anyone interested?  

So what did brutalism evolve into?
Consider the San Francisco Federal Building by Thom Mayne.
So much brutalist architecture is done in concrete that it is hard to see the contempo brutal in steel and wire mesh and glass, but it is there if you look. Note second picture of base of the building.
What to call it? Techno Brutal. Cyber Brutal. Post Modern Brutal?
Frankly, it is a foray into the kind of engineering functionalism that Renzo Piano is doing, but it is being played out in a combination of brutal and international style forms.

Free dictionary definition of brutalism...
"Architectural style of the 1950s and 1960s that evolved from the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is uncompromising in its approach, believing that practicality and user-friendliness should be the first and foremost aims of architectural design. Materials such as steel and concrete are favoured.
The term was first used by Alison and Peter Smithson who developed the style in the UK. The Smithsons' design for Hunstanton School, Norfolk (1949?54) recalls the work of Mies van der Rohe but is more brutally honest, exposing all the services (such as pipes and ducts) to view rather than hiding them in the traditional manner. The Park Hill Housing Estate, Sheffield (1961), by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, makes use of the rough concrete (béton brut) characteristic of Le Corbusier's later work."
This is hardly a learned definition from a respected source, but I thought its probable inadequacy would stimulate some more astute commentary from persons here that actually know the tributaries that converged to form brutalist architecture.
I thought Corbu first used brutalist vocabulary in the 1930s, and did some designs that were never built in the 1940s for the fascists during WWII.
I would also take issue with the notion that brutalist buildings were "user friendly." I have always found them among the least user friendly buildings I have encountered. They create an impression in me of oppression, indifference to the sensibilities of a person, and of a will to intimidate with form.
I would call the Guggenheim brutalist architecture done by a functionalist with sufficient sense of tasteful, organic ornament to keep it from being just plain cruel. But as fascinating as the Guggenheim is, I prefer most of his other buildings.
Brutalism has always seemed to me the Modern's attempt at the gothic.

San Francisco State University Student Union Building...
The architect is Paffard Keatinge-Clay and he really deserves a movie to be made about him. Would that Nicholas Roeg and David Bowie could reunite and do good old Pafford's life the weird, man-who-fell-to-earth justice that it deserves.
Some describe the SFSU Student Union this way: "The San Francisco State University Student Union is a futurist design of two steel space-frame pyramids. Each contains a stairway leading to four partial floors that diminish in size as the pyramid tapers."http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detai...
That is rather an understatement. There's a bit of concrete involved, too. 🙂
I do not really like it, but rather I do marvel at it as a does a half-alienated Stanley Kubrick character standing transfixed before a monolith in 2001. There is so much brazen exploration of formal in this building's architecture that it remains beyond my abilities to do it justice. And because it also repulses me on some level, I may never be able to, either. But I do believe it is a significant piece of work that is over time, despite some reputedly unfortunate modifications to it, proving to be more and more important, rather than less and less so.
I have always thought of this building as brutalist, though it is extraordinary and idiosyncratic enough to defy easy categorization. Futurist and modernist could certainly apply as well. Frankly, it is one of those freaks of architecture that seems to have fallen to earth from another dimension than our own and likely to be fully understood only with the passage of quite a lot of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paffard_Keatinge-Clay

SFSU Union Continued...
It is quite fascinating in many ways, from its external, built-in amphitheater for student protest (ah how quaint the notion of student protest on campus now seems in the age of the Patriot Acts), to its triangular light shaft atria. But it is its deformity of geometric forms that stands out lo these many years later, rather than the modernity of it. The building of it engulfed Pafford in controversy that forced him out of the City by the Bay. I attached a little Wikipedia entry on him for those who care.
For what little it is worth, in the late 1970s San Francisco community of real estate professionals, this building became the latest poster child for the term architectural wet dream. I always liked touching this building, weird and alienating as it was/is. And as time passes, I suspect this building had considerable influence on many architects. I even think it foreshadowed some of recent deformist architecture that we have seen from the likes of Frank Gehry. Pafford was deforming pyramids here in a city recently crowned with a TransAmerica Pyramid. And He was deforming pyramids quite some time before the recent wave of deformist architecture got underway. Paffords SFSU student union has been silently, inscrutably pointing the way to deformist architecture for a long time before the recent wave achieved some vogue. Just drove down 19th Avenue and by the SFSU Student Union the other day on a brief visit to San Francisco, so its presence is refreshed in my mind.

