Orange Country Government Center by Paul Rudolph; Photo: Ty Cole

It’s been a rough year for Brutalism. Chicago’s Prentice Women’s Hospital will likely be razed, and last spring, it appeared that Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, would face the wrecking ball too. But, at last, a victory story!

In a 15-6 vote, members of the Orange County Legislature decided it would be more cost effective to renovate the 43-year-old Rudolph building, rather than demolish it and construct a new, $68 million government center. For the better part of 2012, preservation groups had lobbied hard to save the building, arguing that it’s an important landmark that benefits the community. Read more about the recent decision at The Herald-Record.

And click here to see other embattled Brutalist icons!

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Project:  MP House in Sesma

Architect:  Alcolea + Tárrago Arquitectos

Location:  Sesma, Navarra, Spain

The MP House in Sesma sits atop a sloping site, capturing wide views of the grain fields and orchards of the Ebro River valley below. The structure’s position preserves space for a garden and fruit trees, in addition to presenting an extended facade to the street. The material palette is simple and economical—board-formed concrete and stained pine enabled the architects to create a larger home on a tight budget.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database!

Images courtesy Iñaki Bergera

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Image courtesy of Gensler

Last fall Gensler floated a concept for revamping the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI’s much-groused-about Brutalist fortress in Washington, DC. When the firm released renderings for a futuristic office-retail playground crowned with a rooftop soccer field, the building wasn’t yet on the feds’ chopping block. But, as the New York Times reports, the government has begun courting developers who want to snag the Hoover’s prime location in the now-swanky Penn Quarter neighborhood. The bureau’s thousands of workers, who arrived at the previously un-fabulous Pennsylvania Avenue back in 1974, will once again be shunted off to no-man’s-land (the suburbs!) while the winning development team gets a once-in-a-decade shot at the glamour-chasing game of prime urban place making. Read more!

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Project: AV House

Architect: BAK Arquitectos

Location: Mar Azul, Argentina

While several iconic Brutalist structures in North America face the possibility of demolition, the divisive aesthetic remains strong in many parts of South America. This exposed concrete slab home outside of Buenos Aires captures the spirit of Brutalism, while maintaining a welcoming, minimalist feel. Large glass windows connect the residents to the surrounding wooded landscape. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Gustavo Sosa Pinilla

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Orange County Government Center. Photo courtesy National Trust for Historic Preservation/Ani Od Chai

Brutalism, as a style of building, doesn’t try to endear itself to the public, which is why, perhaps, it’s consistently shunned by it. Sure, Brutalist architecture is difficult to love; it can be alienating, it’s overly large, and it refuses to back down. But when you fall for it, you fall hard. The weighty concrete forms and the undeniable bravado with which they’re employed are enough to make most contemporary buildings blush. Here is architecture with daring and substance.

Still, Brutalism is hard to live with. It’s just so much easier to settle in the cardboard Neo-Georgian houses where we live or abide in the blank, yet innocuous office towers where we work. Brutalism, on the other hand, makes it a point to disrupt the genteel homogeneity of urban life—or it did. The last few years have seen a public backlash against Brutalism—usually supported by faceless developers, easily coerced politicians, and armchair sociology—resulting in the impending or speculative demolition of some of the movement’s greatest icons, such as Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens and even Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles’ Boston City Hall. Last week’s news that Prentice Women’s Hospital will likely be bulldozed continues the trend, and it got us thinking about other embattled Brutalist buildings. Click through to see them!

For a more comprehensive look at this controversial architectural style, read our “Brief, Wondrous History of Brutalism.”

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Photo: Sony

Nothing says “don’t bother me” like a downward gaze and a pair of chunky headphones strapped across your noggin. Who knew what worked for moody urban teens also works for (quasi-)Brutalist architecture? As part of an advertising stunt launched last month, Sony crowned the Planetario Galileo Galilei in Buenos Aires with a giant pair of inflatable headphones, making the irresistibly forlorn, rain-flecked building all the more lovable. The planetarium, which was designed by architect Enrique Jan and opened in 1962, was made over to commemorate “Silent Day,” a fabricated holiday that celebrated the release of new Sony headphones. Continue.

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The Type 583a / M 178 Fire Control Post, Heerenduin, Ijmuiden; All photos: Jonathan Andrews

Wars end, but their legacies live on in, among other things, the structures that manage to escape destruction. These mostly include bunkers, which, because of their near invincibility and the plasticity their concrete forms imply, continue to captivate visitors with their strange auratic powers. The bunkers from the Second World War, in particular, have been the subject of numerous studies, most famously Paul Virilio’s “Bunker Anthology,” not to mention plenty of photographic essays.

Still, Jonathan Andrews’ portraits of the Atlantic Wall bunkers, which stretch from France to The Netherlands, cast the 70+ old structures in a whole new light. Andrews tracked down the bunkers using Google Maps in his grand pursuit of cataloging them. In Andrews’ images, each fortification is documented as the last light of day recedes, giving the works a ghostly, crepuscular presence. The Huffington Post, an Architizer A+ Awards media partner, has the full story, along with plenty more images, here.

The SK Observation Tower, Fliegerhorst, Hemiksem, Belgium

The Military Casemate Type 623, West of Koudekerke, The Netherlands

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Architectural ingenuity was, for a long time, literally wedded to the Church, its great sponsor. This patronage continued into the modern period, and the works that came from that seemingly anachronistic marriage—the antagonism between concrete futures and traditional stone and brick, between boisterous forms and contemplative ceremony—are nothing short of dazzling, especially when photographed by Fabrice Fouillet. “Corpus Cristi”, Fouillet’s photo series of soaring postwar houses of worship, captures the lyrical potency when concrete, wood, brick, and stained glass come together. Click through for more photos.

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Even before a government report last year declared the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., unfit for duty, we knew the FBI’s 1970s-era Brutalist concrete fortress was due for a makeover. Now Gensler is proposing an update that amounts to total plastic surgery. One of four winners of the Office Building of the Future design competition held by the commercial real-estate org NAIOP, Gensler’s revamp is a grim proposition for fans of Brutalist architecture and a potential rallying point for CAD-armed devotees of nebulous futurism. Read more!

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Orange Country Government Center by Paul Rudolph; Photo: Ty Cole

The Hail Mary campaign to save Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center from almost certain demolition has worked! Or for now, at least. Local officials in Goshen, New York voted yesterday to strike down Orange County executive director Eddie Diana’s proposal to raze Rudolph’s structure and replace it with a terrible neo-colonial non-entity of a building. After several months of intense debate, which pitted architectural practitioners, historians, and preservationists against bureaucratic pragmatism and, it should be said, general local opinion, the resolution failed to gain the necessary support to enact Diana’s ‘vision’, with the country legislature voting 11-10 to keep the Brutalist building alive, so to speak.

Aside from a short statement released by Diana, in which he states his “deep” disappointment with Thursday’s outcome, there has been no word as to what will be done with the Rudolph structure, let alone any details revealing how it will be preserved or restored. The building suffers from widespread water damage caused by lifelong rain leakage and last year’s Tropical Storm Irene, in whose wake left the facilities uninhabitable and subsequently vacant. Rudolph’s importance to modernism is without question, but what is the importance of the preservation this modernist failure to Orange County?

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