In his seminal 1955 article "The
New Brutalism," Banham
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.
