Introduction

ALEX KITNICK

New Brutalism remains a tricky term for the student of postwar art and
architecture, both too specific and too general. On the one hand, it is associated
with a small number of writings and projects carried out by a group of architects, artists, and critics in 1950s London. Alison and Peter Smithson first used
the term to describe a residential project in Soho that was to be characterized
by a warehouse aesthetic and unfinished surfaces, and, in a famous 1955 essay,
Reyner Banham wrote that the movements three primary characteristics were
Memorability as an Image, Clear exhibition of Structure, and Valuation of
Material as found.1 Despite having been granted these attributes, however, or
perhaps because of the way they lend themselves to both oversimplification
(unfinished sur faces) and open- ended abstract ion (Memorabilit y as an
Image), Brutalism is often employed today as nothing more than a vague epithet lobbed at vast expanses of postwar institutional building; its associations
with art practice are, more frequently than not, left out entirely. The purpose of
dedicating this issue to New Brutalism, then, is both to reconsider its theses and
to reevaluate its work and writings, while at the same time amending and supplementing earlier histories of the moment, which have emphasized the pop
aspects of the work. 2 In doing so, we hope to recapture something of New
Brutalisms latent critical potential.
As Theo Crosby wrote in the January 1955 issue of Architectural Design, New
Brutalism positioned itself against the contemporaryits veneer of modern
1.
Alison and Peter Smithson, House in Soho, London, Architectural Design (December 1953), p.
342; and Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism, Architectural Review 118 (December 1955), pp. 35461,
both of which are reprinted in this issue. Banham later expanded his essay in The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic? (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), which, while enlarging his canon to include other
examples of European and Japanese architecture, also had the effect of obscuring what was at stake in his
original use of the term.
2.
See The Independent Group, ed. Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October 94
(Fall 2000). See also the recently collected essays in Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds.,
Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010).

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 36. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OCTOBER

details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti.3 Contemporary, in this moment,

functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism, a modernism
already liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style, a look, and
a scenario for up-to-date living. Against this degradation, New Brutalism sought to
return to the first lessons of the modern movement, which led to a close study and
rigorous evaluation of its key architectsLe Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in particular. Such attention paid to history, however, did not lead to rote repetition; in
fact, it enabled a revision. Instead of embracing the automobile as object type, for
example, as Le Corbusier had done in his seminal Vers une Architecture (1923), the
Smithsons imagined the machine as a means of production, embracing it as a force
that might actually produce architecture.4 To this end, and to show architectures
affiliation with the processes of industry, they used building materials as they found
them. Steel and brick were incorporated as they were, with traces of production
upon them, their industrial nature kept intact. (The vicissitudes of brick in New
Brutalist discourse are taken up here by Anthony Vidler.5)
To a large extent, this interest in the as found translated into a preoccupation with questions of surface. Just as Le Corbusier embraced the patterns created by the rough wooden formwork on the exteriors of his concrete piloti at the
Unit dHabitation in Marseille (194752) so did the Smithsons show the
scratch marks and scuffs that went into the making of their own buildings, such
as their school at Hunstanton (194953).6 Eduardo Paolozzi, too, in his bronze
sculpture of the late 1950s, built up figures of hollow men that appear to be
comprised solely of surface incident, with bits of rubbish and scrap caught like
flies in lesions of wax (this process is detailed by Ben Highmore in his contribution7). Similarly, the architect and typographer Edward Wright (recovered for us
here by Craig Buckley8) found text to be part and parcel of the surfaceor better yet, the textureof architecture. Indeed, New Brutalism sought to capture a
multiplicity of things within its envelope; one of its notable characteristics is the
fantastic list of heterogeneous matter that it aimed to absorb. If New Brutalist
art and architecture influenced each other, the Smithsons said in a 1954 interview, they are equally and mysteriously influenced by industrial techniques, the
cinema, supersonic flight, African villages, and old tin cans.9 Engaging a similarly diverse inventory of material, Nigel Henderson made photograms using
debris from bomb sites (though soon almost anything would do, bottles, ice,
3.
[Theo Crosby,] The New Brutalism, Architectural Design ( January 1955), p. 1; reprinted in
this volume.
4.
Of course, Le Corbusier also investigated various mechanical methods of manufacture, as
can be seen in his Maison Domino (1915) as well as in his conception of the house as a machine
habiter. In the end though, Le Corbusiers machine was a better oiled one than the Smithsons desired.
5.
Another Brick in the Wall, pp. 10532.
6.
Such qualities are quite apparent in the photographs of the project taken by Nigel Henderson.
7.
Image-breaking, God-making: Paolozzis Brutalism, pp. 87104.
8.
Graphic Constructions: The Experimental Typography of Edward Wright, pp. 15681.
9.
Bill Cowburn and Michael Pearson, Art in Architecture, 244: Journal of the University of
Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 2 (Winter 1954), p. 20; reprinted in this volume.

