It is one of the great paradoxes of twentieth-century architecture: that the buildings which appeared most austere and raw — the massive concrete structures of the 1950s to 1970s — were in fact realized with an extraordinary degree of care, precision, and craft. In an age of economic boom, growing labor costs, and expanding workers’ rights, such attention to the tactile and material might seem improbable. Yet the period of high Brutalism produced a material culture of astonishing refinement — one that revealed, in every shutter mark and joint, a rare harmony between design intent, social ethos, and human skill.
The Postwar Alignment of Ideals
The decades after 1945 were a unique constellation in architectural history. Across Europe, Japan, and parts of the Americas, societies emerging from destruction were animated by an unprecedented belief in reconstruction — not merely of buildings, but of social order itself. The welfare state, the rise of public education, and the expansion of civic infrastructure all required architecture to embody collective ideals rather than private ambition. The client was not the speculative investor, but the public institution.
In this environment, architects could pursue material honesty and durability without immediate concern for profit margins. The new schools, universities, town halls, and churches were to stand for generations; they were civic instruments as much as shelters. Quality was not a luxury but an ethical duty. The cultural expectation that architecture would manifest the seriousness of public purpose gave room for a precision that the later market economy would no longer tolerate.
Thus the paradox begins to resolve itself: high wages did not exclude high craftsmanship because both were the expression of the same moral climate — a shared conviction that skilled labor, fairly paid, was a foundation of social dignity.
The Keynesian Horizon
Behind this architectural flowering stood an economic philosophy that is almost forgotten today: the Keynesian model of regulated capitalism. It defined the postwar decades across much of the industrialized world and shaped not only fiscal policy but also the cultural meaning of building. Governments embraced the idea that collective prosperity depended on public investment and full employment; that the state had both the means and the duty to direct economic growth toward social balance. Architecture became one of the visible instruments of this consensus.
Public works were not merely tolerated expenses — they were strategic stimuli in a circular economy of labor, production, and welfare. The new schools, hospitals, and housing estates were built in part to stabilize employment and in part to express the tangible results of redistributive policy. In this sense, each building carried within it the logic of Keynesian optimism: the belief that enlightened management of resources could reconcile social justice with economic expansion.
This framework sustained the very conditions under which craftsmanship could flourish. As long as the public sector commissioned work on principles of quality, durability, and civic pride, the skill of the individual builder remained economically viable. The Brutalist building site thus mirrored the Keynesian ideal — a coordinated system where the autonomy of the craftsman and the planning of the state found a temporary, and profoundly human, equilibrium.
The Persistence of Craft in an Industrial Age
Technologically, the 1950s and early 1960s were an in-between moment. The complete industrialization of construction had not yet occurred. The building site was still a workshop; concrete was mixed and poured in situ, its formwork built by carpenters whose knowledge came from prewar traditions of timber construction. The precision of those craftsmen — in aligning boards, cutting edges, controlling surface texture — determined the visual outcome of the building far more than any later finishing process.
This gave the architecture of the time a remarkable immediacy: the form of the building was inseparable from the act of making it. The grain of the timber, the rhythm of the tie holes, the sharpness of the concrete arris — all were traces of a living process. In this sense, Brutalism was not anti-craft; it was a new kind of craft, a fusion of modern material with pre-industrial hand knowledge.
Moreover, the labor force was stable and highly trained. In many European countries, apprenticeship systems had survived the war and were supported by strong unions and public funding. Pride in workmanship was not nostalgia; it was a social contract. The worker on site saw himself as a participant in the making of a collective future. This was still a culture that believed in progress — not as consumption, but as construction.
Craftsmanship as Ethical Aesthetic
For the leading voices of Brutalism — Alison and Peter Smithson in Britain, Reyner Banham in his writings, Paul Rudolph in the United States, Kenzo Tange in Japan, or Gottfried Böhm in Germany — material honesty was never simply a matter of style. It was a statement of moral position. To show the process of building, to reveal the grain of the shuttering or the imprint of the tool, was to acknowledge the human labor embedded in the work.
This was the ethical horizon of Brutalism: an architecture that refused to conceal how it was made. In an age of optimism about technology, it reasserted the dignity of making. The surface of a wall was no longer a mask but a record of collaboration — between architect and craftsman, between form and process, between ideal and effort. The notion of truth to materials carried a social resonance: the belief that honesty in construction mirrored honesty in society.
Institutions of Continuity
The persistence of craftsmanship in this period was also institutional. Public works departments, municipal architects’ offices, and national building agencies maintained long-term relationships with contractors and trades. Knowledge accumulated across projects. In Britain, the London County Council’s Architects’ Department became a laboratory of constructional innovation; in France, the Ministry of Reconstruction employed teams of architects and engineers who shared standards of precision; in Germany, municipal and church building offices continued the prewar ethos of Bauhandwerk.
Such frameworks created continuity between design, execution, and maintenance — a triangle that would later collapse under privatization and fragmentation. The architect could still discuss a formwork detail directly with the carpenter; both saw themselves as co-authors of a civic work.
Architecture schools also nurtured this ethos. From Zurich to Milan, from Tokyo to Cambridge, students were trained to draw not just façades but joints, connections, materials under stress. Construction was not the enemy of architecture but its proof. The notion of the architect as Baumeister — master builder — still lingered, even as the profession moved toward greater specialization.
The Disappearance of the Balance
By the mid-1970s, this equilibrium began to erode. Economic turbulence, oil crises, and the new logic of efficiency changed the climate of building. Prefabrication replaced on-site work; subcontracting fragmented responsibility; the relationship between architect and craftsman became mediated by management layers and cost codes. Concrete lost its tactile aura and became a product.
In parallel, architectural culture shifted from moral to visual concerns. The honesty once inscribed in formwork gave way to the smoothness of postmodern surface. The site was no longer a place of collaboration but of negotiation. Craftsmanship — that visible dialogue between human hand and resistant material — receded into memory.
What Remains
To stand today before the weathered concrete of the Salk Institute, the Royal College of Physicians, or Böhm’s St. Bonifatius in Barmbek is to encounter more than material. It is to feel a social order materialized: a time when the physical labor of building was understood as a moral act, when even the most advanced architecture still depended on the intelligence of the hand.
The Brutalists, often misread as apostles of severity, were in truth the last idealists of construction — convinced that the authenticity of architecture depended on its making, not its image. Their work speaks of a lost synthesis between ethics, technology, and human skill — a synthesis that arose precisely because the world was still willing to believe that craftsmanship and progress could belong to the same future.
Luigi Monzo 