1Modernism Forever: Towards a New ‘ New Brutalism ’ .

Stephen Zepke

In his 1955 essay ‘The New Brutalism’, Reyner Banham

argues that Brutalism ‘has to be seen against the

background of the recent history of history, and, in

particular, the growing sense of the inner history of the

Modern Movement itself.’1 These two histories are, at

least from the perspective of architecture, fundamentally

intertwined. Modernism crawls from the wreckage of

history, which begins again under the entirely new

conditions of the machine. But this ‘new’ history of

modernism proceeds as a series of explosions echoing its

own birth, each time history begins again, resets the

clock, and embraces the future. ‘New Brutalism’ was

typical in this respect, referring to both the movement

that preceded it, while adding the prefix ‘New’ that

turned this continuity into a break, and made emulation

into innovation. So, this time historically, at the same

moment that Malraux is “saving” Corbusier’s Villa Savoye

(image 2) from demolition and restoring it as a monument

to a modernism past, the New Brutalists are declaring

their own rupture of history. New Brutalism does so

through a prefix it shares with a wide variety of

1 Reyner Banham, 'The New Brutalism', The Architectural Review, vol. 118, No. 708, December 1955, p. 356.

2movements keen to define themselves against the pre-war

avant-garde’s, from which they nevertheless drew

inspiration. New Brutalism echoed, while also conducting

a polemic with, the ‘New Empiricism’ of Scandinavian

post-war architecture, it was inextricably linked to the

English ‘New Towns’ where it was found, and indicated

interest in the ‘New Humanism’ introduced by Rudolph

Wittkower’s 1949 book Architectural Principles in the Age

of Humanism.2

In this emphasis on the new then, the New Brutalists

clearly inherited the violent genetic gesture of their

fathers, and used it against them. In this sense, Owen

Hatherley’s provocative recent call for a Militant

Modernism that defends modernism against the defenders of

modernism3 is in fact an old story, already enacted by

New Brutalism in the late 50s. The New Brutalists Alison

and Peter Smithson wanted to revitalise Corbusier’s pre-

war social-utopianism, but within the radically changed

circumstances of post-war reconstruction. So while they

no doubt believed in those classic modernist rallying-

cries such as Brecht’s exhortation to 'erase the traces’,

this erasure was not the fantastical result of a

messianic future to come, but simply offered an empirical

2 See Alison and Peter Smithson's statement in 244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 1, Summer 1954. Reprinted in October 136, Spring 2011, special issue on New Brutalism, p. 12.3 Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism. Hants: zero books, 2008.

3description of the post-war present. This is one of the

most interesting things about ‘New Brutalism’, it is an

avant-garde that was given the opportunity to actually do

something about it.4 As we shall see, in the case of the

Smithson’s this meant two things; a strong sense of class

solidarity, and a vivid interest in popular culture.5 In

any case, over the course of the first half of the

twentieth century Modernism moved - even if only

cyclically - from militant messianism to state funded

projects. In 1920 Corbusier had written about the

industrial revolution as if it was an uncontrollable, but

nevertheless heroic monster, one that brought; ‘An

immense, devastating, brutal evolution [that] has burned

the bridges that link us with the past.’6 43 years later

4 As Peter Osbourne has noted, the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London was founded in 1946, and ‘took a step back from [the pre-war] avant-garde’s ruptural historical futurity into a more expansive present of a new beginning.’ As we shall see, Alison and Peter Smithson, two of the most important New Brutalists, were part of ‘The Independent Group’ who were strongly associated with the ICA. Peter Osbourne, Anywhere Or Not At All, Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London and New York: Verso, 2013. p. 18.5 ‘Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take into account Brutalism’s attempt to be objective about “reality” - the cultural objectives of society, its urges, and so on. Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.’ Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘The New Brutalism’, Architectural Design April 1957, p. 113, reprinted in October 136, Spring 2011, special issue on New Brutalism, p. 37. Many authors have seen New Brutalism’s class solidarity and interest in popular culture as having more to do with a cynical opportunism. See, Julian Myers, ‘The Future as Fetish’, October 94, Fall 2000, special issueon The Independent Group.6 Corbusier, ‘Towards a new architecture: Guiding principles’, in Programmes and manifestoes on twentieth century architecture. M. Bullock (trans.) and U. Conrad (ed.). London: Lund Humphries, 1970. p.92.