New Brutalism: Introduction

elastic bands, negatives).10 In 1953, Henderson, Paolozzi, and the Smithsons

put forth an even wider constellation of specimens in their exhibition Parallel of
Life and Art, which featured photographs of everything from mud flats to bicycle
crashes, and which sought to disclose some of the sources that they understood
to be affecting their practices. In New Brutalism, then, the concrete reality of
both art and architecture were understood to be fundamentally connected to a
world of mediated images, as well as a sundry assortment of cast-off things.
Indeed, New Brutalism took as its task the communication of this heterogeneous world to the postwar subject, drawing together a vast array of dispersed
effects into a consolidatedand perhaps comprehensibleform. For Banham,
it did this via the memorability of the images it producedwhether in the
form of a building, sculpture, or photograph. Not yet postmodern pictures, New
Brutalist images lodged in the brain because they had something thing-like
about them. The New Brutalist image was not abstract but visceral. Banham
once referred to them as concrete imagesimages that can carry the mass of
tradition and association, or the energy of novelty and technology, and deliver
them to the beholding subject (this is the subject of my own contribution).11
If New Brutalism in both its artistic and architectural incarnations sought to
incorporate the diversity of the world, to compress it and forge it into an image, it
also sought to extend outwards, to make plain the systems of circulation and communication that structure lifeand it is here that its concerns become more explicitly
architectural, if no less artistic (this point is developed by Hadas Steiner in her
text12). New Brutalism consistently positioned itself in terms of wider environments
and ecologies, taking particular interest in patterns of connection. Such a concern is
evident in the Smithsons early studies of village footpaths and the sociability of the
working class street. Banhams attention to the topological pathways of the
Smithsons unrealized Sheffield University project (1953) gets to this point as well, as
do Nigel Hendersons stressed photographs of street life, and the scattered blocks
of Paolozzis designs for playgrounds. If the figure of the child was central to postwar
British culture at large, connoting a fresh start and new life, New Brutalism valued it
for offering a qualitatively different way of seeing. As Jean Piaget demonstrated at
this time, children see topologically, and in channeling this view, New Brutalism
began to move beyond the inherited geometries of Renaissance perspective into a
spatial order characterized by affinity and spontaneity.
If the child served as a first guide for the New Brutalists, even more important
was the new culture of communication they saw before them. (If children presented
one model of looking and seeing, the culture of phones and cars offered yet
another. Or, to put it slightly differently, childrens vision provided a primitive
10.
Notes towards a chronology based on conversations with the artist, in Nigel Henderson:
Paintings Collages and Photographs (London: Anthony dOffay, 1977), n.p.
11.
Reyner Banham, This Is Tomorrow, Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 18688;
reprinted in this volume.
12.
Life at the Threshold, pp. 13355.

OCTOBER

model of technological communication.) New Brutalism, as Peter Smithson made

clear in 1959, felt that architecture had to register such modes of communication in
its very form.13 Against the stand-alone buildings of what he and Alison would soon
dub the heroic period of modern architecture, they focused on what they called
town planning and what they would later refer to as the space between.14 Today,
this emphasis on communication in New Brutalism appears bound up with a shift
toward a New Economy in which communication is valued over labor as traditionally
defined. Equally important, however, is the Smithsons insistence that such immaterial networks generate physical form. For them, everything solid did not simply melt
into air; their work serves as an important counterpoint to so much architecture
today in which site, scale, and place are thought to be increasingly irrelevant as long
as an internet connection and large sums of capital are readily available. The
Smithsons stress on the material production of their buildings attests to a resistance
to utopian discourse of the immaterial, showing that physical labor and material
resources are central to architectures very possibility.
If the Smithsons heeded the call of communication, then, they also wanted to
put it in its place.15 In a 1959 interview, Peter Smithson criticized Eero Saarinens
General Motors Technical Center (194556) where, he said, communication had
become an end in itself, the buildings closed-circuit racetrack-like form functioning as a literal road to nowhere. For the New Brutalists, as for Marshall McLuhan,
media were messages, and it is precisely because they felt this way that they wanted to
preserve certain media and the messages that inhere in them.16 The question for the
New Brutalists, then, became how to communicate something through the din of
contemporary noise, or, as they put it, how to face up to a mass-production society,
and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work
within it.17 Their brand of poetry, however, was not meant to redeem society, but
rather to create something of value in a confrontation with it. Though some might
call such a position nostalgic or reactionary, the problem of how to smuggle the
lessons of the past into our present moment, and how to hold the various forces of
the present moment in productive tension, isor at least, should beone of the
most pressing concerns for architects, artists, and theorists practicing today.

13.
See Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, Jane B. Drew, E. Maxwell Fry, Conversation on
Brutalism, Zodiac 4 (1959), pp. 7381; reprinted in this volume.
14.
See Alison and Peter Smithson, The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, Architectural
Design (December 1965). In a late interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Smithson affirmed his
interest in what he called the space between. Peter Smithson and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Smithson Time: A
Dialogue (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2004), p. 20.
15.
This, too, sets them apart from so many architects of the interstitial that we see today.
16.
For more on the Smithsons interest in McLuhan, see their 1962 drawings for an exhibition
project tentatively titled Extensions of Man (done in conjunction with Lawrence Alloway and Reyner
Banham) in Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: The Monacelli Press,
2005), pp. 32627.
17.
The New Brutalism: Alison and Peter Smithson answer the criticisms on the opposite page,
Architectural Design (April 1957), p. 113; reprinted in this volume.

Cover of Architectural Review 14. October 1953.

