- Volume 65 (2020)
- Vol. 65 (2020)
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- Issue 2
- No. 2
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- Pages 193 - 212
- pp. 193 - 212
Building Concrete Democracies: New Brutalism in Great Britain, the United States, and Brazil from the 1950s to the 1980s
Pages 193 - 212
DOI https://doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2020/2/8
open-access
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
This essay explores New Brutalist architecture in transnational
perspective, focusing on the decades between the mid-1950s and the
mid-1980s. Conceived in Great Britain in the early 1950s as a creative
tool to give built expression to visions of social inclusion, New
Brutalism functioned differently as a means for the public articulation
of hierarchies of power in the United States and Brazil. At a time when
debates about American identity, notions of citizenship, and belonging
were becoming increasingly divisive, New Brutalism in the United States
lost its socially inclusive visions of the public as built equality gave
way to privilege in shaping urban spaces in the 1960s and 1970s. In
Brazil, in contrast, New Brutalism functioned as a way of framing
responses to political authoritarianism and economic modernization. By
highlighting similarities and differences in how built form was used and
interpreted in Great Britain, the United States, and Brazil, the essay
underlines architecture’s important role in giving built shape to the
(urban) public.
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