Episode 1 Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry with Jonathan Meades

There was no such thing as architectural modernism.

There were modernisms, plural, several, contradictory,

at odds with each other.

And these idioms have gradually, if grudgingly,

come to be accepted as the norms of the last 100 or so years.

All these idioms, save one, Brutalism,

an offensive din to many ears, but concrete poetry to mine.

What is it about Brutalism that prompts such derision,

such animus, such loathing?

Its aggression?

Its candour?

Its arrogance?

Its sheer art?

This season, as you can see, I am vivacious in fuchsia

and lacy ruffs, whilst last season, I was a street riot of purple

and diamante. Purple is such a very, very brave colour, don't you think?

But had Anna Wintour

or Karl Lagerfeld called me

to say that I should be bedecked in a gingham, taffeta,

scoop-necked young generation jumpsuit

and daubed all over with fig confit spa hydration pamper,

I would have stripped off and gone for it.

Wasps or no wasps!

We think of shifts in taste as being entirely manipulated,

relentlessly, regularly, but our awareness

of this hectoring invitation to conform,

makes us no less conformist.

We're persuaded of need where none exists.

We're enjoined to subscribe to the new,

new clothes, new phones, new cars, new cults

and, of course, new strata of personal debt,

raging hyper-debt.

However, not all fashions, not all crazes,

not all fads, not all tastes, not even all religions,

are blatantly mercantile creations.

Some, the worthwhile minority, are born of commonality,

of harmonious unison, of the thread of juncture,

over complex combination of circumstance,

chance and coincidence and, no doubt,

various other alliterative properties.

Every such shift is peculiar, specific.

Why it happens and how it happens, vary.

Causes lurch from the obvious to the occluded.

Processes are sometimes tangible, sometimes incomprehensible.

All that is constant is that it most surely DOES happen.

Spontaneous and synchronous

are words that ought always to be in quotes.

But nonetheless...

A Housman wrote of Thomas Hardy, that, in 1866,

there was a whole army of young men like himself,

not mutually acquainted, but who, nevertheless,

as they met in the street, could recognise each other

as spiritual brethren because of a certain outward sign.

That outward sign was Swinburne's Poems and Ballads,

protruding from their breast pocket.

This literary sartorial fashion was not imposed,

it was not a strategy devised by the poet's publisher

or by an opportunistic aesthete of a tailor.

The stretched 1860s, from about 1855 to 1873,

where the cultural apogee of Victoria's reign

and of the French Second Empire's gaudy swagger.

Theatre, painting and fiction were out to disturb and to shock.

It was the time of energy, melodrama, sensation novel,

of high art's appropriation of subjects

that had previously been the stuff of penny dreadfuls.

Of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, of the Paris Opera,

the Louvre's extension, the Palais Longchamps in Marseille,

it was the era of Courbet's The Origin of the World

and Cezanne's horrifying painting The Murder,

but that was Cezanne, before he was Cezanne

when he was in thrall to Goya,

of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White,

Armadale and The Moonstone.

Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend,

of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal,

Les Paradis Artificiels.

It was when Paul Du Chaillu introduced dead gorillas to Europe.

This was when Victorian architecture

was at its most quintessentially Victorian.

Indeed, the very word 'Victorian'

appears to have been coined in the late 1850s

by the architect and pamphleteer, Thomas Harris,

who militated for a peculiarly Victorian architecture.

Militated successfully.

Unlike much of the work that had preceded it,

and much of the work that would succeed it,

it could have belonged to no other period.

This architecture was the so-called Modern Gothic,

modern, certainly,

but it had little to do with any hitherto identified form of Gothic.

It may have lacked stylistic precursors,

but it did possess precursors of a different kind,

emotional precursors.

Antecedents which provoke the same mood

carry the same sentimental charge,

which cause you to shiver with the same delighted horror

or unqualified horror. Horror, full stop.

Which presage the undisguised weight

solidity bulk and counter-intuitive juxtapositions

of the Modern Gothic.

Because they create what is unfamiliar,

what was never previously thought or revealed,

the greatest artists incite the greatest contempt,

the most furious denigration.

As a playwright, John Vanbrugh,

whose characters included Lord Foppington

and Sir John Brute,

prompted outrage, delight and the wrath of censors.

As an architect, he prompted merely outrage among his contemporaries

and for many years to come,

from baroque beginnings at Castle Howard,

he ascended to heights of uncompromising primitivism

and was predictably calumnised.

Blenheim Palace was described as a quarry of stone.

Voltaire declared that it had neither charm nor taste,

but so what?

