What Was The New Brutalism Really About Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

What Was The New Brutalism Really About - Essay Example As for the public, they just hate it. The fall-out persists into this century. Before the public can give any large-scale commitment again to architects, a line f mutual understanding has to be drawn under the circumstances which generated the styles and forms f this period. The picturesque architecture f the 1940s and early 1950s is currently enjoying new interest. Its most well-known example is the buildings f the Festival f Britain. This was a national festival put on six years after the end f war, in 1951, which temporarily occupied the area f the South Bank f the Thames directly opposite London's West End. It is considered against the once again popular Ealing comedy, Passport to Pimlico. The Festival buildings embody what's been seen either as a happy marriage or an abominable birth. They are the result f the fusion between two apparently opposed traditions: the rigours f international modernism and the English picturesque tradition, a tradition which implies design first and foremost in terms f the composition f a series f visual pictures.1 In film, there was a broad, and perhaps equally popular equivalent: the Ealing comedy. These quintessentially English films emanated from the Ealing Studio in west London, and were at their best in this period. They epitomise the spirit f post-war Britain and London in particular: a hybrid world where there was a simultaneous longing for radical change and tangible continuity. As if to express this strange contradiction, the comedies feature gangs f lovable robbers, charming and funny murderers and, in the case f Passport to Pimlico, sensible and conventional anarchists. Both architecture and film began to go markedly out f fashion in the second post-war decade. They were replaced with monochrome, and supposedly true-to-life genres: Brutalism's parallel was Britain's version f the New Wave in cinema.2 Angstridden, alienated loners replace chirpy communities. Remorseless realism replaces happy endings. This is both an exploration f parallels between their aesthetics and their preoccupations, and an attempt to cast insight from architecture on cinema and vice versa. The idea f the hybrid is the opposite f the pure. The hybrid straddles two or more classes; its edges are unclear, and difficult to delineate, to draw a line around. The hybrid doesn't have an identifiable, categorisable form. The hybrid obscures the possibility f its reduction to an original set f parts or classes. The hybrid transgresses the edges f established forms. The pure and the hybrid polarise the two tendencies in British post-war architecture. And these two tendencies can be personified in two iconic buildings, the Skylon and Hunstanton School. The Skylon (Figure 1) was a vertical structure built for the Festival f Britain in 1950, and designed by two competition-winning architectural students, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya. Hunstanton School, another competition winner designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, was one f the first Brutalist buildings completed six years late, and crucial to Brutalism's identification as a new and challenging style (Figure 2). The presentation drawing shows the Skylon as part f a picturesque composition complete with moody sky, passing boat and Victorian railway bridge. It also shows that it is meant to be