4Nehru’s inauguration speech at Chandigarth (image 3)

retains the modernist enthusiasm for escaping the past,

but now pairs it to an already happening post-colonial

future. Chandigarth, he said, is ‘the first expression of

our creative genius, flowering on our newly earned

freedom…unfettered by traditions of the past - reaching

beyond the encumbrances of old towns and old

traditions.’7 Bombs have given birth to flowers, and it

is both a horror and delight that both keep returning.

As a ‘new’ form of history then, Modernism was both

detached from the past and projected into a utopian

future by the machine that was its condition. It was this

‘heroic’ Modernism that Alison and Peter Smithson sought

to both distance themselves from, while simultaneously

repeating. It was ‘like,’ they said, ‘an embroidery on

the canvas provided by the heroic period of the Modern

movement, if the needle in sewing has seemed to move away

from the canvas, it returns, each time tracing in the air

our consideration of our … inheritance.’8 It is precisely

this rhythmical revolutionary emergence of the ‘New’,

each time the same but different, that I would like to

7 Jawaharlal Nehru, inauguration ceremony at Chandigarth, ’63, quoted in William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hill, 3rd ed. 1997. p. 4338 Alison Smithson, quoted in Max Risselada, ‘Introduction’, in Alison and Peter Smithson A Critical Anthology, M. Risselada (ed.). Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011. p.20.

5look at here, because it is this that constitutes New

Brutalism as both a history of actual artifacts, and as

an example of a transcendental force that retains its

necessity and relevance for us today. Hatherley puts it

in a very straightforward way in relation to Sheffield's

famously Brutalist Park Hill housing estate (image 4),

‘rather than being patronised as picturesque ruins, as a

beautiful and doomed mistake – it is something we can

learn from, something we can build on.’9 And this would

indeed be the challenge of a New ‘New Brutalism’, to once

more take up its embroidered but still heroic Modernism

according to, and of course against, our contemporary

conditions. To repeat, but without irony; to repeat, but

differently.

In this sense, the ‘New’ in New Brutalism constitutes

more than an architectural style, and is, as the

Smithson’s stated, an ethics.10 It is an ethical

commitment to the New, but one that moves entirely

through its materials. Banham claims that Alison Smithson

first used the term ‘New Brutalism’ in her 1953

description of the Smithson’s project for a small house

9 Owen Hatherley, 'Sheffield: Some Modest Proposals', Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy, J. Westerman (ed.). Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2011, p. 27.10 ‘Up to now Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is ethical.’ Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘The New Brutalism’, Architectural Design April 1957, p. 113, reprinted in October 136, Spring 2011, special issue on New Brutalism, p. 37.

6in Soho (image 5). This house already has the features

that Banham would so famously define New Brutalism by: an

exposed structure composed of formal, axial planes that

are immediately legible from the outside, and a lack of

finish that uses materials in their state ‘as found’. As

a result New Brutalism exhibits, Banham will argue, a

‘ruthless adherence to one of the basic moral imperatives

of the Modern Movement – honesty in structure and

material.’11 This ‘honesty’ constitutes what I will call -

following the philosophical vocabulary of Gilles Deleuze

- the immanent expressionism of New Brutalism. On the

first level, the house expresses the values of the

building’s architects and inhabitants. As the Smithsons’

put it; ‘We see architecture as the direct result of a

way of life.’12 On a second level New Brutalism sought to

extend this honesty to its materials, using them ‘as

found’, and allowing this to determine the buildings

appearance. This was its primary debt to Dubuffet and art

brut, and the main axis of its materialism.

Finally, the structure of the buildings not only

directly expresses the immediate forces it deploys and

resists, but also expresses larger fields of forces that

11Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, vol. 118, No. 708, December 1955, p. 357.

12 Alison and Peter Smithson, quoted in Theo Crosby, ‘The New Brutalism’,Architectural Design (January 1955), reprinted in October 136, Spring 2011, special issue on New Brutalism, p. 18

7are psychological, social and political in nature.

