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'We were building for the people': Renowned Arizona architect on ethics behind brutalist designs

Phoenix Police Headquarters at 620 W. Washington Street.
Christina Estes/KJZZ
Phoenix Police Department headquarters at 620 W. Washington St. in Phoenix.

By now, you've probably heard that the film "The Brutalist," directed by Scottsdale's own Brady Corbet, has been nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars. It tells the story of a fictional Hungarian architect, named Laszlo Toth.

In the movie, Toth is renowned for designing municipal buildings, giant imposing structures made of concrete. He's considered a master of the architectural design philosophy known as brutalism, which had its heyday in America in the 1950s and 1960s.

You can see examples of brutalism right here in Phoenix, if you've ever been to police headquarters or driven past the executive office tower, where Gov. Katie Hobbs works. And when you look at those, or other brutalist buildings, you might think that the name comes from the stark, unadorned aesthetic of the exteriors. But that's not quite right. The name actually comes from the French phrase “Beton Brut,” raw concrete. And the word raw, it turns out, is just as important as the concrete it's describing.

I learned that, and a whole lot more from a conversation I had recently with John Meunier, a renowned architect, in real life. John's house, which he designed himself in the brutalist style, appears on England's National Historic Register, and he's the former dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University.

When we spoke, John told me that brutalism is as much about style as the ethics that informed that style.

Full conversation

JOHN MEUNIER: After the Second World War, we had an awful lot of restructuring to do, not just buildings, but actually society itself needed restructuring. So, some of the earliest buildings were social housing, were schools, were libraries, were city hall buildings. We were building democracy, and, and we were not building palaces. We were not building for the rich and the powerful. We were building for the people.

DINGMAN: Talk a little bit more about this phenomenon of using the concrete and not discussing the concrete, as the core element of ...

MEUNIER: The roots of that go very, very deeply. They go back into the Middle Ages, and one of the things that people liked about those buildings, is that the stone that they were made of was what you actually saw, and the structure and the building were the same thing. The building wasn't built around the structure, the building was the structure. That notion of a kind of raw honesty, became very, very attractive to many people.

The raw concrete of the building, the raw steel of the building, the raw copper of the building, and that gives me an opportunity of course to refer to the Phoenix Public Library. And interestingly enough, the copper was not treated, it was allowed to turn its color into a dark, dark brown, not left as a shiny metal.

DINGMAN: Yeah. So, as you talk about this, there's something rather poetic about your characterization of brutalism, this idea that we're building democracy, this idea that this was about the removal of artifice, but of course, to the modern eye, a lot of this design can look aesthetically, somewhat cold, somewhat, some say it reminds them of prisons and and this sort of thing.

MEUNIER: Well, yeah, I think particularly in America, and when brutalism became a style rather than an ethic, it was adopted by very large organizations, and, you know, America is the country of capitalism and, and, and so the very large buildings of capitalism were done in this style, and they were pretty damned oppressive.

They were huge in scale, they tended to make the human being diminutive. They lacked a kind of richness and, what I call intricacy, and my own particular theme of my work is intricacy, and these buildings tend to lack it. That was not true of the original brutalist buildings.

DINGMAN: So one of the things that we see in the film "The Brutalist" is once he completes this work that he spends the bulk of the movie putting together, you see in the film that, though it is mostly comprised of this sheer concrete that's just arranged in certain angular ways to have a kind of effect, he has put in these very intentional design elements like slit windows towards the top, which are meant to evoke the prison camp that he was in. Is that the type of intricacy that you're referring to that might have been found in these more classical forms of brutalism?

MEUNIER: You're talking to a certain extent about another issue, which is what architecture means. I mean, it does have references, and one of the references obviously is to rhythm. And one of the problems of many disliked brutalist buildings is that they have a very monotonous rhythm. A multiplicity of scales is very important for me in intricacy. Everything from something that you can hold in your hand, to something that you can fit your shoulder into, to something that you can walk through, something that you barely fit in, to something extraordinarily grand.

DINGMAN: Like a big window where light can come in or something.

MEUNIER: Yes, yes, and, and so intricacy is in fact something that often is not associated with brutalism, but in the hands of really good architects, you will see it is.

DINGMAN: Yeah. So tell me, for you personally, as someone who, as you mentioned, has worked in this style and with this ethic presumably, what drew you to it as a young architect?

MEUNIER: Well, you know, as an Englishman, I was brought up with certain strong ethical codes. My house, for example, is built out of the cheapest possible bricks. But, I made a very grand house out of it, and one of the ways you can do that is not by spending a lot of money on materials, but by spending a lot on proportion and scale.

For example, in my house, the living room is 10 feet tall, whereas the bedrooms are only 7'6, and the idea was that the living spaces are for groups of people, whereas the bedroom is for individuals or couples. And so, a different scale is appropriate to them. The 10 foot is higher than normal and so people find it actually slightly grand. Here's this ridiculously inexpensive house with a very grand space in it.

DINGMAN: May I ask how, how much did it cost for you to build the house when you, when you built it?

MEUNIER: Less than 5,000 pounds. Certainly one of the great pleasures for me is this notion of using one's skill, not necessarily one's wallet. Architects on the whole are not motivated by money. Architects are motivated by hoping to have made a contribution to the quality of life, and that contribution is not only a material contribution, it's also a cultural contribution.

DINGMAN: Do you have a sense of what the popular response to this style was? Do you think people tended to appreciate the ethic behind these structures at the time?

MEUNIER: I think in many ways this word brutalism was a tragic mistake, because in the hands of really good architects, you're dealing with something that is actually precious, and life enhancing.

DINGMAN: Yeah, I would say rather than a brutalist, perhaps they should have gone with “structures of truth” or “structures of democracy,” perhaps.

MEUNIER: I mean there's something attractive about the idea of brutal strength, but I'm much more interested in brutal honesty. That, in fact, we're not afraid to be honest. That in fact, we believe that being honest, actually, will improve the quality of our lives.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to an editing error, the image been corrected to show an example of brutalist architecture in Phoenix.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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