This
thread exhibits a great collection of work. I'm especially fond, personally, of the work of Stirling and Gowan (James and James), which includes the Leicester University Engineering Building (below), upon which the Sussex Town Hall (shown) is perhaps based, and of James Gowan's own work, including the Flats at Ham Common.
But I think too much is being asked of the term "Brutalist," here, when a perfectly good and unjustly neglected term is available, namely "Expressionist" architecture. From the early work of Mendelsohn to the present day, a good deal of sculpturally expressive architecture exists for which no other term is as apt; what better word could there be, for instance, to categorize the buildings of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid ?
[Note: I do not call the Ham Common work Expressionist. And we can remember that it was Corbu's ventures into rough-cast concrete that brought forth the term beton brut (French: raw concrete)-- as I recall it.]
http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=expressionist%20a...

SDR...
As your link to expressionist architecture indicates, we might put brutalist architecture under an umbrella called expressionism, but much expressionistic architecture does not look brutal IMHO.
Likewise, regarding recent work like Gehry's Bilbao, Disney, MIT building, and the library shown above and so on, what we see is something that could fit under the umbrella of expressionism, but much of expressionism does not look like Gehry's works mentioned above.
Further, regarding Gehry's work mentioned, and that of some other architects working similarly, I think many persons are not using descriptive terms that accurately characterize what he and others are actually doing.
Gehry has been playing with forms. Specifically he has been playing with deforming forms. He has been deforming both the geometric form language of modernism, as well as deforming the component parts of which those geometric forms are made up of.
Deconstructivist has always missed the mark as a descriptor. Look at any of Gehry's buildings mentioned and you will find deformation, rather than deconstruction. You will find geometric form bent, torqued, sheared, compressed, both overall and in its constituent parts. This is definitely expressionistic work on some level. He is expressing deformation.
In Gehry's buildings and their parts we can always make out what the original form was that was deformed and this I believe is the key to understanding what he is doing. Much other expressionist architecture has nothing to do with deformation at all. Hence, if we must group Gehry's work and others working similarly, under the rubric of expressionist architecture, one should say he is doing a particular kind of expressionist work, what I call deformist.
But if it were entirely up to me, I would not lump Gehry's work under expressionism at all. I think Gehry's work can be more accurately viewed through a lens of post modern mannerism, or perhaps a mannerist formalism reacting to modernism. Just as traditional mannerism was "...a style in art and architecture (c.1520?1600), originating in Italy as a reaction against the equilibrium of form and proportions characteristic of the High Renaissance," so Gehry is rebelling against the form and proportions of high modernism. Instead of rebelling from modernism with ornament, he rebells through deformation of the most basic characteristic of modernist architecture--its geometric form language of the modern. He deforms it. This makes him a mannerist and a formalist, I suppose, rather than an expressionist.
But I have wandered far from the brutal. 🙂

Brutalism
Follows the air that left Le corbusier amd Mies, and later english neo-brutalists in 60's 70's.
Were the vanguard of that time.
It was a strong ideologic crosscurrent in front of the tense stell and glass box chosen by multinationals as a eficency and pragmatism image.
I agree that expresionism is a good term (umbrella too) to use to describe many of this buidings.
I'd call expresionism Ghery's.
But that's the problems when we put tags...
What's the difference expresionism-brutalism?
I like many of the one's posted.
Nick's old Tricorn Centre, I love it. The problem was provably to choose it for a Mall-shopping centre, being un-popular..., must be a cultural center or something like that. A pity. Did somebody went there? The only problem was that they just forgot of the...users?
"""I ma not even sure it is brutalism""" said Dcwilson
I was also tempted to say that i didn't saw much REAL brutalism published here 😉
What about call them Saxon-Brutalism the one you post and Latin-Brutalism this ones?
Testa's is very Le Corbusier inspired, And much Mies is for the Saxon.....

