After World War II, the Franco-Swiss architect who went by the name of Le Corbusier erected brazenly expressionistic buildings, including an 18-floor Marseilles housing project and a hilltop pilgrimage chapel outside the little French town of Ronchamp, that changed the course of modernist architecture. The exposed, poured-in-place “raw” concrete—béton brut—of which they were wholly or partially constructed accounts for “brutalism,” the name by which the architectural craze these buildings launched soon came to be known. The term got traction thanks in no small part to the mode’s tendency to aesthetic brutality. It amounted to a viral reaction against the tidy reductionism of modernism’s own glass-walled box.
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