all me a philistine, but I don't understand these critics who
bash brutalist architecture.
The term brutalism comes from the technique used in construction: béton brut, or concrete poured in place. When they're ugly, it's for one of two reasons: they all seemed to be designed on the same blueprint, and when architects try to change it they overuse cantilevers and misaligned concrete to break up the boxy look, which only makes them uglier.
Boston City Hall photographed by Alexius Horatius showing the misaligned concrete, pillars and bricks used to conceal the brutalist style. CC BY-SA 3.0 Source: Justapedia (resized)
I worked in one for many years. The problem wasn't its ugliness. It was its non-functionality. With all that concrete, there was no space to put the electric wires, so the walls were lined with raceways. This building had a spectacularly expensive emergency generator in the basement, so there's no excuse for the raceways: people knew about electricity even in 1963, when the building was constructed.
I burned out two of them. The first time I pushed a big 208–230 volt refrigerator against the wall and hit a fuse holder—circuit breaker panels are really hard to install in concrete walls, so there were fuses every few feet. There was a loud bang, two seconds of silence, and then all the other equipment in the room started beeping. The other time, an electric motor started making grinding noises. The ACOS, the chief bureaucrat, wouldn't buy a new one: apparently ten different forms had to be filled out. That would have been several minutes of hard work, so we coaxed the motor along until one day it seized up, pulled about a hundred amps, and burned up an entire raceway circuit. Whoever did the electric in that building should have been court-marshalled, but it was a nightmare of paperwork just to get those guys to show up. As far as I know, that circuit is still out.
To install anything new, they had to use jackhammers to cut a hole in the concrete. This always left a ragged hole where you'd expect to see a drywall patch (this being the government, fixing the hole was somebody else's job). There's no doubt that the glass walled building that replaced it was more functional.
But concrete is a lot cheaper than glass. When the designers for one building drafted my colleagues and me for suggestions, no matter how many times we said glass would be nicer they'd whip out their spreadsheets of death and shoot it down. Those designers were certifiably insane. Nobody knows why, but they made one outside wall out of pure metallic zinc. After two years it looked like the inside of an old carbon-zinc battery. They wanted to make the floor on level 2 out of a slab of glass so people could look down at the floor below. Oh, the jokes we made about that: we'd be able to watch people with melted snow on their boots skating right over the balcony to level 1, and we could put videos of our airborne co-workers on Tik Tok.
Those windows are no picnic either. Venetian blinds aren't practical on big windows; in ours they were prohibited in lieu of translucent vinyl shades. So you had a three in four chance of being blasted with oblique rays from the sun some part of the day. Even five I Hate <insert day of the week> posters wouldn't block enough sunlight to let you to see your computer screen. One academic left his shade up permanently, making himself a perfect target for any disgruntled student walking by with a Barrett M82 who wanted revenge for giving him a D minus. That's not a problem in a concrete building: the kid would need a howitzer.
The old Allegheny County Jail (at left) and the Bridge of Sighs (right) spanning Ross Street leading to the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, PA. Photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran CC BY-SA 3.0 Source: Justapedia (resized)
No, their biggest problem isn't that they're ugly. It is that we associate them with that most hated and dreaded of institutions: the government, which loves them precisely because they're so oppressive. Take the former Allegheny County Jail in downtown Pittsburgh. It was connected to the Allegheny County Courthouse, supposedly a renowned example of Romanesque Revival architecture, by a stone bridge called the Bridge of Sighs.
That jail was replaced a few years ago with an even more hideous modernist building. According to WESA FM, despite the nice friendly “Welcome!” banner over the door (or maybe because of it), over twenty people have died there in the past five years. To get the full oppressive impact of these dungeon-like structures, you had to walk down Ross Street at night. As these two gray sandstone dungeons loomed up on either side, illuminated in those days by eerie orange low-pressure sodium streetlights, one was reminded of the brutal fate that awaited anyone who dared to jaywalk in the Big Burgh. Welcome, inmates!
As for cell phone and wireless, it's a draw. Wireless signals bounce around aimlessly in a concrete building, but the glass ones often have metal walls and a metallic infrared-reflective window coating that blocks almost all radio waves. Not that there's all that much thermal infrared from the Sun. Most of it comes from the glass next door, which re-radiates it like crazy.
Far surpassing poured concrete in abject ugliness is the elementary school brick style, with '60s-style squares painted in primary colors that were intended to make the building look child-friendly.
Brutalist architecture isn't necessarily ugly. It's cheap. It's a box. Sometimes it's even functional. That makes it honest in a way those pretentious jenga-style buildings and anti-global-warming buildings covered with plants aren't. Unlike some twisted stack of rotated jenga squares, it goes up fast and stays up. What makes it ugly is its association with the things we hate in life. Soon enough we'll be calling airports ugly because of their association with all the fighting for seats, the hair-pulling, and the suitcases that won't fit in the bin. But in the category of who is the most evil, government almost always wins.
The biggest advantage comes at the end of its life cycle. Unlike a 2000-foot-tall glass skyscraper, all you need to demolish a brutalist building is a wrecking ball. And it's so much more gratifying when that happens that it makes all the dreary years of working inside one seem worthwhile.
mar 12 2025, 6:43 am
