western architectural sense really is.

Reinforced concrete is not the wonder-material it was initially thought to be. It needs plenty of maintenance; it needs to be painted and guarded against water; and it is very very hard to make watertight window junctions.

A critical part of a building that is "functional" is that it's able to change and be altered as needed. No matter how brilliant your programming and research, needs will change. And then you're looking at years of noisy jackhammering and drilling to put a door, conduit, etc.

So if concrete is no everlasting maintenance-free wood, is the physical inflexibility worth it?

It's interesting you should mention flexibility, because 1-3 Willow Road, Hampstead, UK is an interesting example of flexibility. The internal walls are almost all wooden and designed to be folded back, allowing for a very flexible day-to-day use of the space.

On the other hand, the B.A.T. Building in Woking, UK is a large Brutalist building and a friend who used to work there told me that it was indeed an absolute nightmare for running conduit. Wifi didn't work because all the walls were thick reinforced concrete, but it was also built (he said) without room for raised floors or suspended ceilings. They had to drill through those thick walls.

So it all comes down to how you use concrete and where.

Wood is hardly maintenance-free. It also needs painting/sealing and guarding against water. There have also been some spectacular problems where people have tried to do things with wood which should have been done with steel (the fiasco with timber Legoland Windsor Hotel and the emergency reinforcements to support its pool spring to mind).

You sound like you have some experience in construction?

I don't have direct experience in construction, but in a past life I worked in two academic IT departments; it always pays to be good friends with the facilities people in that world. Plus, my more direct co-workers were the ones who needed to run conduit from point A to B. So I have some direct second-hand experience and plenty of bar-stories. American Universities almost always have one or two Brutalist piles lying around, and my experience was no exception.

I was really surprised to learn how much maintenance concrete needs; it cost at least half as much as wood averaged over the life of the building. Acid rain is nasty, rebar rusts and causes spalling, penetrations such as conduit quickly leak. When I said painting concrete, I really meant treating and coating to preserve the material. So, now you have to pay almost as much to maintain this structure - then you get a request to install a new exterior security camera, or run some cat5 to the ceiling for an AP, or add a door between labs, and what would be a one-day job in a wood- or steel-framed building is a week-long torture session of drilling.

Of course concrete isn't evil - it clearly makes the modern world possible! And there are some successful Brutalist buildings. But the Brutalist fetishization of it certainly has not stood the test of time.

Another specific Brutalist feature - particularly espoused by Louis Kahn (not exactly a Brutalist but close enough) - was that the building services, e.g. HVAC ducts and the like, should just be exposed. In his mind, it was awkward and sort of dishonest to try and hide them, so don't bother. As a nerd, I appreciate this sort of transparency, but the poor conduit jockeys were tortured by this. The consequences are subtle: instead of risers and service ducts, each individual conduit is visible and has its own penetration when crossing a wall. Which means: more drilling when you need a new EMT run.

Anyways, this is just a series of war stories. People like to joke that software "engineers" are not real engineers, and this is absolutely true. However, I think experienced software developers have a good sense of just how hard it can be to predict future use and tend to design with that in mind. It has been my personal experience that even experienced architects have not gotten the same feedback cycle, so the facilities department has to bust out the Boschhammer again and again.

Richard Rogers has applied an even more extreme philosophy on some of his buildings (I'm thinking specifically the Pompidou Centre and the Lloyds building) where he put all the HVAC ducts etc. on the outside...

In the UK, the National Trust did a series of tours across Brutalist buildings a year or two ago, and I was lucky enough to get on three of them: the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, the University of East Anglia, and throughout and behind the scenes at the Southbank Centre. Very interesting to see how the building designs and materials have stood up (or not) to the test of time.

As I understand it, the problem with "concrete cancer" as they call it is more likely to happen with some concrete mixes than others. It particularly affects a lot of Modern and Art Deco buildings in the UK from the 30s. I expect it depends on the climate too.

I digress badly, but if you're not already familiar with them you might enjoy Frank Lloyd Wright's Textile Block houses, such as the Ennis House and La Miniatura.

How would the raw concrete metaphor relate to UX / Web design?

I think possibly by not using CSS for layout, only basic styling. Having tables with exposed default cell borders, having headers being browser default sizes, only using system fonts.

I'd say it would be making the page look like bare HTML. Black on white typography. Blue anchor links. Monospace fonts (or arguably default serif font would be more raw).

This is what i'd call brutalist.

Brutalism is peak Late Modernism in the sense that it is the complete exorcising of cultural symbology via ornamentation.

The timing of Brutalism isn't coincidental; it actively marched lock step with late industrialization. The need for an engine of commerce needs specialisation and parts that work with ultra efficiency in the machine. No need for the baggage of cultural nuance nor ecclectic individuality.

Not a surprise that the busted up ideological polemic of "form" vs. "function" takes its dark roots in this era.

On the other hand, the International Style, emerging at about the same time, now that's completely devoid of cultural symbols.

> At the University of Oregon campus, outrage and vocal distaste for Brutalism led, in part, to the hiring of Christopher Alexander and the initiation of The Oregon Experiment in the late 1970s. This led to the development of Alexander's A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/%E6%95%B...

When I look at a lot of Brutalist buildings (not all, but a lot), I can't help thinking the concrete is mostly a facade, which is covering up a steel structure trying to hold up badly engineered blocks that are jutting out for no reason other than being gimmicky.

