Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design (2018)
brutalist-web.design
brutalist-web.design
Even the ones that look okay (the first one in particular) could be easily imagined to look better if they used more lively materials.
In some strange way it reminds me of Koyaanisqatsi, now 40 years old (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35764584)
I saw it in a movie theater a long time ago, the images where exiting, the music unlike anything I had every heard... It was stimulating and at the same time uncomfortable, I remember I was glad to finally see the credits after 1.5 hours of a bombardment of sound.
Still it made a big impression on me and made me discover a whole new genre of music and composers.
Yeah, I can acknowledge that. Though surveys do show that most people tend to favor classical architecture.
There's also the matter of what you're comparing it to. Some brutalism may not be beautiful, or as beautiful as something classical in form, but the best examples are just interesting in a way that a generic 5-over-2 building isn't.
I think maintenance of materials matters a lot as well. Concrete's aesthetic really depends on it being clean and crack-free.
> Concrete's aesthetic really depends on it being clean and crack-free.
... unless you're into the aesthetic of crumbling urban decay? I mean I should know better than to pick pointless fights on the internet, but you kinda teed it up
Brutalism is indeed overused and has a clear meaning for architecture that really do not overlap with these "guidelines"
I suppose you'd have to refer to a site as Functionalist.
and I'm not joking, I think the word brutalist is so attractive to people that it begs to be recolonized regardless of the narrow context in which it once thrived.
>not at all about the pure functionality absence of any aesthetic as
That's exactly the vibe I got from https://brutalistwebsites.com. Like many, I like both the aesthetics of brutalist architecture and brutalist websites – but that doesn't mean "form follows function" can be applied here. Many "brutalist" websites are very confusing, inaccessible, and/or impracticable. I suspect that minimalism or simplicism would be a better term for what the guidelines want to achieve.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible to combine playful aethetics with accessible technology, but that requires compromise and a lot of experience.
For example, one of the ideas behind using raw concrete for public buildings instead of something sleeker and more expensive is to make public institutions more welcoming and accessible to ordinary people. Traditionally, public buildings were built to project the prestige and power of the class of people who ran elite institutions, at the expense of common people who themselves might feel a bit raw and brutal compared to the sleek and expensive buildings where the sleek and expensive elites ran the world in their sleek and expensive suits. Raw concrete is supposed to communicate that the building, and the institution inside, is (at least supposed to be) working for the public, not spending their money to elevate and aggrandize the people in power.
In other words, in those cases, concrete is meant to create a relatable and accessible rawness, like Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot.
I think it works out a lot better in reality than people think, when a building is well-designed. Architectural photography can hide ugliness — almost every building has its equivalent of the flattering "Myspace angle" — but it can also manufacture it, and with the right lighting, angle, and exposure, it's easy to make any tall concrete building look like a gloomy looming hulk.
Local feelings are a better guide to whether a building is good or not than the feelings of people who have never seen a building in person and have been primed by tendentious photography.
More like Vogon poetry to be exact...
I worked for an ecom company (in finance) and we were looking at replatforming. I wondered two things: how hard is it to write an ecom store, and could it be much more performant.
I suppose main problem with going too brutal would be that many people would find it hard to trust.
Product name * Unit of measure
minimal cognitive load[1] from the outset: no (algorithmic) slop dumped onto your cortex - one of the reasons i've never been able to do, say, (music) streaming services
1: emphasis on lack of color for me
I jest of course.
As absurd as finding a glass of ice water in the middle of the Sahara: nonetheless refreshing.
Brutalism looks simple, but horrible and anti-human, especially in Britain's climate, where it tends to get stained by damp and moss.
I actually like that - nature easily integrates it back into itself. That can't happen with glass towers.
As for the anti-human, I always read it as a reminder that there are things bigger than human, which may be why brutalism is so popular with governments.
Moss and vines look great on Britain's Georgian and Gothic architecture. On Brutalist flat surfaces, it just looks dirty.
Brutalism is an academic justification of the brutalisation of the working class, who invariably were the ones who ended up living in cheaply constructed Brutalist architecture. The middle and upper classes (and the architects) keep to their pretty Georgian Neo-classical houses.
Yep, and they'll pull out the "umm well akshually 'brutalism' comes from the french betón brut, it doesn't mean 'brutal'", but they're wrong; the word "brutalism" itself wasn't coined by the French, it was coined by a bunch of too-clever-by-half Anglophone students. They knew exactly what double meaning it would have; it was always a mean-spirited pun.
