brutalism

noun

Etymology: From brutal + -ism. Popularized in 1954 by the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson, from earlier Swedish nybrutalism (“New Brutalism”), after French béton brut (“raw concrete”), the material favored by Le Corbusier.

1. A style of modernist architecture characterized by angular geometry and overt signs of the construction process.

   “In similar spirit, Nigel Henderson, a member of the Independent Group's Brutalist core, exhibited black and white photographs of the East End at the 1953 ICA show Parallel of Life and Art which stressed the unsanitised reality of everyday life: Peter Smithson's defence of Brutalism through the categorical rhetoric of objectivity and truth, quoted above, echoes Anderson.”

   “2004, B. M. Boyle, Brutalism, R. Stephen Sennott (editor), Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture, Volume 1: A-F, Taylor & Francis (Fitzroy Dearborn), page 181, Nonetheless, despite its radical appearance, Brutalism could claim, if not legitimacy, at least ancestry in pre-World War II modernism.”