Brutalism and Evil

This essay, and 35 others, are published on Medium.com

I’m not sure if it was the latest Criminal Mastermind’s Lair (CML) in Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond that reminded me that while not all CML’s are Brutalist architecture, Brutalism has dominated the genre.

Brutalism has been indelibly tainted by its repeated use as a model for the most evil environments in popular culture, just as Nazism has indelibly pegged the German language as sounding, well, sinister (sorry, I grew up watching WWII docs on TV, and it just does that to you) or certain sports cars are perpetually associated with men’s midlife crisis/divorce or certain jingly tunes have one running for the door to catch the ice cream truck (that can still happen to me); it’s Pavlovian.

Brutalism has become a stereotype, and stereotypes are hard to shake.

This ‘guilt by association’ was promulgated by designers, especially film and TV art directors, set designers and production designers (I list them all because I’m never sure if they are different jobs or the same job labeled differently over time) and the films and TV they shape. The re-defining of Brutalism as the language of evil is not only general cultural trope; it is, in effect, propaganda, propagated by a relatively small number of creatives who used aspects of brutalist architecture to match aspects of the evil perpetrated by the characters who occupy these spaces.

It makes sense, on one level, and is too easy on another.

Even the name Brutalism is miscast and misunderstood. It was ripped from the French ‘Beton Brut’, or roughly (pun intended) ‘raw concrete’; buildings that don’t bother to cover up the concrete structure actually holding the thing up. Brutalism might make more sense coming from the Italian; che brutta! translates to ‘how ugly!’ so Brutta-lism might be ‘ugly architecture’! But it’s not that Beton Brut or Brutalism is all ugly (some may differ on this) but that it has become shorthand for evil.

Brutalism has been having a moment for the last several years, finding fans among architects who don’t find it cold, or rough or too monolithic, repetitive or scaleless. Sites like ‘FuckYeahBrutalism’ celebrate the very attributes that make it seem inherently, well, Brutal to some. But that’s not how raw concrete architecture started, and not what it meant to generations; it stood for honesty (in materials), for industry (factories and warehouses) and for a brave new world of light, openness and modernity. That optimism has been subverted by media, aided by the public’s suspicion of modernism and Brutalism’s intentionally aggressive posture.

No one likes a pushy building.

When Beton Brut began (in the raw, unfinished concrete sense) it was most often ‘board formed’; the mold into which the concrete was poured was nailed together out of (usually cheap) planks of wood, often left rough or at least unfinished enough to allow the grain to appear in the concrete. The roughness was also forgiving; if things were a bit off, or the occasional irregularity was cast into the final product a) the technique had a fairly large tolerance for impression and b) get over it because it was virtually impossible to change. Plus it was cheap to construct in an environment with low labor costs (and skill) and high material costs.

Eventually, like a lot of low tech solutions appropriated by high technology creators, especially by masters like Tadao Ando, concrete could look more like burnished leather or honed limestone than something as Brut as Beton. I.M. Pei developed processes and specifications for making concrete look as perfect as a mastic of cement and rocks possibly could. His in-house expert was Reginald Hough (nicely rhymes with ‘rough’) who from 1963 onward has become the single US consultant that everyone seems to turn to make concrete sing.

Today, if you want to create Beton Brut, i.e. the rough cast version that evolved to the name Brutalism, you would have to work hard to make it less precise, less uniform and less polished. Less perfect, it turns out, can be more difficult (much as ‘less costs more’). There are now, in addition to reusable steel forms (shuttering, as is it called in the UK) that are used in nearly every basement of every single family house in the US, there is an entire plywood industry that has developed from the technology used to make reusable, or at least unnaturally smooth, plywood forms. Fin(as in Finland) Color Ply, a product we all use to make furniture and architectural elements, started as a concrete form material. It is now available in lots of colors, with perfect ‘multi-ply’ edges, a phenolic surface and phenol formaldehyde glues to make it virtually indestructible and dimensionally stable.