Etymology helps people understand the mindset at a given time.
That's just like your opinion, man.
> Brutalism is an academic justification of the brutalisation of the working class, who invariably were the ones who ended up living in cheaply constructed Brutalist architecture. The middle and upper classes (and the architects) keep to their pretty Georgian Neo-classical houses.
That is a projection. Most brutalist buildings are not living spaces but things like bridges, university buildings, libraries, airports, museums, etc. Who do those oppress?
If you don't like the concrete because the Soviets used a lot of it, say that without the pseudo-intelecualization.
- ugly
- dirty
- dark
- felt impersonal, not designed for people
- usually smelled of piss
- often associated with petty crime
Most brutalist buildings should be wiped from the earth. People report liking living in the Barbican, perhaps we can keep that one. Most of the rest are nothing more than an eyesore.
Only seeing it from the outside I dismissed it for many years, but once I went in I realised both how huge it is and how it shows the ideas of brutalist and modernist architecture do exist independently of the depressing concrete boxes that have often been built in their name.
It was like prison cells in a panopticon.
> aspirational development for "middle and upper middle class professionals" [1] and remains highly sought after to this day.
In spite of its brutalist architecture, not because. London has a severe shortage of housing/the UK is too centralised.
Water infiltration causes mould and other nasty problems for the people inside, and it makes the exterior physically crumble apart. It's not a thing to be celebrated.
"It looks good when it's fucked up" is the last refuge of indefensible monumentalism; reminiscent of Albert Speer's "Ruin Value", likely devised because he was smart enough to realize his buildings wouldn't survive the decade.
It shouldn't have to be said, but the main function of a building is to keep nature out.
>As for the anti-human, I always read it as a reminder that there are things bigger than human, which may be why brutalism is so popular with governments.
You can make big things to provoke feelings of awe and wonder, or feelings of intimidation and powerlessness. It's a choice. And art is only a welcome "reminder" when it's occasional. People put a skull on their shelf, so that when their eye lands on it some drowsy evening, they are reminded: memento mori. But nobody would like it if every advert on the tube said "you're going to die someday lol". You can't get away from architecture; a brutalist city is one where people cannot go about their day without being reminded that they are tiny and insignificant, and powerful people can do what they like to them.
Then build it accordingly - use water management techniques such as impermeabilization, double walls, drainage, and so many others that ensure the building is safe and sound because rain tends to fall on them anyway and it's not like things like green roofs are a universally bad thing - they even help with heat management. And suspended gardens were even a thing in Babylon.
> It shouldn't have to be said, but the main function of a building is to keep nature out.
No. It's to keep people comfortable, to foster human relationships and social activities within and around it, gently guiding people towards a goal without them realizing it. Architecture was never about buildings - it's about the people who use them.
E.g. a brutalist blog is certainly usable (see for example: http://blog.fefe.de/ which uses the browsers default css and allows you to apply custom css "themes"). If you look neutral at it, it is just text and text is front and center. With clean markup it is more accessible than most sites and people are free to style their default browser template any way they like. This is not anti-human.
Brutalism can be anti-human, but so can be a friendly cushy design language that hides the truth behind fluffy words. It always depends on the execution.
I grew up with a lot of that: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/t-magazine/tropical-bruta...
The GDS design guides are not rooted in aesthetics, they're truly rooted in practicality. Their goal is for the site to be navigable and understandable by as close to 100% of the UK population as they can get. That has to include people with old or unusual devices, people with disabilities, people on slow connections, and so on. It's all about the user.
Actually-existing brutalist buildings are not like this. The architects put aesthetic sensibilities first, usability second, while fraudulently claiming they were doing the opposite[1]. When people complained about how unpleasant it was to live in them, they did the "you're holding it wrong" dodge, and said the users (i.e. inhabitants) were to blame.
[1] For example, they would put in industrial-looking concrete greebles on the sides of buildings, making them look like they served a structural purpose, but actually they didn't. It was purely decorative, but ugly decoration that only appealed to other brutalist architects, meant to trick people into thinking it was some "raw" construction element sticking out.
EDIT lol the stained concrete appreciation society have arrived; but no amount of downvotes will make anyone want to live in coventry
Both demolished. Replaced with the usual speculative tat. Many empty properties (high rents from new build).
