Brutalism

Thursday

Deborah Ross

It’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and while the running time isn’t an issue, as it is engrossing enough, it did frequently feel familiar. What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream? I couldn’t fathom if it had anything new to say. It felt more like classy potboiler – love! Sex! Money! Power! Raw concrete! What film

Tuesday

Jon Morrison

The surprising second life of Colonel Seifert

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the skyline of London was dominated by the work of one architect: not Sir Christopher Wren, but Colonel Richard Seifert. But while Wren is universally admired, Seifert has been reviled. Architects hated his success; the public his uncompromising brutalist aesthetic. Yet now, more than two decades after his death, that appears to be changing. Seifert – who did a spell in the Royal Engineers during the second world war and then insisted on being addressed by his military rank throughout his life – was often said to have had more of an impact on the capital than anyone bar the

Thursday

Helen Barrett

Never pour scorn on Croydon

‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools. London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’.

Thursday

Helen Barrett

Abstract and concrete: the beauty of brutalism

Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents romanticise it, yearn for the civic principles that built it and gloss over its failings; the young see period charm in flat roofs and straight lines, while the old associate them with deprivation; the wealthy mostly avoid it — and many people have no choice but to live in it. Nearly 100 years after Le Corbusier set out his five points of modern architecture the British are still arguing about its merits, partly because we still live with so much of it: housing, offices and civic and industrial buildings. Two