I love carbuncles
Erno Goldfinger’s West London block, Trellick Tower, enjoying renewed popularity
Padraig Boyle
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Liane Jones defends the misunderstood beauty of brutalism
Britain is studded with massive concrete buildings that lots of people, including Prince Charles, loathe. They're often called 'brutalist' buildings – a derisive-sounding term that actually comes from the French for raw concrete, breton brut. Love them or hate them, their sheer scale means you can't ignore them.
Some, like west London's Trellick Tower, thrust skywards. Others, like the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury and Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, squat among older shopping streets. Then there are those that have colonised natural landmarks – the South Bank Centre on the curve of the Thames, and the Park Hill estate on a Sheffield hilltop. To many they are intimidating and ugly. Yet the architects of brutalism saw them as joyous and playful, a step towards a more humane urban environment.
Vision of a new world
Children play in the sunshine on the roof of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse in Marseille
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Brutalism took off in this country in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Britain faced a huge rebuilding task. At the heart of the movement was a vision of cities in the sky – new complexes like Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Marseille, where people would live, shop, play sports and enjoy communal facilities. Concrete was the new wonder-material. Planners and politicians liked it because it was cheap and quick; architects used it to create sculptural, flowing shapes, and revelled in its rough, raw texture.
The leading brutalist architects shared a mission: they wanted people to experience space in a new way. The glass walls of the Hunstanton school by Alison and Peter Smithson, Erno Goldfinger's breathtaking corridors in space in Trellick Tower, the elongated spiral staircases of Denys Lasdun's National Theatre – all were designed to bring the senses alive. They were also supposed to encourage a new kind of socialising – warmer, less formal and class-bound. The brutalist dream was a profoundly democratic one.
But instead of embracing the new architecture, many people recoiled from it. So what went wrong?