Two Cheers for Brutalism

A few years ago, I attended a lecture in which a learned professor complained that American universities are obsessed with ugly buildings. To illustrate his point, he used an example well known to those who traffic in sociology via architectural criticism. He asked us to consider the two main libraries of Georgetown University. The older one, Riggs Library, built in 1891, is a testament to the past glories of Jesuit education. Inside, it looks like something from a fairytale: The whole thing is one big room, with four floors of cast iron walkways, all decorated with intricate metalwork and containing shelves on shelves of rare volumes. Even in the middle of the night, light pours in from the ceilings and high windows, making the place seem especially airy. 

After extolling Riggs, the professor asked us to turn our gaze to Lauinger Library, a Brutalist monolith only a few hundred feet away from it, which replaced the old library in 1970. It may have won awards when it opened, but these days it is considered one of the ugliest buildings in Washington, DC (second only to the Watergate complex, a 2018 poll found). Lauinger is the opposite of Riggs: heavy, dark, imposing. Its narrow windows let in all the light of arrow slits. And inside, it is a disjointed maze of stacks, study rooms, and storage facilities—all illuminated by the harshest fluorescence. Locals joke that it is a building straight from hell. I have heard it bitterly remarked that it is no mistake that Lauinger sits right at the top of the Exorcist Steps.

The professor’s point in bringing all this up was simple: The people who built Riggs believed in something higher than themselves, and, for that reason, constructed a building that would move their students to expressions of wonder. The people who built Lauinger had no such belief—in fact, they were exhausted by belief—and so they built a dim monument to their confusion and despair. The theory is that the whole decline and fall of the American university can be explained by the story of these two buildings. 

Anyone who travels in circles with more traditional tastes is familiar with this line of reasoning: When we believed in beauty, we ornamented our buildings lavishly. Now that we don’t believe, we act accordingly. (In an ecclesial context, where this argument’s currency is strong, it is often pointed out that the heyday of Brutalism coincided with the Second Vatican Council.) It may be a somewhat simplistic way of thinking about things, but at least with regard to Lauinger there is some merit in it. The library’s design is an ironic joke: It is a stripped back sendup of Georgetown’s central building, the venerable Healy Hall (in which Riggs Library is housed), drawn up at a time when Washington, DC was still reeling from the Kennedy assassination and, incidentally, around when the architect was sleeping with the dead president’s widow. It demonstrates strikingly an attitude prevalent in those years, that the great civilizational project of the last two centuries was little more than embellishment on a blank slate. The effect Lauinger exerts on Healy is best observed from the Virginia side of the Potomac River, where it appears as if the newer building’s plain concrete chimneys are taunting the older’s richly decorated spires. 

And yet, for all its faults, I feel a strange affection for Lauinger. There is nothing inviting or homey about the library, but it gets the job done. It is the place I go when I need to focus and work without interruption. And the same could be said for so many other Brutalist research libraries, office buildings, and government headquarters—faceless structures, with hundreds of bespectacled fogeys beavering away inside. These are silent, otherworldly places. Sanctuaries of work. Although few admit it openly, graduate students, researchers, and workaholics the world over love them, sometimes to the point of devotion. After all, there are few things so clarifying as eight hours spent in a windowless room, with nothing but concrete walls to draw the mind into the world of pure thought. 

And to a certain extent, this is what the architects had in mind when they designed these buildings. Much like the Neoclassicists, those great rationalists of the eighteenth century, the Brutalists believed that artifice must be stripped away and replaced with older, more solid principles. It is a fundamentally conservative school of thought. “When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers,” William Gaddis wrote of this tendency in art. “If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries.” 

The Neoclassicists only reached back to the clean geometry of the Greeks and Romans; the Brutalists made it much further—back to the Stone Age. Their focus was mainly on their materials—concrete, wood, and steel—and how, when exposed, they are just as compelling, if not more, than any ornamentation. What I have found from my years of working in various Brutalist libraries is that when the effect is successful, the building itself becomes edifying, not because it offers the eye something to admire, but because its plainness provides a simple frame to direct and focus the mind. 

But I am beginning to speak above my paygrade. Amateur architectural criticism is a pastime nearly as old as the trade itself. And no wonder: big buildings are by their nature public works of art and deserve all the scrutiny of the public. My learned professor rightly observed that the imposing libraries of the mid-20th century often fail to inspire the impressionable young people who pass by them. But, I would add, for those who enter and study within, they often find there is nowhere they would rather be.