BRUT: Europe, or why architecture is not what it seems

Part of the Glasgow International Festival of 2018, this one-day event was a series of talks and discussions around architecture and the urban environment. The approach was to explore themes related to modernist architecture – or more particularly, stuff made out of concrete in Europe after the 2^ndWorld War.

The event kicked off with a talk by Owen Hatherley about the interplay between modernist housing in the UK and in the former Soviet Union, exploring the idea that somehow concrete housing projects are ‘Soviet’ either in design quality, or social engineering.  In fact, it seems more complicated than this, with the interplay between the two more reminiscent of a jazz duet.  The twentieth century witnessed developments at different points in eastern and western Europe, sometimes with a nod to each other, at other times not.

What tends to get lost in the political interpretation of architecture is that for the residents, this very often meant a substantial improvement in the quality of their housing.  Nor were there many dissenting voices around the cultural offerings incorporated into these schemes, even if a middle class liberal conscience might inwardly scream at the assumption that working-class families only really needed a pub, a bookies, and a bingo hall to keep them occupied.

The relationship of people to their built environment was explored in the context of the suburb of Silainiai, in the city of Kaunas, European Capital of Culture for 2022.  Here, resident artists had begun to explore how art could encourage residents to interact with their local environment (which it turns out was more interesting than first appeared), and thereby with each other, helping to create the kind of neighbourliness and community that everyone seems to want, but no-one is quite sure how to build or measure.  That experience was made all the more important because the one building from the original plan that was never built in Silainiai, was the cultural centre itself.

The achievements in Kaunas are interesting because they have been attained despite the apparent monolithic and repetitive nature of the housing.  Yet one of the artists in residence found that concrete was much more interesting than she first thought, and had a subtlety to it that is easy to miss.  Thus the narrative is not one of humanising a brutal environment, but of challenging perceptions of that brutality.  Concrete, it seems, is worth a second look.  As any fan of Grand Designs will tell you, concrete is often a key part of a building project, and can create fascinating textures to walls that make them far from brutal.

That beauty is also evident in Italy, where there is a form of architecture known as ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’, a tongue-in-cheek description of unfinished civic works (irrigation schemes, roads, stadia) where the point of them was as much to support local cement manufacture as to actually complete a finished structure.  Indeed, it was open to question whether even the architects thought their works would actually be finished.  And if so, this raises the question of what they are.  For the Italian artists behind the label, the thought process is simple: if architecture is a mix of form and function, and these structures have no function, then they must be pure form, or art.  Therefore the question is what to do with monumental concrete artistic expressions.  There is something extraordinary about these follies – concrete again proving itself beautiful, even when half finished.  The incomplete stand for a never-finished stadium, or the (literal) road to nowhere, take on a strange quality when left in that state.

Of course, you don’t need to go to Italy to see versions of this, and there are plenty of cities with unfinished concrete structures in them dating back decades.  The oddity with unfinished structures is their resemblance to follies (never intended for completion) or ruins (which follies are trying to imitate).  They are an unusual space, and the same can be said for buildings like St Peter’s Cardross, a ruined modernist training school for priests.  Edward Hollis argued that the importance of St Peter’s in its current state is not so much a question of what you can do with the building (destroy, re-complete, adapt, manage as a ruin), as the creative space it offers the imagination. The building itself may continue to crumble and decay, but as long as it is there, it offers inspiration for the creative.

In a similar way, remnants of the Berlin Wall, a hateful use of concrete if ever there was one, now turn up in the oddest places and have the oddest uses: the backdrop to a wedding seemed the strangest of the lot.  Yet perhaps strangeness is in its blood: the original use was startlingly strange, dividing a city representing the opposite of everything that cities themselves celebrate.  What perhaps is odd is that is that it takes that new strangeness – Berlin Wall as wedding ceremony accessory – to remind you that it had always been strange.  It has not just become so because we see it in places we do not expect.  But it is also that startling use of concrete that becomes a creative outlet itself.

Concrete as a work of beauty, as a basis for creative and artistic expression, seems a long way from the brutalist impression it is famed for. Yet as Hatherley explained, this is more a result of a determination to frame concrete, brutalist architecture, and in particular high-rise living, in a political narrative that reflects neither its potential (as shown by private refurbishments of ex-local authority high rise buildings) nor the significant improvement in living standards it offered.

If places like the Reidvale flats in Dennistoun became a haven for any amount of illegal activities, so would many places if they were never actively policed; likewise, anywhere that is not maintained and upgraded becomes irrelevant; and any place that becomes the dumping ground for those with no stake in society becomes the horror show that you would have imagined.  But it is an unsettling narrative that blames concrete (as a substance) or high-rise housing (as a structure) for this, particularly when it exists alongside seismic changes in employment patterns in post-industrial cities.  But given this narrative, the final use of the Red Road Flats in Glasgow as housing for asylum seekers, when already condemned as unsuitable for Glasgow citizens, should make everyone feel extremely uncomfortable.

It is striking that concrete apartment blocks remain a large part of the housing stock in some ex-Soviet countries.  The reason is entirely pragmatic – you just can’t knock down that volume of housing all at once, and you would have to question why housing that is still sound would be reduced to rubble.  Yet in western Europe, it seems we are both rich enough to make the choice and also stupid enough not to have a sensible conversation about what this architecture has delivered for people.

The saddest part of the story came back to the debacle in Glasgow in 2014, when it was announced that the destruction of the Red Road Flats in Glasgow would form part of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.  This was to showcase Glasgow’s regeneration, as a whole approach to housing was swept away.  As Chris Leslie observed, whilst you can understand that viewpoint, it is hard to see why the organisers of the Commonwealth Games could not understand that others did not share it.  The linking of concrete, and high-rise housing, to the ‘bad old days’, the failure of socialist urban planning, is a peculiar obsession of political classes. In reality, people just want somewhere decent to live.  It was their outrage at their former homes being turned into a political message that won the day.  The Red Road Flats are now gone, but not as part of some ghoulish celebration.

What was most striking about the whole day was that constant interplay between the apparent brutalism of concrete (the image), the way in which it nonetheless improved lives (by providing better housing), and the ways in which concrete can be beautiful, even in the unlikeliest of circumstances. What also emerged too was that concrete is just a means to an end, a way of making things that could otherwise not be made that quickly, or that cost-effectively, or that creatively.  The structures and environments it helped to create can in turn become creative places.  There is beauty in the unlikeliest of places.

BRUT Europe, featuring talks by Owen Hatherley, Pablo Arboleda, Hussein Mitha, Edward Hollis, Evelina Simkute, Egidijus Bagdonas, and Chris Leslie, was organised by Marija Nemcenko, The Lithuanian Cultural Institute and the European Commission in the UK, and held at The Art School, Glasgow on Monday 7^thMay 2018.