Brutalism was never about stripping buildings of all aesthetics, a common misconception or often heard derogatory argument against many forms of minimalism. Minimalism does not eliminate design. It is more about rejecting purely decorative elements and working directly with the structural elements and building material. Recognising aesthetic choices is therefore not fraudulent or dishonest, but your lack of understanding what brutalism is about.
No, that's what they claimed they were doing. The reality was different.
That's really funny, because I've seen websites that tries to appeal to "hacker"/"minimalist" aesthetics doing the same thing.
An example: the file-hosting service https://0x0.st. When you try to visit a link to a non-existing file, it will crash with a trace message that exposes the offending code block from fhost.c.
Wow, so RAW and BRUTAL. It's even written in C, so hacker-ish! Until you find out that the error message is fake: https://git.0x0.st/mia/0x0/src/branch/master/templates/404.h...
The server is actually written in Python and it generates a randomized, fake C-looking trace message for its 404 page.
I always post this when open.gov comes up.
Might not be appropriate to other kinds of site.
The ML in HTML stands for "markup language". Too many frameworks produce garbage markup, which is why for typical CMS systems I write my own themes that use HTML as it was intended to be used.
One of my favourite German hacker/nerd blogs uses more or less the browsers defaults for ages now and it is so blazingly fast that it is my regular "does the internet work"-website: https://blog.fefe.de/
"The day's headlines delivered to you without bullshit."
I disagree with this, HTML in it's raw rendered state is not pleasant to read. You have to apply some rules (or specify the rules in your browser) to get the text to a state where it is pleasant to read.
But it also has nothing to do with brutalist websites.
There’s really no relation between this list of guidelines for brutalism and between sites that actual people would describe as brutalist.
That term has been kicking around for a few years now. Personally, I always felt it a very evocative definition for these kinds of sites:
https://brutalistwebsites.com/
A few other key words that come to mind are “artsy”, “experimental”, perhaps “post-modern”. And also “barren”, “self-important”, “hostile”.
What the guidelines in this article have in common is not that they lead to brutalist websites, it’s that the lead to good websites.
So why hijack a confusing term?
- structural elements aren't obscured by decoration - infrastructure (cabling, conduits, piping, ductwork, etc) is likewise 'left exposed' - building materials also left unadorned - physical shapes are building-blocky, not 'finished' - visual design elements are strictly utilitarian, or incidental to materials
I've gotta say while I mostly agree with the author, this article's "A website's materials aren't HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code" claim really rubs me the wrong way right off the bat - the structural elements are absolutely HTML and CSS and JS. HTML is the physical architectural structure, CSS is the visual treatment, and JS is the infrastructure that allows interactivity.
If anything, default browser styles would seem to be the nearest we've got to "HTML (structural elements) aren't obscured by decoration (CSS)." No rounded corners, no drop shadows, no parallax. Which makes "The default visual appearance of a button is often unpleasant or clashes with the visual language of the site" - I think under Brutalism, the clash would essentially be accepted as a hazard of "building materials left unadorned." Maybe you could sneak it in under "visual design elements are strictly utilitarian," as visual design is an incredible tool for usability
Leaving the infrastructure (JS) out in the open is a little trickier, though I guess you could point to open sourcing your codebase and not obfuscating your production code so it's easily reviewable in the Dev Tools as a way to satisfy that ideal. Static HTML sites also seem like they'd be a little more in line with Brutalism than SPAs I suppose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Does_exactly_what_it_says_on_t...
From Wikipedia: “The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur, and surprise to achieve a sense of awe.”
Fits IMO.
But:
> A website is neither an application nor a video game. It is for content, and so its design must serve that purpose.
No, a website is for selling something, anything, to someone, anyone. So on most sites it follows that design is built/tortured to achieve this goal.
> Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
The site fails to meet its own stated design criteria.
In contrast, “flat” is just a visual style.
This feels overwrought. A website is a collection of documents (webpages). That's it. A document is just a vehicle to store and/or transmit information. They can be made to be pretty and engaging to make that information easier to consume.
So the document metaphor is too simple as it only describes what happends at the html/css level but not how the user interacts with the site and the purchases that result from this interaction.
That guide and website is the least worst I've see in this style, but the general brutalist web-design makes me want to turn off the computer.