The New Brutalist Architecture Anthropology Essay

The untried Brutalist Architecture Anthropology Essay refreshing Brutalist computer architecture is the tabucome of a British architectural ethic named untried Brutalism. harmonise to Peter and Alice Smithson, the term was coined from a newspaper paragraph heading which, by poor translation of French, called the Marseilles Unit by Le Corbusier Brutalism in architecture1. The Smithsons anointed their possess British brand of Modernism by adding New both beca do they came after(prenominal) Le Corbusier and also in response to the style of the architectural Review which at the start of the 1950s sunned many articles on the New Monumentality, the New Empiricism, the New Sentimentality etc.2 Thus, New Brutalism was set to up be the direct line maturation of the Modern Movement.According to Banham (1966), whilst the terms Brutalism and New Brutalism ar often physical exertiond interchangeably, it is important to distinguish the meanings of the two terms as this paper will be waying on the latter. Brutalism, though a British term, refers to an architectural esthetical that is characterised by sticking repetitive angular geometries, and where concrete is used. A building without concrete can achieve a Brutalist character through a rough blocky appearance, and the expression of its structural materials, forms and services on its exterior. A nonher common writing is the exposure of the buildings functions in the exterior of the building. Banham (1966) summarises the key characteristics of Brutalist architecture as formal legibility of plan, clear order of battle of organize, direct and h starst use of materials and clear exhibition of services. Thus, Brutalism casts back in time to include Le Corbusier as one of its important contributors.On the other hand, New Brutalism was coined before any New Brutalist architecture was create. It is an ethic, not esthetical and is associated with socialist utopian ideology supported by Peter and Alison Smithson an d the Team 10 group of architects amongst which they belonged. It is more related to the theoretical tidy up in urban theory proposed by CIAM than to bton brut. Thus, having originated from entirely different, organic theoretical doctrines, the British brand of Brutalism has considerable differences to Brutalist architecture from the continent. New Brutalism was born(p) in the post-war era, almost exclusively in the Architects De break outment of the London County Council (LCC) the only place where young graduated architects such as Peter and Alison Smithson and many from the Architectural Association school (AA) could find work in London. Many architects who have returned from the world had fought to make the world unspoiled but the economic terms of the determine of victory was heavy and the country faced long periods of austerity resulting in shortages, a shortfall in living accommodations and social services. It was a time of kind-hearted socialism and commitment to the welfargon postulate following the election of the Labour Government in 1945. The government had assumed responsibility for the welfare of the large number in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 1930s.3 Many houses of the on the job(p) class poor that were in the centre of large industrial cities such as London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have been destroyed. In London, Abercrombie and Forshaw published the County of London Plan which described the challenge faced by the government. The report recognised that there is abundant evidence that for families with children, houses are preferred to flats. They provide a private garden and yard at the same level as the main rooms of the dwelling, and fit the English temperament.4 But, to pose everyone in houses would result in the displacement of two-thirds to three-quarters of the people. The planners wished to minimise the out-movement of jobs. They settled on 136 persons per acre which based on the research they did put one third of the people in houses, and some 60 per cent in eight- and ten- storey flats about half of families with two children will go into flats, but even this density meant the overspill of 4 in 10 of all people living in this zone in 1939.Furthermore, there was the whiz of lesprit nouveau of making a fresh start after the cleansing effect of the war. The London architectural debate was fractionized largely between the student generation and practicing establishment architects. The Establishment architects tended towards Socialist political alignment, with the welfare state architecture of Sweden as the architectural paradigm. For the whole generation of graduating architects from the AA were strongly enamourd by the ideas of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe the Ville Radieuse and the Unit dHabitation suggested a model to be applied by good hard socialist principles in good hard modernist materials.5 They felt the Establishment architects were tending towards what they saw as a softer and more humanist Modernism, a retreat from the pre-war, heroic form of Modernism6. The Architects Department at the LCC provided a model in the early years it had an unusually free hand, because the Ministrys ordinary cost sanctions did not apply to it7. It first produced the great Corbusian slabs which culminated in the only true realisation of the Radiant City in the world the Alton West estate in Roehampton8.The New Brutalists concept of order is not classical but topological its implementation on a spot could have involved judging the case on its merits (i.e. overthrow form, accommodation required, finance available) rather than in accordance with a pre-established classical or picturesque schema.9 Thus, they distinguish themselves from the earlier Brutalists such as Le Corbusier who proposed in his 1925 Plan Voisin to bulldoze most of central Paris north of the