The Beautiful, the Sublime and the New Brutalism | Andrew Kwok

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The Beautiful, The Sublime, and The New Brutalism: Analysing the New Brutalism Movement of Post- War Britain in relation to the principles of the Picturesque Andrew Kwok Chun Yin


Figure 1: River Wye (c.1806-7) by Joseph Mallord William Turner, engraved by W. Annis (1812)

‘The views, on this side, are not the romantic steeps of the Wye: but tho of another species, they are equally grand. They are chiefly distances, consisting of the vast waters of the Severn , here an arm of the sea; bounded by a remote country- of the mouth of the Wye entering the Severn- and of the town of Chepstow, and it’s castle, and abbey. Of all these distant objects and admirable use is made; and they are shewn, (as the rocks of the Wye were on the other side) sometimes in parts; and sometimes all together. In one station we had the scenery of both sides of the hill at once’1

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William Gilpin. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c.: Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. (London, 1800), 58


Introduction When I first visited Chepstow for my personal project, I was struck with awe by the sight of the castle as I walked across the Old Wye Bridge: the masonry ruin stood majestically on the limestone cliff, with its irregular form merging into the rocky landscape and its varying skyline integrating into the nearby forest. Down below, the mud bank was constantly being harassed by the lively, rushing water of the River Wye. Such scene is described as ‘picturesque’, a term that was popularised by the clergyman William Gilpin at the same place 225 years ago. A great many things can be picturesque as long as it exhibits the required quality, that is, to be ‘expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’2. Yet, in today’s architectural world, the popular understanding of such term is rather trivial and ambiguous. Many buildings, notably those in the countryside, are labelled picturesque without being picturesque. To understand and apply the its principles in modern building design, I believe the closest epitome of the picturesque is in fact the architecture of New Brutalism. At first glance, the notion of associating the two ideals seems to be completely absurd. One would immediately connect the former with lively scenes of the natural landscape, whereas the latter with the oppressive, melancholy concrete structure. Yet if we look beyond the book’s cover, there was arguably a subtle inheritance of the picturesque principles within the New Brutalism movement. The aim of this essay therefore is to explore what picturesque means and to propose that the New Brutalism Movement is indeed the successor of the former. Since the theoretical history of the picturesque has gone through numerous theorists, I shall narrow it down and concentrate thematically on the works of Gilpin, Burke, Price and Ruskin. The essay shall then look on the emergence of the New Brutalism as the legacy of Le Corbusier’s ‘Unite’ and initially the antagonist of Pevsner’s picturesque ideology. I shall then investigate the underlying characteristics of the New Brutalism, mainly from the writing of Reyner Banham and the Smithsons, together with several precedents as supporting material, in accordance to the picturesque principles formalised by the earlier theorists.

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William Gilpin. An Essay Upon Prints , 2nd edition. (London: J Robson, 1768), xii

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Figure 2: The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window (1794) by Joseph Mallord William Turner

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In the Manner of a Picture As previously mentioned, the picturesque was popularised by William Gilpin after the publication of the Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty in 1791. His writings were often accompanied by his own water colour and ink wash drawings during his travel around parts of Britain between 1768 and 1776, and from them he explained the aesthetic composition of a picturesque scene. In short, Gilpin was intrigued by irregular objects that are pleasing to the eyes in a painting, scenes of grandeur that burst unexpectedly upon the eye3. In one particular example he investigated a Palladian building in a pictorial sense:

‘A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree... But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps.’4

What Gilpin was after are scenes that heighten one’s emotion, that surprise one’s eyes with unexpected elements. He explained that a uniformed, regular or smooth object is incapable of expressing picturesque beauty. Instead, a picturesque composition is the unity as a whole from a variety of parts, in which they can only be obtained from rough objects. It’s a scene that was broken by various elements. ‘Roughness’ is therefore a key quality in a pictorial landscape, as it forms the essential point of different between the beautiful and the picturesque.5 Gilpin’s emphasis of roughness in his theory was highly influenced by Edmund Burke’s A philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful in 1756, in which Burke associated the beautiful with smoothness and the sublime with roughness. Written in a Newtonian Empiricism tone, he went in great details in investigating the two values, studying their origins, effects and causes. To Burke, ‘mathematical ideas are not the true measure of beauty’6, instead one would experience the pleasure from the beautiful or the terror from the sublime through relaxation and excitation of the human nerves respectively. In other words, the aesthetic quality of an object is not experience and judged in a rational manner but naturally through human instinct.

