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.)
In his seminal 1955 article "The
New Brutalism," Banham
To Linda FitzSimmons, a British academic, feminism was essentially a political movement, an attempt to redress age-old injustices; but as another delegate dryly remarked, "In the ranks of the world's oppressed, Anglo-American womanhood is not the most conspicuous victim." Magda Zurowska, a television commentator from Poland, believes that feminism led to sexual competitiveness and to the kind of
new brutalism in which courtship itself was suspect.
Concern for security has led to a
new brutalism. Fortification creates a conflict between the desire to make people feel welcome and the grim need for defense.
Reyner Banham claimed it as an example of
New Brutalism. The house provoked a lively formalistic debate and started within Ungers an intellectual debate with his own early work.
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.
After the 1925 Paris Exposition the Architectural Review promoted the concept of 'Swedish Grace' to typify a mode best exemplified in the detailing of Stockholm Town Hall: after World War II it promoted the concept of 'The New Empiricism' which embodied a bloodless but pretty pragmatism that was one of the main provocations of 'The
New Brutalism' -- a half-truth that in the absence of any exchange in debate slumbered there.
