Brutalism, 20 iconic buildings around the world

The project was designed to meet the post-war housing needs of the population of Marseille. The 18-storey complex houses 1,600 dwellings in 337 duplex flats and is characterised by the widespread use of rough concrete. In spite of its monumental dimensions, which suggest the idea of de-personalisation and disorientation, the project pays scrupulous attention to social spaces and public services: the school, library, kindergarten, hotel, green roof, swimming pool, supermarket, laundry and shops animate an autonomous and organised micro-world on pilotis.

In Chandigarth, an ideal city in the manner of Renaissance utopias, the urban layout follows the structure of a human body with the governmental and administrative buildings located in the "head": among these, the Palace of Assemblies - part of the ensemble that includes the Legislative Assembly, the Secretariat and the High Court - is characterised by a bare, plastic, exposed concrete structure emphasised by the hyperboloid roof and the towers that evoke the water collection structures of Ahmedabad.

An iconic symbol of Milanese urbanitas, the Velasca Tower represents the will to rise again of a city devastated by war, looking to the future with a strong reference to the past. Made entirely of reinforced concrete and finished with terracotta grit and pink marble from Verona - which give the building a warm hue - it houses shops, offices and flats; its characteristic morphology is a tribute to the vertical city that was developing in the 1950s with a reference to the city's historic skyline, studded with towers and bell towers, and in particular to the tower of the courtyard of arms of Castello Sforzesco.

In Berlin's Hansaviertel district, the Dutch duo's building stands out in the urban landscape as a dry, compact 16-storey monolith containing 73 flats. The exterior surfaces, made of exposed concrete panels with regularly spaced windows, are indebted to the figurative imprint of De Stijl in their use of the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, almost as if to soften the grey concrete outer shell.

The museum stands on Avenida Paulista in the heart of the city, like a mighty belvedere with 2,100 square metres of exhibition space supported by gigantic portals in deep red pigmented concrete: the almost childlike simplicity of the assembled volumes - the glass parallelepiped, the structural frames, the floor and roof horizons - and the play of colours recall a playful, primordial expressive approach typical of art brut.

The building is located in the rolling hills of the south of France where it fits, despite its mammoth volume, in a respectful way thanks to the designer's choice to raise the powerful mass of two floors on pilotis that allow a seamless perception of the surrounding landscape. The material chosen is concrete, both cast in situ and precast, which rigorously designs the façade in a tight rhythm of alternating structural ribs and voids.

The complex, designed for three media companies (a newspaper printing plant, a radio station and a television studio) was conceived as a flexible megastructure that could be expanded as the needs of its occupants evolved. The functional layout envisages the concentration of service functions (lifts, toilets, installations) in 16 gigantic cylindrical reinforced concrete towers with a diameter of 5 m and the placement of offices and activities on the various floors, according to an aggregative system which, based on the theories of the Metabolist group, could have been reproduced indefinitely on an urban scale.

The unfinished cyclopean building of rectilinear forms alternating with rounded shapes and imposing curves is one of the most controversial buildings in downtown Boston. The exterior and interior surfaces are characterised by widespread use of bush-hammered concrete, giving the monumental body an aura of roughness and gravity. Today subject to urban decay and crime, it has paradoxically been the backdrop for a film set (The Departed) in the guise of an imposing police headquarters. 

Conceived as a symbol of institutional architecture and the yearning for freedom of an independent country, the Parliament House stands in the desert as a massive monolith surrounded by an artificial lake, which acts as a cooling system and at the same time contributes to the building's aura of monumentality and timelessness. The complex comprises eight rooms aligned concentrically around the large parliamentary chamber and is made of in-situ concrete and inlaid white marble, in homage to local materials and building traditions.  

Caustically described by the heir to the throne of England as a clever way to build a nuclear power station in the centre of London without raising objections, the building was designed as part of an urban landscape to which it relates with a play of articulated masses that relieve the visual impact of the monolithic volume, with a system of open spaces and visual relationships with the surrounding context. The composition revolves around markedly vertical elements (the two towers of the proscenium and the Open Theatre and the smaller towers housing the vertical distribution), connected by horizontal volumes on which terraces open up with views of the city.  