Those aren't cardinal qualities, sure, it does lack charm,

but there never was any intention that it should possess

such a conciliatory and welcoming quality, rather than grandeur.

And if Voltaire equated taste with restraint and courtesy,

then he was, again, right.

It's not a polite building, it is dramatic, rhetorical,

aggressive, as violent as a static object can be.

Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope bemoaned Vanbrugh's work's

lack of elegance, their deliberate coarseness.

The poet and clergyman, Abel Evans, the incumbent of Great Staughton,

a couple of miles from Vanbrugh's Kimbolton Castle,

and a recipient of the patronage of Vanbrugh's great enemy,

the Duchess of Marlborough, notoriously wrote...

Scatology and Christian mercy are evidently compatible.

After Vanbrugh had finished work at Kimbolton,

the Florentine, Alessandro Galilei, added a portico.

Stylistically contrary, but of an appropriate scale.

Fifteen years later in Rome, Galilei went further,

he just about out-Vanbrughed Vanbrugh.

Again, the style owes little to Vanbrugh, the scale,

the monstrous scale owes everything.

Sinister, barbaric, sullen, distended, glowering,

entirely classical, but Gothic in mood.

It's a bracingly morbid display, fit for a race of giants.

It's a matter of great regret that Piranesi

never designed an original building.

He restricted himself to becoming

one of the greatest artists of the sublime.

He etched prints, many of which depicted hallucinatory prisons, invented prisons.

Thankfully, at the turn of the 20th century,

Gino Coppede, better known for his

extravagant Art Nouveau villas,

and for the picturesque area of Rome named after him,

designed, in Genoa,

a number of outrageous buildings which clearly derived from Piranesi.

They are so encrusted with swollen motifs,

and with the frozen zoo of malevolent animals,

and so heftily rusticated

that they menace anyone who comes upon them,

they bully the eye.

80 years later, after Brutalism's short summer,

Ricardo Bofill and Peter Hodgkinson,

posing as neo-classicists,

match Brutalism's aggression

in their columned, pedimented

top-heavy Parisian housing projects.

As I say, it's not a matter of style

but of mood,

of cast of mind.

Why should buildings be friendly?

Why should landscapes?

Do we really want to be chums with geological formations?

Do we crave matey waterfalls?

The proposition that buildings should be on a human scale -

that is, slight and not too alarming,

is ridiculous.

Like many Greenish, eco-friendly dicta,

it's a deprecation of mankind.

A curtailment of our ambitions

and capabilities,

still we ought to be polite to the Earth.

The modern Gothic also lacked stylistic successors.

For it was deplored even as it was being built,

it led nowhere.

It very swiftly became to be regarded as aberrational,

coarse, absurd, grotesque,

uncouth, violent, excessive, degraded.

and the supreme manifestation of the cult of ugliness.

According to the trade newspaper, The Architect,

"It is the first time in the history of art

"that crudity has been directly and laboriously

"sought out."

It wouldn't be the last time.

Here were architects imposing their will,

their aggressive, looming, non-consensual,

rampantly individualistic will,

designing in reaction to pretty much everything,

creating to indulge themselves,

experimenting out loud in a spirit of absolute indifference to the public's bemusement.

It was as though an alien sensibility ruled the collective

architectural imagination.

This was the architecture which several subsequent generations

routinely calumnised

with the epithet "Victorian monstrosity".

They calumnised it because that was what they had learned.

That was what was done.

That was what was normal.

They shared the incurious passivity of the flock, which, in other circumstances,

allows autocrats to flourish.

They didn't look, they didn't bother the question.

They didn't trouble to scrub the scales from their eyes.

They lazily accepted the received idea,

la pensee unique,

the unchallenged cliche.

The consensual taste.

Had Margaret Thatcher exhorted Britain to embrace Victorian values

a few years before she actually did so in 1983,

she'd have prompted incredulity.

For most of the 20th century, "Victorian" had a narrow, pejorative meaning.

Millions of people who had never heard of, let alone

read Lytton Strachey

accepted his assessment of the Victorians

of their idolatry, of their religious mania,

their Empire.

The very word "Victorian"

prompted rancour, despisal,

and, above all, ridicule.

On the one hand, it evoked moral and social squalor,

inhumane working conditions, the workhouse,

disease and extra disease,

the exploitation of children like Little Tom

the Chimney Sweep.

Rookeries.

On the other hand...

well, another bunch of cliches.

Preposterous sentimentality,

bourgeois pomposity,

spectacular philistinism,

appalling taste,

ostentatious piety,

finely tuned pomposity,

adherence to what Orwell snobbishly decried

as "the money-grubbing Smilesian line."

