Vignette City 28.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

Brutalism was an architectural movement of the mid-20th Century. A fat, ugly, mean bastard child of Modernism. From the French beton brut meaning “raw concrete”. Massive, commanding, and forbidding, it was effective for government buildings and shopping mall exteriors. See: The University of East Anglia, Western City Gate Belgrade, Habitat 67, the AT&T Long Lines Building, the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, the back side of your local grocery store. Some say there is beauty in the rough hewed brick and mortar because, like a chrysalis, it protects that which is most warm and delicate about its vital innards. Might we all be Brutalists.

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