Hunstanton School (1949-54) (image 6) for example, uses

Mies van der Rohe’s steel frame, but abandons his

classical proportions. Instead the proportions are based

on structural calculations, and are appropriate for the

type of steel that was used. Similarly, some of the

utilities didn’t fit the frame, and are allowed to

protrude, in this way contradicting the geometry of its

predecessor, van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of

Technology Alumni Building. (image 7) As Reyner Banham

put it in his inimitable style; ‘Hunstanton appears to be

made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and it is in

fact made of glass, brick, steel and concrete. Water and

electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the

wall, but are delivered to the point of use by visible

pipes and manifest conduits.’13 (image 8)

This means that aesthetically the building’s form

expresses its function, which should also be confirmed by

the experience of the building in use. But this ‘use-

value’ of the building, if I can put it like this, meant

that it also expressed much wider fields of forces,

encompassing in some cases as we shall see, the very

movements of the cosmos. Closer to home these wider

connections of the New Brutalist building appeared,

13 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism, quoted in John Jacobus, Twentieth-Century Architecture: The Middle Years 1940-65. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966. p. 119.

8according to example taken from Banham, in the way ‘the

“connectivity” of the circulation routes is flourished on

the exterior and no attempt is made to give a geometrical

form to the total scheme.’14 Banham is discussing the

legendary ‘streets in the sky’ (image 9) that the

Smithsons had taken from Corbusier and used in their 1952

plans for the Golden Lane Project, and which they

subsequently used 20 years later in Robin Hood Gardens.

(images 10 and 11) These streets connected the separate

buildings in an estate, and supposedly replicated the

social community of working class streets.15 In their

class commitments these buildings also sought to

cultivate a real connection between the proletariat and

the state, or at least the post-war labour government in

Britain. As ‘Socialist architecture’ for the poor, New

Brutalism evoked a new world and a new future, one of

high-rise communities instead of slums, one of

employment, social welfare and a future of equality and

entitlement. New Brutalist buildings therefore

embodied both an aesthetic and political avant-garde, one

that was often awkward, and accused by their bourgeois

14Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’, The Architectural Review, vol. 118, No. 708, December 1955, p. 361.

15 Banham wrote, ‘they become the real backbone of social communication and grouping’. Guide to Modern Architecture. London: The Architectural Press, 1962. p. 134.

9critics of ‘ugliness’.16 Berthold Lubetkin was perhaps the

most active protagonist of the utopian conjunction of

municipal socialism and unashamedly avant-garde design,

claiming architecture had to ‘march shoulder to shoulder’

with the proletariat, in order to create an ‘eldorado for

the working classes.’ In justifying the radicalism of his

Finsbury Health Centre, he declared that ‘nothing is too

good for ordinary people’, a phrase virtually taken up as

a slogan by the postwar Labour government. Similarly, but

less politically, Laurent Stalder has recently argued

that Brutalism was an ideological form that understood

scientific method in strictly modernist terms, as

challenging architecture ‘to go beyond its own accepted

principles and become an expression of society in

change.’17 Brutalist aesthetics looked to express new

scientific and political developments together, and it is

this that is most relevant to our efforts to understand

the contemporary relationships of politics and art.

New Brutalism’s strong commitment to a sense of

‘connectivity’ led to its interest in what we would today

call urbanism. Peter Smithson put it nicely when he wrote

16 As Bertold Lubetkin, another important New Brutalist, put it, ‘The admiration of aesthetically beautiful things is characteristic of the bourgeois aesthetic.’ Quoted in J. Mourdaunt Cook, The Dilemma of Style, Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Postmodern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. p. 245.17 Laurent Stalder, ‘Architecture as “Image,” or What’s New About New Brutalism?’, Clog, vol. 1, no. 2, June 2013, special issue on Brutalism, p. 21.

10that buildings,‘need to have formal characteristics which

give access to the affections and skills of its

inhabitants, that invite them to take responsibility for

the spaces around them.’18 And this sense of

responsibility did not stop at the walls of one’s home,

for a building cannot be separated from the urban fabric

within which it appears, and its walls do not separate

people from the city, but connect them to it.

