In the annals of architectural criticism, few essays have exerted as profound an influence as Reyner Banham’s "The New Brutalism," published in the December 1955 issue of The Architectural Review . Banham did not merely describe a nascent stylistic trend; he weaponized a term that would define the material and ethical landscape of post-war reconstruction. For contemporary architects, historians, and students searching for a version of this foundational text, the quest is often driven by a need to bypass poorly digitized, corrupted, or incomplete optical character recognition (OCR) scans of the original mid-century layout.
Initially, it was a "moral attitude toward materials and structure." It emphasized honesty in construction—meaning that materials were used in their raw, unfinished state ("as found") and that the structural systems were fully exposed and understood. reyner banham the new brutalism pdf fixed
In "The New Brutalism," Banham sought to codify a new attitude that was emerging from the avant-garde. He famously isolated three core qualities that defined a New Brutalist building: In the annals of architectural criticism, few essays
By the mid-1950s, the early idealism of the International Style had begun to stagnate. In Britain, post-war reconstruction was underway, but much of the new architecture felt watered down, safe, and overly sentimental. Initially, it was a "moral attitude toward materials
Banham's 1966 book title poses the central question of the movement: Is New Brutalism a matter of ethical principles about how to build, or is it merely a style, an aesthetic choice? The Smithsons, the architects most closely associated with the movement, argued that "Brutalism has only been the subject of stylistic discussion, whereas its essence is ethical". However, Banham himself, through his book, seems to come down on the side of it being an aesthetic, as he presents a "barrage of examples of buildings that use board formed concrete and brick".