Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses, and other Topologies of Contemporary Life

Rotor, RDF181, Brussels, 2007-08
In the early 1950s, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson announced their arrival with a call for a “new brutalism”—a polemic sketched out over several years through texts and building projects. Describing new brutalism as an ethic, not a style, the Smithsons aimed to meet the changing needs and desires of postwar society through an architecture that directly expressed the material conditions of its time. Their friend and critic Reyner Banham defined a new brutalist building by its “1. Memorability as an image; 2. clear exhibition of structure; 3. valuation of materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found,’” and argued for “the threat and the promise” of such “bloody-minded” work within an increasingly staid culture of postwar modern architecture. In contrast to the style that came to be known as brutalism, the new brutalism anticipated diverse and fertile trajectories: playful, ironic, and critical uses of found objects and materials in the manner of Dada, Pop and art brut; both high-tech and crude explorations of the limits of functional, technological and/or ecological determination and expression; close attention to ordinary and economical forms of construction and use.
Today, the imperatives of the new brutalism almost perfectly articulate a latent theory of contemporary architecture that connects a number of practices. This exhibition appropriates the new brutalism as a “found” theory of the present, exploring its relevance as a design methodology rooted in material economy, spatial flexibility, structural expression, and disregard for prevailing aesthetic conventions. What do the ethics of these working methods offer architects at a time of acute social and environmental crises? How do such ethics relate to the stylistic affectations of an image-saturated architectural culture?
Organized in an associative manner that recalls the curatorial and graphic experimentation of the Smithsons’ 1953 exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (in collaboration with artists Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi) and their “Dubrovnik Scroll” (presented as a gift to the members of Team X at the final CIAM conference in 1956), this exhibition puts early projects and texts from the Alison and Peter Smithson Archive in dialogue with a selection of paradigmatic contemporary building projects produced since 1988, suggesting a parallel history to the preoccupations and pedagogies of the American academy that can be traced back through MoMA’s Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition of the same year, or even to the rupture of the modernist project c. 1968. Through this visual and textual conversation, it aims to reveal a set of principles and possibilities that are animating the work of a new generation of students and faculty at the GSD and beyond.
All work by Alison and Peter Smithson, Reyner Banham, and their critics is drawn from The
Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, held in the Special Collections of the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Additional contributions to the exhibition have been made by:
Iñaki Ábalos & Juan Herreros (courtesy the Canadian Centre for Architecture)
Mark Anderson & Andrew Zago
Shigeru Ban
b+
Lionel Devlieger / Rotor
Jan de Vylder & Inge Vinck
Ensamble Studio
Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
Jones, Partners: Architecture
Lacaton & Vassal
Mark Linder
Office for Metropolitan Architecture