The New Brutalism By Reyner Banham May 2026

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. the new brutalism by reyner banham

Crucially, Banham also introduces the concept of the Borrowed from the Smithsons, this aesthetic embraces the everyday, the vernacular, and the imperfect. A brutalist building does not invent a utopian order; it confronts the existing order—the water tower, the exhaust vent, the service stair—and elevates these “found” elements without ironic distance. This is where Banham’s criticism becomes radical: the beautiful is no longer a property of form, but of truthfulness . To understand Banham’s project, one must first grasp