Subscription 790/year or 190/quarter

A future cast in concrete

The elevated concrete is about to be erected – both architecturally and sculpturally.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Concrete
Kunsthalle Wien

Ausstellungsansicht_Beton_6
All photos from the exhibition

Da Crush Nazism, Bjørn Mellbye Gullicen's memorial of the communist resistance movement Osvald Group, was presented at the Railway Square in Oslo last year, the real estate magnate and sculpture park founder Christian Ringnes reacted with resentment. Gulliksen's sculpture, which consists of a steel hammer that smashes a hook cross on a stone base, according to Ringnes at home in the 1960 century's Soviet Union: "It is a super brutal and old-fashioned sculpture," he told Aftenposten.

Ringnes' use of the term "brutalist" is typical. Brutalism was originally the term for an architectural style that had its heyday between 1955 and 1980, and which is characterized by the use of prefabricated concrete modules and untreated surfaces. The name comes from the French béton brut, which simply means raw concrete. But since the end of the 1970 century, brutalism has become a curse that involves cold, inhumanity and impenetrable bureaucracy. State power over individual, coercion over freedom. Not just brutality, but, as the "ism" ending suggests, brutality put in place.

Brutalism must be said to be the official architecture of the European welfare state, and in particular characterize public buildings such as libraries, schools and not least social housing blocks. And it is striking that a building style that is so much associated with post-war community building is generally regarded as ugly and inhumane.

First and foremost ethical. Initially, there were practical and economic reasons for the welfare state being cast in concrete. After the war, there was extensive housing shortage, and a huge number of institutions had to be rebuilt. Concrete proved to be the perfect material for solving the task. It was reasonable, and by using prefabricated modules, large projects could be completed in a short time. But the concrete was also attributed beyond the purely practical and aesthetic: the young English architects Alison and Peter Smithson – the couple who introduced the concept of brutalism in the mid-1950s – emphasized the authenticity, honesty, strength and directness of the concrete. Brutalism was not primarily about aesthetics, but about ethics. Concrete's standardized modules implied social equality: In principle, a cultural or government building had no different design than a housing block for the working class.

Even Picasso does not seem to be able to generate popular support for the Government Quarter.

But these ideals gained opposition from both the field and the media. Gradually, it became common to associate concrete with traffic machines and bleak, eerie, drab urban landscapes. A typical description of this sadness can be found in Dag Solstad's portrayal of, among other things, the Oslo district of Ammerud in the 1980s novel Attempt to describe the impenetrable: "[M] onstrumet Ammerud… where there was nothing, except the blocks, which spread, in gray concrete, a picture of a cold, technological society that had run wild." For the critics, the concrete building of brutalism became the tombstone of the social democratic welfare state.

! 0407-009 BURNER

Gray, but not uniform. Now, however, the concrete is about to get some kind of erection. Architects and artists have once again begun to use concrete as architectural and sculptural material, and the once hated brutalism is the subject of blogs, exhibitions and publications. A couple of years ago, the Norwegian Design and Architecture Center in Oslo showed Teigen Fotoatelier's documentation of Norwegian post-war architecture under the appropriate title "Brutal?", And if you are in Austria by October 26, you can join the exhibition "Béton" at Kunsthalle Wien . In this exhibition one can see works by some twenty artists, all of whom deal with the concrete architecture, and which are based in places as diverse as Brazil and the former Yugoslavia. One of the interesting things about "Béton" is that it shows how wide the variations were within brutalism: The concrete blocks may have been gray, but far from uniform. Austrian Werner Feiersinger's photographs of post-Italian postwar modernism demonstrate, for example, the possibilities offered by the concrete material for experimental architects, and consequently how eccentric the results were.

In hindsight, it is easy to see that brutalism was ingrained in ideology.

Common to many of the works in the exhibition is that they examine the relationship between the architecture and the ideas associated with it, whether they are negatively or positively charged. In English Liam Gillick's documentation of the London suburb Thamesmead, the original utopian ideals underlying the construction of the residential complexes in the 1960s are weighed against the negative perception of the suburb in subsequent decades. Thamesmead's reputation was particularly colored by the fact that the city was the backdrop to some of Stanley Kubrick's most dystopian scenes A Clockwork Orange. Danish Sofie Thorsen has reconstructed sculpture play stands that artists erected in municipal residential areas in Vienna in the 1950s and 1960s, but which decayed and disappeared in line with the ideals they expressed.

An ideological architecture. In hindsight, it is easy to see that brutalism was ingrained in ideology, which was expressed by both defenders and critics. The style disappeared almost completely after the political right-turn around 1980. As the English author Will Self has written, standardized brutalism was rejected by the neoliberal regimes because they had to give inequality a "visual justification" – the architectural form of the 1980s. financial and free trade regimes were not heavy, horizontal concrete columns, but light, elegant skyscrapers in glass and steel. Today, many of the most famous buildings of brutalism have been forged or demolished – a result of a lack of political will and little popular support to preserve this architectural era.

This also applies to the most well-known of post-war concrete complexes in Norway: Erling Viksjø's government quarter in Oslo. Viksjø is also represented in Kunsthalle Wien. Palestinian-American Jumana Mannas Government Quarterly Study from 2014 consists of three castings of the ornamented concrete pillars in the high block. While brutalism's landmarks in the UK are in danger of being demolished after decades of neglect, the government quarter became a momentary ruin following the bomb explosion on July 22, 2011. The zoning plan for a new government quarter states that the 1958 highblock should be preserved, but that the curved The Y-block from 1970 will be demolished – against the National Antiquities Council's advice.

It is debatable whether the Government Quarter should be called brutalist or not. Viking's ornamentation and experiments with sandblasted concrete, as well as Picasso's integrated decoration work, make the building unique. But it seems that the attitudes to the concrete architecture are the same anyway. While the architectural environment mainly speaks to preserve the historic buildings, the critical voices are more representative of the public opinion. The architect Jan Carlsen's assertion that the buildings "reflect the power arrogance and strict rationalization thinking of social democracy", and that "the Labor Party's single empire after 1945 got the architecture it deserved" is probably shared by large sections of the population. Even Picasso does not seem to be able to generate popular support for the Government Quarter. The ideologically grounded, prevailing view over many decades that concrete buildings are by definition ugly, offers little hope that the Y-block will survive. It asks if art exhibitions and architecture blogs can remedy it.

The exhibition will be on display at Kunsthalle Wien in Austria until October 26.

 

You may also like