The Architecture of Unease: How Brutalism Became Beautiful Again

Once derided as concrete monstrosities, mid-century brutalist structures are experiencing a renaissance among a new generation of designers drawn to their uncompromising honesty.

Jul 16, 2026

By Chiara Romano

Brutalist concrete building with a cantilevered upper block against a blue sky

The ramp up to the Yale Art and Architecture Building still forces a decision. You either take the long way round, past the bush-hammered piers, or you cut through the shadow they throw across the entrance at four in the afternoon.

Buildings of this kind are rarely decided by architects alone. A structural engineer, a planning officer and a facilities manager who will never be named in the credits each moved this one several metres from where it started, and the drawings record the argument.

Dr Ines Halloran, an architectural historian at the Bartlett who has spent six years cataloguing post-war concrete in northern Europe, has been close to it from the start.

What changed

The surface is the argument. Bush-hammering, the process of beating cured concrete until the aggregate breaks through, turns a flat grey wall into something that reads differently every hour of the day.

Two of the people who started the project had left by the time it finished, and the handover notes are now part of the studio's standard kit.

What changed is not the buildings. It is the photographs of them.

Concrete does not flatter anyone. That is precisely why a certain kind of client is coming back to it.
Halloran

How it works

Between 1962 and 1974 the practice went from a cost-saving measure to a house style, and then, almost overnight, to a liability. Councils painted over it. Owners clad it. A generation of buildings disappeared behind render.

What stops this being a one-off is the documentation. The practice has published the details, which means the next team does not have to rediscover the same three failures.

Peers have been generous in public and more pointed in private, mostly about cost.

Asked what they would change, the team answers with process rather than product: earlier conversations, fewer assumptions carried over from the last job, and a willingness to lose an argument in the first week rather than the last.