What is a Brutalist House? "Unlike other architectural movements, Brutalism has no originary house. Instead, its exaggerated formal expressions and excessive material treatments were first tested at full monumental scale in buildings for public and institutional programs. From there, they trickled down to residences for architects and industrialists who desired a different kind of modern house for the 1960s. Often meditative, sometimes psychedelic, a bit paranoid, the results would have made good homes for Hollywood villains. This should not, however, imply that Brutalism’s characteristics are antithetical to those desirable in a domestic environment. On the contrary, they can increase a house’s atmospheric variety and play up the contrast between the tenebrous and the sundrenched, or the raw and the slick. This is what I hope to demonstrate through my selection of houses from across the United States built in the 1960s. They may not be as “heroic” as Brutalist public buildings, and most wear the Brutalist label only loosely, but each carried the burden of updating the modern house type for new times and new lifestyles. It is telling that three of seven have been demolished to make way for overblown, neo-Colonial “McMansions”. These 1960s houses were openly hostile to traditional domestic values, which made (and still makes) them seem dangerous in an architecturally conservative country like the US. Moreover, many of these houses were sited on dramatic landscapes that make the land on which they sit more valuable than any building, let alone one that offends conventional taste. Talk show host Phil Donohue, who took down John M. Johansen’s roughly-textured Labyrinth House in 1988, described it as “an avant-garde bomb shelter” and cited unwelcome, sometimes architectural visitors in his decision to demolish it for greater security and privacy. Even when gently curved and relatively smooth, as in Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty’s Lincoln House, Brutalist surfaces can still rub prospective residents the wrong way. The Lincoln House was taken down in 1996 to make way for a new structure that mimicked (or perhaps mocked?) its distinctive elongated shape. To contradict my trickle down narrative, some may point to Alison & Peter Smithson’s 1953 design for a residence in London’s Soho neighborhood. It is true that the first appearance of the term “New Brutalism” in the architectural press was in a brief comment on this house design, but the project was never built and its documentation is so perfunctory that it seems more a one-line joke than a house. One can’t completely dismiss its influence, but as Reyner Banham pointed out more than once, US architects preferred a different, more aestheticized use of concrete, brick, and block. Like the Smithsons, many of the architects in this selection were best known for public buildings, and several were beloved teachers, but these houses show them to also be rigorously experimental housebuilders. Breaking open and transforming the largely rectangular glass boxes that had come to predominate modern house design during the 1950s, these seven experiments use curvilinear walls, deep-set openings, broad cantilevers, rough textures, and geometric plans to amplify architecture’s expression. If that isn’t a description of Brutalism, I don’t know what is." (Text: Michael Abrahamson. Image: John M. Johansen /// Mummers Theater /// Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA /// 1966-1970. Image source: FYB Fuck Yeah Brutalism.)

'London Brutalism' - Thomas Danthony & Michael Abrahamson