I work in and around a shamed architecture: A brutalist building built in the early 1970s that not long ago was called, “timeless” in a local newspaper. It doesn’t matter where this building is, every city has many like it.
Brutalist buildings feel empty when filled and lonely even with a friend. The coarsest person is unnerved by their soulless concrete immensity. Their lime-scented walls beg for some kind of humanity but cannot receive it.
Brutalist architecture and architects have been sufficiently criticized in the last 50 years. The style is defunct. Many public housing projects and the World Trade Center are long destroyed. But many remain, and thousands of us still work or live in them. We have no choice.
These monstrosities were disliked almost from the start, except by central planners, who were eager to concentrate people and pragmatism, thus their predominance worldwide. The mid-1950s to the mid-1970s were an era of architectural self-gratification (as opposed to now?). The designers and planners were paid for ugliness no one who lived or toiled within them approved or enjoyed.
Above: Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis.
In the U.S., the style is linked to the failed social experiments of the Great Society era. Amity Shales' excellent book, The Great Society, details the squalid St. Louis public housing project, Pruitt-Igoe, and the behemoth Housing and Urban Development building in Washington, D.C. Both have their stories and are examples of the hubris that accompanies centralization.
Above: The Robert C. Weaver building
Pruitt-Igoe did not last 20 years. Its very design invited pillage, crime and neglect. The Robert C. Weaver building endures, despised, dripping rain and snow-melt down bare concrete year after year.
What is it about these concrete beasts that disturb us so? Not just their facades but also their interiors?
I have a theory: We hate the void.
The Gothic mansion and the dark forest disturb us not because they are empty but precisely because they are not. These places are OCCUPIED. Ancient instinct raises our hair: there is something out there, or in there, unseen, watching. These are places in history, of events long passed, of triumph and suffering, of mystery and supernatural presence or harbor corporeal friends and enemies. We fear what could happen.
And it is personal. “IT” wants to eat us or trick us, steal our horses, destroy our crops or tempt us into perdition. The things in these places are not indifferent to our intrusion. They take it seriously. Even the most agnostic people feel uneasy on an empty street at night, or in a derelict mansion or alone on Little Round Top.
Above: and unnamed Victorian mansion in Detroit, Michigan.
The modernist building, however, is empty. Something deep within us knows it can never be filled. We simply exist for some hours in an occupied oblivion. Once inside, there is nothing to watch us. Memories and sentiments cannot cling to the concrete. The rooms are infertile time-spaces. And we hate it.
Why?
Perhaps this: throughout our natural history, humanity never confronted self-made void. Being alone is not as frightful as being certain that you will remain so. We recoil at synthetic solitude. God made us team players. Somehow a few, very few, men of influence were not endowed with that providential revulsion.
Even pictures of the void disturb us. Photographs of derelict shopping malls and offices are common click-bait. Recently popularized as “liminal” spaces, these unnerving, lonely images are now modified or manufactured to enhance our loathing further.
Even some short films have been made about this horror. These films are poorly plotted, but the liminal device exploits our revulsion of modernist oblivion.
George Lucas used liminal horror to good effect in THX-1138 keeping us simultaneously agoraphobic and alone, like its protagonist.
THX eventually escapes the occupied void into a vast, likely inhospitable, uncertainty. But no matter, the dangerous landscape is where freedom lives. And hope.
In literature, two famous writers contrast on this theme. Lord Dunsany’s sublime, fantasy versus the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. To Dunsany, the lintel of a Irish mansion’s door was a gateway to a warm fire, a whiskey and some revelation, benign or malign. To Lovecraft that same lentil was a portal into a void, indifferent to man, which emits decay and “unspeakable terrors.”
Below: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
Years ago, the derelict Detroit mansion had the warmth of love and fire. Its abasement makes us sad but also curious. What happened there? Who owned it and why did they leave such beauty? Neglected beauty is haunting and convicting. Orphaned memories demand our our adoption.
Brutalism brings us none of this wonderment or guilt. We are not surprised when they are decayed, graffiti covered hulks. We feel no guilt. No self-respecting ghost would be caught dead there.
Remember when you were a little kid and you got lost and couldn’t find your mom? Suddenly, everyone around you was a stranger and all you wanted was to find her hand. Until you did, you had an inexplicable, stomach-lonely feeling you would be lost forever. That is how modernist structures make people feel.
Great buildings were built for great things or great people. Thus, if we insist our days be anastomosing, ephemeral toils, giving glory to nothing, pursuing Croesan vanities while learning no humility, perhaps we get the buildings we deserve.
“It is vey difficult to draw away from the face of God—it is like a warm fire, it is like dear sleep, it is like a great anthem, yet there is a stillness all about it, a stillness full of lights.”
― Lord Dunsany
Quo vadisimus?
Below: The truly beautiful Mark Twain house. Hartford, Connecticut.
Well said! The most egregious use of brutalist architecture I’ve encountered is the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth. What architect in his right mind would create such a monstrosity of concrete, steel, and rivets to commemorate the Archangel’s announcement and the Virgin’s fiat, and to contain the very spot of the Incarnation? Verbum caro HIC factum est. It’s a sacrilege. As Jordan Peterson has said, brutalist architect tells the person, “You don’t matter!!”
Good stuff. I think it started earlier. The metric system is one symptom of a move away from measurement by human dimensions to the cold and abstract. We see the same principal when we compare the planned cities of the Enlightenment onward, like the uniform "blocks" of Paris or many US cities, with the organic sprawl of older, especially mediaeval settlements. Likewise, compare Westminster Abbey, which grew bit by bit over generations, with St Paul's Cathedral in London, built all at once by a single mind. One has grown organically and collectively, the other has had a form imposed upon it. It seems to me that the modern trend for bare concrete churches is an extension of the same principle: one of de-socialisation and ultimately, of de-humanisation, all devised by expert committees. One could say something similar about the wretched Covid masks: another centralised imposition which flattens difference, crushes expression and so prevents the interaction and communication that makes a society more than just a myriad isolated consumers. Yet here we are, sitting behind identical screens, slaves to glowing rectangles...