Archives: Brutalisms

Mesa Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

The unusual color of the exposed concrete was achieved by adding reddish sand and is intended along with the bush hammered surface to forge a link to the similarly colored backdrop of the Rocky Mountain crags. Antithetical to many other brutalist builds…

20th Century Building on South Hill Park, NW3

Banham terms this a brutalist example of a “a sudden upsurge of architectural quality in English domestic design”. The façade is reminiscent of Mies but on the garden side the exterior becomes a mix of exposed concrete, wood and visible brick.

Tower House

On a triangular plot sized only 20.5 square meters, Azuma pre-empts the later popular Japanese mini-house type. The efficient use of space in downtown Tokyo was also a protest against the then rapid sprawl that was arising

Lari House

Like Sigurðardo?ttir in Iceland Yasmeen Lari was her country’s very first female architect. And just like Sigurðardo?ttir Lari opted for the brutalist design language for her first design for a dwelling.

Pilgrimage Church (Wallfahrtsdom)

The Catholic pilgrimage church and the related cloisters arose in the small and primarily Protestant hamlet of Neviges. In Gottfried Böhm’s oeuvre there are many sculptural and cleft-looking concrete churches. Neviges is the largest, and is the secon…

Kanagawa Prefectural Youth Center

With a library, a theater hall, a planetarium and many other facilities, the youth center is a multipurpose building of a quite considerable size. A projecting cornice cites the Festival Hall, completed one year earlier. The main section is rendered ent…

Pionir Hall (today: Aleksandar Nikoli? Hall)

The competition had a deadline of just 9 days and the project had to be designed and built in only one year. This resulted in the architects still planning the upper floors while the lower part was already being constructed. The result could be describe…

Crematory

The Leinfelden-Echterdingen crematorium is another example of Brutalist sepulchral architecture. Most notable are five sculptural elements protruding towards the top which exhibit a certain kind of machine aesthetics.

Negev Center

The center connects an interior, bazaar-like arcade with office spaces on the second floor and apartments on the third. Only a part was actually realized, which explains the abrupt closure on the east side. No real link to the city was ever forged. The …

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