Consequently, ‘The invention of a new house,’ Peter

Smithson said, ‘is the invention of a new kind of

street.’19 And the invention of a new kind of street

implies an urban transformation, or even a social

revolution. This was a long-standing commitment of

modernist architecture, clearly expressed in the ‘La

Sarraz Declaration’ from the CIAM conference of 1928,

where the group announced its aim to ‘attain the

indispensable and urgent harmonisation of the elements

involved by placing architecture on its true plane, the

economic and sociological plane.’20 Town planning had a

18 Peter Smithson quoted in Max Risselada, ‘Introduction’, in Alison and Peter Smithson A Critical Anthology, M. Risselada (ed.). Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011. p.20.19 Peter Smithson in Beatriz Colomina, ‘Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson’, October 94, Fall 2000, special edition on The Independent Group, p. 9.20 CIAM, ‘La Sarraz Decleration’, in Programmes and manifestoes on twentieth century architecture. M. Bullock (trans.) and U. Conrad (ed.). London: Lund Humphries, 1970. p. 109. The CIAM was an international association of architects that the Smithson’s would some years later become a significant part of.

11directly political sense, inasmuch as CIAM saw it as the

organisation of collective life against, as their

‘Charter of Athens’ had it in 1933, ‘the ruthless

violence of private interests’.21

In this way the new form of immanent expression

developed by New Brutalism implied a new world of

socialist empowerment. New Brutalism was in this sense

archetypically modernist, but at once utterly new and

particular to its context.

We clearly see here the double dimension of New

Brutalism, at once directly engaged with the

particularities of its situation, ‘as found’, while

nevertheless connecting these with wider conditions that

led all the way to transcendental dimensions both

abstract and cosmic. This tension was clearly described

by Jakob Bakema and Aldo van Eyck, Dutch members of ‘Team

10’, an architectural group the Smithsons also belonged

to that in many ways took over the position of CIAM in

the early 60s. ‘Each period,’ Bakema and van Eyck wrote,

‘requires a constituent language - an instrument with

which to tackle the human problems posed by the period,

as well as those which, from period to period, remain the

21 CIAM, ‘Charter of Athens’, in Programmes and manifestoes on twentieth century architecture. M. Bullock (trans.) and U. Conrad (ed.). London: Lund Humphries, 1970. p.138. ‘Private interest will be subordinated to the collective interest.’ p. 145.

12same, i.e., those posed by man - by all of us as

primordial beings. The time has come to gather the old

into the new; to rediscover the archaic qualities of

human nature. I mean the timeless ones.’22 This sense of

the wider, transcendental themes of modern architecture

had a variety of sources, the most significant for New

Brutalism being Rudolph Wittkower’s 1949 book

Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.

Wittkower argued that the centralised plans of

Renaissance churches that were based on antiquity did not

represent a ‘pagan’ turn, away from the transcendental

concerns of medieval architecture, because their

harmonies were intended as a worldly echo of celestial

and universal truths. Pure geometric form embodied

religious principle. The Smithsons regarded Wittkower’s

book, along with Corbusier’s Modulor as the most

important architectural texts of the post-war years, and

as a timely tonic for pre-war British Functionalism,

precisely because it emphasised the wider social and

cultural significance of universal architectural forms,

methods and proportions.23

Another interesting influence were the German art-

22 Quoted in William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hill, 3rd ed. 1997. p.446.23 See, Christof Grafe, ‘Finite Orders and the Art of Everyday Inhabitation’, in Alison and Peter Smithson A Critical Anthology, M. Risselada (ed.).Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011. p.106-9.

13historians Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Willhelm

Worringer, who saw art as a symptomatic expression of a

society’s transcendental values and influenced Walter

Gropius and Siegfried Giedion, the secretary of CIAM,

through whom their ideas filtered on to the New

Brutalists. Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer understood the

geometric and nonrepresentational art forms found in much

prehistoric art, but later banished to decoration, as

expressing transcendental truths that went beyond human

values and empirical experience. Siegfried Giedion’s

influential book The Eternal Present, which drew heavily

on Wölfflin, explored this idea in a vitalist register

when he argued that ‘living architecture’ displayed its

own life rather than representing a prior one, because

architecture was life itself captured in a material form.

