渐近线 • 粗野主义建筑史:笔记
Episode 2:
Much of this seemingly monolithic gigantism might form the mise-en-scene of myth. Seemingly, because whilst the majority of brutalist works are built on a superhuman scale, and belong to an extra-human realm, they are fragmented, articulated, punctuated.
It's what Max Ernst talked of his own work as being - a hallucinatory series of contradictory images. A series which refuses to be resolved into a single meaning.
It wasn't until it began to attract idolaters of a sort that anyone thought to look at bunkers and flak towers as architecture, rather than as the defences of a vanquished regime.
However, as a springboard to a new sort of architectural invention, it was peerless.It was a conduit. It sanctioned sculptural concrete, which had been off-limits. And it vastly increased the gamut of models that architecture might draw on. It changed architecture's attitude towards both the past and nature.
The sublime elements of nature that succoured Brutalism....Jagged rockscapes, repetitive basaltic organs, subterranean extravaganzas and geological gaudies, weird trees, petrified forests. An architecture suggestive of such phenomena is bound to be more alien in Britain than it is in dramatically furnished countries, where the link between built forms and natural forms is more readily made. Inverted pyramids, allusive shapes reckless cantilevers, toppling ziggurats, vertiginous theatre, imitations of Pyrites the defiance of gravity - always a sign that a demi-god is at work. The architectural imagination was flying. Which was alarming to the timid, aesthetic arbiters of a country which was zealously divesting itself of the relics of the last time that architects went on a collective bender. England was being architecturally cleansed of High Victorian works. Buildings of great grace and greater brutality were demolished at the rate of a dozen a week throughout the 1950s. They were, of course, "monstrosities". Brutalism changed the way that architecture drew upon nature. Applied decorative representations, usually formal, occasionally naturalistic, of, say, bearded steroid junkies called atlantes, of boughs, tendrils, fronds, bucrania, of vessel-bearing maidens called caryatids - all of these disappeared with International Modernism. They didn't return. Brutalism, however, did not shun representation. Anything but. Instead, however, of just incorporating natural forms, its ambition was to create buildings which were themselves natural forms. Such a remaking of the planet was not a modest undertaking. It didn't copy what was already there. It invented natural forms, new natural forms.
The Brutalists created the most haptic civilian architecture ever. Board-marked concrete grazed skin, furrowed concrete tore clothes, bush-hammered concrete just hurt. Here is an instance of the way in which they overbearingly demanded an audience and, having won that audience, treated it with unrepentant aggression. They never pandered. And they never forgot the belligerence that Brutalism was born from. A building is a weapon.
Because architecture is not a language, it requires no translation. We glance at architecture, we stare at it, we scrutinise it, we react to it. We may feel frightened, we may feel awestruck, we may feel powerless in the presence of vastness and blankness. But whatever properties we invest it with are the products of our sensibility, our reason, our wonder, our despisal. There is no compact with buildings. Our relationship with them is one-sided.
Western history and background
Open, transparent, sustainable. The three great lies of the age. Life itself is not sustainable. I'm going to die. You are going to die. Get over it. The sacred cow of sustainability is due for slaughter.
these values..."values" are bound in a Western culture which demands cosiness, comfort, instant comprehensibility, pap, and populism's goody bag. And the solaces of smallness of scale. Humans in the First World, the rich world may have got physically larger, fatter, but the objects around them have been miniaturised. Fubsy hands grasp midget computers. Sausage fingers miss-hit Tony Meyboards. We live in a microworld. We live, too, in an atomised world. There is every reason to be nostalgic for the Cold War. But why the structures that derive from that era should be deemed surplus to requirement and thus expendable is a different matter. Taste. Crazes. The adherence to norms. Fashion.
The destruction of Brutalist buildings is more than the destruction of a particular mode of architecture. It is like burning books. It's a form of censorship of the past, a discomfiting past, by the present. It's the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur. It's the cutting down to size of a culture which committed the cardinal sin of getting above its station, of pushing God aside and challenging nature. It's the destruction, too, of the embarrassing evidence of a determined optimism that made us more potent than we have become....An architecture which in the words of Mr Owen Luder...
Doesn't have any reason to say sorry.
