Reading (Real) Public Space

Reading Public Space and Its Structures: Should the Architect be "Author"?

From open2.net

For Peter and Alison Smithson, this gentle populism and watered-down design was not what Modernism was all about. They demanded a return to a more rigid, formal architecture and put their ideas to work with their Secondary School in Hunstanton, Norfolk, completed in 1954.

At Hunstanton, the Smithsons made a virtue of the construction process of the building: structural and service elements were left exposed and the austere steel and glass frame gave the building a skeletal appearance.

This "truth to materials" approach was anti-aesthetic, but, the Smithsons believed, more honest and true to Modernism's basic principles. Reynar Banham dubbed the school 'the New Brutalism', a movement which aimed, in his words, to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulation."

But the honesty in the Brutalist treatment of materials means that these buildings are often considered to be simply ugly, and what's more, have not proved immune to the crippling social problems which spread in the 1970s in particular.

With many Brutalist buildings, the feeling exists that the needs of expressing an architectural ideal comes before the needs of the human beings who have to use them. By the time the backlash against Modernism was in full swing in the 1970s, Brutalist buildings often bore the brunt of the criticism.