This idea can be clearly seen in the modernist ontology

of New Brutalism in which genesis - the production of the

new - is both the singular eruption defining the

particularities of a building or an artwork, as well as

being the transcendental value that repeats timelessly in

a universal history of creation.

As we know Modernism was certainly not averse to a

sense of its own cosmic relevance. Chandigarth’s ‘cosmic

landscape’ made up of its buildings and their

cosmological harmonies, would be a perfect example of

14this.24 The assembly hall, for example, was aligned with

the zenith of the sun’s path rather than with the other

buildings or with the city as a whole. As Corbusier put

it, great architecture becomes art when: ‘It captures

something that transcends history, a living spirit.’25

This conception of a life that animated matter but

exceeded our possible experience of it was known as

‘hylozoism’ in the Naturphilosophie of the Romantics,

while today we call it, somewhat more prosaically, ‘vital

materialism’. The trajectory from the Romantics to the

modern passes first of all through Friedrich Nietzsche,

who repudiated the Romantic narrative of Sehnsucht and

redemption, while affirming a transcendental concept of

the future that emerged in the untimely event. He called

this event of emergence ‘overcoming’, and sought to free

it from the nihilism of the human, all too human. We

need, Nietzsche said, a ‘critique’ of those values that

people take for granted, because without such a

revaluation of values we are condemned to a ‘present

lived at the expense of the future’.26 What Nietzsche

calls ‘genealogy’ is an immanent critique by which human

24 See, William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hill, 3rd ed. 1997. p.429.25 Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, quoted in Mark Wigley, ‘The Architectural Cult of Synchronization’, October 94, Fall 2000, special issue on The Independent Group, p. 39.26 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), C. Diethe (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 7-8.

15values are revalued, so making history affirm the true a

priori, which is ‘will to power’, or the power of life to

overcome its own conditions. Genealogical critique in

this sense affirms the transcendental and ahistorical

force of the future, of becoming itself, in a specific

historical event. This philosophical idea should be

familiar to all students of Modernism. For example,

Harold Rosenberg’s analysis of the ‘act’ in action

painting, a reference shared by Deleuze and the

Smithson’s, would be an example; ‘Art as action,’

Rosenberg writes, ‘rests on the enormous assumption that

the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the

process of creating.’27 Art, but equally architecture in

these terms, is defined by its act or action, by the

becoming constituting its event rather than by what it

represents or constitutes its meaning.

It is precisely through a philosophy of artistic

Modernism that Nietzsche found his most important

followers, in particular Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari and Michel Foucault. All advocated a

transcendental understanding of modern art oriented

around a hylozoist affirmation of the new. As Deleuze and

Guattari put it,

27 Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New. New York: Da Capo Press, 1960.

16It is here that art accedes to its authentic

modernity, which simply consists in liberating

what was present in art from its beginnings, but

was hidden underneath aims and objects, even if

aesthetic, and underneath recodings and

axiomatics: the pure process that fulfils itself,

and that never ceases to reach fulfilment as it

proceeds – art as “experimentation”.28

Material experimentation, we might say, is the form of

immanent expressionism proper to the undetermined, proper

in other words, to the future itself. Foucault puts it

very precisely when writing about the music of Pierre

Boulez, which produces, he says, a ‘dual simultaneous

transformation of the past and the present by the

movement that detaches one from the other through an

elaboration of the one by the other.’29 This is a rather 28 Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze; Anti-Oedipus, p. 370-1, 1983. The purposiveness of Nature, in other words, is neither the regulative function of organic unity discovered by Kant, and nor is this unity the genetic and living force animating all matter that was consequently discovered by Naturphilosophie. For Deleuze and Guattari the purposiveness of Nature is a living force animating matter, but this is resolutely inorganic, and its self-generating principle is to overcome all forms of representation, most importantly the human. Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental and vital materialism is therefore an ontology of becoming, as it was for Romanticism, but because matter expresses its constitutive and ontological difference, becoming expresses an always already open – rather than organic – whole. For Deleuze and Guattari art retains its Romantic pre-eminence, and its Romantic naturalism, but without any trace of a Romantic organicism.29 Michel Foucault (1998), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Essential Worksof Foucault 1954-1984, volume 2. J. Faubion (ed.), London: Penguin. p.