House in Soho, London

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON

In this statement on their project for a house in Soho, London, Alison and Peter Smithson first
invoke New Brutalism by name. Their short definition, stressing the buildings lack of finishes
and its exposition of structure, will go on to influence the theses that Banham attributes to the
movement in his seminal essay two years later. The invocation of the terms shelter and environment is also significant.A.K.
The attempt was made to build in Central London, and failed because of difficulty with adjoining owners. It seemed that a series of Trusts held the surrounding
land (all bombed) but it turned out to be one man who intended to build kitchens to
the left, W.C.s the right and restaurants to the rearthis contract was about to be
signed after nine months work.
On the normal city site costing between 15s. and 25s. per sq. ft. one can apparently do little different from the Georgian, but it was considered that a different
internal order must be visualized. The air and sunlight of the attics in the daytime
suggests that living quarters should be up top, with the bathroom in the cool dim
basement.
It was decided to have no finishes at all internallythe building being a combination of shelter and environment.
Bare concrete, brickwork, and wood. The difficulty of unceiled [sic] rooms was
satisfactorily overcome by the disposition of rooms which were also placed high up or
low down according to light-sunlight desired.
Brickwork may suggest a blue or double burnt or colored pointing; but the
arbitrary use of color and texture was not conformed with, and common bricks with
struck joints were intended. The bars and color variation have some sort of natural
tension when laid by a good bricklayer.
In fact, had this been built it would have been the first exponent of the new
brutalism in England, as the preamble to the specification shows: It is our intention in
this building to have the structure exposed entirely, without internal finishes wherever practicable.
The Constructor should aim at a high standard of basic construction as in a small warehouse.
Architectural Design (December 1953), p. 342.
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 11. Alison and Peter Smithson from Architectural Design, December 1953, p. 342.

Alison and Peter Smithson. Sources. 1953.

Art in Architecture

BILL COWBURN AND MICHAEL PEARSON

In this brief synopsis of an interview, Alison and Peter Smithson again stress the core influences on their worknamely Le Corbusiers bton brut and a new relationship between art
and buildingwithout using the term New Brutalism itself.A.K.
During this interview with Alison and Peter Smithson 244 were told that the
old relationship between architecture, painting, and sculpture was something they
no longer wanted, not because it is too difficult to attain, but that it is no longer necessary. This attitude arose from their practice of Anti-Art Architecture.
However, painters and sculptors are still important because it is only ideas
that are outmoded, not materials.
They felt that the museums were killing them, because art has been made
something to be stared at with guides and to be written about, not lived. When
artists worked for religion and helped to make churches, they were at one with
their materials and society; art was religion. Yet it is inconceivable to them that
they should work in this way with painters and sculptors today. Their work is now
the inspiration without which architecture would be impossible. The truths they
reveal are built into the architecture itself.
After this, the conversation turned to the particular, which is quoted below
as a conclusion.
When Le Corbusier has spoken of the synthesis of the plastic arts,
we wondered what he meant. When he tried with Lipchitz at the Villa
de Mondrot, or with himself as artist in the Pavilion Suisse or at the
Unit dHabitation, to formalize the relationship between architecture and painting or sculpture, it was always a failure (only in his own
flat where Lgers, Ozenfantes, et al. are scattered about as possessions
is one moved).
Gardez-nous du pleonasme! says Le Corbusier. I find myself instinctively the adversary of forced art, of art made to order.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 1516. Bill Cowburn and Michael Pearson, from 244: Journal of the University
of Manchester Architecture and Planning Society 2, Winter 1954, p. 20.

16

OCTOBER

But why are the shuttering marks on the Unit an essential part of it
when the art works (modular men, steel, glazed screens, etc.) are so
trivial? It is because the architecture is complete without them. They
are there because Le Corbusier is chasing yesterdays dream when
todays reality is already there. Architecture, painting, and sculpture
are manifestations of life, satisfying real needs; of man and not of each
other. They influence each in a poetic way, but are equally and mysteriously influenced by industrial techniques, the cinema, supersonic
flight, African villages, and old tin cans.
244: Journal of the University of Manchester Architecture
and Planning Society 2 (Winter 1954), p. 20.

Parallel of Life and Art:

Indications of a New Visual Order*

NIGEL HENDERSON, EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, AND

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON

The exhibition Parallel of Life and Art opened on September 11, 1953, at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London. Consisting of 122 photographic enlargements edited by Nigel
Henderson, Ronald Jenkins, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson, it explored
how reproductive technologies affect the terms of cultural production. The architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham would later refer to the exhibition as a locus classicus of
the New Brutalist movement.A.K.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In this exhibition an encyclopedic range of material from past and present is
brought together through the medium of the camera which is used as recorder,
reporter, and scientific investigator. As a recorder of nature objects, works of art,
architecture and technics; as reporter of human events the images of which sometimes come to have a power of expression and plastic organization analogous to
the symbol in art; and as scientific investigator extending the visual scale and
range, by use of enlargements, X-rays, wide-angle lens, high-speed and aerial photography.
The editors of this exhibition, Nigel Henderson, photographer, Eduardo
Paolozzi, sculptor, Peter and Alison Smithson, A/A.R.I.B.A. architects, and Ronald
Jenkins, A.C.G.I. engineer, have selected more than a hundred images of significance for them. These have been ranged in categories suggested by the material
which underline a common visual denominator independent of the field from
which the image is taken. There is no single claim in this procedure. No watertight scientific or philosophical system is demonstrated.
In short it forms a poetic-lyrical order where images create a series of crossrelationships.
August 31, 1953

ICA Archives, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.5.1.2.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 7.

