Brutalism is a mid-20th-century architectural movement using exposed raw concrete and massive geometric forms — confrontational, civic, and now controversially loved.
Brutalism takes its name from the French 'béton brut' (raw concrete), the material Le Corbusier left rough and unfinished, with the imprint of its wooden formwork visible, in his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952) and the chapel at Ronchamp (1955). The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined 'New Brutalism' in 1955, and the term spread through Reyner Banham's writings. Brutalist buildings are characterised by massive geometric volumes, exposed structural elements, and an uncompromising honesty of materials — typically raw concrete, but also brick and steel. The movement flourished through the 1960s and 1970s in civic architecture worldwide: London's Barbican (1965–1976), Paul Rudolph's Yale Art and Architecture Building (1963), Boston's City Hall (1968), the National Theatre in London (1976), Marcel Breuer's UNESCO building in Paris (1958), and the megastructures of postwar Soviet, Yugoslav, and Brazilian public housing. Reviled in the 1980s and 1990s, brutalism has experienced a critical and popular revival in the 21st century, with active campaigns to preserve buildings once slated for demolition.