Alison y Peter Smithson. Sede de The Economist (Londres, 1959-64)

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Alison y Peter Smithson. Sede de The Economist (Londres, 1959-64)

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Alison and Peter Smithsons’ Upper Lawn Pavilion (also known as the “Solar pavilion”), 1959-1962
https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/my-modern-house-upper-lawn/
The Brutalism Post Part 3: What is Brutalism? Act 1, Scene 1: The Young Smithsons
What is Brutalism? To put it concisely, Brutalism was a substyle of modernist architecture that originated in Europe during the 1950s and declined by the 1970s, known for its extensive use of reinforced concrete. Because this, of course, is an unsatisfying answer, I am going to instead tell you a story about two young people, sandwiched between two soon-to-be warring generations in architecture, who were simultaneously deeply precocious and unlucky.
It seems that in 20th century architecture there was always a power couple. American mid-century modernism had Charles and Ray Eames. Postmodernism had Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Brutalism had Alison and Peter Smithson, henceforth referred to simply as the Smithsons.
If you read any of the accounts of the Smithsons’ contemporaries (such as The New Brutalism by critic-historian Reyner Banham) one characteristic of the pair is constantly reiterated: at the time of their rise to fame in British and international architecture circles, the Smithsons were young. In fact, in the early 1950s, both had only recently completed architecture school at Durham University. Alison, who was five years younger, was graduating around the same time as Peter, whose studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served as an engineer in India.
Alison and Peter Smithson. Image via Open.edu
At the time of the Smithsons graduation, they were leaving architecture school at a time when the upheaval the war caused in British society could still be deeply felt. Air raids had destroyed hundreds of thousands of units of housing, cultural sites and had traumatized a generation of Britons. Faced with an end to wartime international trade pacts, Britain’s financial situation was dire, and austerity prevailed in the 1940s despite the expansion of the social safety net. It was an uncertain time to be coming up in the arts, pinned at the same time between a war-torn Europe and the prosperous horizon of the 1950s.
Alison and Peter married in 1949, shortly after graduation, and, like many newly trained architects of the time, went to work for the British government, in the Smithsons’ case, the London City Council. The LCC was, in the wake of the social democratic reforms (such as the National Health Service) and Keynesian economic policies of a strong Labour government, enjoying an expanded range in power. Of particular interest to the Smithsons were the areas of city planning and council housing, two subjects that would become central to their careers.
Alison and Peter Smithson, elevations for their Soho House (described as “a house for a society that had nothing”, 1953). Image via socks-studio.
The State of British Architecture
The Smithsons, architecturally, ideologically, and aesthetically, were at the mercy of a rift in modernist architecture, the development of which was significantly disrupted by the war. The war had displaced many of its great masters, including luminaries such as the founders of the Bauhaus: Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer. Britain, which was one of the slowest to adopt modernism, did not benefit as much from this diaspora as the US.
At the time of the Smithsons entry into the architectural bureaucracy, the country owed more of its architectural underpinnings to the British architects of the nineteenth century (notably the utopian socialist William Morris), precedent studies of the influences of classical architecture (especially Palladio) under the auspices of historians like Nikolaus Pevsner, as well as a preoccupation with both British and Scandinavian vernacular architecture, in a populist bent underpinned by a turn towards social democracy. This style of architecture was known as the New Humanism.
Alton East Houses by the London County Council Department of Architecture (1953-6), an example of New Humanist architecture. Image taken from The New Brutalism by Reyner Banham.
This was somewhat of a sticky situation, for the young Smithsons who, through their more recent schooling, were, unlike their elders, awed by the buildings and writing of the European modernists. The dramatic ideas for the transformation of cities as laid out by the manifestos of the CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture) organized by Le Corbusier (whose book Towards a New Architecture was hugely influential at the time) and the historian-theorist Sigfried Giedion, offered visions of social transformation that allured many British architects, but especially the impassioned and idealistic Smithsons.
Of particular contribution to the legacy of the development of Brutalism was Le Corbusier, who, by the 1950s was entering the late period of his career which characterized by his use of raw concrete (in his words, béton brut), and sculptural architectural forms. The building du jour for young architects (such as Peter and Alison) was the Unité d’Habitation (1948-54), the sprawling massive housing project in Marseilles, France, that united Le Corbusier’s urban theories of dense, centralized living, his architectural dogma as laid out in Towards a New Architecture, and the embrace of the rawness and coarseness of concrete as a material, accentuated by the impression of the wooden board used to shape it into Corb’s looming, sweeping forms.
The Unité d’habitation by Le Corbusier. Image via Iantomferry (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Little did the Smithsons know that they, mere post-graduates, would have an immensely disruptive impact on the institutions they at this time so deeply admired. For now, the couple was on the eve of their first big break, their ticket out of the nation’s bureaucracy and into the limelight.
Sugden House - Alison and Peter Smithson (Watford, 1955)
Robin Hood Gardens. May 2017

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TRENDING CONCRETE. BRUTALISM IS IN VOGUE
Brutalism is trending. Seemingly everyone can agree on this. But the celebrated trend, which until now is limited to social media and certain academic circles, cannot be trusted. Instead we have to understand and analyze its genesis and validity. It's no coincidence that certain parts of academia and of the public are interested in Brutalist buildings at exactly that point in time when they are about to disappear from the cityscapes for good.
The global crisis that produces more and more FORMS of collapse seems to be the appropriate stage to re-enact the tragedy of postwar architecture, this time as farce. For the newly found interest is wrong and doubly so. Neither is anyone interested in the real CONTENT of Brutalist buildings that have a critical, dystopian character, nor does anyone reflect on the possibility of transferring the impulses of Brutalism to contemporary times. Sure, "where nothing is as it should be, the old needs not be restored". In our case that's not even possible. The heydays of Brutalism are over for a reason. As architecture "[that] tries to face up to mass-production society"#1 , Brutalism has its time core, to speak with Adorno. Not to understand this, and therefore not to be able to translate Brutalism into today's postmodern world, is the political mistake.
Instead, large proportions of those promoting the trend pay homage to the museumisation of modern architecture, one that tames and paws it. This actually is the same with Bauhaus architecture. The eternal apologetic mantra about just how much Bauhaus would have loved to change society gets a stale aftertaste when it is integrated in this WRONG SOCIETY.
Once the critical sting of Brutalism -- and Bauhaus -- is extracted, the postmodern resentment can lay back and laugh about the grey days that seem to have been gone for a long time. With this, the understanding of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilization and the recognition that after World War II nothing was the same are brushed aside as something foolish just as well as the insight into the limitations that framed Brutalism. (New) Brutalism had answered with a self-restriction to the belief in social progress and the hope that everything will be good in the end that was around in the 1920s: through the way (over)functional buildings display their producedness and reproducibility, those buildings adopt an attitude against this WRONG SOCIETY without fleshing out a picture of the right one. It is in this "too little" that the surplus value of Brutalism is found.
That the hate Brutalist architecture had to face from the beginning is changing to admiration now is in itself quite consistent. As long as those buildings were shocking they worked as an interruption, as an attempt to "alienate from the alienated world" (Theodor W. Adorno). They reminded us of the WRONGNESS OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY. The "concrete monstrosities", tamed beasts today, cannot do that anymore. The postmodern soul was able to reconcile with another bulky element of its modern heritage.
#1 Alison and Peter Smithson in The New Brutalism
concrete abstraction, february 2017
Alison y Peter Smithson. Hunstanton Secondary School (Norfolk, 1949-54)
(via Alison and Peter Smithson > Upper Lawn Solar Pavilion Folly | HIC)