"Smiles" being Samuel Smiles,

advocate of self-help and thrift.

Mrs Thatcher in a line of descent from Manchester liberalism,

and indeed from Smiles,

was only able to get away with exhortations to emulate the Victorians

because by 1983, a shift of taste had occurred.

The vigour, energy, seriousness and inventiveness

of the 19th century were at last widely recognised.

Those qualities were most tangible

in the buildings that surrounded us,

the layers of lazy prejudice were being removed.

High Victorian design,

the modern Gothic,

was, by the 1980s,

beginning to be widely relished.

the buildings' harsh weirdness

was appreciated as something quite extraordinary

by people who did not belong to the Victorian Society,

who did not go on rood screen field trips,

who did not attend polychromatic brickwork study days.

The public was belatedly, very belatedly,

catching on to the imaginative invention

of long-dead artists, long-dismissed artists

This peculiar shift of taste

was contingent on several circumstances.

First...

there was by now a century's gap

between the buildings and their growing band of admirers.

this gap was propitious,

People could look and gaze and appraise

unhampered by the recent past's attitudes,

by the routine antipathy

by the distaste of the parents, of grandparents and great-grandparents.

Second...

a generation had come of age witnessing all around it

the destruction of 19th-century buildings which,

whilst they stood,

were overlooked or taken for granted.

Cuthbert Broderick was one of the geniuses of the age,

yet his Oriental Baths in Leeds

and his Royal Institution and Town Hall in Hull

were ripped down by ignorant clots,

who, if they thought about it,

which is unlikely,

reckon that genius and Victorian were incompatible.

Third...

the earliest proselytisers for Victorian architecture

and for the era's devalued painting,

most famously John Betjeman,

Harry Goodhart-Rendel,

Osbert Lancaster,

Evelyn Waugh,

had been regarded by their own generation

as puzzling provocateurs,

not quite serious,

forever mischievously guying the public with the perverse asceticism.

It was such people who founded

the Victorian Society in the late 1950s

to try to stem the tide of destruction.

By his very presence, Nikolaus Pevsner.

not yet a secular saint,

endowed it with gravitas.

Pevsner's affection for Victorian architecture

was actually qualified.

Fourth...

there was a new enemy.

Pevsner had a blind spot about the modern Gothic.

Because he believed that modernism should be white

an rectilinear,

as it had been in the 1920s and '30s,

he was entirely out of sympathy

with the modernism that began to emerge at the end of the '50s

and in the early '60s.

This modernism was in reaction to the smooth, sleek,

elegant work which had preceded it.

It didn't seek to be pretty,

it didn't seek to soothe.

and it was soon the object of bien pensant loathing.

"Monstrosity" had a new word to preface it.

"Concrete".

'Concrete mon...concrete mon...

'concrete monstrosity...'

For the first time since the 1860s,

there was an architecture with guts, with attack.

with what the Victorians called "go".

An architecture which shunned sweet-natured niceness

and emetic unction.

We don't expect films and novels or paintings

or sculptures to be pretty,

so why should we expect buildings to be pretty?

there are other qualities we seek.

Nightmares are more captivating than sweet dreams.

More memorable, too.

They stick around longer.

Georges Braque

said that art's job is to trouble us,

while science's job is to reassure us.

There are too many artists who want to be scientists.

The architecture of the 1960s and the 1860s

are remarkably akin...

in mood,

in aspiration,

in fragmentation,

in counter-intuition,

in discordance, in mongrelism,

in arbitrariness,

in impurity, in irreason.

In offending against the most dismal

of characteristics,

common sense.

They have both been habitually regarded

as transgressive,

for they show the architect not as a servile technician

or social worker,

but as a maker, an artist.

An artist creates what he regards as necessary.

He creates in order to achieve something which did not previously exist.

What an artist does is not pander to his patron's taste,

rather, he flatters the patron into believing that it is he,

the patron, who is the creator of the scheme

which the architect has proposed.

The collusive first person plural is important here:

"We think", "we do",

"we achieve".

Thus the architect is granted the licence to do his will.

Again, he does not attended to a notional audience.

Second-guessing doesn't come into it.

Nor did focus groups,

though they had, mercifully, not been invented in the 1860s.

And even in the 1960s,

they were confined to the milieu of academic sociology

and to assessments of mass media.

Crucially, they assessed experience.

They focused on what had been

and not on what was yet to come.

They were not used as instruments of prospective urban estate planning.