17complicated way of saying that modernist art detaches the

present from its historical conditions in order to

actualise an undetermined future, but in doing so it also

fulfils and elaborates those conditions. In this sense,

Foucault says, modern art establishes,

a polemical relationship of reduction, refusal, and

aggression to culture, social norms, values and

aesthetic canons. This is what makes modern art since

the nineteenth century the endless movement by which

every rule laid down, deduced or induced, or inferred

from preceding actions is rejected and refused by the

following action. In every form of art there is a

sort of permanent Cynicism towards all established

art.30

Modernism is, according to Foucault, part of the

‘historical category’ of ‘Cynicism’, one ‘that traverses

– under diverse forms and with varied objectives – all of

Western history’.31 This transcendental history of

Cynicism emerges, Foucault tells us, ‘especially in

modern art’.32 The Smithsons then, as Cynics, (image 12) 244.30 Michel Foucault (2011), The Courage of Truth, (The Governement of Self and Others II), Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, F. Gros (ed.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 188.31 Ibid., p. 38.32 Ibid., p.187.

18self-styled champions of the people, an ‘eruption from

below’33 achieved by revolutionaries and artists, Foucault

tells us, people ‘bloody-minded’ in their ‘ineloquence,

but absolute consistency’ as Banham rhapsodised,

producing - he is speaking of their Sheffield University

competition entry (image 13) - ‘the same graceless

memorability as martello towers or pit head gear’.34

While there has been some doubt cast on the

authenticity of New Brutalism’s class allegiances, it is

possible to see an architectural version of vital

materialism in the Smithsons’ proposal for the

university. (image 14) In particular how they built in

the maximum flexibility to the structures, making them

both full of potential life, but at the same time not

determining it. They write;

The ring of high-level circulation and service in

a continuous building complex makes it possible to

satisfy the university’s desire to expand

horizontally rather than vertically, in spite of

the huge volume of building. Furthermore, the

technological intention of much of the university

seems to point to buildings of the maximum

33 Ibid., p.188.34 Reyner Banham, 'The New Brutalism', The Architectural Review, vol. 118, No. 708, December 1955, p. 357.

19flexibility - so that today’s laboratory can be

tomorrow’s testing room or group of studios ...

This flexibility is most easily achieved in a

simple, repetitive, continuous structure.35

Furthermore, a panel system was proposed for both the

interior and exterior of the building, that meant any

changes in the interior use of the building would be

immediately expressed on its exterior.

To continue trying to think New Brutalism

philosophically, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s

idea that art begins with the house, and that

‘architecture is the first of the arts.’36 Like the New

Brutalists they also follow Dubuffet and art brut in

understanding all forms of construction as the expression

of their constituent matter and force. This is the sense

in which they claim that architecture finds its model in

Dubuffet - it is a process by which the material is

liberated from its form to express its immanent force, a

force inseparable from both its architect and their

equally cosmic plane of composition. As a result,

according to Deleuze and Guattari: ‘One no longer covers

35 Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture. There is a clear echo with Deleuze’s rhapsodic treatment of serial composition in modernist texts and art in Difference and Repetition, as well as with the very structure (series) in The Logic of Sense.36 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G.Burchell (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 186.

20over; one raises, accumulates, piles up, goes through,

stirs up, folds.’37 The architect raises the material from

the ground and in so doing erases the form/ground

distinction, this ‘ascent of the ground with Dubuffet’38

means that all that remains are vectors, operational

deframings by which inside and outside are able to

express their mutually determining process of co-

transformation. To use a rather current term, it is a

kind of architectural plasticity. The frame or house is

the way the architect is able to intervene in society,

and in a more specifically modernist sense, is able to

introduce into the present an undetermined future. This

then, is the transcendental horizon surrounding our

present, challenging us to vitalise our own material in a

way that expresses its freedom. The political question

then becomes how to make this freedom proliferate.