Seine in order to replace it with a hard of identical sixty-story towers. The Swiss architect was working in an inter-war Paris of exuberant, chaotic and often sordid everyday life10 when the urban center was racked by dis calm and slums. He believed in centralising order (The contrive of cities was too important to be left to citizens11). His plans always relied on his famous paradox we must decongest the centres of our cities by increasing their density in addition, we must better circulation and increase the amount of open space. The paradox could be resolved by building high on a small part of total understanding area12. This vision required clearing entire sites (WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE The city of today is dying because it is not constructed geometrically13). In war-torn London, the New Brutalists had the luxury of bomb-cleared sites but they also had a greater awareness for the historical model of the place-the formulateers of the Barbican estate built around St Giles perform which survived the bombing and designers of Park Hill in Sheffield preserved grey street names from the slum for their elevated walkways. Le Corbusier developed his principles of planning most full in La Ville Contemporaine (1922) and La Ville Radieuse(1932). The plans differed in their recommendation for social distribution. The Contemporary Citys clearly differentiated spatial structure was designed to reflect a specific, single out social structure ones dwelling depended on ones job14. The residential areas would be of two types six-storey luxury apartments for professional white collar workers (e.g. industrialists, scientists and artisits), and more modest accommodation for workers, built around courtyards, with less open space. These apartments would be mass-produced for mass-living. The apartments would all be uniform, contain type furniture and be collectively serviced much like a hotel. Le Corbusier also designed entertainment and cultural complexes close to the middle-class in the centre of the city. The blue collar workers would not function li ke this. They would roll in the hay in garden apartments within satellite units. A different and appropriate sort of green space, sports facilities and entertainments would be available for these residents. Many aspects of New Brutalist architecture band ideas from the Contemporary City. Income segregation has been practiced to different extents the Barbican estates apartments vary between elaborate and fashionable layouts on the affluent south side (where the tenants were mainly city workers) and simpler layouts and designs on north side where social housing is concentrated15. Furthermore, whole out of town social housing estates such as Thamesmead have been built to match Le Corbusiers satellite units.By the time of the Radiant City, though the tenets of the Corbusian religion remained unchanged, there were important theological variations. Everyone will be equally collectivised and live in giant apartments called Units. Every family will get an apartment not according to the b readwinners job, but according to rigid space norms no one will get anything more or less than the minimum necessary for efficient existence. Everyone will enjoy collective services such as cooking, cleansing and childcare. Similarly, New Brutalist architects have tried to logically work from basic human ineluctably in order to distinguish the necessary from the unnecessary and thereby simplifying live architectural conventions to create an efficient living or working space16. However, rarely have they attempted to create truly mixed-income neighbourhoods, having concentrated on social housing estates. Although the recent redevelopment of Park Hill estate in Sheffied is mixing affordable and commercial residential housing in the Brutalist estate, it cannot be said that mixed-income communities were a tenet of New Brutalism.Brutalist architecture quickly became the official architecture of the Welfare State. Criticisms of its severe problems took a very long time to come. In order to see why, it is important to appreciate how bad were the pilot film dense rows of smoke-b deficiencyened slums that the towers replaced. Six years of war had reduced those parts of London and the great provincial cities to a smuggled squalor. For two decades, any social disbenefits of modernist planning and its transformation of the town passed largely unremarked17. Criticisms rapidly became deafening in the 1970s after the subsidy administration had been reconstruct and local authorities were already phasing out their high-rise blocks. Though the outburst was triggered by the collapse of a building in a gas explosion, the bulk of the complaints were eloquently summarised by Kenneth Campbell, who was in charge of housing design at the LCC and GLC from 1959 to 1974, to be the lifts (too few, too small, too slow), the children (too many), and the management (too little)18. Most importantly, critics like to point out that the true cause of all such problems, of which Corbusier i s a fully culpable as any of his followers, was that the middle-class designers had no real feeling for the way a working-class family lived19 in their world children are not hanging around the landing or playing with the dustbin lids20. Chapter TwoDreams v Reality intimate the Minds of Brutalist ArchitectsThe sin of Corbusier and the Corbusians thus lay not in their designs, but in the mindless arrogance whereby they were imposed on people who could not take them and could never, wedded a modicum of thought, ever have been expected to take them21 Corbusian Brutalism and New Brutalism suffered very much similar design failures, and the two have often been combined or confused in ridicule. However, this chapter points out that New Brutalism should not be indiscriminately blamed for deigning solely for the high-flowns of the middle-class, or that