The New Brutalism

THEO CROSBY

By 1955, New Brutalism had become a frequent topic of conversation in English architectural circles thanks, in large part, to the construction and publication of the Smithsons school
at Hunstanton. Here Theo Crosby frames New Brutalism in terms of a re-evaluation of modernism and an evocation of Japanese architecture.A.K.
When I hear the word contemporary, I reach for my revolver. X.B.
In 1954, a new and long overdue explosion took place in architectural theory. For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the
coinage of M. le Corbusier and had created a styleContemporaryeasily recognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of modern
details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti. The reaction appeared at
last in the shape of the Hunstanton School (by Alison and Peter Smithson) an
illustration of the New Brutalism. The name is new; the method, a re-evaluation of those advanced buildings of the 1920s and 30s whose lessons (because
of a few plaster cracks) have been forgotten. As well as this, there are certain
lessons in the formal use of proportion (from Professor Wittkower) and a
respect for the sensuous use of each material (from the Japanese). Naturally, a
theory which takes the props from the generally accepted and easily produced
Contemporary, has generated a lot of opposition. All over the country we
have been asked to explain the new message. In the hope of provoking as many
readers as possible to think more deeply about the form and purpose of their
art, we asked the Smithsons as the prophets of the new movement, to supply a
definition or statement, which, somewhat edited, appears below.
Our belief that the New Brutalism is the only possible development
for this moment from the Modern Movement, stems not only from the
knowledge that Le Corbusier is one of its practitioners (starting with the
bton brt of the Unit), but because fundamentally both movements

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 1718. Theo Crosby, from Architectural Design 1955, p. 1.

18

OCTOBER

have used as their yardstick Japanese architectureits underlying

idea, principles, and spirit.
Japanese Architecture seduced the generation spanning 1900, producing in Frank Lloyd Wright, the open plan and an odd sort of constructed decoration; in Le Corbusier, the purist aestheticthe sliding
screens, continuous space, the power of white and earth colors; in
Mies, the structure and the screen as absolutes. Through Japanese
Architecture, the longings of the generation of Garnier and Behrens1
found FORM.
But for the Japanese their FORM was only part of a general conception
of life, a sort of reverence for the natural world and, from that, for the
materials of the built world.2
It is this reverence for materialsa realization of the affinity which can
be established between building and manwhich is at the root of the
so-called New Brutalism.
It has been mooted that the Hunstanton School, which probably owes
as much to the existence of Japanese Architecture as to Mies, is the first
realization of the New Brutalism in England.
This particular handling of Materials, not in the craft sense of Frank
Lloyd Wright but in intellectual appraisal, has been ever present in the
Modern Movement, as indeed familiars of the early German architects
have been prompt to remind us.3
What is new about the New Brutalism among Movements is that it finds
its closest affinities, not in a past architectural style, but in peasant
dwelling forms. It has nothing to do with craft. We see architecture as
the direct result of a way of life.
1954 has been a key year. It has seen American advertising equal Dada in its
impact of overlaid imagery; that automotive masterpiece, the Cadillac convertible,
parallel-with-the-ground (four elevations) classic box on wheels; the start of a new
way of thinking by CIAM; the revaluation of the work of Gropius; the repainting
of the Villa at Garches?
Architectural Design ( January 1955), p. 1.
1.
The architects Tony Garnier (18691948) and Peter Behrens (18681940)Ed.
2.
The Japanese film Gate of Hell, showed houses, a monastery, and palace, in color for the
first time.
3.
See Walter Segals letter in Architectural Design (February 1954).

The New Brutalism

REYNER BANHAM

In this seminal essay, Reyner Banham brings together a number of the key terms that had
been gathering around New Brutalism, defining the movement in three theses: 1,
Memorability as an Image; 2, Clear exhibition of Structure; and 3, Valuation of Material
as found. New Brutalisms revision of the modern movement, Banham argues, is partly
the work of his generation of architectural historians, who had recently begun to write its history. Banham also rethinks his response to Parallel of Life and Art here, seeing in the exhibition a powerful example of how image and texture might be bound together.A.K.
Larchitecture, cest avec des matieres bruts, tablir
des rapports mouvants.
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture
Introduce an observer into any field of forces, influences or communications
and that field becomes distorted. It is common opinion that Das Kapital has played
old harry with capitalism, so that Marxists can hardly recognize it when they see it,
and widespread diffusion of Freuds ideas have wrought such havoc with clinical
psychology that any intelligent patient can make a nervous wreck of his analyst.
What has been the influence of contemporary architectural historians on the history of contemporary architecture?
They have created the Modern Movementthis was known even before Basil
Taylor took up arms against false historicismand beyond that they have offered
a rough classification of the isms which are the thumbprint of Modernity into
two main types: one, like Cubism, is a label, a recognition tag, applied by critics
and historians to a body of work which appears to have certain consistent principles running through it, whatever the relationship of the artists; the other, like
Futurism, is a banner, a slogan, a policy consciously adopted by a group of artists,
whatever the apparent similarity or dissimilarity of their products. And it is entirely characteristic of The New Brutalismour first native art-movement since the
New Art-History arrived herethat it should confound these categories and
belong to both at once.
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 1928. Architectural Review, December 1955, pp. 35461.