It's evident that if an audience is asked what form a new

housing development should take, it will reply,

"Like A", or "like B".

Something with which it is already familiar,

something extant.

Not something new, not something

which is yet uninvented.

The consensual cannot help but be feeble.

The architecture of both eras

has incited irrational opposition

and a baffled incomprehension

disguised as moral censure.

What is the point of having a cast of highly trained,

often highly imaginative, architects

if they have to heed the opinions

and suffer the aesthetic distaste

of oafish "I don't know much about architecture

"but I know what I like"

elected representatives.

And is there any other kind of elected representative?

Of course, such distaste should be taken as a backhanded compliment.

But the way of the world dictates

that it's oafish "I don't know much about architecture

"but I know what I like"

elected representatives

who have access to the demolition community's hoe rams,

wrecking balls, high-reach excavators,

hydraulic jacks, hydraulic shears

and explosives.

Even the densest scum-of-the-earth,

eager-to-ingratiate-itself politician

knows that it will be applauded at the mere utterance of the words

"concrete monstrosity".

THE PHRASE REVERBERATES

Any modest, self-effacing

newspaper columnist

can be sure that he will please

readers with the same ready-made formula.

For, as well know, concrete monstrosities

are culpable of virtually everything.

They promote every known social ill

and many which have yet to be revealed.

Addiction, family breakdown,

sexual violence,

they are responsible for the Teesside shoplifting epidemic.

For paedophilia,

long-term unemployment,

arson,

infanticide,

looting,

for a festive gamut of diseases,

benefits fraud,

depression,

pre-teen pregnancies,

incest,

and concrete being nothing if not versatile, cannibalism.

Cannibalism is one of war's unspoken

enormities.

Snacking between battles.

It's a by-product.

War is politically and demographically predictive.

It creates future boundaries, future reparations,

future migrations,

future regimes.

It's also technologically predictive.

The idea, shared by Harry Lime

and the French writer Paul Virilio,

that war is the mother of invention

is rather sweeping

but much that is occasioned by belligerent necessity

does make its way

into Civvy Street, Civvy Plaza, Civvy Mall.

Surgical advances, prosthetics,

transport, fabrics, prefabricated

structures like the Bailey bridge and the Mulberry harbour,

chronometry, food substitutes

other than human flesh,

space travel, road technology,

telecommunication systems,

remote-control cinematography,

surveillance systems,

optics, computers,

computer-controlled machine tools which

de-skill workers,

cartography,

weapons, of course - a GPS is a weapon,

we are all beneficiaries

and victims of martial ingenuity.

There is a sort of architecture that mimics

defensive structures.

Playful architecture.

Country houses and their lodges

were Liberaced with abundant turrets,

crenulations, corbels, drawbridges.

This architecture was at several centuries remove

from that which it drew upon.

The meaning of the model

of what was imitated,

one murderous lout baron building

to protect his fiefdom

from the dragonnades

of a second murderous lout baron

had all but been erased

in a welter of neo-chivalric whimsy.

The temporal gap between bellicose bunkers

and the civilian buildings that took their cue from them

was a mere few years.

The inspiration for hospitals, laboratories,

apartment blocks, schools,

universities,

was the recent past.

The National Socialist past, as it happened.

Are Volkswagen cars evil?

Whilst the concrete architecture of the third quarter

of the 20th century adopts the mood

of the 1860s,

it steals the forms and shapes

of the defences built for an atrocious regime

by slave labour

and glorified by the German writer Ernst Junger

as "holy".

But then Junger did have a quasi-mystical attachment

to the apparatus of war.

HEAVY GUNS FIRING

Paul Verilio

likened them to barrows, tumuli,

funerary sites,

which, of course, they sometimes inadvertently became.

Nazi Germany built thousands of fortifications:

bunkers, observation posts,

anti-aircraft posts,

U-boat pens,

flat towers.

There were altogether about 60 types.

They were mostly built by the Todt Organisation

and they were mostly designed by the architect

and engineer Friedrich Tamms.

He described as "cathedrals of artillery".

"To shelter is to pray."

"They are true monuments to God

"and the eternity of the German people."

They are, certainly, hard to get rid of.

For Tamms, as for Junger and Verilio,

building was as fundamental a part of war

as fighting.

A creation was as essential as bombing.

The majority of German's less-trusting artists

emigrated while they could.

As Billy Wilder had it...

Those who remained were subjected, willingly or not,

to censorious compliance

which was as small-minded as it was sinister.

Conditions for creation

where hardly propitious.

Art and architecture were propagandist instruments.