the designers similarly imposed the designs upon such unwitting residents without considering their social-economic needs and lifestyle. W ith ambition for a new approach to modernist architecture, the New Brutalists sought to exploit the low cost and pragmatism of mass produced materials and pre-fabricated components22, mixing uses instead of segregation (as in Le Corbusiers design of La Ville Radieuse), designing specific to location and purpose and to use their signature elevated walkways which they named streets in the air. A satisfactory analysis of the architecture would evaluate the performance of such design features one by one, in essence performing an autopsy and separating the healthy organs, from the moderately healthy and the failed. After the function is over the pathologist may wonder why certain failed organs were designed in a way that may have been responsible for displace them in the line of trouble. To understand this we will look at what the architects were trying to achieve and the sources that influenced them.Peter and Alice Smithson wished to achieve the Virgilian dream the peace of the coun tryside enjoyed with the self-consciousness of the city inhabitant into the notion of the city itself23. Thus, unlike Ebenezer Howard who created the garden cities to combine the benefits of the countryside with the utility of city services, the Smithsons wished to take the garden city back into the city. They sought control and calm as key qualities in the modern city.They were also inspired by the flood of new consumer technologies and advertising. The Smithsons felt Le Corbusier was the first to put in concert the world of everyday and fine arts towards the end of his life in Unit dHabitation in Marseilles. They felt he viewed historic art possibly the classical origins of heroic architectural principles not as a stylistic source but as a pattern of organisation, and a source of social reform and technological revolution24. The Smithsons themselves recognised that advertising was making a bigger contribution to the visual climate of the 1950s than any of the fine arts. Adver tising was selling products as a innate accessory to life and is packed with information for the average man it had taken over from fine art as the definition of what is fine and desirable by society. They recognised that the mass produced consumer goods had revolutionised the house without the intervention of the architect. However, they also felt that pre-fabricated buildings built for utility and not aesthetics (e.g. schools and garages) have adapted to the built environment a lot better to the existing built environment than buildings designed by fine art architects. Thus, in context of the desire to create calm and safe dwellings for the city dweller, architectural should be developed for the machine-served city.As with the majority of architects of their age, the Smithsons were profoundly influenced by the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. The Smithsons in particular stated that they were profoundly changed by two of Rohes themes1. To make a thing well is not only a moral i mperative, but it is also the absolute base of the pleasure of use2. The machine-calm city. No rhetoric, just ordering of elements to effect a gentle, live, equipoise ordinary quality. Neoclassicism.25The first point touches on the material aspect of Rohes love for perfection of peak and the use of the finest quality of materials, with the greatest care. The Smithsons felt Rohe had a special feeling for materials as luxury the observer is made aware of the essence of each material26 Interestingly, this focus on the existential qualities of concrete and the keenness to use the material for its physical characteristic has enjoyed a recent revival in architecture. Conversely, there is debate with regards to the rationalness why the Smithsons and the Modernist architects before 1980s used the material so liberally. Sarah Williams Goldhagen believed that the Smithson did employ concrete for its physical properties whereas Adrian Forty argues that such conclusions are misguided in part because the Smithsons themselves tried to appeal to a later audience by discussing their earlier works in a new light in their everydayations. Forty believes that the Modernist architects of per-1980s were mainly interested in the form of their structures further that in the ordinariness of their forms and the unremarkable, smooth and grey expanse of concrete they sought to achieve an abstract formlessness, as if literally urging the structure to disappear with irrelevance. Thus, concrete was not chosen because it was concrete, but rather because it had the properties the architects desired. The latter explanation seems to be the case of the Smithsons in 1974 when they wrote that many old cities the feeling of control is derived from the repetition of the use of materials on every roof, the roofs having been built at the same pitch, with similar roof lights etc. This suggests that perhaps the repeated use of concrete in so many parts of the building was not motivated by its suita bility but by the need to repeat and release control.The Smithsons were keen for their repetition of elements to seem to derive from the intention of the whole, rather than seeming to have been designed as one separate entity which is then repeated. They found that a repetition with subtle differences used by Rohe in creating a large at-the-whole-community- dental plate central open space was life-including27. They also felt that a building is more interesting if it is more than itself if it changes the space around it with connective possibilities but by a quietness that until now our sensibilities could not recognise as architecture at all. They felt a sense of wellbeing can be found if the built-form and the counterpart space are locked together28. The recognition that a building is not alone, that