A new warmth towards brutalism,handsome volumes on Charles and Ray Eames, Le Corbusier, or George Gilbert Scotts prodigious gothic outputBest of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights,chosen by the Guardian’s writers and critics
A striking aspect of Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism (Yale University Press), or a hefty survey of postwar British architecture,is that it isn’t approximately brutalism precisely, but approximately this and many other styles of architecture. So it seems that someone, or her publishers perhaps,inserted the B-word because they thought it would aid to sell the book. Which no doubt it does. Because brutalism, once the encapsulation in three-and-a-half syllables of everything thought hateful approximately modern architecture, and a word whose inventors didn’t even want to sound kind,is now exciting, sexy, and intriguing. Which could fill been predicted: baroque and gothic were once also terms of abuse.
Owen Hatherley has done more than most to bring approximately this reappraisal,and this year further pushed the boundaries of received taste with Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane), a loving exploration of the housing estates, and TV towers and bureaucratic palaces built by eastern bloc countries in the Soviet era. It has the merit of confronting you with an alternative reality – in this case a different version of 20th-century architecture – to the one you thought you knew. The book is the outcome of epic travelling through places most architecture writers never visit. It also tries,with varying degrees of success, to reconcile Hatherley’s beliefs that both communism and modernism fill been wrongly written off.
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Source: theguardian.com