Folksy glorifications

of idealised peasants,

populist glorifications

of genitally impoverished athletes,

kitschy essays

in emulation of Imperial Rome.

Though they had drawn on and exaggerated

various strains of 1930s European art,

they were, after the War,

regarded as works

which had occurred in toxic isolation

and which were so contaminated

that they were now in eternal quarantine.

These fortifications are the exception.

They were the most original and most influential

works of art created

during the 12 years of the National Socialist imperium.

Accidental art?

Art waiting to happen?

Proto-art waiting to mutate,

chrysalis to imago,

accidental art whose potency

would only be revealed by its gift

of inspiration to a post-war civilian world.

The fact that they might be compromised by having been built

by forced labour

will not concern any subsequently plagiarising architect.

The form is the thing.

Forget the cause, the purpose,

the enormity of the regime that built them.

Forget their association

with the occluded war,

the internal, racial war,

the war that Apulian did win.

The former is the thing, the appearance,

it always is.

Unlike folkish cottages,

unlike pseudo-vernacular Ordensburgen,

the elite training schools,

unlike neoclassical arenas,

bunkers appealed to the Modernist sensibility.

Second-generation Modernism derived, then, from Nazi models.

This was not, perhaps, the architectural gift

that Hitler and Speer, with his vacuous theory

of the value of ruins,

had hoped to bequeath to the post-war world.

Somehow, under the nose of the tyrant and his toady acolyte,

Tamms had laid down the blueprint

for the greatest of post-war architecture.

Tamms' own practical source

lay in the engineering structures

that he himself had designed

in the six years after the "glorious seizure of power".

Autobahnen,

their viaducts,

their bridges,

their landscaping, this was the greenest of regimes.

Tamms expressed his theoretical basis thus:

"Practical use stands in the way..."

This must have been cheering for those who sheltered in is bunkers(!)

He went on...

"Rather, the Monumental must contain something unapproachable that..."

"The Monumental is the symbol of a community bound by a common ideal."

Save for the last sentence, this is sane enough.

Ernst Junger called Tamms' architecture "holy",

which can mean anything.

He also called it "cyclopean",

which specifically signifies a dry-stone,

no mortar, no cement,

method of building used by the Mycenaeans

3,500 years ago.

It this composed of large, uncut boulders,

many times larger than those that are typically used

for upland walls in Britain and Spain.

Structures are held up by gravitational force,

by the sheer weight of stone upon stone.

More broadly, "cyclopean" has come to mean

"massive", "elemental", "crude",

or rather, apparently crude.

For although there is nothing delicate

about cyclopean structures,

there is nothing coarse about the thought behind them,

any more than there was anything coarse

about Mycenaean script, Linear B.

In the earliest years of the 20th century,

there was a fashion amongst occidental painters

and sculptors

the drawing upon Mesoamerican, Polynesian,

Maghrebian

and sub-Saharan African sources.

Sculptures, masks, totems,

ideograms, pictographs,

Picasso and his many imitators,

Modigliani, Matisse,

they were all at it.

Retrospectively,

this fashion has been dignified

is being founded in the spirit of anti-colonialism,

which lends it a supposedly ethical dimension.

So it is not then merely a question of sequestering

a visually exciting sculptural style

whose meanings and devices are not understood(!)

No, it was a gesture of solidarity

towards the victims of colonial wickedness,

an early instance of self-congratulatory

Western penitence and ostentatious exculpation.

Artistic correctness, avant les lettres.

What it is really about is a familiar trait.

The desperate search for fresh inspiration,

for a new trigger.

Instead simply looking back to different eras

of European culture,

as architects had routinely done from the 15th to the 19th centuries,

it extended its research,

not just to different eras but to different continents,

and to objects whose value had hitherto

been held to be ethnographic rather than aesthetic.

It was a way of escaping the continuum of the Renaissance,

of casting off the shackles of 500 years of linear perspective

and of abjuring illusionism,

which had anyway been usurped by photography.

A kindred process occurred in music,

where jazz and ragtime, pretty much exclusively black music

in a still-segregated United States,

provided the foundation for works by European composers,

Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel,

Kurt Weill,

Igor Stravinsky,

Constant Lambert.

This opportunistic rummaging

through the artefacts of non-classical,

non Judeo-Christian cultures

was an oblique continuation

of the Romantics' idealisation

of the noble savage

and the quest for perfectibility,

or "reality".

Real reality.

Or feral salvation.

Or natural truth.

Or some delusional state along those lines

through the adoption of primitivism.

The Early Modern movement in architecture

took a different path, different paths.

