Colour, Composition, and Scale: Analysing Brutalist Photography

Sometimes sculptural and expressive, sometimes monolithic and monotonous, the Brutalist architectural style is equal parts diverse and divisive. From its origins as a by-product of the Modernism movement in the 1950s to today, Brutalist buildings, in architectural discourse, remain a popular point of discussion. A likely reason for this endurance is — with their raw concrete textures and dramatic shadows, brutalist buildings commonly photograph really well.

tmSN House / BLAF Architecten

A typical challenge for Belgian cities today is to make their 19th and early 20th-century urban fabric more liveable and sustainable, without driving away all economic or manufacturing activities. Most of these areas are characterized by a mix of industry and housing, high land occupation, hardening of open space, and soil pollution. Today most of the industry has moved away from these areas and the infrastructure over time has been parcelled out to small-scale private owners. “Pitting” is one of the strategies that many cities include in their urban policies for these areas, trying to avoid tabula rasa. The tmSN house does so in a radical way.

Academia Shelter / gru.a

Taking advantage of a pre-existing eucalyptus structure (which delimits a small soccer field) we designed a simple shelter in polycarbonate tile, bamboo and galvanized steel tubes.

7x17 House / BHA studio

The house’s context is located in Phu Bai town, which is ten kilometers far away from the heart of Hue city. A growing urban area leads to a narrowing of arable land. Hue city is known for its harsh weather conditions, so we chose a 7x17x11m single-shell structure to cover all the spaces of the building.

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