Human beings are physical creatures and our physical environment can communicate messages that are more powerful than if you just read them in a book. I find that brutalist buildings often communicate a visceral sense of power, profundity, inhuman scale, etc.
A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth necessitated the building's inhuman size.
Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the forces of chaos.
In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that is very large.
Brutalist structures are hideously ugly and oppressive to the human spirit. Why anyone thinks architects and advocates for the dehumanizingly ugly should be allowed to use public spaces for these projects is a mystery to me. We have to share these spaces, and for people to say things like "sometimes you should feel insignificant" and then impose it on the rest of us in building form is objectionable.
I honestly don’t think I will ever recover from Boston City Hall and not see it in every brutalist building I see. It was that traumatizing to even stand near it. If the Empire from Star Wars and Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time had a baby it would be that building.
A Brutalist library can give one the sense that it houses the knowledge of hundreds of generations. From a time when the gigantic heroes of myth necessitated the building's inhuman size.
Entering a Brutalist courthouse might feel like walking into a fortress where the forces of law and order make their stand to protect society from the forces of chaos.
In short, I agree, at least in part, with the critics of Brutalism who say that it creates in the viewer a feeling of insignificance and the sense that the environment was not fully built for you. Where I disagree is when they say that we should never feel that way. At a time when the comforts of modern technology allow people to live divorced from nature and where social media allows everyone to be at the center of their own world, I think its valuable to occasionally be reminded that we are each a very small part of a world that is very large.