But all led away from primitivism,

towards a fundamentalist trust in progress,

trust so strong it was a faith.

In the strain of Modernism that became known as the International Style,

future would be determined by technocrats.

Architecture was willingly in thrall

to such doctrines as Taylorism.

There was the widely held belief, no proof required,

that the state could be remodelled like a factory.

Architects planned to create a practical Utopia.

They did not regard themselves as builders or artists,

but as social engineers.

Reason didn't sleep, far from it.

It suffered such insomnia

that it created its own monsters.

Monsters so hyper-rational

that they became instruments of managerial madness.

Machines were worshipped,

man would be transformed into a machine.

Photos of Le Corbusier's work

invariably include his cars,

which today look hopelessly old-fashioned

beside the buildings.

They were there to emphasise

that the buildings, too, are machines.

These buildings, heralds of a new society,

lidos, airports,

health centres, coach stations, garages,

mostly clung to Euclidean geometry.

Whilst International Modernism was to its adherents

a social programme,

rather than an architectural idiom,

its buildings were instantly recognisable

because they were stylistically costive.

The same few devices were endlessly employed.

Most had flat roofs,

most had white walls,

most had abundant glass.

Most shunned ornament, which,

as every junior draughtsman knew, was crime,

because a dotty Austrian, Adolf Loos, had said so.

Progress,

the progress they would claim to represent,

was also a pretence.

Progress explicitly connotes movement,

change,

perpetual experiment.

Equally explicitly,

it precludes stasis.

By the mid-to-late 1930s,

rectilinear white modernism had ground to a halt.

It cannibalised itself.

At least it did if it could get out of its straitjacket.

Its self-censorship caused it to repeat itself.

It ignored Picasso's dictum

"copy anyone but never copy yourself."

Extraordinarily, he practised what he preached.

There was the blue Picasso

of starving beggars,

the rose Picasso of harlequins and mountebanks,

the sub-Saharan Picasso,

the elephantine-women-running hand-in-hand

and liable-to-have-a-heart-attack Picasso,

the freaks-with-several-heads Picasso,

the voyeuristic-primate Picasso,

the Minotaur Picasso,

the flying-horse Picasso,

and, at last,

the dead Picasso.

They were all Picasso,

one man was many men.

It was not till mid-century

that architecture caught up

and sought to emulate the variety

and energy which abound in modern painting,

sculpture and literature.

A shift of self-image occurred,

architects began to cotton on to the idea

that, rather than remain sterile technicians

of a Neverland

that had never come to be,

they might create the Neverland that never would be

in the guise of artists,

unconstrained artists,

fecund artists.

Certainly expressive artists,

even Expressionist artists.

If the architectural Modernism of the long 1960s

had as one source the grubby secret of Nazi fortifications,

it could also claim a less compromised ancestor.

The Expressionism of the 1910s, the 1920s

and the early 1930s.

The earliest attempts to use concrete as an architecturally

sculptural medium were made by Expressionist architects

such as Erich Mendelsohn

at the Einstein Tower at Potsdam.

Even though Mendelsohn soon abandoned Expressionism

for the abstract geometry of the International Style,

there is much more of this stuff than is generally acknowledged,

wrought by less famous hands.

The inventor of decaffeinated coffee,

Ludwig Roselius,

commission the architect

Bernhard Hoetger

to rebuild Boettcherstrasse in Bremen

in an Expressionist manner.

It included a gilded relief

which proclaimed Hitler

to be the "Lichtbringer".

An unfortunate dedication,

given that the bringer of light

is one of Lucifer's names.

At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally,

Hitler responded by denouncing

the street's architecture as degenerate.

Having then been condemned by the Nazis,

Expressionism was, after the war,

disregarded because, although not exclusively German,

it was tainted by that association.

Moreover,

it was an idiom of the despised North,

it was representational.

And its characteristic material was brick,

which was deemed non-modern.

No matter that many international

modern buildings were of brick,

rendered to give the impression that they were of concrete.

Concrete was modern.

So modern that watching it set

was like watching the future arrive.

International Modernism

strove for standardisation,

for production-line architecture,

for collective anonymity

and personal self-effacement.

The ideal building was not only

a machine,

it appeared to have been designed by a machine.

The Expressionist instinct was entirely contrary,

undisguisedly individualistic.

The artist is omnipresent,

pulling the strings, performing,

failing to be modest,

asserting him or herself,

in the case of architecture, it is almost certainly a him.

