In an extract from ‘How to Love Brutalism’, John Grindrod examines the ways brutalist buildings are (mis)represented in culture

Buildings.

Extracted from ‘How To Love Brutalism’ by John Grindrod
Batsford, 144pp, £13
Illustrations by The Brutal Artist

If you only knew brutalism from its representation in culture you might not recognise the actual buildings at all. Perhaps that’s why people with no direct connection to it sometimes hate it so much. After all, popular depiction of the style tends to be hamfisted. Spot a bit of brutalism on TV or in a film, and it’s likely to be a dangerous, murky place where crime is rife – a metaphor for failed idealism. If you’re lucky it will be the cold, bleak backdrop to middle-class frigidity, similarly signifying some loss of humanity. In fictional media, brutalist flats are inhabited by the untrustworthy and broken, violent criminals ply their violent trade and armed police storm along the balconies, training their sights on council issue doors. In pop videos, a brutalist landscape conveys how urban and ‘real’ the musician is, how ‘down’ with the disadvantaged or rebellious kids. Never mind that the architectural backdrop might actually be full of millionaires.

Top: Still from ‘A Clockwork Orange’, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1971)
Above: Trellick Tower, London, designed by Ernö Goldfinger and completed in 1972 (illustration by The Brutal Artist)

Perhaps the most celebrated representations of brutalism in written culture come in the novels of JG Ballard, particularly the landscape of his ‘apocalyptic novels’ – ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, ‘Crash’, ‘Concrete Island’ and ‘High-Rise’ – written between 1969 and 1975. I find the first two in particular almost unbearably frightening, more for a sense of the author’s tortured state of mind than for the incidents described. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ is a series of short hallucinated snapshots of modern spaces – airports, motorways, hotels – filled with glimpses of disturbing events and a sense of impending, incoherent threat, in chapters with provocative titles such as ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. ‘Crash’, which began as one of the fragments in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, takes the drily shocking documentation of car crash injury studies, and recasts them as observations of a new sexual thrill. The overwhelming landscape of cars and their crashes – motorways, car parks and flyovers – becomes erotically charged: flesh is penetrated by wrecked engineering and bodily fluids are spilled on the tarmac. ‘Concrete Island’ switches the emphasis from car to location, with our fractured hero trapped on a network of reservations beneath a flyover, where a strange primitive society of modern dropouts is forming. Here the concrete landscape is awe-inspiring, like a desert or ocean and just as impassable. ‘High-Rise’ is Ballard’s most architecturally ‘brutalist’ novel. It is set in the first of a new complex of giant self-contained luxury towers, where civilisation begins to fail as the services, hierarchies and social order go into terminal decline. The novels are each shocking, bleak, darkly funny and deeply disturbing. These are not the easy sideswipes of a dismissive anti-modernist. Rather they are the fascinated, penetrating gaze of someone genuinely anguished by the possibilities offered by modern society.

Mainstream comedy and brutalism might seem unlikely bedfellows, but there are plenty of examples in the TV of the 1970s”

After Ballard’s shock tactics, mainstream comedy and brutalism might seem particularly unlikely bedfellows, but there are plenty of examples in the TV of the 1970s. Take Bob Newhart, the gentle, urbane American storyteller, whose self-titled proto-Frasier psychologist sitcom ran from 1972–78. The title sequence featured the monumental flying saucer futurism of Marina City, and Newhart’s character lived in a large International Style slab block, the Thorndale Beach North condominiums. Even more radically, Mary Richards, lead character in ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’, moved into one of the most uncompromisingly brutalist structures in Minneapolis, Ralph Rapson’s Riverside Plaza (1967–74). This became her home in the final two series, from 1975–77. Her flat, in the 39-storey McKnight Building – a rough concrete slab block with bright Mondrian-style colour panels within its confidently expressed grid – might not scream 1970s light entertainment, but it’s a glimpse into the very different dreams and aspirations of that cultural moment.