National Library Buenos Aires
1961
"This emblematic work of Testa - a partnership with the architects F. Bullrich and A. Cazzaniga - has become one of the landmarks of contemporary architecture in Argentina.
Constructed from a contest-winning design from early in the 1960s, the Library was completed recently in the early '90s
Two concepts characterize the uniqueness of this work. The first lies in the idea of strength of the part that lifts the reading rooms above the ground, burying the deposits of books underground. This will generate a sort of "monumental table", below which flows the continuity of the existing fleet, qualified by a set of sculptural forms. "
http://en.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php?title=Buenos_Aires_National_Lib...

National library details
some details

The National Library is brutal...
It is in my humble opinion the definition of brutal.
La Mesa Grande Brutal.
Inverted massing, giganticism both overall and in its parts, thick heavy forms given no lightness even with considerable use of glass, commanding, domineering, unrelieved harshness in surfaces, etc.
But it does give one impression that is not very typical of brutalist buildings, which are often very static. While the table reference is certainly apparent, I also find a sense that this building could begin walking towards me, like some vast robot, or machine just landed from another planet, especially from lower angles looking up at it. It has a robotic quality that I don't find in most brutalist buildings.
It would be fun to see what Testa's dreams were like. I get the feeling these buildings only hint at what he imagines. 🙂

Brutal architecture like the National Library...
gives one an experience quite similar to that of huge ships and hydroelectric dams, and gigantic mining equipment.
The scaling and massing tends to make one feel dwarfed. I note ships, dams and mining equipment, because these are all vast objects that one tends not to find nurturing, or intimate, or beautiful (though some great passenger liners have approached being beautiful). They are all things that make use of brute force to do work for us that we could not possibly do ourselves.
I find it very interesting that while we can, and tend at least to try to design large buildings to "feel good;" in brutal architecture, we design buildings to appear to create space with a brute force we could not possibly make ourselves.
It is, I suppose, the logical extention of defining a building as a machine for living in.
The mistake here is that a building is not really a machine for living in. It is a building. Think about this a moment.
A ship is a machine for crossing water. It can carry persons, or not, but its machine function is to cross water.
A hydro dam is a machine for storing and converting water to electricity. It can hold people inside it, or on it, or not, but its machine function is to control water and create electricity.
A great earth moving machine is a machine for excavating and moving earth from here to there. It can hold people, or not hold people, but its machine function is moving earth.

continued
A ship, a hydro dam, and an earth mover are machines that do work for us. As great tools, their designers pretty much dispense with the aesthetics that make these machines intimate and nurturing to us and instead get on with the sizing and scaling of them required for them to use brute force to do their work for us.
But buildings, most buildings anyway, are man-made habitats for human beings to live and work in. If all a building were designed to do were to store boxes in one place for a period of time and for a cost per cubic foot/per week, as in the case of a warehouse, or a storage library where there were no book readers, just maintenance persons (like shiphands on a ship), then there would be some appropriate analogy between buildings and machines like ships, hydro dams, and great earth movers.
But the analogy of a building being a machine for living/working in breaks down completely, when one is talking about a house, an apartment building, or an office building, or a shopping center, etc. These are engineered habitats for human beings.
So what is/was the valid logic in architects adopting the forms of machines doing brute force work in the design of libraries, classroom buildings, office buildings, shopping centers and so on? It always felt wrong to me and now its seems utterly illogical and rather inhumane, also.
I could perhaps justify using brutalism, or some other extreme formalism, as an expressionistic means in monumental architecture that does not have to be used by human beings for living and/or working in. From the Great Pyramid, to the Arc d' Triomphe, to the Washington Monument, to much abstract modernist sculpture for public spaces, monuments can be effective simply because they are gigantic and impersonal and not very hospitable.
But a library? a classroom building? an office building? a house? an appartment? a shopping center?
Gads! Brutalist architecture only makes sense to me if one reasons that a building is not a building, not a habitat for humans, but rather a machine for processing them from one thing into another.
Processing human beings, like cattle?
Now where does that lead?
I refuse to go there.
I can see the brilliance in some brutalist architecture.
But I still think it a misguided and unfortunate architectural language.