It is not the moral squalor of part of its provenance

that causes this kind of sculpted concrete

to be called Brutalist,

and the inventive, prolific, religiose,

unrepentant National Socialist Friedrich Tamms

to be considered the first Brutalist,

though that would be reason enough.

The term NyBrutalism -

"new Brutalism" -

is supposed to have been the coinage,

the jocularly mocking coinage

of the Swedish architect Hans Asplund.

It referred to a house in Uppsala

designed in 1949

by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm.

In comparison with the work which would subsequently

be labelled Brutalist,

the house is meekness itself.

Indeed, were it not built of industrial bricks,

which no doubt prompted Asplund's remark,

it might stand as the very example

of the sweet, light, ascetic,

puritanical Scandinavian architectural elixir

which afflicted this country for at least 10 years after the war.

An elixir in the image of the austere,

sanctimonious Chancellor of the Exchequer,

Stafford Cripps.

Modest architecture

which had much to be modest about.

Its most complete expression was the 1951

Festival of Britain.

Ill-named, it was the Festival of Scandinavia,

even pre-war Scandinavia.

The word "Brutalism" caught on.

A group of English architects

on a then-routine pilgrimage to Scandinavian shrines

met Asplund.

Among them was Michael Ventris,

the polymath who would decipher Linear B.

He was also a polyglot

who spoke Swedish,

not that Asplund's coinage required much translation.

It became popular in London's architectural circles.

It was initially always prefixed by "new",

which prompts the question,

what was the "old" Brutalism

that Asplund was alluding to?

Either way, it was a signifier

in search of an object,

an -ism that lacked a movement

or school or tendency or trend to go with it.

This was taxonomy back-to-front.

The title preceded the book, so to speak.

Ventris and his colleagues

appear to have used it in a slightly derogatory sense.

It was adopted by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson,

almost as a badge of defiance.

It was further disseminated by their sometime acolyte

and interpreter, Reyner Banham.

The Smithsons were manifesto people.

Joiners, doggedly avant-garde.

Sedulously alternative,

eagerly self-publicising.

They had all the characteristics required

for a successful career in the arts.

But they had no aptitude for art itself.

They lacked an essential perhaps THE essential,

attribute of architects,

they were absolutely bereft of a visual sensibility.

Banham was a stater of the bleeding obvious,

a committee man and academic

who believed himself to be a perpetual rebel

and a very unconventional indeed.

He was an energetically tenacious follower of fashion.

He was like the credulous who scuttled from one cult to the next

in search of the "truth"

when no such thing exists.

Brutalist architecture, Pop architecture,

Archigram architecture,

megastructural architecture,

green architecture,

hi-tech architecture.

This is a man who would have trampled on his grandmother

to snuggle up to a passing trend.

He positioned himself as an insider,

magnanimously divulging

to the "lay reader",

his patronising expression,

the secrets of whatever cult he was currently in thrall to.

His prose was embarrassingly ingratiating,

matey,

designed to show what a right-on, finger-on-the-pulse

kind of guy he was.

Whilst it still had absolutely nothing material to signify

other than a vacuum,

the very word "Brutalism"

became laden with further associations.

First...

Just as the generation before his had drawn on African art,

so did Jean Dubuffet

draw on the untutored, often disturbed,

often disturbing work

of psychiatric patients and the mentally fraught.

Patronisingly revered

as "idiots savants"

when they are frequently just "idiots".

Someone somewhere, no doubt,

considers this a form of exploitation.

Dubuffet also collected this work.

He called it...

"Brut" here meaning rough, raw, crude, spontaneous.

Expressive of demons and back-brain horrors.

It's also in extra-cultural phenomenon,

which is to say that the work

of a Mumbai taxi driver

will resemble that of a retired gardener in Castile.

The work is made without any reference to the cultural

norms of the society that its makers inhabit.

So there is, then, an unwitting internationalism about this stuff.

Brutalism also had appended to it a link to beton brut -

raw concrete, the stuff of bunkers.

The material which would evidently be considered harsh and

unaccommodating by a public,

which apparently craved the solicious of thatch,

pitched roofs, winking dormers,

wicket gates, bogus beams,

lichenous sandstone and prettiness.

Not beauty, just prettiness.

Most pertinently, Brutalism suggested brutality -

physical threats and violence.

Rumbles, stramashes.

Bottlings.

Had Banham and the Smithsons not been so silly,

so smug, such defiant teenagers,

had they ignored Ventris's and Asplund's pejorative word

and chosen something wholly mendacious...

..then the reception granted to this idiom might have been happier.

For their opponents knowing nothing of art brut or of beton brut,

and are prized only of the English component,

it would not have had the ammunition

of what sounds like a culpable boast of aggression.

