Brutalism

Brutalism was an architectural movement that flourished from roughly 1950 to 1980, taking its name from the French beton brut, raw concrete, after Le Corbusier's use of unfinished, board-marked concrete surfaces at the Unite d'Habitation in Marseille. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term New Brutalism in the early 1950s to describe an ethic of structural honesty, exposing a building's raw materials, concrete, brick and structural systems, rather than concealing them behind applied finishes, an approach they extended to civic buildings, housing estates and universities across Britain, continental Europe, and beyond. Prominent examples include the Smithsons' own Hunstanton School, Denys Lasdun's National Theatre in London and Paul Rudolph's Yale Art and Architecture Building, and though long dismissed by critics as cold and forbidding, Brutalist buildings have undergone significant reassessment and preservation advocacy since the early twenty-first century.