Robin Hood Gardens, a manifesto of the Smithsons' design culture and now demolished, was a two-hectare social housing development consisting of two cyclopean precast concrete buildings housing 210 dwellings for about 700 inhabitants. Designed to respond to the functional need to accommodate the less affluent sections of the population, the aim was to foster a sense of community within a vision of collective living: hence the design of the central green space with the artificial hill generated by the building's landfill, intended as a focal point for interaction, and the corridors at every third floor of the structures, overlooking the courtyard and conceived as spaces for meeting and relating.

Designed and built for the '67 Expo in Montreal as an experimental neighbourhood, the project explores the use of prefabrication technologies to create low-cost, functional yet intriguing spatial compositions. The complex, which houses 158 flats, is characterised by an effective play of assemblies which, thanks to modular assembly technology, guarantees different conditions for all the flats in terms of orientation, views and internal layout, despite the identical volume of each flat. 

In keeping with the well-established English typology of the terraced house facing the street, the project consists of three blocks oriented east to west and arranged in a curvilinear parallel pattern along two pedestrian streets. Despite the cyclopean dimensions of the buildings, specific attention has been paid to the quality of the living space, both on the public and private fronts: on the one hand, the street is not only the access space but also the place of relations around which the life of the community is articulated, and on the other, each house has a private open space, in the form of a roof garden or terrace.

Located in the middle of the desert, Be'er Sheva was an experiment in urban planning that was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier's urbanistic suggestions and Brutalist language. The numerous buildings constructed from the 1960s onwards - residential, administrative, educational, cultural and entertainment - share the common denominator of an architecture with plastic forms and massive reinforced concrete volumes: among these is the university library, a building with imposing forms and faceted volumes that accentuate the monolithic nature of the composition.

With its mighty concrete pillars and suspended volumes, the building oscillates between the massive vigour of brutalism and the levitating tension of futurism, taking on the appearance of a spaceship landed in California. The building has eight floors, two underground and six above ground: in the above ground floors, a dynamic play of widening of the surfaces, increasing from the bottom to the centre and scaling up from the centre to the top, creates an evocative effect of overhangs and reflections on the glass surfaces.

Situated on the site of the ruins of the castle of Königsberg (capital of Prussia), construction began in 1970 on a 28-storey multifunctional building but due to the conditions of the marshy terrain, structural problems forced the construction of only 21 floors. In 1985 work was financed to complete the building in its raw state and in 2005 restoration and finishing work was carried out, although the interior has remained unused. As Ernest Nathan Rogers said, "the corpses of architecture remain unburied".

The mixed-use residential and commercial building is an expression of the Metabolist language, a cultural movement that represented the cultural rebirth of post-war Japan, and is an example of the concept of serial application of the housing capsule model. The complex was conceived as a residence to meet the essential housing needs of “homo movens”, as defined by Kurokawa himself, the commuting worker or short term resident in the city, and consists of two reinforced concrete towers of different heights from which the 140 overlapping housing capsules are "hung".

With a contamination of Persian and Islamic figurative languages inclined towards hyper-decoration, Soviet Brutalist architecture in Central Asia is characterised by a deviation towards ornamentation associated with a monumental, propagandistic and representational architecture in line with the dominant political programme. The Hotel Uzbekistan fits into this framework with its powerful volume, slightly inflected in the centre to lighten its visual impact and covered on the façade with a weave of decorative elements reminiscent of embroidered fabric.

Born as an ambitious project of the Istituto Case Popolari at the end of the 1970s, the complex represents the utopia of the Falansterio, or a city enclosed within a building, as also represented by the Karl Marx Hof and the Unité d'Habitation. The complex is made up of three buildings: the main body, almost a kilometre long and extending over nine floors, a lower one parallel to the first and a third oriented at 45° to the first two. Stigmatised as an emblem of suburban decay, it still evokes widespread reflection on issues of participation and community.

The cyclopean and curious concrete structure in the shape of an inverted cone that towers over the urban landscape of the suburb of Midrand in Johannesburg is a facility operated by Johannesburg Water that holds nearly 2 million gallons of water for the surrounding community. While the upper part of the building houses the reservoirs, the lower part is designed to contain commercial spaces. Not an urban sculpture or land art experiment but a visually recognisable and functionally characterised work for the community.