Reappraisal of the Concept of New Brutalism in Contemporary Architecture

In the 1960s, the New Brualism movement witnessed two opposing conceptions that can give rise to "Smithsons’ Brutalism and Banham’s Brutalism" The first one had the ambition to propose an "art of inhabitation" . This art of inhabitation also involves the use of "as found" materials. For the Smithsons, "as found was a new seeing of the ordinary, an openness as to how prosaic "things" could re-energise our inventive activity” . For the Smithsons, "Until now, brutalism has only been the subject of stylistic discussion, whereas its essence is ethical." In 1966, Reyner Banham published the first historiography associated with the New Brutalism movement. In this book, entitled The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? . Banham attempts to list and illustrate a series of projects that he considers representative of a "brutalist style". The English critic focuses instead on the aesthetic stakes of New Brutalism. Nevertheless, both visions put forward the use of as found materials. In the field of contemporary architecture, we can perceive the aesthetic/ethical duality in the theories of the reuse of "as found" materials. Our article aims to characterize the two approaches of New Brutalism and to understand how these conceptions are reappraised in the field of contemporary architecture. More precisely, we will investigate the question of the reuse of materials through case studies, which, in a period of "climatic urgency", decreed by the European Parliament in particular, re-actualizes the ethical ambition of New Brutalism