Béton
Brut

What was it?

Le Corbusier described his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille in 1953 as béton brut — raw concrete. He meant it literally: strip the formwork, leave whatever the concrete looks like, don't plaster it or paint it or apologize for it.

Architects in London, Boston, New Haven, Belgrade, Montreal, Chandigarh, and Tokyo ran with it. By the 1960s they were building housing estates, universities, civic centres, and memorials entirely out of exposed concrete. Le Corbusier planned entire cities in India with it. The Soviet Union built vast quantities of it, mostly housing. Post-colonial governments across Asia and Africa used it to signal modernity. In America, Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer gave it to government agencies and universities. Some of it is extraordinary. Some of it is grim. Most of it is both.

Most of it got built between 1953 and the late 1970s. Then it became unpopular. Then a lot of it got demolished. Then people started trying to save what was left. Boston City Hall was just designated a historic landmark in 2024. The FBI is moving out of the Hoover Building and nobody agrees what to do with it.