Eduardo Paolozzi

LAWRENCE ALLOWAY

In this text on Eduardo Paolozzi, Lawrence Alloway makes specific reference to Lszl
Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, whose explorations of modern vision had informed much of
Parallel of Life and Art. Of particular interest to New Brutalist discourse is Alloways
emphasis on new ways of seeing wholes, as well as his early references to ideas later associated with Marshall McLuhan concerning the connection between media and messages.A.K.
A negative fact about the art of Eduardo Paolozzi is that it rejects much that
modern art has needed in the past. His frame of reference is not a tradition or a
studio, as these institutions have been understood; it is the great arena of visual
material, art and non-art, typical of the twentieth century. Since 1953, Paolozzi
has pursued the human image in art, but not exactly on the terms of traditional
art. For example, though influenced by Marini at one stage in his career, he does
not, as Marini does, refer to time-bound riches of our art heritage. Some of
Paolozzis forms certainly refer to art traditions, but only in the way in which he
also refers to ads in the New Yorker, exhibits in the Natural History Museum, or
strips in a comic book. Paolozzi, more than any other artist working in England,
integrates the modern flood of visual symbols, a primary fact of urban culture,
with his art.
The images he collectsof a sexy model girl, a mutilated war veteran, an
aerial view of a city, and so ondo not in themselves set his imagination working.
Rather, when he draws or models, his experience of visual symbols (art and nonart) is part of his way of seeing. The new reality revealed by modern photography,
which Paolozzi uses, is current in modern art. It is closely connected, for example,
with Bauhaus ideas, especially as developed by Moholy-Nagy and Kepes in the
United States. These artists, among others, saw the field and defined it formally
and theoretically. But Paolozzi approaches the material from the opposite direction; to him motion studies, microphotography, illustrated magazines are natural
sources. To him Moholy-Nagys Vision in Motion is not a grammar, but just another
collection of images, in line with Life.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 2931. Lawrence Alloway, from Architectural Design, April 1956, p. 133.

This Is Tomorrow. Installation views, Whitechapel Gallery. 1956.

Editorial

MICHAEL PEARSON

In this brief editorial, Michael Pearson takes up a number of themes central to New
Brutalism, including the use of topology, seen here in the work of Nigel Henderson and
Eduardo Paolozzi.A.K.
Discussing basic architectural questions, Moholy-Nagy said, Architecture
will be brought to its fullest realization when the deepest knowledge of human life
as a total event in the biological whole is available. One of its important components is the ordering of man in space, making space comprehensible by its articulation. The root of architecture lies in the mastery of the problem of space; its
practical development lies in technological advance.1
Space cannot be considered as an isolated quality but only relative to the
presence of man and the eye of the beholder. As one moves about in an environment one receives a visual image of the experience, perhaps mentally appreciating topological rather than metric properties in the same way that a child considers qualities of closure, proximity, separation, and continuity before straight lines,
angles, parallels, and regular forms. 2 The stressed photo above by Nigel
Henderson shows the relation of figures to the spatial complex of the street,
whose topological qualities are greatly heightened by the distortions, giving one a
visual image of the whole scene.
The spatial systems of Radcliffe Square, Oxford, and Seaton Delaval conform
to the Renaissance ideal of having one viewpointor a series along a clearly
defined axisderived from the discovery of perspective. []
At the turn of the century the Cubists, and later the Futurists and De Stijl,
evolved and developed a new conception of space which has been continually
modified by succeeding generations. Consequently we now have a new set of principles from those of the Renaissance architect. Linear perspective is no longer a
1.
Lszl Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947).
2.
Jean Piaget and Brbel Inhelder, The Childs Conception of Space (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1956).
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 3536. Michael Pearson from 244: Journal of the University of Manchester
Architecture and Planning Society 7, Winter 19567, p. 2.

This article has been cited by:

The New Brutalism

ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON

This short text was the Smithsons contribution to Thoughts in Progress, a monthly discussion forum in Architectural Design, the April 1957 issue of which was dedicated to
New Brutalism. It contains one of the Smithsons most famous comments about the movementthat it 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. Resisting the easy reduction of
New Brutalism to techniques such as poured concrete, the Smithsons insist that their project is fundamentally ethical in nature.A.K.
If Academicism can be defined as yesterdays answers to todays problems,
then obviously the objectives and aesthetic techniques of a real architecture (or a
real art) must be in constant change. In the immediate postwar period it seemed
important to show that architecture was still possible, and we determined to set
against loose planning and formabdication, a compact disciplined, architecture.
Simple objectives once achieved change the situation, and the techniques
used to achieve them become useless.
So new objectives are established.
From individual buildings, disciplined on the whole by classical aesthetic
techniques, we moved on to an examination of the whole problem of human associations and the relationship that building and community has to them. From this
study has grown a completely new attitude and non-classical aesthetic.
Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take into
account Brutalisms attempt to be objective about realitythe 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.
Up to now Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is
ethical.
Architectural Design 27 (April 1957), p. 113.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 37. Alison and Peter Smithson from Architectural Design, April 1957, p. 113.

Cover of Architectural Design. 1957.

Statement

NIGEL HENDERSON

This brief statement by the artist Nigel Henderson prefaces a series of his photographs that
appeared in Uppercase 3, a journal edited by Theo Crosby. Published in the same issue as a
portfolio of the Smithsons work that stressed the importance of holistic thinking, Henderson
emphasizes his inability to writeand also perhaps to workin such a fashion while nevertheless returning to ideas of materiality and the importance of the artifact.A.K.
I thought I would try to write directly to illuminate my work. But found I
couldnt do it. It involved me in using words like a criticin the pretension, for
me, of exact word-usage. WordBrick; WallSentence; RoomParagraph;
HouseConcept, and the totality of the relationship of house to houses and to
environment.
A philosophy, in short.
Then I tried to write about time. The Rodent Time, I called it. Erosion, the
saliva, the Lick of Time; Corrosion, the Teeth. Agents of Destruction, Agents of
Revelation. The calligraphy of Time that reveals, for instance, the sinews, the
fibrous quality of woodthe lines of retreat or weaknesses of materials that reveal
its innate quality: as sand subsides into water; as cracks canter across walls, or
stains seep up like explosions flowering out like pancakes. Or as boots broach,
their layers arching under uneven strain like geological strata; their leather the
rind of fruit, pithy, the cobblers tacks eager to be out and off, like seed pips. A
new boot is a fine monument to a manan artifact. A worn-out boot traces his
images with a heroic pathos and takes its part as universal image-maker in the suburbs of the mind. Time works like an analytical chemist with its tinctures and titrations. It gives us intimations of the reality of things.
Nigel Henderson, Uppercase 3 (1960).

