Brutalism: the language of evil

I’m not sure if it was the latest Criminal Mastermind’s Lair (CML) in Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond that reminded me that while not all CML’s are Brutalist architecture, Brutalism has dominated the genre.

Brutalism has been indelibly tainted by its repeated use as a model for the most evil environments in popular culture, just as Nazism has indelibly pegged the German language as sounding, well, sinister (sorry, I grew up watching WWII docs on TV, and it just does that to you) or certain sports cars are perpetually associated with men’s midlife crisis/divorce or certain jingly tunes have one running for the door to catch the ice cream truck (that can still happen to me); it’s Pavlovian.

Brutalism has become a stereotype, and stereotypes are hard to shake.

This ‘guilt by association’ was promulgated by designers, especially film and TV art directors, set designers and production designers (I list them all because I’m never sure if they are different jobs or the same job labeled differently over time) and the films and TV they shape. The re-defining of Brutalism as the language of evil is not only general cultural trope; it is, in effect, propaganda, propagated…