Atlas of Brutalist Architecture

The Library Essay

Concrete Deserved a Second Look

Brutalism took its name from raw concrete, béton brut, and for half a century took the blame for everything cold in postwar building. Phaidon's atlas, first published in 2018, answers with evidence: nearly nine hundred buildings in over a hundred countries, from civic halls and universities to churches and housing estates, photographed plainly and organised by region.

The timing was deliberate. Many of these buildings were facing demolition just as a younger public was learning to love them, and the atlas serves both as a survey and as a record of what stands to be lost. Seen together, the buildings read less as a brief brutal fashion than as a worldwide public architecture, built in an optimistic material by governments that still built.