The New Brutalism By Reyner Banham Best May 2026

Banham famously traces the movement’s paternity to two sources: the Swedish architect Hans Asplund (who coined the term “nybrutalism” in jest), and more seriously, the late work of Le Corbusier. In his analysis of the Unité d’Habitation (1952) and the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1954), Banham shows how Corbusier’s béton brut (raw concrete)—left with timber grain marks and drip streaks—became the material signifier of a new authenticity. Unlike the smooth white plaster of the Villa Savoye, brutalist concrete wears its making on its sleeve.

The Ethical as the Aesthetic: Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism and the Making of a Counter-Movement the new brutalism by reyner banham

Banham’s 1955 article, “The New Brutalism,” in the Architectural Review , first codified the movement. He identified three core principles: 1) Formal legibility of structure (the “beauty of the skeleton”), 2) Clear exhibition of materials (no paint over brick), and 3) An architecture of “image” rather than space—a building that reads as a single, memorable gestalt. This was a direct riposte to the picturesque spatial manipulation of figures like Frank Lloyd Wright. Banham famously traces the movement’s paternity to two

When critic Reyner Banham first used the term “New Brutalism” in 1955, it was almost a joke—a label for a cluster of unpolished, aggressive projects by Alison and Peter Smithson, such as the Hunstanton School (1954). By the time he published The New Brutalism in 1966, the term had been applied to everything from Marseille’s Unité d’Habitation to London’s brutalist council estates, often as a pejorative. Banham’s task was therefore forensic: to rescue the term from mere abuse and forge a precise critical framework. This paper explores how Banham shifted architectural criticism from formal description to ethical evaluation, arguing that New Brutalism’s true legacy is its demand that architecture reveal, not conceal, its means of existence. The Ethical as the Aesthetic: Reyner Banham’s The

To understand Banham’s project, one must first grasp the architectural climate of 1950s Britain. The dominant discourse was still the late Modernism of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which Banham found increasingly sterile—a “white, machine-for-living” aesthetic divorced from lived reality. The Smithsons, as members of Team X, sought to break from CIAM’s functionalist zoning. Their Hunstanton School, with its exposed steel frame, glass bricks, and visible water tanks, horrified traditionalists. Banham saw in it a return to the radical honesty of early Modernism (Gropius, Mies) but stripped of any compositional elegance.

Banham’s analysis of Hunstanton (1954) is the book’s keystone. He describes how the school makes no attempt to hide its functions. The electrical conduits run openly across ceilings. The steel columns are standard rolled sections, not encased. The brick infill is laid in a common bond, not a decorative Flemish bond. For Banham, this is not poverty of design but an “intense, almost neurotic concern with the reality of the building.” The aesthetic emerges directly from the ethical demand: Do not simulate. Do not embellish. Let the building be exactly what it is—a shelter for learning, assembled from industrial components.

Banham’s book had two major effects. First, it canonized Brutalism as a legitimate historical movement, allowing subsequent critics (Kenneth Frampton, William J.R. Curtis) to place it within a broader trajectory of tectonic expression. Second, it inadvertently provided a rationale for the movement’s excesses. As Banham later admitted, his defense of “ugliness” was misinterpreted by a generation of architects who produced genuinely inhuman, anti-urban megastructures. By the 1970s, Brutalism had become synonymous with bleak, vandalized public housing.