Brutalism - the purest mortifying representation of nature and the human kind
Huge fan of dystopian, massive and scary looking buildings
I don’t know what drew me to brutalism, I don’t remember when it did, but I remember feeling like the odd one out everytime I said I love brutalism. To this day I still don’t understand why it’s so look down upon, it’s a beautiful architecture movement.
Listen, I love me some extra flavour, Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Gothic, Romanticism, the list goes on, but that’s where I find the charm in brutalism, it simply does not need all that, it’s like the skeleton of a building before the complexity comes in, but it feels complete, it feels right, and it gets to you.
Now, there’s brutalism and there’s brutalism. The style was initially created for practical reasons, mass construction, money saving porpuses, not all of the constructions are beautiful the minute you look at them, others feel like they’re made for shock value, brutalism was never made to be pretty, and that’s exactly why it’s beautiful. It’s like a person, it deserves a second look at, a different perspective, a context, someone who understands.
Brutalism, to me, feels like a representation of nature in its purest and rawest form, I can’t quite explain it but there’s something so primate, simple and pure about this movement, it’s like stripping down a building until we can only see a version of it that can’t hide from us, the truth in concrete, glass and metal.
What drives me so much to this movement is the fact that it feels like a big mystery, a story yet to be unraveled, when you look at a brutalist building it doesn’t feel comfortable at all, it’s geometric, cold, dark, but it feels welcoming, you want to get inside, you want to know what more there is, it’s just one big building waiting to tell you a story if you’re up to it. “But how can something look uncomfortable but feel welcoming?” I could say the exact same thing about people. Actually, David Lynch said it better:
“I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.”
Brutalism stands out like no other movement, maybe I’m too into the dystopian vibe but a massive concrete building that looks unfinished has a lot more to say than your regular building. It makes us feel powerless, it makes us leave our own minds and return to earth, realise how tiny we are, how insignificant we are in this neverending galaxy, it shows how far we want to reach, that’s the charm of huge things, they’re huge because we want to be huge, and they’re pretty interesting to look at while we’re at it. Brutalism shows power and it shows our hunger for power, brutalism is just another way of looking at the human mind, it’s just a sort of messenger we created to show eachother we can be practical, artistic, powerful and huge. That’s art to me.
I don’t know if this was the case to anyone but the main thing that attracted me to watch The Brutalist was the architecture, the art influences, the designs, and that’s also what made me like the movie more. As soon as we discover that he’s a Bauhaus man I’m immediately even more interested, when he finishes building the library I’m in awe (it’s not brutalist but you see where I’m going), it’s simple, it’s practical and it’s so deeply beautiful to look at. How can something that feels so lonely and unhuman touch someone so deeply.
It’s us, it’s the little creatures living in this giant rock.
What Brutalism lacks in decoration it makes up for it by enigmatically trying to connect with us.