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, p. 47. Nigel Henderson from Uppercase 3, 1960.

Nigel Henderson. Colchester 1 and Colchester 2. 1960.

Eduardo Paolozzis
Psychological Atlas*

JOHN-PAUL STONARD

Eduardo Paolozzi compiled his collage book Psychological Atlas while living in
Paris in 1949 and discovering, as he put it, the relics of the prewar Dada and
Surrealist movement. Preserved as an archival item, Psychological Atlas is rarely
seen; in a poor physical condition, it is kept together by yellowing scotch tape and
desiccated glue. Its appearance approximates Paolozzis own definition of the
modern relic as something fortuitous and ephemeral, somewhat dusty, pathetic,
and absurd, like the votive crutches and other macabre objects that the beneficiaries of miraculous cures have left in a shrine like that of Lourdes.1 Psychological
Atlas is clearly a homage to the remnants of Surrealism, made as Paolozzi was
meeting such figures as Tristan Tzara and Alberto Giacometti, with the knowledge
that the movement was drawing its last collective breath.2
The psychology Paolozzi surveys in his collage book is that of popular
imagery: robots, animals, landscapes, bodybuilders, politicians, ethnographic
images, industrial architecture, film stars, and the whole assortment of sensational or exotic material to be found in illustrated newspapers, from the
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung to Life magazine. A number of mont ages evoke
Surrealist ethnographic assemblages, but the tone is modified by the inclusion
of a collaged television set on the opening page and a color image of an
American city a few pages further on. Scenarios created by cut-out figures pasted onto strange settings evoke scenes of contemporary life, using familiar
methods of Surrealist disjunction. Other tableaux are more bewildering, show* This essay is derived from a paper given at the Contemporary Art Workshop at the University of
Chicago, February 2010. Thanks to Christine Mehring, to Jennifer Wild, and to all those who participated, and also to the staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, London.
1.
Paolozzi, quoted in Interview with Eduardo Roditi, in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and
Interviews, ed. Robin Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 86.
2.
Paolozzi arrived in Paris in June 1947. Undoubtedly, he would have visited the last major group
exhibition of the movement, Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, which opened at the Galerie
Maeght in July, and he would have talked to Tzara about his political condemnation of the movement, formulated in the lecture Le Surralisme et laprs-guerre given at the Sorbonne in April that year.
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 5162. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Brutalism of Life and Art*

ALEX KITNICK

Eduardo Paolozzi
In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo
Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at Londons Hanover
Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed a
scorn of bourgeois finish.1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological
finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of sandy, textured plaster arranged in odd patternsrashes of bumps, clusters of squares, and sinuous lines. Though many had
titles such as Squid and Land and Sea, and thus claimed a relationship with the natural world, none bore easily identifiable subjects within themselves. Appearing
less worked by hand than weathered by nature, their textures were akin to encrusted skeletons or long-dried tire tracks.2 They were not so much abstract as they
were artifacts, cast-off things and relics that spoke of a distant world.
Poised on inelegant pedestals, Paolozzis freestanding sculptures possessed
similar qualities, finding their forms in plaster of Paris, patinated bronze, and
encrusted metal rods. All had a basic quality about them, their scorn of finish stressing their physical properties, and in many cases there seemed to be a correspondence between the medium used and the form an object took, as if each were a
study in the properties of its material. Where the bronze sculptures featured tabletop-like surfaces that gave way to alternately organic- and totemic-looking protuber* This essay derives from the first chapter of my dissertation, Eduardo Paolozzi and Others, 19471958
(Princeton University, 2010). I would like to thank Beatriz Colomina, Brigid Doherty, and Esther da
Costa Meyer for their close readings of my work. Special thanks are due to my advisor, Hal Foster,
whose incisive support of my project was crucial to its realization. The friendship and scholarship of
Annie Bourneuf and Craig Buckley inspired me as well.
1.
Herbert Read, New Aspects of British Sculpture, in British Council, The XXVI Venice
Biennale, The British Pavilion (London: Westminster Press, 1952), n.p. The exhibition Kenneth King,
Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull ran from February 21 to March 18, 1950.
2.
One of Paolozzis bas-reliefs had been shown previously in the exhibition Les Mains blouies
at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1949. See Frank MacEwen, Eduardo Paolozzi, Derrire le Miroir 22
(October 4, 1949), n.p.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 6386. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Another Brick in the Wall

