I have a few issues with this article. Most notably, it doesn't prove that brutalism is back at all; it just admits that the style is no longer universally disliked by the public -- perhaps (I'm speculating) out of nostalgia, perhaps out of wistful remorse for having judged it too harshly, or perhaps by the fact that it's no longer the style associated with government intervention, with homogeneity, with willful disregard for social convention.

I also disagree with the notion expressed midway through the article that brutalism was about "an uncompromising desire to tell it like it is". In fact, most brutalism that I'm familiar with deliberately provokes by its unnatural (or even top-heavy) massing, sheer vertical lines, and dominance of concrete over other materials as a deliberate choice. The claim reads as disingenuous since Le Corbusier used structures featuring beton brut -- raw, exposed concrete -- which is where the term brutalism originates. It was very much an aesthetic choice, intentionally designed to be provocative.

As an aside, to me, the Washington DC Metro [1] represents the best of brutalism -- a functional design that, albeit stark, is pleasing to the eye solely as an accident of its function. It expresses the sheer human grandeur -- in this case, tunneling through the earth -- without being visually offensive.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/12-07-12...