me_irl

What? Brutalist architecture is not from prehistory. We have actual examples of it. Also we have books written by the people that designed those buildings.

The concept of material honesty involves presenting the materials (usually concrete) without paint or processing so that its fundamental physical qualities like texture and color are apparent. To the young dissatisfied architects of the 1950s, this primitivism-inspired notion that raw concrete could make a beautiful surface by itself felt like an antidote to the sleek finishes of mainstream Mid-century modernism.

Raw, unfinished concrete or beton brut became one of the hallmarks of brutalism (it’s tempting to say that only concrete buildings are brutalist, but some of the earliest buildings to be labeled brutalist like the 1954 Hunstanton School by Alison and Peter Smithson incorporated much brick and steel.) Raw concrete was transformed from a utilitarian substance into a haute architectural statement by the aging Le Corbusier, who decades earlier had helped launch the Modern Movement with his Villa Savoye (1931) and manifesto Vers une architecture (1923). Between the end of WWII and his death in 1965, Le Corbusier explored the structural and aesthetic qualities of raw concrete. At the Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles (1952), he designed a rationalist “machine for living”, with apartments, shops, and communal space connected by “streets in the sky”, all within a structural grid of beton brut. At the Convent of La Tourette outside Lyon (1961), he explored the sculptural, plastic qualities of raw concrete, using this seemingly utilitarian substance to craft some of the most sensitive, poetic, and evocative spaces of the modern movement. Finally, at the Palace of Assembly in the master-planned Indian state capital of Chandigarh, Le Corbusier celebrated the structural power of concrete through huge, imposing columns.

Quoted from an AskHistorians thread on reddit where you can read more about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rcsjht/today_brutalist_buildings_seem_pretty_universally/