ANTHONY VIDLER
We were stuck, and are still stuck in many ways,
with the problem of the brick.
Peter Smithson, 1959
Daddys flown across the ocean / Leaving just a
memory / Snapshot in the family album / Daddy,
what else did you leave for me? / Daddy, whatdja
leave behind for me?!? / All in all it was just a brick
in the wall. / All in all it was all just bricks in the
wall.
Pink Floyd, Another Brick
in the Wall, 1979
Full Disclosure
Beginning architectural studies at Cambridge in the fall of 1960, I was presented with what in retrospect was one of the most didactic of New Brutalist buildings,
the new extension to 1 Scroope Terrace designed by Colin (Sandy) St. John Wilson
and Alex Hardy and completed two years earlier. Reyner Banham opined that into
this relatively small building were poured most of the intellectual aspirations of the
Wilson, Smithson generation.1 A two-story cube, with thirteen-inch thick brick walls,
exposed concrete floor slabs, wood and tubular steel details, and a bton brut projection pulpit sculpted like a van Doesburg axonometric, it seemed to realize everything
that the Smithsons unbuilt Soho house of 1952 aspired to be. Carefully proportioned according to Le Corbusiers Modulor, it was also a living memory of the neoPalladian, pre-Brutalist moment that was influenced briefly by Rudolf Wittkowers
publication of Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism in 1949. And a living memory at that, with lectures from Leslie Martin, founder of Circle and friend of Naum
Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, and Ben Nicholson, and design criticisms from Wilson and
1.
Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: The Architectural Press,
1966), p. 126.
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 105132. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Life at the Threshold

HADAS STEINER

Territory
In 1949, the year that the architects Peter and Alison Smithson moved to
London to begin their professional careers, an ideological controversy over the
avant-garde role of architecture in the postwar period erupted within the Congrs
International dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM). Le Corbusier, who had founded
the organization twenty-one years before, sparked the dispute with his address to
the seventh congress in Bergamo, Italy. After declaring the pursuit of the industrialized housing prototypes and functionally zoned urbanism that were characteristic of the early phase of modernism obsolete, he proposed that successive meetings be dedicated to the drafting of a new charter. That charter, he stated without
much in the way of explanation, would be known as the Charte de lHabitat. At
the time, habitat was a clearly defined, if broad, concept in the biological fields
that governed the interconnectedness of the organisms that inhabited a region. In
the interwar period, a similar urban discourse had grown up dedicated to the territorial arrangements that social activities assume.1 Until this point, however,
CIAM had been focused on the development of a standard that would accommodate the most rudimentary necessities of habitationor dwelling, as this goal was
translated into English.2 Le Corbusier remained vague about the architectural
application that he hoped this ecological concept would assume at CIAM, though
he requested that all the national delegations participate in the discussion over
the place of lHabitat in the human complex.3
Peter and Alison Smithson both joined CIAM during the period of this highstakes controversy and were instrumental in shaping the ecological debate in terms
1.
Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (1947; repr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 3.
2.
The first CIAM publication was entitled Die Wohnung fr Existenzminimum (Frankfurt:
Englert und Schlosser, 1930) and was based on a traveling exhibition of the same name.
3.
From a circular letter sent after an Extraordinary Council Meeting held in Paris in May of
1952 and signed by Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt; quoted in Eric Mumford,
The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism: 19281960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 218.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 133155. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Edward Wright. Mural for Union Internationale des Architectes Congress. 1961.
Courtesy of the Estate of Edward Wright.

Nigel Henderson. Screen. 194952/60.

Julian Schnabel directing Miral. 2010. Jose Haro.

Julian Schnabel. Miral. 2010. Jose Haro.

Julian Schnabel. Miral. 2010. Jose Haro.

Miral: A Response to Rabbi Kula

RACHID BENZINE

Dear Julian, Dear Rula:

The letter by Rabbi Kula raises a lot of interesting points about how your film
can be understood by the Jewish community. I think that there are several ways to
respond to each of the arguments used by the Israeli supporters, the political realists,
and those who will want you to fit into one label.
For those who will expect to see the film as a fair resume of the conflict, you
have to respond that you didnt want to make a political film, even if you are aware that the
film can have a political impact. You are responsible for what you say, but not for the way
people will understand (or not) what you say. And everyone will interpret things
through their own stories. But the thing that struck me is that they will look at the
film through their collective stories (Jewish and/or Israeli), but not through their
personal, individual, and specific stories and personalities.
Thats the worst thing in many situations of conflict: there are no more individuals,
there are only groups. You must give a sort of mechanical and instinctive support for
those who look like you, who think like you, who pray like you. And when you share
that, then you can no more break the consensus with your own community. Thats why
most of the reactions the Rabbi mentioned are said in the name of the group: they are
not personal opinions.
The amazing power of a film like Miral is that it raises the I speaker: its the illumination of one story, one destiny, of one person who fights not to be overwhelmed
by the whole conflict. Miral has to find her own way, to choose between her personal
chance to pursue her education and her collective destiny. Your film is amazingly beautiful
because at the center of it, there is one question, strong and necessary for every human
being: Who do I want to be and to become? That question is extinguished in situations of
conflict because then you have an imposed (consciously or unconsciously) responsibility towards your people. We go back again to the question of the choice, which is
so important, and you have to insist on that. And the people who will watch the film
will also have to choose the level with which they want to understand it.
You know, the most important thing for you will be not to answer peoples reactions or questions. Just answer them by asking one single question: Why do you think you
react like that? I think that the reasons for their reactions are much more important than the
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 211212. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

