What does our love of brutalist buildings say about us" First on Tumblr, then on Instagram: frame-filling, deep-shadowed, looming edifices, gray and often looking perpetually damp, pocked by windows, frilled with balconies, enlivened by murals or supergraphics or plants.
But popularity breeds restlessness. Paul Rudolph?s bush-hammered walls" Been there. The Barbican" Done that. Boston City Hall" A thousand op-eds. Flaine" Boutique ski resort. Marina City" Album cover.
The eye needs to travel. So social media gave us more: bigger buildings, more flamboyant and flowing forms, more spectacular settings. Like Yugoslavia: first through the photographs of Jan Kempenaers, widely published in 2013, then through Instagram accounts like @_di_ma and @socialistmodernism for a daily dose of concrete. To an American audience the forms, names and locations were strange, adding to the abstraction and the othering headlines: ?These 1970s brutalist buildings in Serbia look like Star Wars spaceships,? said Quartz, who filed them under the category ?Futuristic Finds.?
It was as if a forest of concrete mushrooms had sprouted and grown to gargantuan size while we were otherwise occupied. New books on Brutalism, high on dramatic photography, low on context, rushed to incorporate the most charismatic examples, like the stalactic wings of Dorde and Miodrag ?ivkovi??s Monument to the Battle of the Sutjeska (1965-71) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Or the space frame...