Yet again, these literary developments were following certain impulses in architectural practice; the beginnings of a New Brutalism that Johnson enthusiastically championed (and which will be furthered discussed in the latter parts of this essay.
New Brutalism stressed its "rootedness" in the everyday and the particular properties of site and the needs of its inhabitants.
In his seminal 1955 article "The
New Brutalism," Banham
In the very decade when academics were seriously challenging the rationality or fairness of canon-formation, a
new brutalism even more characteristic of that decade was speeding up time's steady rate of attrition, and putting up a more effective resistance to de-canonization than the arguments of Allan Bloom and Christopher Ricks combined.
Reyner Banham claimed it as an example of
New Brutalism.
When the city rose again it was as a new Coventry, herald of the
new brutalism and modernism of the 1950s, and it became, at a stroke, one of the least loved city centres in England.
Hipkins quotes Reyner Banham's definition of
New Brutalism as an attempt to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible.
Pevsner's judgements on modem town planning were a modem form of the trahison des clercs - we know best, and will give you what is good for you, even if it is the
New Brutalism, with raw concrete showing the marks of the shuttering.
No metaphysics, no aristocratic preoccupation with elitist codes, this would truly be, as Banham called it in The
New Brutalism, an architecture autre.
The architectural features evident so far are a recrudescence of Osbert Lancaster's
New Brutalism exemplified by a multi-storey car park and other concrete masses.
article of his Review period was on the New Brutalism (p75), where he made dear that, in his sense, the term is derived from Le Corbusier's apophthegm that 'L'Architecture, c'est avec des matieres bruts, etablir des rapports e'mouvants',(1) and that, as well as defining an artistic territory for the Smithsons, he was defending their austerities against, among others, the Marxists who preferred 'picturesque detailing without picturesque planning' and who used Brutalism as a term of abuse for almost all Modernists.
Reyner Banham's notorious article introduced New Brutalism to a public that never accepted the proposal.
