The name is misleading. In many languages «brutal» suggests something harsh and unpleasant, and for decades Brutalism was accused of exactly that. But the word has a more technical origin: it comes from the French béton brut, concrete poured in place that, once the formwork is removed, is left as it is, with the grain of the wooden boards printed on its surface.
Where the name comes from
The story of the label is more tangled than it looks. According to the Society of Architectural Historians, the term «neo-Brutalist» was first used in Sweden in 1950 by the architect Hans Asplund, as an insult. In England, in 1953, Alison Smithson spoke of «new brutalism» about an unbuilt house in Soho. In 1954 the Smithsons completed the school at Hunstanton, in Norfolk, which the critic Reyner Banham reviewed in 1955: it is that text, «The New Brutalism», published in Architectural Review in December 1955, that turned the label into a movement.
At the beginning, then, English Brutalism was not a style of surfaces but an ethical position: honesty in materials, exposed structure and services, a legible plan. Only in the United States, in the 1960s and 1970s, was the word «new» dropped and the term became a simple style label.
The model: Le Corbusier in Marseille
The reference point is Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952: 337 apartments for about 1,600 residents, in raw concrete that carries the imprint of the wooden formwork boards. That concrete left as it is, with no plaster or cladding, is the true genetic code of Brutalism.
These features (scale and mass, large concrete shapes, rough surfaces, visible services) are the ones the Royal Institute of British Architects lists as typical of Brutalism. The same body notes that in the 1960s béton brut dominated, with board-marking at the National Theatre and hammered aggregate at the Barbican.
Four places, four faces
In London, Denys Lasdun completes the Royal National Theatre in 1976: exposed concrete terraces stepping down to the Thames. In New Haven, Paul Rudolph turns concrete into a ribbed, hand-hammered skin with the Yale Art and Architecture Building. In Boston, the city hall by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, chosen through a competition announced in 1961, was started in 1963 and completed in November 1968. In São Paulo, Paulo Mendes da Rocha takes raw concrete down a different road, that of the paulista school, where the structure is the building.
Not all Brutalism is concrete: Hunstanton, the first building to carry the label, is made of exposed steel and brick, and that is precisely why Banham praised its constructional frankness.
Why it still divides
Brutalism has always divided opinion. The Royal National Theatre was compared by Charles, Prince of Wales, to a nuclear power station; the Yale building was celebrated and hated at the same time; Mendes da Rocha rejected the label. Yet it is precisely the frankness of the materials, the same quality early critics looked for, that makes these buildings recognisable at a glance. To go deeper into the best-known cases, see the articles on Rudolph, Lasdun and Mendes da Rocha.