Brutal

Brutalism, Italian Fascism, and civic architecture in Melbourne.

We are currently experiencing a fetishistic fascination with twentieth century architectural styles broadly dubbed as Brutalism. Photographic exhibitions, coffee table books and social media platforms are flooded with imagery of architecture that is starkly unadorned, bold, aggressive, and unapologetic.

However, the buildings that are being identified under this labelling of imagery, were created over a broad time frame and within often unrelated social, political, historic and environmental contexts. In the examples of the Communist Soviet Union and Fascist Italy, buildings that are currently fashionable in imagery were conceived under harsh political imperatives. As well as the shared visual or formal traits, an often occurring, and possibly more telling characteristic of this architecture for our times, is that regardless of the political orientation, these buildings often engage with the city with a civic responsibility and architectural generosity that are more rarely manifested under the primarily market dictated conditions of current life in Australia. Have capitalism and consumption become so rampant in our society that images of buildings previously widely derided as ugly and from draconian, totalitarian, dictatorships now appeal to us?

With the current political climate in Australia and Internationally, it seems a fitting moment for architects to design civic architecture with an awareness of current and historical political context. The word “Fascism” has begun to appear in the mainstream press in the USA to describe their own president. While in Australia, neo-Nazi and Alt-right figures successfully infiltrated the Australian National Party and a surge in neo-Fascist influences can be identified throughout European politics.

In Italy, the Fascist regime fell at the end of the second world war, but the significant built examples of civic architecture created during that time have had a lasting and ongoing social benefit, now detached from the politics that created them.

In Melbourne there are significant examples of brutalist architecture created in the decades after the second world war. The Harold Holt Swim centre in Glen Iris is a key example, originally designed in 1967 by Kevin Borland and Daryl Jackson and modified with a new extension by Peddle Thorp architects in 2010. The original scheme was an innovative, well considered and sensitive proposition providing a major civic function within suburban neighbourhood fabric. The additions made in 2010 offer an opportunity to assess considerations about how important architecture from the past should be modified, extended or reinterpreted.

This Design Studio will involve preliminary exploratory exercises undertaken in groups, with an individual major project being the design of a new civic building(s) or complex for the current site of the Harold Holt Swim centre. The existing buildings and pools will be assumed to have been completely or substantially cleared away. Students will propose a new civic brief replicating the brief of the current swim centre as a starting point, but this brief can be modified, expanded or entirely reconceived.

Working through the precedent example of Italian Fascist architecture, students will determine what fundamental qualities they perceive as important in civic architecture. This studio will look beyond the visual characteristics of brutalist and Fascist architecture and dismantle precepts of political influence to gain an understanding of what can be learned from these examples for the creation of a new, local civic architecture suitable for our time and place.

This Design Studio is paired with the Studies Unit titled “The Formal Basis of Melbourne Brutalist Architecture.”