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Comment by hyperorca | Hacker News Reader

I agree. On reading 'brutalist', I thought it would be grey, or purely black and white, more "concrete" and slightly depressing.

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I’ve always thought of brutalism as the ultimate “function over form.” It’s brutal in the sense that it “brutally” strips away the form until all that’s left is the function. It’s like minimalism without the vanity.

I have been operating with the same working definition for a long time. I think the author is misusing the term.

Might want to look it up before getting set on your definition. Sibling comment has it (mostly) right: it’s literally “raw concrete”.

Learning moment. Thanks for the clarification.

Brutalism actually comes from the French word for concrete, "beton brut"; not English "brutality".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Brutalism

Unfinished concrete, specifically. I would translate "brut" as "bare" or "unrefined" here. English brutality is related to French brut, but in French it means more like crude, unrefined, raw, blunt, with no particular sense of animalistic or violent.

Brut is raw. Brute or brutal is related to violence.

Perhaps we should be right-click->view-source'ing for the true brutalist experience.

e: ah, in this very thread https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html

It's called brutalism because brute is the French word for concrete. To many being made out of concrete would be a defining feature of brutalism, to others it's the exposed building materials without façade.

It's called brutalism because brute is the French word for concrete.

Umm...the French word you're looking for is "beton". The rest of the thread has plenty of (correct) definitions of "brut" for reference.

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