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William Gilpin. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty: On Picturesque Travel: And on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 6 Ibid., 7 Ibid., 34 Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by J. T. Boulton. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 91

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Figure 3: Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas (1853) by John Ruskin

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Picturesque as an Aesthetic Quality Burke’s aesthetic theories were continued to be revised and debated in parallel to the picturesque by Sir Uvedale Price. In his Essay on the Picturesque, Price fundamentally agreed with Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, but went further to suggest that the ‘Picturesqueness’ as the middle ground of the two aesthetic values. Following Burke’s studies of succession and uniformity as the causes of the sublime and the gradual variation and delicacy as the causes of the beautiful, Price introduced the grandeur of intricacy as an attribute of the picturesque. In his writing, he used several examples to explain such quality, including the forest landscape of Titian’s San Pietro Martire, the irregular skyline formed by the pinnacles of gothic architecture, and the multiply breaks and bold projections of rocks. His theory was later re-emphasised by John Ruskin, who likewise valued picturesque as an aesthetic category in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. Ruskin argued that the picturesque is a lesser form of the sublime, as it possess the intricacy but lacks the vastness. A picturesque object thus lies in ‘sublimity not inherent in the nature of thing, but caused by something external to it’.7 The period thus marks the transition from Neo- Classism to Romanticism or even eclecticism. The concept of mathematical perfection was no longer the defining aesthetic quality. The classical views of proportion, ratio and symmetrical were no longer canon in the society of aesthetic. Instead, critics, architects and the public were all thinking pictorially, regarding buildings as sceneries. The adoption of multiply styles and irregular, asymmetrical planning became fashionable in the design of gardens, country houses and palaces.

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John Ruskin. The Works of John Ruskin, X. Edited by Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 193

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Figure 4: Tintern Abbey and the River Wye by (1794) by Edward Dayes

Figure 5: Travellers halted at a Country Inn by (1649) by Isack van Ostade Haarlem

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The Everyday The image of the everyday had also played an immense role in the picturesque theory. In his Observations on the River Wye, Gilpin’s picturesque description of Tintern Abbey was accompanied by his remarks of several run-down cottages nearby (Fig. 4), He wrote:

‘Among other things in this scene of desolation, the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants were remarkable. They occupy little huts, raised among the ruins of the monastery; and seem to have no employment, but begging’8

Instead of seeing these objects of poverty as obstacles to the grandeur of the ruins, Gilpin believed it enhanced the picturesque beauty of the scene. His taste for such objects was no exception, as the rise of the picturesque had sparked the interest towards paintings of the lower subject. Out of all picturesque theorists, it was perhaps Price who was the most avid admirer of such genre of art. This could be seen from his commentary of Isaack van Ostade’s Rest by a Cottage, as he delightfully described the detached cages hung out from the wall, porches covered with overgrown ivy, unequal heights of the roof form, and the unstable structure holding up the building. To him, the paintings of the ordinary were most successful in achieving picturesqueness, as he praised their authenticity and verisimilitude through the displays of disgusting, everyday objects. Ruskin is also a lively commentator of the lower picturesque art, but he was ultimately disgusted with the heartlessness associated with it. He argued that the delight arises from enjoying from the sight of disorder, suffering and poverty was ethnically immoral, and instead such genre of picturesque painting should express sympathy. Ruskin thus championed J. M.W. Turner’s watercolours of the peasant’s lives, for it shows the painter’s pensiveness and compassions towards the miserable rural life. Equally, he applied such ideal to his study of Gothic architecture, as he believed its buildings represent the picturesque nobility of the manual labour of the ordinary.

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William Gilpin. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c.: Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. (London, 1800), 50

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Figure 6: School at Hunstanton (1954) by Alison and Peter Smithson.

