Brutalist architecture as post-World War II reconstruction

When World War II ended in 1945, the European continent was not only in physical ruins but also in moral, economic, and political collapse. The urban landscape was one of devastated cities, millions of displaced people, and an urgent need to rebuild not just homes but also collective symbols of stability. In this devastated environment, brutalism emerged not as a decorative style but as a direct response to the trauma of war and the urgency of reconstruction.

The term brutalism derives from the French expression béton brut, used by Le Corbusier to designate raw, unadorned concrete, which he experimented with in projects such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, inaugurated in 1952.

But what was still part of a broad modernist project for Corbusier transformed in the 1950s and 60s into an architectural language laden with political meaning. In the United Kingdom, Alison and Peter Smithson were among those who reinterpreted brutalism as an ethic of clarity and sincerity, advocating that architecture should reveal the materials without ornamentation and express its function directly. It was the antithesis of nostalgic reconstruction, which tried to imitate old facades as if the war had never happened.

Exposed concrete met a practical and symbolic need. Practically, it allowed for quick construction, at a lower cost, and with prefabrication techniques that reduced labor.

The scars of the material, bubbles, marks from the mold, roughness, the building showed its harshness, its direct relationship with the destruction that preceded it. Symbolically because it assumed that the past could not be reconstructed as it was; it was necessary to erect something new that conversed with the present.

In countries like Germany, France, Poland, and the United Kingdom, it became the vocabulary of state reconstruction. In destroyed cities like Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Dresden, housing complexes, administrative blocks, and universities rose in heavy concrete and monumental geometries. East Germany consolidated the plattenbau, prefabricated concrete buildings that promised decent and affordable housing for the population. In France, the Unité d’Habitation condensed the modernist ideal of the vertical city: housing, commerce, leisure, and services in one block, as if the building could be the basic cell of a new urban fabric.

The social dimension was central. In the 1950s and 60s, brutalism solidified as mass architecture. Housing complexes built in the peripheries, like the French banlieues or the British New Towns, housed populations displaced by war and migrants from rural areas. At first, they were seen as showcases of modernity and progress. But over time, many of these spaces became stigmatized as scenes of exclusion, violence, and state abandonment. The same aesthetics that symbolized hope began to carry the weight of social inequalities unresolved by politics.

This ambiguity explains the polarization around brutalism. For some, it was a project of democratic reconstruction, where the state offered housing, culture, and services in a solid and lasting environment. For others, it was cold, dehumanized architecture, compared to bunkers or prisons.

However, one cannot dissociate brutalism from its function as a war archive. The rough and heavy surfaces conversed with the ruins still visible in the cities. The exposed concrete did not hide the scars, but reorganized them into a language of reconstruction. It was both a scar and a cure: a reminder of destruction, but also a tool for renewal. This memorial dimension, little discussed, partly explains the enduring aesthetic strength of brutalism today.

Outside of Europe, brutalism found resonance in countries also undergoing processes of social transformation. In Brazil, architects like Lina Bo Bardi, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Niemeyer himself reinterpreted exposed concrete in dialogue with tropical modernism.

The Sesc Pompeia by Lina, or the Ibirapuera Gymnasium by Mendes da Rocha, show how brutalist roughness could be adapted to a logic of coexistence and leisure in the context of accelerated urban growth. In Mexico, universities and libraries incorporated the language as a symbol of national modernity.

As decades passed, many brutalist buildings were demolished, especially housing complexes considered social failures.

Others, however, began to be revalued, whether through preservation movements or the aesthetic fascination of new generations. Profiles dedicated to brutalism on social media, books, and exhibitions have brought the style back into focus, now seen as radical modernist heritage and not just heavy concrete. An emblematic case was the Robin Hood Gardens in London, demolished in 2017 despite international protests, including a request from MoMA in New York to preserve part of the structure.

Today, amid new housing crises and forced displacements, brutalist memory raises questions again. An attempt to build, over the rubble of war, structures that were both shelter and monument, functionality and memory.