Possumblog

Obscure Architectural Term of the Day!

Today’s term is:

BÉTON BRUT. ‘Concrete in the raw’, that is, concrete left in its natural state when the formwork is removed. Sometimes special formwork is used to show clearly the timber graining on the concrete surface.

From the Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, Third Edition.

You get a two-fer today, because although rough-cast concrete has been around since concrete, once you recognize it as a medium and give it a fancy name and don't think of it as random sloppiness, well, you get yourself a whole movement devoted to artfully crafted artlessness. (Sorta like primitive painters who, it just so happened, went to art school and have PhDs.)

ANYway, raw concrete became quite the craze and gave us (from the same source as above) the name:

BRUTALISM. A term coined in England in 1954 to characterize the style of Le Corbusier at the moment of the Marseille
and Chandigarh, and the style of those inspired by such buildings; in England Stirling & Gowan; in Italy Vittoriano Viganò (Istituto Marchiondi, Milan, 1957) [News story here, originally in Italian and translated by Google, which shows that time has not been kind to this building. Ed.] ; in America Paul Rudolph; in Japan Maekawa, Tange, and many others. Brutalism nearly always uses concrete exposed at its roughest (BÉTON BRUT) and handled with overemphasis on big chunky members which collide ruthlessly.

“big chunky members which collide ruthlessly”-- Why, that’s not architecture, that’s FOOTBALL! And if you’ll look at football stadiums, that’s the way a lot of them (including this lovely) are built.

Finally, to top things off, TWO limericks devoted to the topic.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at October 12, 2006 11:50 AM