Figure 7: School at Hunstanton (1954) by Alison and Peter Smithson. Ground Floor Plan

Figure 8: School at Hunstanton (1954) by Alison and Peter Smithson. First Floor Plan

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The Emergence of New Brutalism The Picturesque theory had continued to manifest in the form of Visual Planning under Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, whose articles were frequently published in the Architectural Review magazines between 1936 and 1945. Using Cambridge, Oxford and Bath as examples, he suggested that Cities and Towns should be designed in sequences of pictorial views. He challenged the standard uses of orthogonal drawings and opted for the use of landscape design techniques proposed by Humphry Repton, a famous picturesque landscape designer in the late 18th century, in urban design. The theory quickly came into scrutiny, especially by the younger generation of architects of PostWar Britain. Many saw the Modern Movement led by the likes of Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Le Corbusier as the way forward, and what Pevsner proposed was simply a ’blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’9. This prompted the formation of the New Brutalism Movement in Post- War Britain spearheaded by Peter and Alison Smithson. At first, the New Brutalism Movement could be seen as a revolt against the picturesque tradition of Britain. This is very evidential from the Smithson’s first commissioned project, the Hunstanton Secondary School. Constructed in exposed steel frame with glass- brick infill (fig. 6), the building was designed in such a strict geometric grid that the architects’ ‘bloody- mindedness’10 was imprisoned within it. The rigid axial form was strongly expressed in the three block design, with symmetry persists in both elevations and floor plans throughout the whole building (fig. 7&8). The Smithsons were also obsessed with the whole idea of mathematical proportion and modular system in the detailing. The school has every quality of a classical or Palladian architecture, in which Reyner Banham compared it to Mies’s building Illinois Institute of Technology, suggesting that the Smithsons’s design to Mies’s was like ‘Colen Campbell offering to remove certain ‘irregularities’ from the style of Palladio.’11 We should not, however, see the movement as a complete rejection towards the picturesque principles, as Helena Webster stated that ‘the definition of ‘New Brutalism’ changed with the changing preoccupations of the Smithsons’12. I have therefore investigated the three main themes of Brutalism manifested during the Post- War period, in which they could be identified with some of the earliest theories of the Picturesque.

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Reyner Banham. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), 13 Ibid., 19 Peter Cook. “Regarding the Smithsons,” The Architectural Review (July 1982): 3 Helena Webster. Ed. Modernism Without Rhetoric: Essays on the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. (London: Academy Editions, 1997),

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Figure 9: Robin Hood Gardens (1972) by Peter and Alison Smithson

Figure 10: Barbrican Estate by (1976) by Chamberlian, Powell and Bon

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An Image According to Banham, the New Brutalism has three key aspects: 1. 2. 3.

The building as an unified, memorable visual image Clear exhibition of the structural elements The celebration of raw, untreated materials

The term ‘image’ was made significant by Nigel Henderson, a collaborator of the Smithsons and Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi in the Independent Group. The team’s most representative work of such idea was no doubt the Brutalist exhibition called Parallel of Life and Art in 1953 (fig.11), showcasing a series of bizarre photography that related to anthropology and technology in a rather violent, unconventional manner. These images were texturized with a grainy effect and mostly shown in a high contrast of light and dark. They took the form of ‘Art Brut’, to question the aesthetic values of modern society. ‘Image’, in this case, is a conceptualize device. An ‘image’ is different from a ‘picture’: while a picture tends to apply to something external and objective, an image exists in one’s mind, capable of affecting human emotions13. Brutalist buildings are physical manifesto of such ideal: whether it is the Robin Hood Gardens (fig. 9) or the Barbican redevelopment (fig. 10), their bold, imposing stature, together with its normally vastness in dimensions, are often awe-inspiring and even frightening. In other words, they are considered to be picturesque, as they ‘strike us beyond the power of thought, when the vox faucibus haes mental operation is suspended’14.

Figure 11: Parallel of Lift and Art (1953) by The Independent Group 13 14

Thomas Schregenbeyer. “‘As Found’ is a small affair, it’s about being careful”, Architecture is not made with the Brain. (London: AA Press, 2005), William Gilpin. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty: On Picturesque Travel: And on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 49

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Figure 12: Sudgen House (1956) by Peter and Alison Smithson

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The anti- aesthetic stance of Brutalism is also comparable to the undermining of neoclassical standard of taste by the 18th century picturesque theorists. The concepts of aesthetic could only be perceived by empirical senses rather than mathematical principles established by classical aesthetes. Subsequently, the fascination of the poor, humble rural scenery was a result from the rejection of perfectionism and the reflection of taste in aesthetic theory. Picturesqueness, as Price suggested, could be found mainly in the everyday ‘naturally mean subject’, such as a rugged cottage, a butcher shop, or a deprived village. A brutalist image therefore is a theoretical continuance of the picturesque’s interest in ugliness, deformity and the ordinary. An example would be the Sugden House designed by the Smithsons in 1956 (fig.12). The building was a unified, memorable visual image, not because of its elegant architectural composition, but rather its ‘ugliness’. Critics were shocked and disgusted by its ‘architectural illiteracy in plan, construction, and appearance’15. Indeed, the Smithsons rejected the conventional language of a traditional Arts- and- Crafts suburban house, and instead placed windows according to the internal need. The result was awkward looking elevations in all sides. Nevertheless, the Sudgen House is successful in conveying its message: ‘to face up a mass- production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work’16. Just as a Picturesque painting requires a tinge of disgust in displaying verisimilitude over perfection, a Brutalist architecture adopted the rustic texture and brutal forms to replace the propaganda of the clean, white Machine Age aesthetic of the pre- war period.

As Found, Structural Expression and Truthfulness If Le Corbusier was the prophet of the Brutalist movement in Post- War Britain, then the ‘Breton Brut’17 of his Unité d’habitation in Marseille would be the gospel. Constructed in 1939, the use of raw reinforced concrete was never considered initially. The action taken was in fact a reaction to the economic and political pressure from the contractors after the steel- framed proposal was rejected. The result however was hugely celebrated by the younger generation of Britain; its heroic scale, its spatial organisation and its innovative use of material signified Le Corbusier’s term ‘Vers une architecutre’.

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Fred Lasserre. The Architectural Review. (December 1958) Reyner Banham. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), 10 Alison and Peter Smithson. Architecture Review. (London, December 1957)

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Figure 13: School at Hunstanton (1954) by Alison and Peter Smithson. Interior of the Gymnasium.

Figure 14: Flats at Hams Common (1958) by James Stirling and James Gowan. Internal Corridor.

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As a result, many Post- War Brutalist buildings in Britain were constructed in such fashion that the use of rough, untreated concrete surface as the building façade might be seen as the most prominent characteristics of the movement. However, such adoption of a specific material in a specific manner is not the underlying principle of New Brutalism. In fact, when the Smithsons acknowledged the term in 1953, they announced it as ‘an ethic, not an aesthetic’18. What the Smithsons was more concerned was the idea of ‘As found’ in architectural theory. In their words, architects should show respect for materials as it is ‘a realization of the affinity which can be established between building and men’19. ‘As Found’ is therefore the celebration of the common and the ordinary. The Smithsons’ statement echoed strongly with Ruskin’s ‘Truthfulness’ in his ideology of the Picturesque. To Ruskin, Gothic architectures are picturesque, as they are normally perceived with ‘angular and broken lines, vigorous oppositions of light and shadow, and grave, deep, or boldly contrasted colour’20. Later in The Stones of Venice, Ruskin emphasized the savageness, rudeness and naturalism of Gothic Architecture that formed its picturesqueness: unlike the Greeks and Romans, the Gothic builders presented their love of natural objects ‘unconstrained by artistic laws’21, and their imperfect works are ‘signs of the life and liberty off every workman who struck the stone’22 and their buildings ‘bestow dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness’23 In this case, the Hunstanton Secondary School is as ‘brutalist’ and ‘truthful’ as Unite: the exposed steel frames clearly show the materiality and structural honesty of the building, and its unconcealed appearance was ‘appreciated as Queen Anne builders used brick or Regency engineers used stone’ (fig. 13) 24. The interior yellowish brick surfaces and timber window frames, together with service pipework, electrical circuits and air ducts, are all left uncovered, emphasizing the Smithsons’s concern with ‘the seeing of materials for what they are’ The ‘As Found’ aesthetic continued to be seen in many other Brutalist architecture, most notably the flats at Ham Common in London by James Stirling and James Gowan in 1958 (fig. 14). Influenced by Le Corbusier’s Les Maisons Jaoul in Neuilly, the architects used a palette of materials consisted of primarily wood, concrete and fair face brick, all exposed and adopted to their true qualities, associated functionalities and their structural limitations: timber for the door and window frames, reinforced concrete for the pre- stressed floor slabs, and bricks for the loading- bearing walls. The formwork patterns left engrained on the concrete surface, the roughness of the bricks and coarseness of the timber were the modern equivalent of the picturesque Gothic ruins.

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Reyner Banham. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), 10 Peter and Alison Smithson. Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic 1955- 1972. (London: Latimer, 1973) John Ruskin. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. (London, 1849) John Ruskin. The Stones of Venice. Edited by Joseph Gluckstein Links. (London: Pallas Athene, 1851) John Ruskin. The Works of John Ruskin, X. Edited by Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 193 Ibid., 190 Philip Johnson. The Architectural Review. (September 1954),152.

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Figure 15: University of Sheffield Competition Entry by Alison and Peter Smithson. External Perspective.

Figure 16: Park Hill, Sheffield (1961) by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith.

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Topology One of the most recognisable architectural languages of Brutalist buildings is the frequent use of the ‘pedestrian street- deck’ system influenced by Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine. By forming longitudinal communal circulation corridors on the upper floors, this provides a variety of public spaces for social interaction. The Smithsons initially explored the idea in their Golden- Lane Housing Competition in 1952, declaring that these ‘streets in the air’ would ‘carry the symbolic burden as an objective pattern of human activities’.25 While the competition was eventually won by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon, the competition set the tone of Smithsons’s formulisation of Topology as a design method. In architectural discipline, Topology expresses the ‘connectivity’ between locations as the main element, instead of giving the overall building a pure geometry. The architecture itself would exhibit a variety of forms interlinking each other, and therefore the overall scheme would heavily response to both its site and its own structure. The Smithson’s competition entry for the University of Sheffield Extension illustrated such ideology in the most radical way. We can, however, associate this to Price’s commentary of a picturesque scene:

‘In general, nothing contributes so much to give both variety and consequence to the principal building … Of this kind is the grandeur that characterizes many of the ancient castles; which proudly overlook the different outworks, the lower towers, the gateway, and all the appendages to the main building.’26

To Price, the varying individual elements of the ancient ruins or landscape are the causes of the picturesqueness. This is evidential in the Sheffield Competition Scheme (fig. 15), which was described as a ‘continuous flow complex’. Its many gangways, corridors, bridge, decks, wells, ramps, stairs, corridors and vertical cores were the equivalent to Price’s ‘outworks, lower towers, gateway’ of the ancient castle. These topological elements determined the overall varying appearance, instead of one single pure form. The Park Hill Development in Sheffield (fig. 16), designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, adopted a similar approach: the whole scheme is divided into several segments with varying heights, with each of its limbs looping back to itself like a wiggling worm. The street- decks circulated around the whole development, with pedestrian bridges filling the gaps between blocks. The overall form was therefore picturesque, as it shows ‘two opposite qualities of roughness, and of sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity’.27

25 26 27

David Robbins, ed. The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, (exhibition catalogue). (Cambridge, Mass. And London: MIT Press, 1990), 243 Uvedale Price. Essays on the Picturesque, Vol II. (London, 1810) Ibid.

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Conclusion In short, Brutalist architecture is picturesque. The movement might start off as an architectural agenda to pursuit the ‘une architecture autre’28 of its time, to revolt against ‘the lack of rigour and clear thinking’ and the ‘romantic pasticheries of the festival of Britain’29 established by its older generation. Yet the emphasis of the Image, the questioning of the aesthetic values, the use of impasto textured materials, the adoption of intricate forms and varied elements and the attention to the topographical surrounding are all resonances to the picturesque. It’s therefore not all yet unreasonable to include Brutalism as part of the dogma of the British Picturesque. While our beloved Prince Charlies might find my comment offensive, as he once described the Brutalist building of Birmingham Central Library as ‘unmitigated disaster’30, I would propose that if one wants to design a modern picturesque building, one must look at the architecture of New Brutalism.

28 29 30

Reyner Banham. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. (London: The Architectural Press, 1966), 68 Ibid., 41 Nicholas Rossiter. HRH Prince of Wales: A Vision of Britain, (London: BBC TV, 1988)

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Bibliography •

BANHAM, Reyner. The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. London: The Architectural Press, 1966.

BURKE, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by J. T. Boulton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

COOK, Peter. “Regarding the Smithsons,” The Architectural Review (July 1982): 3.

CROOK, J. Mordaunt. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the PostModern. London: John Murray, 1987.

GILPIN, William. An Essay Upon Prints: Containing Remarks Upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty; the Different Kinds of Prints; and the Character of the Most Noted Masters: Illustrated by Criticisms Upon Particular Pieces to Which Are Added Some Cautions That May Be Useful in Collecting Prints, 2nd edition. London: J Robson, 1768.

GILPIN, William. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c.: Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. London, 1800.

GILPIN, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty: On Picturesque Travel: And on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting. London: R. Blamire, 1792.

LASSERRE, Fred. The Architectural Review. December 1958.

JOHNSON, Philip. The Architectural Review. September 1954,152.

KNIGHT, Richard Payne. An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. London, 1805.

MACARTHUR, John. The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities. New York: Routledge, 2007.

PEVSNER, Nikolaus. Visual Planning and the Picturesque. Edited by Mathew Aitchison. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010.

PRICE, Uvedale. Essays on the Picturesque As Compared with The Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, For the Purposed of Improving Real Landscape, Vol II. London, 1810.

ROBBINS, David, ed. “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’”, The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty. Cambridge, Mass. And London: MIT Press, 1990.

ROBBINS, David, ed. The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, (exhibition catalogue). Cambridge, Mass. And London: MIT Press, 1990.

ROSSITER, Nicholas. HRH Prince of Wales: A Vision of Britain, London: BBC TV, 1988

RUSKIN, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. London, 1849.

RUKSIN, John. The Stones of Venice. Edited by Joseph Gluckstein Links. London: Pallas Athene, 1851.

RUSKIN, John. The Works of John Ruskin, X. Edited by Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

SCHREGENBEYER, Thomas. “‘As Found’ is a small affair, it’s about being careful”, Architecture is not made with the Brain. London: AA Press, 2005.

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SMITHSON, Alison and Peter. Architecture Review. London, December 1957.

SMITHSON, Alison and Peter. “The aesthetics of Change”, Architects’ Yearbook 8. London, 1957, 17.

SMITHSON, Alison and Peter. Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic 1955- 1972. London: Latimer, 1973.

WEBSTER, Helena. Ed. Modernism Without Rhetoric: Essays on the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. London: Academy Editions, 1997.

WIEBENSON, Dora. The Picturesque Garden in France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Illustrations •

Cover Image. Digital Image. From: The Architectural Review. September 1954, London

1. ANNIS, W. River Wye by J.M.W. Turner. 1812, Etching and mezzotint on paper,184 x 265 mm. Tate Britain, London. From: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-river-wye-engravedby-w-annis-a01007 2. TURNER, Joseph Mallord William. Inside of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire. Exhibited 1794, Watercolour on paper, 322 x 251 mm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. From: http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-inside-of-tintern-abbey-monmouthshire-tw0539 3. RUSKIN, John. Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas. 1853, Pen, brown ink, ink wash (lamp-back) and bodycolour, 477 x 327 mm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. From: http://ruskin.ashmolean. org/collection/9006/9037/9356/all/per_page/25/offset/0/sort_by/seqn./object/14350 4. DAYES, Edward. The View of Tintern Abbey on the River Wye. 1799, Aquatint. Private collection, London. From: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/famous-paintingsinspired-tintern-abbey-7147126 5. VAN OSTADE HAARLEM, Isack. Travellers halted at a country inn. 1649, Oil on oak panel, single plank, 850 x 1250 mm. Private collection, London. From: http://www.sothebys.com/en/ auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.21.html 6. Digital image. From: http://brutalism.online/component/joomgallery/ image?view=image&format=raw&type=img&id=182 7. Digital image. From: https://en.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php/File:Escuela_Hunstanton_ planta_alta.jpg 8. Digital image. From: https://en.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php/File:Escuela_Hunstanton_ pb.jpg

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9. LOUSADA, Sandra. 1972, Digital Image. The Smithson Family Collection. From: https:// municipaldreams.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/p14307-robin-hood-gardens-1972-300dpi.jpg 10. STEWART. Round the Barbican. 2011, Digital Image. Available from: Flickr, https://www. flickr.com/photos/semi-detached/6341382074 11. Digital image. From: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-748-spring2015/ files/2015/04/parallel-of-life-and-art_08.jpg 12. TOOMEY, Arphot. South East Elevation. 1956, Digital Image. From: http://www. ajbuildingslibrary.co.uk/projects/display/id/2950 13. Digital Image. From: The Architectural Review. September 1954, London 14. ARMSTRONG, Anna. Langham House Close, Ham. 2012, Digital Image. Available from: Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/french-disko/8023938139 15. Digital image. From: http://www.mixite.cat/wp-content/gallery/universidad-de-sheffield/ unniv-sheffield_2.jpg 16. Digital image. 1964. From: http://www.sheffieldhistory.co.uk/forums/uploads/ monthly_04_2007/post-14-1176955958.jpg

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