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I'm familiar with brutalism. I think the ideology of the exposed structural materials is to show infrastructure without artifice. By "infrastructure" I don't just mean the electrical/plumbing or whatever as maybe hilighted in bowelism. The first definition of infrastructure in the random dictionary I looked up online is "the underlying foundation or basic framework."

As wikipedia says of brutalism, "There is often an emphasis on graphically expressing in the external elevations and in the whole-site architectural plan the main functions and people-flows of the buildings." Some have called brutalism the "truthful expression" of materials, structure, function.

I think it is interesting to think about how that might apply to web sites, it's not entirely clear to me.

Brutalist buildings don't need to be brutal, here's one of my favorites: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Geisel-L...

Many of the brutalist 70s tower blocks are wretched, but here's one I always liked: http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/029/273029.jpg



I'm probably off the mark but a mirrored facade is a long way from brutalism to my view; the structure is certainly modernist but status too far from utilitarianism for me to call it brutalist.

Also, I like some of the brutalist 70s tower blocks too, in the right context (I'm quite fond of Goldfinger's Trellick), but your example seems to have too many ornamental curves to be brutalism (at least as far as that classification is used in the UK).


Which example? They're both widely known as brutalist examples here in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library

http://chicagobrutalism.com/

I dunno, I guess it's "I know it when I see it", and we each know different things when we see them, heh.




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