Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.
To be in a brutalist building is not to feel oppressed, but to be oppressed. With every acute angle and stark space the minimalist forms inform you that not only do you not belong, but that your presence is actively unwanted. To the brutalist building a human is like a virus that has somehow slipped through the outer defenses of the immune system - it (yes, it) must be expunged. Brutalist buildings are weaponized to do just that.
The walls are made of concrete, often fluted on the inside, with jagged edges and exposed shards. Run your hand along such a surface quickly and you'll find yourself painting the wall red. Dim, quavering fluorescent lighting enhances the cave-like atmosphere, often flickering in strobe-like fashion, goading you into a seizure. There is precious little furnishing inside, perhaps a concrete bench every half kilometre or so along one of the endless grey corridors, all indistinct and muted. Obsessed with the precision of its geometry, the building will offer no accommodations for humans. Those benches will be perfectly flat and unyielding, making sitting on them a bizarre challenge, the corners will lack fillets and radii so that one feels always the danger of being cut by some edge, and the layouts will be alternately labyrinthine and gargantuan, optimized either for cockroaches or some extraterrestrial giants, but never humans.
Brutalism hates humans, hates what it means to be human. It comes from the realm of ideal forms, removed from the impurities of the material world, and its very presence threatens the continued existence of the material. First one is oppressed, but eventually one is enslaved. The human perspective is lost, and the brutalist meme perpetuates itself, inducing human hosts to build more brutalist structures, to transform ever more of life into death, of goodness into hatred.
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| University of Waterloo Math & Computer Building, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada "Leave, human" Original Image [Source] |
Brutalism is architecture but is also a rejection of architecture, at least of prior architecture. Prior to Brutalism, most architecture was informed by its location, by its materials, whether by intent or simple necessity. Architecture was seen as a way to transform the natural environment into one more suited to human purpose. This requires compromise: how to meet the human needs in the context of the environment without degrading the surroundings upon which humans are still dependent. Many times a balance was not well struck, and the environment suffered. The brutalists seem to have learned the lesson that there can never be an improvement in the environment, that the mere presence of structure represents a violation, a rape of the land. But rather than abandon architecture (and thereby favouring the environment) they swing the other way, giving up any pursuit of compromise, of understanding the surroundings.
That the ideal forms of Brutalism have no place for the messy reality of humans is no surprise. But the forms are perfect, therefore it is not the structure that is at fault, rather the people themselves. Their presence is an invitation to people to transform themselves into ideal forms. But what does this mean? What could it mean? What is existence outside of the material, beyond the impure? Nothing, only non-existence. This is less an invitation then and more a goading toward collective suicide. Brutalism is life-depleting.
Is it intentional? Could it all be a mistake? Perhaps the architects didn't realize all of the consequences? Fool me once... there's much much more than a few brutalist buildings. Brutalism comprises an impressive body of work that is both deep and wide. After the first building, a walk through would be all that was necessary to understand the consequences. No human can endure such an experience and not feel unwelcome, not feel hated for their very innate fallibility. The effect then is deliberate, as intended, and even appreciated. By whom? Those who have inculcated self-loathing, whose hatred of materiality is part of an obsessive ritual, whose deepest yearnings are towards obliteration. Who? Who else? Christians.
The roots of Brutalism are Christian, they are deep within the traumatized euro-psyche, and they are very old. Brutalism professes its roots in rationalism, in the rejection of tradition and old dogma, in an embrace of science. But it is based on an incomplete science, one that has eliminated the complicated machinery of humans as part of its simplifying assumptions, and by eliminating humans, by removing the natural, it embraces death over life and therefore aligns itself with one of humanity's darkest traditions - Christianity.
The vast blank canvasses of brutalist walls offer no inspiration or aspiration to the human who is confined within them. What are you looking for human? We might imagine the walls asking. Something beyond these walls? There is only oblivion.
Perhaps with a coming augmented reality explosion brutalist buildings the world over will come to be seen as quietly brilliant, their cavernous spaces and blank canvases providing ample playroom for all-new digital creations and decorations. But to continue to understand such a space as brutalist would be to misunderstand Brutalism. These buildings would be repurposed, their original intent subverted.