In movies, brutalist concrete lairs seem as ubiquitous as those carved into mountains or volcanoes (the ones with those recognizable rough hewn walls, but always with a smooth floor). As a trope the ‘Carved Underground Lair’ is such an instantly recognizable sign of an evil mastermind’s secreted base that there should be a permanently constructed version in every movie studio lot, as I imagine the Senate or Oval Office is already. Or at least I hope that’s the case…

Ken Adam may be as responsible for these motifs as any other designer; he designed the underground war room for Dr. Strangelove, along with scenic design for most of Kubrick’s films and seven of the earlier James Bond films. Adam’s design for the war room deep below the Pentagon was so convincingly embedded in the American psyche that Ronald Regan, when he requested to see the space, expected to see the Kubrick/Adam version. Imagine his disappointment, though Ron was a guy who lived very much in the Hollywood ether, so it wouldn’t be the first time. The Dr. Strangelove war room set is magnificent, “the best set ever designed” in the humble opinion of Steven Spielberg (at first he said to Adam ‘the best set you’ve ever designed’ before he corrected himself). Though the film was in black and white Kubrick insisted the table be covered in green felt, for that ‘poker game’ feel. Contrast the genius of that space with the famous picture of the Obama team assembled to watch the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden; it might as well have been a suite at the Marriott. Life does not always imitate art, though in this case it really should.

Ken really sealed the deal with A Clockwork Orange; using the Brutalist housing estate Southmere in Thamesmead as the scene of Malcolm McDowell’s home and exteriors for his coup retaking the Droogs. It was nearly new when Kubrick shot Clockwork, yet it still exuded the darkness, the dystopian sense of dread, that has dogged the Brutalist brand. That gloom may have as much to do with the weather, or the sinister way Malcolm tipped his head down, but Brutalism took the hit. At around the same time in London, Robin Hood Gardens, another Brutalist composition, was built in an attempt to define the appropriate style for social housing. Both of these have failed so spectacularly as to have warranted demolition. Gone. Wasted. Robin Hood Gardens was so architecturally significant that the V&A kept a 3-story section of the building as an artifact, displayed at the Venice Biennale as if it were a piece of Noah’s Ark. While other examples of the same style, in the same city, used for the same purpose have not only succeeded, but are now listed (landmarked) buildings.

Why has one, The Barbican succeeded while Robin Hood and Southmere have been such abject failures as to require erasure? It’s not the style or design skill, and not the vertical vs. horizontal. It’s not necessarily the locations or the quality of construction. And what does any of this have to do with Brutalism as the anointed style of the evil genius?

If one traces the use of concrete as a monolithic building technology, a good place to start is the Pantheon in Rome; there were earlier uses, but the Pantheon is, well, the Pantheon of early concrete. The entire dome is a massive concrete span that was the largest in antiquity and remains the largest unreinforced concrete span today. And no one has ever called the Pantheon Brutalist, though maybe the emperor who built it…

Concrete technology disappeared for millennia. I am still fascinated by this idea that innovation can be lost, as though we simply lost, for centuries, cell phone technology. Concrete technology was rediscovered and ultimately greatly improved with the introduction of steel reinforcing. Reinforced concrete (unlike the Pantheon) is how modern concrete has become integral to nearly all forms of construction, and is based on a simple but critical coincidence; the expansion/contraction rates of concrete and steel are nearly identical (were they not, the buildings or roads or bridges would tear themselves apart in changing weather).

That lucky coincidence, combined with the fact that thin rods of steel are very strong and efficient in tension (pulling at the ends) but not so great in compression; they buckle like Charlie Chaplin’s cane when tested in compression (pressing at the ends). Concrete is incredibly strong in compression, but terrible in tension. Put the steel in the concrete (the lime in the coconut) and these two forces, both critical, are each perfectly handled by the most efficient material. It’s a marriage of convenience and coincidence.

Once the idea that this plastic (in the sense of moldable form) material could be incredibly strong with the addition of steel reinforcing bars (‘rebars’) it was game time. Virtually any shape could be formed, the final appearance would be mono-material (as though carved from a single block), it was nearly indestructible, and could be less precise (meaning less skilled labor) and still work perfectly. It’s an inexpensive solution where labor is less costly than materials; concrete is, generally, cheap but the formwork is labor intensive.

Contrast that with steel, the other modern building material; steel is not a plastic material, it’s really the internal scaffold and is both expensive and requires precision and skill to assemble and to manufacture. The world between these two approaches (determined entirely by their materiality) describes the entire gamut of modernism from rigidly framed to freely formed. If steel is the skeleton then concrete is all muscle and skin. It’s not that you couldn’t build the same buildings in either material, but why would you? Wood, steel, stone, concrete, membranes (and soon plastics) each have their own comfort zones; they easily make forms in line with their particular physics, while they can uneasily imitate other materials, with a certain leap of illogic.

