What Is New Brutalism?

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The intent of this paper is not to offer a new interpretation of New Brutalism. On the contrary, this paper is collaborating with recent researches on New Brutalism, such as the works of the architectural historians M. Christine Boyer and Dirk van den Heuvel, which observe the multiplicity and convolution in the debates. By unraveling a version of New Brutalism that is more interested in history than technology, more traditional than POP; I am hoping to point out a rather startling mutation from the New Brutalism discourse. In 1961 Crosby left the AD and began a rather unfortunate venture at the builders’ company Taylor Woodrow, where he worked with the six members of Archigram on the design of a new Euston Station and a dozen large-scale …show more content…

His works at Pentagram were known for its ostensibly decorative design, often produced through collaboration with artists and craftspeople. Amongst the British post-modernist Crosby was still an anomaly due to this adherence to customized design, crafts, and alternative building methods. What Crosby manifested in his later works was an anti-industrialization ideology that could be best put in comparison with the Arts and Craft tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris. Inheriting their obsession with Japanese architecture in the previous decades, Crosby would argue that since the engineers had already taken over the responsibility of creating the structures, architects should at least claim the right to protect and create the expressive elements. While stylistically Crosby’s works were opposite to the New Brutalists’ rational and primitive aesthetic, he continued to argue for well-made design and the social responsibility of architecture. Occasionally, Peter Smithson would take up a cameo role in Crosby’s ventures and produced works that were could at best described as uncanny to both Modernist and Postmodernist. What was consistent in their works, albeit the stylistic differences, was the regard of an architectural polemic. The excitement around New Brutalism today is perhaps still in debt to these post-war

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