Brutalism: An Apology

Brutalism did not ask to be hated. It arrived in a particular postwar moment with genuine beliefs about what buildings owed to people, and the people — eventually, over decades, with mounting certainty — decided the buildings had been wrong. This book is not a rebuttal. It is an apology, in the old sense: a reasoned account of a position that the person holding it still believes.

Claus Morrow-Sink spent fourteen years visiting Brutalist buildings across six countries, speaking with the people who use them and the people who would like to stop using them. His method is simple: he listens. His conclusions are more complicated. He does not ask you to love the buildings. He asks you to consider what it would mean if the buildings had been right and we had been wrong, and what we would owe them if that were true.

The book ends with a chapter titled 'The Buildings That Are Still There,' which is shorter than you would expect and longer than you would hope.

Required for anyone who has ever walked past a concrete tower and felt, without wanting to, something.