it exerts an influence on its surroundings and needs to interact with it to be successful seems now far off from the emphasis of todays planning policies for high quality, inclusive design which should merge into existing urban form and the natural and built environments29. However, what sounded similar is very different in practice as we can see in robin lout Gardens, a project by the Smithsons where they consciously incorporated their vision of inclusive design. We can see that the buildings were definitely designed with the central space in mind they are even curved according to the landscape features. However, the estate does not integrate with buildings of the surrounding areas very well in terms of scale or layout. Critics state that it failed to come to terms that existing spatial fabrics held memory and value30. People adapt slowly to change a building that nods to the original fabric will aid the adaptation process. This design fails to be inclusive for the surrounding areas that are outside the architects control and thus does not fall into the broader scope of todays standard of good design. However, an earlier project by the Smithsons was a wide ly held success for integrating well within and introducing variations to the City of London. This was the Economist Plaza which was completed in 1964. A group of three office towers built on a picturesque piazza to allow pedestrian movement independent of the road system with street level access to services and shops, it broke the London tradition of the closed block, and may be considered the precursor of later office developments such as Broadgate31. However, its success was also attributed to restraint that was sensitive to context, by the use of stone instead of concrete to assimilate choice of material of older buildings nearby, and designing on the basis of an ancient Greek acropolis plan to maintain with the scale and governing lines of tradition-bound St Jeremys Street. The successful features of this project also marked a retreat from Brutalism to the restrained classicism of Mies van der Rohe32. The Economist Plaza is an example of how the Smithsons usually go about the designing process they conducted length research into the working practices of the journalists of the Economist magazine in order to create the most efficient structure. Their aim was for their buildings to be specific to their location and purpose33. They also took inspiration from the works of others. At the time when the Smithsons were compiling their debut to the Golden Lane housing competition between 1951 and 1953, they had contact with the Hendersons who were conducting social studies in the East End of London. This steered their reading of the city towards a form which reflected the structure of human association. This led to their radical suggestion that the street and housing blocks might multiply in a random and biological way to form a network overlaid on the existing city in a way reminiscent of molecular patterns or fractals. Thus, the topography or the context of a specific site would mould the disposition of the project. The idea of a network is based on the Smiths ons belief that a community cannot be created by geographic isolation which, they feel, was the fault made by English neighbourhood planning (through grouping around an infant school, community centre or group of shops), and the Unit concept of Le Corbusier34. They aspire to aid social cohesion through the looseness of grouping and ease of communication. They felt the quintessential role of the planner is to create a sense of place by encouraging the creation of non-arbitrary groupings and effective communication, making possible groupings based on the family, street, district, region and city apparent. To maintain the looseness of grouping and the ease of communication, density must increase as population increases. The Smithsons believed that we must build high to avoid eating up farmland and creating congestion and increasing move time on the roads. The architects recognised that high-rise living led to problems such as deprivation of outdoor life, the ineffectiveness of vertic al communication, and difficulty in forming friendships for the lack of horizontal communication at the same level35. And so they proposed an ambitions vision of a multi-layered, city, leaving on the ground the support networks such as freight and utilities. In large cities, such things as light industries, workshops, clinics, shopping centres and small hotels could easily be located on raised levels integrated with the deck-dwelling pattern the hope is that the returns of close physical proximity will draw people to the clearly different districts of the city cause an urban revival a new city in which the home will be very much the centre of all activities36. The council house in the UK should be capable of being put together with others in a similar sort, so as to form bigger and equally comprehensive elements which can be added to existing villages and towns in such a way as to revitalise the traditional hierarchies, and not destroy them. The architects felt that building imi tation market towns both inside and outside cities deny them the unspoilt to be urban forms because they do not engage with the pre-existing community to which they have been attached. The architects were also interested in achieving clarity between private and public space, much like Le Corbusiers Unit which preserved the individual in seclusion while giving expression to the communal life and faith of the smart set with a double-height collective space, and links through the balconies with the world outside. The interior street provides an enclosed world of neighbours whilst the shopping arcade and the roof space belong to and own expression to the total community.37 The Smithsons were keen to preserve this divide From the moment the man or child steps outside his dwelling