Organized by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Chair of Architectural Theory, the “Brutalism. Architecture of Everyday Culture, Poetry and Theory” symposium will be taking place in Berlin May 10-11. Their position on this topic is that Brutalism’s critical review of classical modernism and post-war modernism gave rise to a unique laboratory situation, in which modern architectural trends still of relevance today were developed and tested for the very first time. More information on the event after the break.
Not only did Brutalism’s aesthetic and formal features set the course of future developments, as late minimalism attests; the ethical, which is to say socio-political subtexts of its ‘Everyday Architecture’ approach likewise exerted a lasting influence on architectural and urban planning discourse, as evinced by the Las Vegas- and Suburbia-oriented postmodernism of Venturi, Scott, Brown, for example, or by the Dirty Realism of the late 1980s, which fostered a new urban planning approach to urban sprawl. To investigate Brutalism in the light of the above can thus contribute significantly to understanding key architectural developments that occurred in the later years of postmodernism.
