Brutalism, a mid-20th-century architectural style, appears aggressive—even violent—but broke ground when Swiss architect Le Corbusier described the design look he sought: “béton brut” or “raw concrete.”
Architects and historians place brutalism in the broader modernist movement, the 20th century departure from traditional forms to a focus on an industrializing world.
Both the overall movement and the substyle are seeing a local resurgence.
Irvine-based architecture and design firm LPA Inc. was lead architect on the restoration of two buildings—the circa 1961 sanctuary, known as the Arboretum, and the 1968 Tower of Hope—at the former Crystal Cathedral campus in Garden Grove. Now Christ Cathedral and owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, it’s under renovation.
“The Tower was seismically unsafe—another owner would’ve torn it down,” said James Wirick, a principal with LPA. “We couldn’t have done this work without a client willing to invest a lot of money.”
Renovation of the tower cost $7.8 million, and the Arboretum was $6.7 million, said Ryan Lilyengren, diocese communications director.
The main glass sanctuary at the complex is modernist, while the two LPA-led projects display brutalism’s generous concrete, especially on the tower’s exterior concrete stairs.
The campus is open during renewal work, which is scheduled to be done in 2019. The diocese’s efforts to maintain the site’s architecture and history are winning accolades—most recently a 2016 Modernism in America citation for technical achievement from an international modernism conservation group.
The West Coast production studios of the Catholic Church-affiliated EWTN—Eternal Word Television Network, a nonprofit broadcaster reaching 240 million households—and Orange County Catholic Radio are housed in the tower and include satellite links, robotic cameras, and a 24-hour internet radio stream.
“It’s a fully built-out radio facility,” Lilyengren said. “We want to add more TV content.”
The tower is topped off by the Chapel in the Sky, where the diocese still conducts services (see graphic, page 22).
Concrete Rising
English architectural critic Peter Reyner Banham amped up Corbusier’s phrasing by coining “new brutalism”—which a news account of recent growing interest in the style said was “meant to upset people, and it did.”
“Brutalism” more generally came to signify a style characterized by unfinished concrete—and lots of it.
“A key element of brutalist architecture is weight,” said Alan Hess, an architect and historian in Irvine. “Buildings were meant to look massive and muscular.”
A world where concrete is boss.
Wirick at LPA put it this way: “The big burly football player in the modernist family is brutalism.”
International Movement
OC is firmly part of growing interest around the world in modernism in general and brutalism in particular.
An April article in The Guardian newspaper in London noted at least a half-dozen new books on brutalism and products including notecards and a map of London pointing out brutalist buildings.
The Wall Street Journal in May reviewed the redevelopment of the former BBC Television Centre in West London—a “curvy Brutalist-era concrete complex”—into a $1.5 billion apartment project where the smallest two-bedroom unit, at 650 square feet, starts at $1 million.
The BBC moved to a new site in 2013 after more than 50 years at the old one.
Observers said that kind of “adaptive reuse” is a way OC’s modernist and brutalist-era buildings can maintain their distinctive looks.
Béton Mod
Brutalism isn’t about what’s done with concrete but what isn’t.
Wirick calls concrete in such buildings “pure,” and Hess explains that, “You pour concrete into forms and strip the forms to see the beauty and the strength. You don’t cover it in marble. You don’t paint it.”
A brutalist building “has something rough about it” and “shows evidence of being handmade,” said Daniel Paul, a Los Angeles-based senior architectural historian with ICF International Inc., a publicly traded consultancy in Fairfax, Va., that maintains an office in Irvine.
Paul said brutalism can have a sculpted look, “but the building is intended to openly and clearly reveal all its parts and the construction process.” Modernism can sand—and paint—the concrete, and add glass and girders.
Buildings in Orange County can include all of the above.
Human Touch
Paul, an Anaheim native, has led tours of OC’s overarching modernist architecture that include Fairmont Newport Beach hotel, Koll Center Newport and Irvine Towers.
Other local brutalist-based buildings include government and university edifices erected during OC’s growth spurt of the 1960s and 1970s:
• In Fullerton, the county municipal court complex; a Ketchum University administration building and amphitheater; and Langsdorf Hall and Pollak Library at California State University-Fullerton.
• Santa Ana Civic Center structures, including the county law library and Santa Ana City Hall.
• The Ida Haxton Post Office on Atlanta Avenue in Huntington Beach.
• Cypress College is also a great example of brutalism, Paul said.
“Brutalism was about giving modernism a human touch,” he said.
“Human” and “raw concrete” don’t seem to connect, but brutalism’s unfinished features are meant to point to people over machines. Modernism’s industrialized layers are stripped to brutalism’s pure, raw concrete.
By Design
Architect and urban planner William Pereira and his design team envisioned many of the county’s most recognizable buildings, including Disneyland Hotel, which opened in October 1955; several in the city of Irvine—landing him on the Sept. 6, 1963 cover of Time magazine; parts of Newport Center; and University of California-Irvine, which opened in 1965.
It’s not true brutalism and doesn’t claim to be.
One reason is that Pereira favored precast concrete panels, and brutalism uses “poured-in-place” concrete done on-site.
A UCI library web article calls his approach “California ‘Brutalist’”—giving it a regional flavor.
Hess said that whatever else it was, “it was truly visionary.”
He said that’s because dominant 1950s-era design trends had produced “cookie cutter” suburbs: straight streets, and homes built “with no concern for parks, schools, shopping” or pedestrian-friendly areas.
Irvine Company moved against that grain with a city “designed to be a solution” to such challenges.
Mother of Invention
Many local modernist and brutalist buildings came to be for two reasons: time and money. It’s how they built back then, and it was cheap.
“The buildings here weren’t terribly remarkable for their time,” said Jesse Colin Jackson, a UCI professor who’s taught on the architecture of Orange County. “Building booms coincided with architectural trends.”
He said, “There was no faster way to erect buildings in 1965 or 1970 than to make them out of concrete. This was a decision governed by efficiency.”
UCI humanities professor and architectural historian Edward Dimendberg said it began as a necessity.
Post-war years were “a period of austerity, [and economically] it was impossible to finish concrete.”
Back to the Future
Locals see a modernist legacy in any case.
“People come from all over the world to see the (cathedral) campus,” said Chris Jepsen, assistant county archivist. “It’s a good comeback to ‘Orange County’s a cultural wasteland.’”
He noted an “architectural petting zoo” of local design styles “from the 1880s to the most modern,” where a circa-1901 county courthouse in Santa Ana—the building where he works—is “reflected in the windows of a 1980s office park.”
Modernist buildings can be popular with businesses.
Jepsen, for instance, called a two-story modernist building of glass and concrete at 230 Newport Center Drive “a real gem.” Current tenants include a FedEx Office location and a yoga studio.
A four-story office at the corner of Michelson and Dupont drives near John Wayne Airport recently got a facelift that emphasized a brutalist-inspired “raw concrete” look, plus exposed steel girders and plenty of modernism’s windows.
“The value could be in the distinction,” UCI’s Jackson said. “If your building is interesting, that’s good.”
His UCI colleague, Dimendberg, noted that new building materials could be a hybrid of the concrete and glass that until now have been separated into walls and windows.
“It’s become possible to make transparent concrete,” he said. “It looks like glass, and you can run (electrical) current through it.”
He said a company could use the material to pursue an image, for instance, of “a strong business open to the public.”
It may be impossible, though, for brutalism to completely shed its angry connotations.
“The closest thing we have to brutalism in Southern California,” said Paul at ICF International, “is the freeway system.”