our responsibility starts for the individual has not got the control over his extended environment that he has over his house38. The Smithsons entry for Golden Lane failed but their design laid the foundatio ns for the development of streets in the air. The streets in the air are a reinterpretation of East End bye-law streets because the Smithsons saw that such traditional streets in the East End function well as a main public forum for communication, as a playground for children and provide open space for public gatherings and large scale sociability in working class Britain. To fulfil these functions in a Brutalist apartment block, Le Corbusiers rue intrieure-the double-loaded, long, dark corridor on the inside of the building will need to be move to the exterior. They will be 12 foot wide, continuous and reach every part of the development. At Park Hill estate, Sheffied, the architects even made sure that original Victorian street names were kept and neighbours from the original slum area where the estate replaced were housed next to eachother. This contributed to the initial popularity of the estate but it could not stop problems of abuse and dilapidation following.It is interest ing to compare the fates of Robin Hood Gardens and Park Hill. The vertical circulation system and access from streets in the air were said to make the Robin Hood estate unpopular39. However, it was also blamed for disagreeing with the Smithsons idea at Golden Lane of housing elements forming networks or clusters and the Team 10 premise that a buildings first debt instrument is to the fabric in which it stands by having been divided into two building blocks. They do not demonstrate, by combining into a longer entity the potential for a city wide pedestrian network40. On the other hand, Park Hill estate does join up into a large entity but its 12 foot decks were in turn blamed for providing quick getaways for burglars and other criminals. Neither building realised the dream of the elevated community utopia. Does this suggest that streets in the air in actuality never got off the ground? The Barbican estate offers safe and secluded elevated decks with beautiful views over the estate but it does not serve as a social gathering place for the residents nor a playground for the children. It seems somehow it is extremely difficult to recapture the East End feel in the Smithsons signature design feature. At the CIAM conference in 1953, they attacked the decades-old dogma propounded by Le Corbusier and others that cities should be zoned into specific areas for living, working, leisure and transport, and that urban housing should consist of tall, widely spaced towers41. The Smithsons ideal city would combine different activities within the same areas. However, the legacy of CIAM and of Le Corbusier was a significant burden and will take time to wear off42. By the close of 1960s, there was a shift from the raw Brutalism of the 50s to a gentler and more refined form of architectural language43. Team 10s urban productions were marked by a distinct retreat from the early mobility-driven solutions to solutions based on the metamorphosis of inherent qualities of existing ur ban structures where large open sites were concerned or rehabilitation and reprocess of existing structures combined with new small-scale interventions, were existing structures are concerned. In effect, many of the so called Post-Modern revolutions of 1970s, including participation, rehabilitation, restoration, preservation, and political reorganisation, had been pre-dated by Team 10s thinking during 1960s.44Does this suggest that the New Brutalists finally acknowledged the mistakes of their designs and retreated? Such an interpretation would have ignored the context of 1950s where a quick solution was needed to re-house many people from bombed out regions in the centre of industrial cities and putrid slums. However, haste is a lazy excuse for questionable design. It cannot be ignored that the hard concrete aesthetic and morphological autonomy in part alienated Brutalist works from their residents and ended up forming ghettos for housing for the lower classes. In fairness, many es tates in Britain were brought off the sweep through by local authorities too lazy or unimaginative to hire architects and planners of their own45 that resulted in appalling dimness and dullness46. But, the original designs from New Brutalist architects also proven to be design disasters. Despite their efforts to accommodate the working class into their towers, they designed buildings with features that were highly unsuitable for such residents and eventually drove them away.Chapter 3Design FailuresAccording to R. K. Jarvis47, Le Corbusiers urban design principles belong to the artistic tradition in urban design, sharing the umbrella term with Camillo Sitte, Gordon Cullen, Roy Worskett and the Ministry for Housing and Local Government in London which designed the post-war British towns and villages. From first appearances, such principles could not be more different. Sittes emphasis artistic principles in city building is the direct aesthetic antithesis to modernists conception of O rder by pure geometry and neither would have tolerated the rows of front-and-back garden semi-detached houses of post-war England. Martin Kreigers Review of Large Scale Planning48 sets out three binds the set of limitations of particular attitudes that are common with all urban designers of the artistic tradition. Firstly, the desire for a formal, general model which will provide a scientific foundation for planning analysis and proposals can be seen just as clearly beneath Sittes sensual and overwhelmingly visual impressions as Le Corbusiers utilitarian explanations of the benefits of international-style living. Guidelines, whether calling for That the centre of plazas be kept free or WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE