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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