The Geisel Library, University of California San Diego

Staggering, really. The design would be unthinkable by contemporary standards but the argument is there. Architecture now is more about simulating a future landscape but there was a time when design itself was about creating a future landscape built upon a foundation in a design for living in the future. Is Brutalism a fair appraisal of the aesthetic? It doesn’t seem so. The designs, in their own right, are more akin to the log cabins of bygone. The philosophy is almost a future rustic. There is a reason that people are drawn in recent years to industrial designs with the same warmth of feeling reserved for log cabins and remote ski chalets. It speaks of lifestyle in a way that steel and glass can’t. There is still throwback, of course, to associations with authoritarianism and government offices but that hardly seems fair. The same could be said of so many other schools of design.

No, the revival of interest in Brutalism seems a revival at once of interest in both the past and the future. It speaks to the imagination and the potential for a future. I do get that through film and art we’ve come to associate the style as part of a dystopian realm, but that feels quite unfair to me given the vision of the architects.