This does not mean, of course, that we should go on

building Brutalist buildings. Although the original New

Brutalist buildings, or at least those still standing,

have an undoubted grandeur, their vision of the future

has become dated. Although well-suited to science-

fiction, the use of Brunel University in Kubrick’s

Clockwork Orange (1971), (image 15) Antonioni’s use of

the Brunswick Centre in The Passenger (1975)(image 16)

37 Ibid., p. 194.38 Ibid.

21and Truffaut’s use of the London City Council Brutalist

flagship Alton West Towers in Fahrinheit 451 (1966)

(image 17) seems to have condemned them to being symbols

for alienation and socialist dystopia, either the working

class out of control, or totalitarian control.

But the Smithson’s were also important members of the

Independent Group, and along with Nigel Henderson,

Eduardo Paolozzi, Reyner Banham, Laurence Alloway and

Richard Hamilton amongst others, a collaborative art

group responsible for two important exhibitions, Parallel

of Art and Life held at the ICA in 1953, and This is

Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. It is

here that they explored a version of New Brutalism that

seems to be directly engaged with issues that confront us

today. The exhibition Parallel of Art and Life (image 18)

appears as an extraordinarily contemporary exhibition,

complete with a found-object aesthetic, a non-

hierarchical ‘installation’, (image 19) an archival vibe,

and a curator-as-artist methodology. (image 20) This

emergence of a ‘post-object’ style of installation pre-

dated its minimalist version in the US by nearly a

decade, but also offered a more interesting philosophical

approach. US minimalism was significantly influenced by

Robert Morris’ reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s

Phenomenology of Perception, and his belief that

22minimalist installations revealed our perceptual

gestalts, in particular geometric forms and the figure-

ground relationship. We have already seen how the New

Brutalist’s explicitly rejected the figure-ground

relation in favour of the construction and expression of

mutually determining material and social forces. As a

result, the ‘installation’ or ‘post-object-based

practice’ that emerges in Parallel of Art and Life (image

21) is not oriented around a transcendental subjectivity

conditioning phenomenological experience, as it is in

minimalism, but around a transcendental materialism that

continually overcomes its conditions in search of the

new. In this sense, Parallel of Art and Life extends the

transcendental materialism of New Brutalism to the

popular image and the mass-media networks through which

it flows as a commodity. It is as if Parallel of Art and

Life prefigures Deleuze’s suggestion that minimalism

should in fact be read through art brut, so that its

‘form no longer contains a volume but embraces a

limitless space in all directions’.39 This space, he says,

is processual, more like a “performance” that would

include the spectator.40 This ‘performance’ however, is

not subjective, and nor is it human, but is instead the

39 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, T. Conley (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 160.40 Ibid., p. 123.

23unending material process of folding and unfolding within

what Deleuze calls in a remarkably modernist vocabulary,

the ‘infinite and living machine’ of a “new system”.41

This ‘infinite machine’ is digital technology, and the

‘new system’ is that of late capitalism it makes

possible.

Here Deleuze’s genealogical reading of Minimalism in

terms of art brut clearly incorporates both New Brutalism

and more particularly the most contemporary aspects of

Parallel of Art and Life. ‘Dubuffet’s plastic habitat’,

Deleuze writes, ‘does not allow the differences of inside

and outside, of public and private, to survive.’42 What we

have instead is a world of images in constant variation,

where modulation - or the constant process of

folding/unfolding - becomes the mode of a simultaneous

construction and expression of an encompassing and ever-

changing mediascape. Now we know that Deleuze was

skeptical about this new ‘society of control’ as he

called it, and on occasions sounded quite ‘tragic’

regarding its future, as Toni Negri noted, and as can be

seen at the end of his book on Foucault, or towards the

end of Cinema 2. What he seems to have seen is that the

power of new media technology combined with popular

culture meant the end of art, or at least the end of its

41 Ibid., p. 124.42 Ibid., p.137.

24modernist faith in a new future. How then, does Parallel

of Art and Life offer us strategies for today? How might

it indicate the possible outline of a New New Brutalism?