It is
easy to forget that architecture -- the building that gets built, for whatever reason(s) -- is a loose fit with the program (or brief, to the British). In other words, someone is hired to design a structure, and that person (or persons) then gets to grind his own aesthetic ax (as they say) while fulfilling the requirements for enclosed and serviced space. If the design is seen by the client as serving the purposes of the institution paying the bills, it is perhaps built. (It might be claimed that the most successful structures, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, are those in which the architect's concepts are least diminished by client second-guessing and editing, though that would be hard to prove, I suppose.)
I proposed the alternative category of Expressionist architecture, because I think that a good deal of what we are looking at here might be properly so designated. We need to remember that not every object fits neatly into a single pre-existing pigeonhole, despite our desire to so place it. A building could easily be called both Brutal and Expressive, it seems to me. And the latter term neatly removes any negative connotations of the former.

Historic context
On Testa's brutalist buildings:
Just in case, Testa's examples are not unpopular, and I even read that people like them a lot. I never heard somebody said that are awfull buildings. Yes are indeed space ships landend on the park, that's one of the best ponits and reason I like it! 🙂 ........I wouldn't call it "La Mesa Grande Brutal" but "La Nave Espacial Brutal" would find it as a big commpliment 😉
I know I used the relationship style/use, but I admit that's not much fair: The use of building (house/church/library/shopping center) is not related to the style.
When an architect is descontructivst or whatever, will 'do it for any use. Provably the best can do is to manage somehow to use the best of that stly for that use.
But's not what I wanted to point, It's important to understand each movement in it's own historic context.
As Heath said and searching a bit brutalismis is quite unaccepted and unpopular.
DCwilson: don't you worry, you are not alone!
By the way if we want to start or use this (untiteld yet) thread for the most awful buildings/style, is surely the best moment. There is list of the most awfully buildings and many brutalists are top ten.
But if I was not so sure about to do that on design objects don't think why will be good for architecture.
Good architecture is good architecture because itself independently from the style.
We can find good an bad architecture (I wouldn't call it architecture then) in every style and every historic moment.
But returning to the historic context..., there was something with modernism, something wrong, something....
That was one try. Why didn't people like it?, needed a bit more ornament? and a bit of color? Color?...a bit of Pink! and ooops! Postmodernism!
Before to demolish those buildings we could try to see the importance or not of that building, what that said about that time. Is a good or a bad piece of architecture?

Then...? One question for collectors and no collectors
1)
For the ones that are in the chair collection
Brutalism is in the same historic period of the MCM and all the chairs are so commented here.
Could somebody certainly explain why the chairs are so great and the buildings so bad? If it's really like that
After all many many chairs where found not in the a demolition but in the garbage...
What must go to garbage and what must be pick it up?
2)
For the ones that are not in the chair collection
The thing that could be more interesting for those that are not on the chair collection, We those that have been trying to see where is the design going, wich direction, which ways.
At some point we saw the problems of postmodernism and Starkys styles. We begin to see other options.
If somebody could go to visit the place or the link of the current "Rough cut" at MoMA, there is an interesting collection of designs that is a step behind. Many dutch. Very interesting. Amazing. But will be surely clear that in the future (next week?) will be tagged as not nice (brutalist can be taged too).
What would recommend to the designers? Don't follow that way, some people won't like it...
Or they are building some steps that others will follow building...?