He Took Me To Flavertown When No one Else Would

I’m writing a book of history. When I did all that research on brutalism, I realized not for the first time but more fully and completely than ever before the extent to which historical fact is often really disruptive to the stories we tell about it. Most “history” doesn’t even survive the barest investigation of the facts because most “history” is political storytelling.

“brutalism is communist” is one of the biggest stories about Brutalism, and it’s why people both love and hate it, but it’s really not true. Communists invented the word Brutalism to mock American tenement housing which by the mid 50s was collapsing and lacked anything resembling modern amenities. They contrasted it to “the new humanism,” the soviet school of architecture’s high ceilinged, centrally heated, public transit accessible public urban housing. Those apartments built under Stalin are still in high demand in Moscow and st. Petersburg because the architects and the builders did a good job. They’re old, but still decent places to live. Brutalism was a slur for designs that centered cost-cutting over safety or liveability. Meanwhile, architects like Miese or Le Corbusier were designing buildings that centered neither the occupant nor the financier, and were pushing this radical view that material science could make architecture the new great center of artistic expression. “Béton Brut” or raw concrete became the medium of the post war reconstruction because it was cheap but you could mold it into anything. architecture could experiment structurally with techniques that had previously been limited to sculpture and you could get buildings that truly seemed to defy gravity.

The Brut of art brut and Béton Brut was confused with the Brutal conditions of cheap american tenements and then reclaimed homophonically by a bunch of edgy British architects to make a style that is permanently misunderstood even by the people who like it because it was born from this condensation of two separate meanings of the word “Brut(e).” Brutalism only gets its socialist associations in the 70s and 80s when tory politicians started mongering conspiracies about the inherent socialism of public housing (cheap, made of concrete) because poor people lived there. the “commie block” of eastern europe was far more common in yugoslavia than russia until the late 60s and 70s when brezhnev built more of them for, again, cost reasons.

All art is political. All of it. And politics has been moving at the speed of sound even since the first proto-human said “you can’t sit with us” at the lunch table. Renaissance faires are a kind of public art that exists because of a political movement that killed or destroyed the careers of thousands of queer people and communists. Those people, working in hollywood, were trying to live lives, be free, and change minds about what society could accept and when they were blacklisted by HUAC and Joe Mccarthy and Ronald Reagan, they went out into the woods and made their own party so they could stay working and living and making art.

“Historical accuracy” was not the goal. Surviving a political purge was the goal. Now, not everyone who studies history cares about the same things. My roommate in grad school was working on lightbulbs. Just lightbulbs. nothing else. It would have killed me, to be honest. He loved it. But if you are going to complain about historical inaccuracies in the folk tradition that was created to survive a political purge you better damn well be right about what you’re fucking talking about.