They make me think of over-styled hatchbacks with oversize spoilers, air intakes, and such. It's not all functional, but it looks functional. And maybe it's nice inside, but I suspect it's got tacky fake racing seats, bouncy suspension, and a sound system with way too much base.

Obviously I don't like Brutalist architecture, so I might be biased. And some of it really looks like abstract modern cathedrals, with sweeping concrete arches that look both functional and efficient. But a lot of it seems to designed to look functional at the expense of actually being functional.

Brutalism (and especially neo-Brutalism) didn't allow facades. While that concrete may have rebar, the entire Brutalism philosophy was about not hiding the materials of construction. If a thing was to be made of concrete, it was going to look like it (instead of a faux brick or tile facade or whatever else), and a thing wasn't to be made of concrete if it didn't need to be (at the time that was often the cheapest material for the work).

The concrete extensions out from Brutalist buildings were designed with a function: to create outdoor courtyards and gathering spaces, interesting shades and "cubbies" for socialization. A lot of those spaces don't get used for that much anymore, but that's as much of change in people's relationship with the outdoors as modern a/c has changed the landscape.

There were a couple neo-Brutalist buildings rather central to my University's campus, which lead to my interest in the style, and it was interesting realizing how intentional they were meant to shape the space around themselves. That was a case where you would see a lot of those strange concrete overhangs used and subconsciously appreciated by students throughout the day. I don't think a lot of students realized those spaces were intentionally designed for just that usage.

The specific complaint is that Brutalism is utterly dependent on reinforced concrete. The outer faces are largely cladding and support for the rebar which makes the entire structure viable; concrete alone has terrible tensile strength, and so can't possibly support high-tension structures like Boston City Hall.

That's not just a mechanical observation; it's a major source of criticism for Brutalist works. Rebar ages terribly. Its lifespan is perhaps 10-20% that of pure concrete, and the Brutalist style actively shortens that range. The lack of paint and cladding enables the moisture damage that destroys rebar; concrete is not actually impermeable. (It also tends to create unsightly stains due to rust.) Brutalist buildings need repair quickly, and tend to fail in particularly unpleasant ways - repair is expensive and urgent once decay starts.

I agree that extensions and elevated structures can add value. I'm told Boston City Hall's overhangs and plaza produced a welcoming sitting area for many years. But at the same time, it's currently a foreboding stretch of wasted space in the heart of the city. I don't know how much of that is a changing relationship with political institutions (City Hall is less 'local' and more 'political' today) and how much is the changing role of public space, but it does leave a lot of Brutalist works failing at their original goals.

Absolutely, reinforced concrete is not a recommended structural design tool in modern thinking, but some of that is learning lessons from mistakes Brutalists made, so it's hard to fault some of the over-reliance on reinforced concrete.

Just because a lot of Brutalist works seem to be failing at their original goals with at least a couple decades of hindsight, doesn't mean it wasn't worth exploring those ideals and goals. There's a lot Brutalism has taught us/can teach us about building materials, and the public's ever-changing relationship with civic spaces, and even what the "usefulness" of "ugly" buildings can sometimes be.

Source: experiences trying to keep computer science classes in a university building designed by famous functionalist architect Alvar Aalto (university now named after him).

Ie, they tried to make buildings that looked Brutalist, instead of trying to design them to be functional and eschewing (or not paying as much attention to) aesthetics, which (in my uninformed opinion) is what Brutalism, as a movement, was about.

In my case it was that the architect (who worked in early 1960's) could foresee classrooms with tables, but could not foresee that the classroom tables would have computers connected to a network (as they had in 1980's).

Building structures with exposed structural materials means there's no space for hidden infrastructure like cabling and power points. Building structures out of concrete in particular is antithetical to modern technology - no one could have seen WiFi coming, but it's a major hurdle in all-concrete structures.

The shift to power outlets and internet connectivity is a major aspect of usability; it's a shame that so much of Brutalism is in colleges and transit spaces where people urgently want those things.

In regards to that, I have trouble considering a website that needs JavaScript to display plain images truly Brutalist in spirit.

Brutalism was at its core an ideological movement, its purpose to create buildings for the masses in the new socialist utopias. As such, it often explicitly rejected aesthetics as decadence, and sought directly to shock the bourgeoise.

Also, being ideological and utopian, its purported functionality was directed at utopian people, not actual people, which explains why these building often don't, in fact, feel all that functional. One clear shortcoming is that ugliness breed ugliness -- people are much more likely to take care of, and in general behave well, in a pretty environment than in an ugly one, aka. the broken window theory.

Also, some NSFW images on that brutalist website gallery.

You can mimick the look of brutalist architecture and make things look like concrete. But then, you're going explicitely against the "philosphy" by default: don't pretend you're not using concrete.

You can mimic/adopt the philosophy, but then it will not look like brutalism.

It means "raw" / unrefined / untreated -- so something like "just the basics" / "rough and ready".

Concrete is "beton" and "beton brut" is one type of concrete.

I don't know if they're actually doing well as a business, but I like their style.

I personally consider this style applies to any building without proper function; no windows, open-plan offices...

Brutalist comes from 'raw', not from 'brutal'. Brutalist buildings have windows. And I've yet to see a brutalist open-plan office.