Bèton Breton

At Adam Thornton’s request, a quick review of some English and Breton brutalist structures.

Moncontour Water Tower, looking like the hilt of a modernist Excalibur, sticking up out of mother Earth. Or, with its pubic hair ring of trees, maybe it looks like an updated piece of Nicolas Ledoux’s Plan for an Ideal City at Chaux.

I cannot find any credits for the architect or engineer who devised this, nor for the landscape designer who made it such an iconic ritual object. It’s currently regarded as “infrastructure porn.” Welp, give it a decade and people will start to celebrate it, or not.

Michel, Lacaille, Lechat, Perrin-Houdon & Weisbein: Eglise St-Louis, Brest, 1958

Brest, in Brittany, was heavily bombed during WW2, so there’s a lot of postwar reconstruction. This church and the one following seem unusually interesting, to me at least. One recalls the Dutch “maritime modern” school of Amsterdam, the other has the reticulated look of a Berlage design.

Philippe Bévérina: Chappelle de Kerveguen, Brest, 1958

Alvaro Siza: Church of Saint-Jacques de la Lande, Rennes, 2019.

Brutalism for God continues into the 21st Century! The interior shots (click the links) make it look calm and meditative and less like a piece of electronics packaging.

Ernő Goldfinger (no,really): Trellick Tower, London, 1972.

I never even imagined that Ian Fleming might have named a villain after a postwar Hungarian-British architect, but apparently: “A discussion on a golf course about Ernő with Goldfinger’s cousin prompted Ian Fleming to name the James Bond adversary and villain Auric Goldfinger after Ernő—Fleming had been among the objectors to the pre-war demolition of the cottages in Hampstead that were removed to make way for Goldfinger’s house at 2 Willow Road. Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design… Goldfinger consulted his lawyers when Goldfinger was published in 1959, which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character ‘Goldprick’.”
But he didn’t. Everyone backed down, the film went ahead, and humourless Goldfinger forever afterward had to answer annoying, irrelevant questions.

This, by the way, was Goldfinger’s house, 2 Willow Rd. (1939) for which he tore down those two cottages. Not actually Brutalist (despite the fears of the neighbours before it was built), but brick. Nonetheless it conveys the ideas of the style clearly. Its detractors rather foolishly criticized it for being “boxy” and “square,” allowing the defenders (rather unnecessarily) to employ snooty ethnism in their rebuttal: “As for the objection that the houses are rectangular, only the Eskimos and the Zulus build anything but rectangular houses.”

Philip Dowson (Arup): Denys Wilkinson Building, 1967, houses the astrophysics and particle physics departments at Oxford University. Originally built as the “Nuclear Science Building,” its concrete is unusually laced with Boron. The university insists that this is to keep background radiation out, locals think it’s to keep naughty scientific radiation in. I wonder if there’s some occult alchemical thing going on, given that the architect went to Gresham’s School. Features some non-right-angles despite being neither Zulu nor Eskimo in origin.

George Finch, with Ove Arup and Partners: Brixton Recreation Centre, London, 1985. One of the real success stories on this list – still in use, still appreciated by its local community.

Museum of Memories, ’39-’45, Plougonvelin, built 1943, renovated as a museum 2021. Former WW2 German bunker on the Breton coast.
You can also rent another bunker in the chain for holidays, if you feel like feeling like a Nazi artillery spotter for a week.