Concrete left as it is, just as it was poured. Steel left as it is, just as it was cut. Nothing covered in plaster, nothing embellished.
Brutalism applied this principle to buildings: it preserved the marks left by the formwork, treating the raw structure as a finished wall. Braun did the same with a record player in the late 1960s. A flat panel, a few knobs, nothing superfluous. We see this common thread in a stainless steel kitchen built as if it were meant to bear heavy loads, or in a speaker cabinet that seems to have been manufactured rather than styled.
I keep coming back to the fact that none of this was intended to be ‘cool’. It was simply about being true to the material. Perhaps that is the real reason why it hasn’t aged a bit: there was nothing trendy about it from the outset.
