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We have a contrary opinion of brutalist architecture. Sounds awful when you say it - btutalist. It's a deliberately plain style. Nobody decorates the raw building materials. So you typically see a lot of concrete in these mid-20th century buildings. To many eyes, they're just ugly. But NPR's Kaity Kline found some people who felt otherwise.
KAITY KLINE, BYLINE: Washington, D.C., is a brutalism hot spot. One good example is the FBI headquarters. The J. Edgar Hoover building takes up two city blocks downtown. All concrete, lots of straight lines, and an insane amount of windows - looking up at it, people have thoughts.
DARREN WILLIAMS: It kind of looks like a prison with windows, just a concrete slab stuck in the middle of the city.
DEVON ACKMAN: A mass of stone and glass with not much architectural detail.
SONYA OWENS: I don't think it's the most attractive building in D.C. It hasn't been washed.
ARIEL CARANE: I can't stand it. I work right across the street from it, so I have to look at it every day that I'm in the office, and it's just - it's so ugly.
KLINE: That was Darren Williams, Devon Ackman, Sonya Owens, and Ariel Carane (ph).
ANGELA PERSON: I think that folks can feel like these buildings are out of scale.
KLINE: Angela Person is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Oklahoma. She says, one of the pioneers of brutalism, Le Corbusier, coined the term beton brut, which roughly translates to raw concrete.
PERSON: What he meant was this idea of pared back architecture that's raw and really sort of honest in its materials. You can understand how the building is held up, whether it's made of concrete or steel.
KLINE: Brutalism became a popular way to rebuild after World War II, she says.
PERSON: Because it could be relatively rapidly constructed, relatively affordably constructed.
KLINE: Person is a co-curator of a new exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., called Capital Brutalism. The eight-monthlong exhibit explores the history of seven brutalist buildings in the capital through photos, drawings and archival documents. The goal, she says, is to get people to consider the possibilities these buildings present today. Architect Jeanne Gang is a contributor to that exhibit. She says, architects see brutalism a little differently.
JEANNE GANG: With architects, there is an appreciation.
KLINE: She's the founder of the firm Studio Gang and says, one way to see brutalism is through its accessibility.
GANG: Everyone has concrete in every part of the world because they have the earth that's below them, which is used.
KLINE: And if you don't like the way brutalist buildings look, Gang says it's actually environmentally friendly to renovate them.
GANG: The energy and the embodied carbon in the materials that made them was already sent into the atmosphere when they were built. When you tear them down, you're adding more energy to these structures.
KLINE: The production of concrete is responsible for around 8% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, according to a 2020 study from Princeton University.
GANG: So it's kind of, like, so wasteful that it's criminal in a way. It's like, you could be building on these interesting buildings and make them work for today.
KLINE: Gang says, with the proper funding, brutalist buildings can be transformed. One just has to get past the outside to see what's possible on the inside. Kaity Kline, NPR News, Washington.
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