Pop videos have long been a great place to spy brutalism. London’s concrete landmarks have been extensively catalogued across pop culture, and in particular the Barbican. In 1965, British pop band Unit 4 + 2 performed their hit ‘Concrete and Clay’ on its vast construction site, a place continually shut down through industrial disputes. By 1981 it was star of The Specials’ clip for ‘Ghost Town’, with the millionaire pads, galleries and concert halls standing in somewhat incongruously for depressed Coventry. More recent videos for ‘Shutdown’ by grime artist Skepta (2016) and synth eccentrics Metronomy’s ‘Months of Sunday’ (2015) were shot there too. Meanwhile back in the 1990s, the Britpop wars between Blur and Oasis were played out through Ernő Goldfinger’s towers of London. West London’s Trellick was somewhat of a recurring motif in the work of Blur, starring in the touristy video for their glorious 1993 single ‘For Tomorrow’ and name checked in their 1995 ballad ‘Best Days’. Balfron, in the East End, cropped up that same year in the bombastic, fiery-tinted film for the Oasis anthem ‘Morning Glory’. Catch the walkways and towers of municipal housing estate Thamesmead as the nostalgic backdrop to childhood bad behavior in The Libertines’ ‘What Became of the Likely Lads’ (2004). Neave Brown’s Camden housing scheme Alexandra Road pops up in an experimental virtual reality film for Foals’ ‘Mountain at My Gates’ and in a rather more soap-opera effort for The 1975’s single ‘Somebody Else’. It’s not all about London, of course. I’m particularly fond of Michel Gondry’s film for The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Go’, shot in the uncompromising concrete geometries of Front-de-Seine in Paris, a 1970s development designed by Raymond Lopez and Henri Pottier. Part 1930s health and efficiency workout, part beached synchronized swimming routine, the video is an attempt to inhabit the hard landscape with suitably machine-like movement.

In cinema we all know of Stanley Kubrick’s appropriation of brutalism as brutalizing landscape in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. There’s the massively blocky lecture centre of Brunel University and the bright perfection of newly built Thamesmead estate. Decades later, TV superhero comedy ‘Misfits’ was filmed on the same estate, the backdrop now run-down and rain-stained rather than a dazzling sci-fi playground. Filmmakers frequently exploit the gritty nature of concrete as a backdrop to action and violence. Hard-hitting 1970s cop show The Sweeney loved a bit of concrete. A good example was a 1975 episode, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill!’, a bank heist that was actually filmed at Brunel University’s students union precinct (Richard Sheppard, Robson & Partners), then a landscape of low concrete parapets and rough panelling. In Antonioni’s 1975 film ‘The Passenger’, Jack Nicholson’s tough guy journalist finds himself adrift in the Brunswick Centre in London. Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower crops up yet again in not-quite-zombie horror ‘28 Days Later’, and ‘Blitz’, a violent 2011 vehicle for gruff tough-guy Jason Statham.

Whether representing our rough recent past or our bleak urban future, brutalism seems a perfect visual shorthand. When London’s newly completed South Bank Centre stood in for a 26th-century prison planet in the 1973 Doctor Who serial ‘Frontier in Space’, nobody was in the least surprised. This was a landscape of space-age grit, after all.

These edifices are often the everyday manifestation of government or corporations, and so become the perfect settings for tales of high-level political intrigue”

But, as we have seen, brutalism doesn’t always denote urban toughness. These edifices are often the everyday manifestation of government or corporations, and so become the perfect settings for tales of high-level political intrigue. The Watergate complex (1962– 71) in Washington DC was the essential location for Alan Pakula’s 1976 film of ‘All The President’s Men’, given Nixon’s clumsy attempts to have the Democratic offices there bugged. The slick, curved Italian design of the complex conjures up the era every bit as much as Robert Redford’s flares or Nixon’s surly TV denials. Time and again, classic American conspiracy thrillers from the 1970s show the brutalist headquarters of government and business as the blank faces of surveillance, corruption and threat. Modern takes on the genre continue the theme: in 2014 the stylish BBC TV spy series ‘The Game’ attempted to recapture some of the Cold War era’s slippery spirit, effectively using the abandoned shell of Birmingham Central Library to stand in for the MI5 office of the day.

Perhaps the most curious brutalist location in film is an imaginary one: the winter fortress in ‘Inception’, Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi thriller. It plays with ideas of ‘dream architecture’ – be that the map of a dream and the structures within that, or as a metaphor for storytelling and the creation of imaginary worlds. In the movie the daring heist team dive into the subconscious of their victim in order to plant an idea. The architecture of the dream they create has to be complex, like a maze, so that they can fool the dreamer by pulling them deeper and deeper into the game. Different layers of dreams have different architecture: first is the early 20th-century city, with its sturdy bridges and blocks; then there’s a Mies-ian shiny mid-century hotel; beyond that we’re into a concrete hospital fortress. One of the most striking things about this fortress is its similarity to William Pereira’s Geisel Library in San Diego, a sculptural extravagance that is the very opposite to the mindless monotony so often associated with modernity in filmmakers’ minds. As an imaginative representation in a film so obsessed with architecture, it’s one of the most interesting portrayals of brutalism in popular culture.

Yet depictions of post-war architecture usually tend towards the negative, serving as places for social realists and pop commentators to show they’re in touch with the dispossessed. In such places, abandoned by civilisation, society collapses; instead there are encounters with nightmarish gangs of zombies or droogs. Luxurious apartments buildings stand in for the bleak sites of inner city depravation, and quiet estates for the haunts of gangland central. Intoxicating as they are, sometimes it’s best just to forget these images, wander along and see for yourself.