How to Love Brutalism by Grindrod John;

Author:Grindrod, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

Boston City Hall, Boston, USA.

Architects: Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles.

Like city halls, religious buildings have the job of attracting and housing a great number of people. The artistic verve, fearlessness and massive voids of brutalism appealed to the church as well. In Minnesota there’s a fine example: Saint John’s Abbey Church (1954–61), designed by Marcel Breuer as part of the university campus in Collegeville. The presiding Abbot, Baldwin Dworschak, wanted ‘a church which will be truly an architectural monument to the service of God.’ Breuer certainly provided that, with his audacious design, requiring tons of ‘in situ’ reinforced concrete, formed in moulds made by local carpenters. The finished edifice is awe-inspiring, with the bell tower a freestanding sculptural entity, like a sturdy radar dish on legs. Inside, a procession of parabolic arches supporting the roof creates a dramatic series of prosceniums, investing the body of the church with the appearance of a concertina. At one end the concrete has been perforated like a honeycomb, creating the frame for a wall of stained glass.

As we’ve seen with the Geisel Library, book depositories have also provided golden opportunities for brutalist architects, possibly because their size and the general need to minimize windows makes them suitable for the monumental raw concrete treatment. Take Zalman Aranne Central Library (1968–71), part of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel – another outrageous example. Externally and from the side or back it presents a rather inscrutable face to the world, as just a stepped series of concrete walls: impressive, for sure, but anonymous. But from the front or above an entirely different building emerges – one dominated by a cluster of roof lights. They sit on top like bubbles on the surface of dishwater. For the design team, Shulamit Nadler, Michael Nadler, Shmuel Bixon, Moshe Gil and Shimshon Amitai, the library was all about light. Keeping the windows to the top of the structure and channelling the light through galleries and internal spaces makes perfect sense, to avoid light damaging precious books and to allow for the maximum wall space for shelving. Inside the building, the hundred vaulted skylights allow sunlight to filter through to the many different levels and areas of the building. The concrete itself matches the texture of the surrounding Negev desert, while providing a fixed point in this ever-changing landscape, and the appearance of the building could be straight out of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune.

The shadiest brutalist civic structure I can think of is the headquarters of one of the world’s most secretive and powerful organizations: the FBI. The J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC (1969–75) had been designed back in the early 1960s by Charles F Murphy and Associates, with Stanislaw Z Gladych as the chief architect. It was a tough assignment, because there were many competing ideas of what it should be and how it should be done, and these conflicts created a series of expensive delays. The local authority had wanted a retail arcade as part of

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