There is a building in London that was called “a nuclear power station” by the Prince of Wales, “a great grey beast” by a former arts minister, and “the ugliest building in Britain” by a newspaper that ran the poll three years running. It is also, on any given weekend, one of the most photographed buildings in the city, with queues for the tours and a waiting list for the memberships.
The National Theatre on the South Bank was designed by Denys Lasdun and completed in 1976. It is made almost entirely of board-formed concrete, its surfaces still bearing the impressions of the timber shuttering that shaped them. It has no decorative elements. It makes no concessions to charm. It is, by most conventional measures of what buildings are supposed to do, a failure.
And yet.
Why the hatred lasted so long
Brutalism — the term derives from béton brut, Le Corbusier’s phrase for raw concrete — arrived in Britain in the 1950s as architecture’s answer to the welfare state. It was civic, ambitious, and deeply earnest. Tower blocks for workers who deserved the same light and air as the wealthy. Universities for students who were the first in their families to attend one. Cultural centres for cities rebuilding from the rubble of the war.
The buildings aged badly, or rather the society around them changed faster than anyone expected. The tower blocks became synonymous with social failure — not because the architecture had failed, most architects would argue, but because the maintenance budgets dried up and the social infrastructure was never built. The concrete stained. The lifts broke. The brutalist ideal and the brutalist reality diverged in ways that were hard to forgive.
What changed
The generation now photographing these buildings did not live through the disappointment. They encounter Brutalism as texture, geometry, ambition — the very qualities that made it controversial now make it interesting. A generation raised on algorithmically flattened aesthetics finds something almost shocking in buildings that refuse to be smooth.
Several of the most endangered examples have been saved in the past decade by campaigns mounted largely by people in their twenties and thirties who had no memory of what these buildings were supposed to represent. They saved them because they are extraordinary objects. That might be enough.