Or maybe not.

With godparents like these,

Brutalism was not off to the greatest of starts.

Worse, the Swedish coinage, which had been adopted in Britain,

spread rapidly.

Hardly surprising, for with minor variations

the same word recurs in countless languages.

And the meanings recur too - persistently denigratory.

To people across the world,

Brutalism suggested merely brutality.

They were not apprised of the French words for raw concrete.

They knew nothing of Dubuffet's art brut.

Here was a further instance of unwitting internationalism.

When Friedrich Tamms began designing bunkers and flak towers,

there was nothing new about concrete.

It was, indeed, a very old material

which had been used successfully by the Romans,

the Pantheon, the Pont du Gard, et cetera.

After several centuries' neglect,

new interest was taken in it in the 19th century.

But the structures made then were predominantly engineering ones.

BELL CHIMES

It should have appealed to architects of the Modern Gothic

but didn't, partly because of its perceived technical limitations,

but more than that, it was a matter of snobbery.

There perhaps still is a footling hierarchy of materials.

Besides stone, beside even brick, it was considered ignoble.

The offal of the building world.

It was left to the manager of the concrete building company to design

this Swedenborgian Church in South London

as a sort of advertisement for the stuff.

The unreinforced concrete is incised and coloured to lend it

the appearance of old red sandstone blocks.

Hardly a typical London building material.

But a floor on the aggregate gives the game away.

It looks like honeycombed hokey-pokey

and leaves no-one in doubt that it is concrete.

The Royal Liver Building in Liverpool,

early reinforced concrete,

is more successful in carrying off the deception that it's stone.

What was new almost 2,000 years

after the construction of the Pantheon

was Friedrich Tamms' appreciation of reinforced concrete's pliability.

Its plastic capacity.

Its potential as a sculptural medium.

This last might seem an irrelevance

in a martial structure

with a bellicosal defensive.

But Nazi Germany was, evidently,

a tyranny which controlled by every means, including aesthetic ones -

dress, ceremonial, film, painting, architecture.

Tamms created forms, quasi-figurative forms

that recalled fortresses, dungeons,

megaliths, visors, fists in chainmail,

sci-fi Mohawks, helmets,

animals preparing to pounce.

Part of the Atlantic Wall Lacanau in the Medoc,

manned late in the war by members of the Indian legion of the SS,

took the shape of a hideous reptile.

These various forms of threatening imagery were intended

to send messages of German might to the people of the occupied countries

and to the German people themselves,

who began to feel that they too were victims of occupation.

How does an idiom that's made for war adapt to peace?

Readily.

What changes need to be effected?

Few for pieces relative.

The architecture of National Socialists' fortifications

made for the pedigree Second World War prove to

have multitudinous uses in the Cold war.

The mongrel Cold War.

Concrete took wings. You know what I mean.

Whilst it was hardly freed of the exigencies of defence,

of rhetorical shows of strength

and of the deadly playground's brinkmanship,

it was able to stretch itself with monolithic abandon.

The Modern Gothic had effected secular building types

with religious imagery.

Brutalism achieved something kindred - the libraries

and universities and shopping malls and clinics and hospitals

and hotels and car parks of both the Soviet Bloc and of the Free World,

which might not have been entirely free,

but was a good deal freer than usefully idiotic

fellow travellers would allow,

were infected with belligerent imagery

all drawn from the loser in the pedigree war.

Russia's Great Patriotic War,

the National Liberation War as it was called in Tito's Yugoslavia.

The initial cause was not masked. Of course it wasn't.

It was the very bombast and bellicosity

that attracted architects

who were browned off with monochromatic smoothness,

with lightness of touch, with the restraints of good manners.

No architect was more browned off with these qualities,

the cardinal qualities of heroic modernism,

than Le Corbusier,

who was its unquestioned master.

The man who would bury it, who would lead this savage reaction

against what he himself had invented and seen replicated the world over.

The moment was right for a new archetype,

for a new model for the devoted flock to copy.

Next week, here comes the Sublime.

Marvel at the might of mountains, yardangs, earthquakes.

Gasp as lava is pumped hundreds of metres into the air.

Gaze at the seething ocean, basalt columns and pounding waterfalls.

Gape at jackfruit trees and sausage trees...

the force of the screaming wind.

Experience the contortions of trees,

Banyan exposed roots.

Thrill to see tsunamis and geysers, termitaries.

Electric storms turning day to night, tornados, snowdrifts,

canyons and hoodoos.

Feel the force.