We worked on the Sten-Frenke house that Richard Neutra designed in 1934, after his majestic Lovell Health House; Lovell was a steel frame with sprayed concrete (like a swimming pool) while the Sten House was a wood frame imitating concrete. Neutra was clever enough to manipulate one material to imitate another, and it’s almost an American tradition to do that. George Washington’s house, Mount Vernon, is a wood house imitating cut stone. Thomas Edison designed all-concrete houses meant to imitate everything from wood bookshelves and railings to roofing tiles and stone paving, all in concrete.

Material alchemy is marvelous.

Concrete invites the shapely and bold. It’s very freedom from strict rectilinearity and  consistent internal structure gives us more plastic (there’s that word again) possibilities. It is also, potentially, a monolithic material; one material can form, without assembly of differing parts, walls, floors, openings, facades, paving, roofs, stairs, etc. etc. It’s an aspect greatly valued by architects wanting to promote the abstract quality of their work. It’s like the quality of a Robert Ryman painting; monolithic, white but upon closer inspection obviously handmade and inevitably complex. Ryman’s work is textural rather than chromatic, just as concrete buildings are poured rather than assembled.

Still, what explains the association of Brutalism, or concrete, with evil mastermind’s lairs?

Raw concrete has always been the material of choice for functionally demanding structures like bunkers and pillboxes, prisons and fallout shelters, nuclear power plants and nuclear missile silos, as well as monumental exercises like dams. These are inherently associated with danger, with anonymity and logic, rather than humanity and emotion. The language of their forms has taken on the whiff of death and evil intent. The bunker and pillboxes of the WWII era have a formal similarity to Nazi helmets, and, a generation later, the design for Star Wars.

If the massive pillboxes had saved Allied lives they might seem heroic, not evil. If not for Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima we might think of nuclear power as purely good and these sculptural towers would seem majestic rather than ominous (as the same form is at Chandigarh, before the nuclear power age).

It is also a matter of seemingly inhuman repetitiveness, a lack of detail and a certain inherent darkness. Concrete, unlike brick, has no elemental unit that establishes scale. No matter how massive a brick wall still is made from pieces we can pick up, things about the size of a shoe. Concrete can be any scale, and often is.

There is a prison near our upstate home in Greenhaven that is surrounded by the most remarkable, scaleless concrete wall; it’s enormously high and seems a mile long, utterly foreboding and without any hint of detail except the round guard turrets spaced along the span. Even they don’t help humanize it.

Across the street is a much loved lumber yard where at least one employee is a former inmate at the prison. It must be a powerful disincentive to recidivism to face the gargantuan enclosure every time one leaves work. It scares the hell out of me when I pass it, and I’ve never seen the inside!

From the outside (where I intend to stay) it looks like a doppelganger for Aigues Morte, a medieval town in southern France, where a huge rectangular wall encloses a (possibly Roman) gridded world inside and though it is the same scale and shape as Greenhaven it is made of a beautiful golden stone, rendering it not only human but beautiful.

It may be that buildings that are obviously handmade, or at least made of units that can be managed by a human, are what makes the difference. Maybe it’s like the color of light; the typical explanation for preferring incandescent bulbs over their successors is that we are (according to the explanation) evolutionarily keyed to think of candlelight as the ‘proper’ source of artificial illumination. According to that construction we may be inherently enchanted by an assembly of stones or bricks or shingles but not by enormous blocks of undifferentiated gray concrete.

Whatever it is, we will likely be stuck with the association.

My wife designed a book for the Bloomberg administration in NYC collecting all the speeches made at the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. It was a lovely little document and the pages of type were delicately punctuated with the occasional red character. It was lovely until, that is, someone said it looked like blood (it didn’t of course). That’s all it took to undo the design element; once mentioned it could never be forgotten.

We are highly suggestible and once heard it cannot be unheard.

And maybe that’s all it is; once the lairs began to be conceived in Brutalist concrete we could never go back. It’s a cliché, a sign and symbol, and more than a stylistic genre could ever shake. It’s a bit like that silly little mustache that Hitler sported; nothing particularly insane about it, but like the name Adolf, it’s unlikely to be a fashion for a very long time