For the love of concrete
Following a two-hour lecture on post-war architecture by Barnabas Calder as part of our third-year Architectural History course in the University of Liverpool, we nonetheless gathered in the Budden Lecture theatre early-on this academic year, to hear him speaking for another hour on Brutalism. His new book "Raw Concrete: The beauty of Brutalism" is the reincarnation of the author's narrative lectures which he delivered every week for the past three years of my course in the University. The thing that lies at the heart of the book is that "Brutalism, not only was the best architectural period that ever has been, but probably ever will be", as he mentioned in the lecture, primarily in order to jokingly offend and get responses. However, whoever has never read his work, or attended his lectures before, will not know right away that all of his conclusions, like the one above, are all appointed with reason. He continued to explain that he wonders if that's a bit mean to say in a room full of people who are wanting themselves to become the best architects the world has ever seen, "but I don't think you stand much chance, compared" he said, as he once again spread laughter across his audience.
His advocacy of Brutalism comes from central theorist of Brutalism, Reyner Banham, he explained shocked at the picture on the slideshow, as he looked very similar to him, with his new glasses and recently-grown beard.
Brutalism was a very short lived moment. Denys Lasdun's career included quite many styles he went through even with a 7-year interruption. That, he mentions, is not the norm. After the war he comes back working with tecton in the immediate post war year and within a few years he is rebelling with his own architecture from some years before and then he questions how many architects have the chance to do that in their career. And lastly, his first university building for Cambridge University, a prestigious permission that he seems, at some extent, to have lost his nerve and in his pursuit of 'specialness' and "he panicked and put a silly hat on it", and the Budden theatre laughed. The Royal College of Physicians in London is glorifying. All this time in his career he was doing things that didn't resemble what we call brutalism, until the 1960s premature brutalist styles.
His university of EA, outside Norwich, glorying in its exposure of services, loving the geomassive quantity of concrete. Lasdun operates in this highly brutalist style and Barnabas Calder explains his experience in the Christ College of Cambridge.
With different explorations of style, Calder is trying to show us the climax of his book, the architectural violin, as he names it, which is what the National Theatre of London should be like.
He explains the resistance that Lasdun faced towards his new stylistic development going out of fashion. He got through more styles that the medieval ages went through.
Calder asked: "How come architecture changed so fast in this period and so dramatically? How come that at the end of the great acceleration through the post-war years it was producing as amazingly good architecture as the National Theatre, which is one of the best buildings the country has ever seen?" He continues to answer this question using a graph on the energy in England during the 19th and 20th century to explain the peaks due to industrial revolution, and the rest changes that caused consumption change. This concludes only to point out that energy isn't just a proxy for the economy; it's actually how architecture is made, how buildings are run and what they have been made of, and therefore energy is architecture in a very fundamental sense. This incredible acceleration in the amount of energy available in a country that was one of the most energy-rich countries in the world, means that you get more activity. The number of buildings erected is increasing and that's one of the main reasons why architectural styles are increasing as more people get a chance to build something. Lasdun saw 50 or so projects being complete in his career and he had time to reflect and comprehend so he could build this massive collection of ideas for architecture. And this is the result of shear quantity of energy available in construction. Energy is cheap at the Brutalist period.
The Trellick tower is the most obvious result of use of concrete and steel as well as the only way such a high building could work is through petrol, which is in liquid form and can reach such heights. Concrete industrially produced becomes cheap. It was never cheaper than a brick wall, as the author of Raw Concrete explains, but once you are willing to pay you get better looking results. Even glass which you do not think as a brutalist material, which it is but it just steps back from the concrete walls, was very energy-hungry.
So what you have in this architecture is a celebration of the availability of these materials due to the cheap energy, and all those services that are brought in this period. For the first time these residents have indoor lavatories, indoor hot and cold water, central heating, and lifts. The boiler house on the Trellick house at the time was an extraordinary piece of progress that the future was coming. Now oil was being burnt to provide them with comfort, which is a wonderful thing to show off about.
People see brutalism because of its toughness as an honourable attempt to do things cheaply for the many instead of the few. That's wrong, as this was what the architecture of 1940's was doing in the immediate post-war time. Spending lots and lots of money to build things that would be better than what they built before.
'Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism' is the way to go in understanding the phantasmagorical production of architecture in the post-war period, so much for students, as much as for academics, since the architectural culture of the 21st century can use a wake up call in all the philosophising which people tend to characterise our profession with. Having the chance to read Barnabas Calder's lecture in an illustrated book should not be something to be missed by anyone trying to understand architectural history.