212

OCTOBER

reactions themselves. If you can bring them to wonder about the way they are prisoners
of their representations, then youll have done your job. You cannot change people: you
can make them aware of why they are the way they are. So if you show how powerful the
conflict is in shaping their views (because it distorts a beautiful story into a propaganda film, for example), I think they will change their mind. Emotions are not what we
are: they are just signals. So ask your audience to wonder about these signals: what do they tell
them about themselves?
Another idea: people like the man who said that it was a Hamas propaganda
film think that they speak the language of reason because they speak about real
politics, and because they feel deeply rooted in the ground, in reality, and not in
emotions. People such as him would say that the film is playing too much on emotion and is totally disconnected from reality. For me, its the contrary. They are
prisoners of emotions, of the ideas they have about the conflict; they dont really
use their reason when it comes to judging the film. So here is the paradox: the film
uses the language of emotions to convey a reasonable, meaningful, and constructive message,
whereas the aforementioned people are using the language of politics (referring to real politics) but to convey an emotional message.
Another idea: for those who dont want to hope anything anymore because
they are afraid to be disappointed, you can say that the film is not really about
hope. Its about the possibility of hope. Its about what we shall do to give hope some
space to come again. And the first thing we shall do is leave behind us all those representations that make us react with emotions and not with our head. Miral is not a
picture of the conflict: its a question about our responsibility (what do we do for these children to take them away from violence), and about ourselves (why do I think what I think
about that conflict)?
Last idea: I dont think that taking Miral as a policy paper on the conflict is a
good idea. Because for me, it would be in contradiction with saying that its not a
political film. Its a film with potential political impact, but its not a political film. You are
not acting yourself in that conflict, but you can give people the desire to act themselves. You are an artist, not a political scientist. Stick to that position.
For me you are a translator: you translate the reality into poetry, into emotions, and
then these emotions can be translated into concrete actions. But you cannot be expected to
take these actions by yourself, and thats why you cannot in an artistic field give a
restitution of that conflict and a position about it: its not your job.
These are some of the ideas I wanted to share. If I think of anything else, I will
write you!

Image-breaking, God-making:
Paolozzis Brutalism

BEN HIGHMORE
In a world dusted with Strontium 90, the
note of impotent fury can again be heard.1
On May 2, 1958, The Times published a short article about the artist Eduardo
Paolozzi, which is partly an account of an illustrated lecture that Paolozzi had just
delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and partly a cursory discussion of his sculptures and his working processes. The articles title uses a phrase that
Paolozzi frequently employed to describe his working practice: Metamorphosis of
Rubbish. In its mocking and patrician prose the article claims that Paolozzi has
an easy confidence which, no doubt, would not be shaken by any unfriendly insinuation that, metamorphosed or not, his work is still rubbish.2 That debris and
junk, which is the material starting point of Paolozzis sculptures, could undergo
some form of metamorphosis and still remain unassimilable bric-a-brac is, of
course, not the point that the journalist is trying to make (the journalists joke is
that the sculptures might well be worthless rubbish), yet it is an inadvertent insight
that we could glean from (and against) the articles bemused desire to mock and
denigrate Paolozzis work.
At the start of the article The Times correspondent writes:
Lured along to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street by
the promise of an illustrated statement by Eduardo Paolozzi widely
advertised as Image-making, God-breaking we were disappointed to
learn from the chairman that the title was not quite right. It should,
apparently, have read Image-breaking, God-makinga somewhat
ambitious commission, one felt, nevertheless.3
God-breaking is what the establishment (and The Times is nothing if not its
mouthpiece) had come to expect from its iconoclastic modern artists. Imagemaking, God-breaking names an uneasy settlement of avant-gardism: however
1.
2.
3.

Michael Middleton, Eduardo Paolozzi (London: Methuen, 1963), n.p.

Metamorphosis of Rubbish: Mr. Paolozzi Explains His Process, The Times (May 2, 1958), p. 7.
Ibid., p. 7.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 87104. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Clock Time

ROSALIND E. KRAUSS

Christian Marclay is a holdout against the eclipse of the medium. This requires
that he embed his work in what I elsewhere term a technical support.1 (If traditional art required artisanal supports of various kindscanvas for oil painting, plaster
and wax for bronze casting, light-sensitive emulsion for photographycontemporary
art makes use of technical supportscommercial or industrial productsto which it
then makes recursive reference, in the manner of modernist arts reflex of self-criticism. For Marclay, this technical support is commercial sound film, from which he
has extrapolated that process into pure synchronicity. Earlier, this was to be found in
his focus on synch-sound in the use of mostly Hollywood films for his masterful Video
Quartet (2002).
An anthology of film clips joined top-to-bottom, Video Quartet runs four loops
of clips from commercial sound films on four DVD screens, spaced out along a
wall. Sometimes the synchrony is visual, as circular forms (phonograph turntable,
roulette wheel, trumpet rim) play simultaneously across the visual field. At other
times, Marclay seems intent to contrast sound and silence, a historical divide over
which sound jumped in 1929 to turn movies into talkies. At such points, it is the
very era of silence that Marclay ambitiously wants his viewers to see. How to do this
is not obvious, but one electric moment presents cockroaches spilling onto a
piano keyboard and scurrying over it (soundlessly, of course).
The Clock (2010), Christian Marclays latest work, is also a compilation of film
clipsfragments of commercial films, joined end-to-end. Projected in video on a
wall as a segmented twelve by twenty-one foot image, The Clock selects fragments
in which the dials of wristwatches and large free-standing clocks figure prominently. Doubling this temporal focus, The Clock stretches over twenty-four hours of
audience and projected time.2
Marclay has turned to pure synchronicity as the undeniable support for post1.
See Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition, October 116 (Spring 2006) and A Voyage
on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
2.
My thanks to Malcolm Turvey for his reading and helpful critiques of this essay.

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 213217. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tacita Dean. The Line of Fate. 2011.

Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New
York / Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.
The depicted hands are those of the late Leo Steinberg.