Between brutalists: The Banham hypothesis and the Smithson way of life

This essay revisits the debates on the New Brutalism as it emerged in Great Britain in the early 1950s. The shifting positions of its main propagators, Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham, are scrutinised through a re-reading of the polemics of the period and its aftermath. Conventionally, Banham's ground-breaking essay of 1955 ‘The New Brutalism’ is used as a starting-point for a unified history of New Brutalism. However, as it turns out, the Smithsons and Banham held very different opinions about the direction of the New Brutalist project. Whereas Banham advocated an integration between architecture and the latest technologies, the Smithsons sought to combine modern architecture with a multiplicity of tendencies within British culture, reaching back to Arts and Crafts concepts, among others. To open up the discourse and to measure the various shifts, the essay discusses the concept of ‘Image’, identified by Banham as one of the key concepts of New Brutalism, in relation to the various statements made by the Smithsons. In contrast to Banham, the Smithsons defined New Brutalism by laying emphasis on the material qualities of architecture and the aspects of process and making in architectural construction. This was related to their ambition to redesign the system of relationships between the everyday, domesticity, labour and the larger society. In short, it was a different ‘way of life’ that was behind the Smithsons' project for New Brutalism.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.OLD Woningbou