Parallel of Art and Life contained 122 black and

white images that were organised by category in the

catalogue, but hung according to formal associations

within the gallery, producing a deliberately confusing

effect. Ryan Johnstone has recently suggested that the

show was a direct engagement with the popular

photographic exhibitions developed by Herbert Bayer and

Edward Steichen at MOMA, one of which had toured to the

ICA in 1952. (image 22) These encompassing experiences

composed of photos from Life magazine juxtaposed pictures

of individuals from vastly different socio-cultural

contexts with similar poses or expressions and pictures

of crowds as aestheticized abstractions, in order to

illustrate a universal and natural order (equality and

democracy) unaffected by history or politics.43 Parallel

of Art and Life (image 23) took this form, but subverted

it by foregrounding its own photographic means of

production to the point where the images became

ambiguous. In this way the exhibition directly confronted

the self-evidence of the universal values of American

43 Ryan Johnstone, ‘Not Quite Architecture... Cold War History, New Brutalist Ethics and ‘Parallel of Life and Art,’ 1954’, Interspaces: Art and Architectural Exchanges from East to West. Available at www.artinstitute.unimelb.edu.at.

25democracy with their own material conditions of

possibility – the photograph. The camera, the show’s

press release claimed, was used as a ‘scientific

investigator’ to explore ‘common visual denominators

independent of the field from which the image is taken’.44

These ‘common visual denominators’ created the formal

categories the photos were grouped into in the catalogue,

but the hanging of the images tended to dissolve this

order and create new connections within it. In this way,

the show’s ‘obtrusive logic’ (its organising categories)

was both evidenced and undone in their exhibition, giving

way, according to the catalogue, to a ‘poetic-lyrical

order’ that changed with every viewer.45 This ‘logic’

clearly privileged a contingent ‘image’ whose

‘information’ was created - or as Deleuze had it

‘performed’ - by its wider context. This at once analytic

and creative ‘image’ was therefore both scientific and

aesthetic, and produced an open and aleatory experience

as an immanent expression that emerged from but also

contradicted the formal categories that operated as its

structure. Similarly, the exhibition revealed both the

44 This type of generic ordering became increasingly important to the Smithson’s, particularly in relation to their numerous publications, and for their analyses of the historical layers of cities. See Max Risselada,‘Introduction’, in Alison and Peter Smithson A Critical Anthology, M. Risselada (ed.). Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011. p.23.45 Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Parallel of Life and Art: Indications of a New Visual Order’, reprinted in October 136, Spring 2011, special issue on New Brutalism, p. 11.

26wondrous and fantastic realism brought by new technology,

while at the same time showing how this also blurred

distinctions between organic and inorganic, art and

science, or large and small. Rather than obey existing

laws of representational realism such as the universal

humanism of the Family of Man, the show instead offered a

typology of texture, a typology of materials and the

forces that fold it to create everything from microscopic

biological bodies to cosmic events. In this sense, the

camera made wildly differing things similar, but only in

a way which also made them utterly fantastic.

Today, we take this power of the photographic ‘image’

for granted. What is the interface except a continuous

process of ‘compare and contrast’ in which differences

don’t reveal their deeper universal truths, but are

effaced through the standardisation of their format. This

is perhaps the sinister intuition of Parallel of Life and

Art, that the photographic medium levels differences

through making them ubiquitous, turning singular images

into the everyday expressions of any-individual, while

withholding from its users the right to reinvent its

conditions of possibility.46 Today, the various formats

46 As Vilém Flusser puts it, ‘Anyone who takes snaps has to adhere to theinstructions for use – being simpler and simpler – that are programmed tocontrol the output end of the camera. This is democracy in post-industrial society.’ Towards a Philosophy of Photography, A. Mathews (trans.). London: Reaktion Books, 2000, p. 59.

27governing image production have become our new

cybernetic, but no less transcendental subjective

conditions of possibility, and the challenge of a New New

Brutalism would be to find the ways to turn these

conditions productive, to intervene in their logic, as

Parallel of Art and Life did, in order to produce

something that goes beyond its limits.

28