Many consider Brutalism began in its most literal form with this 2016 Unesco World Heritage Site. It was the first and most famous of the many similarly named housing developments across Europe by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier for a nation that was still displaced and recovering from the Second World War. 

While at a time béton brut (rough-cast concrete) was the most viable replacement for steel frames that were then too expensive due to post-war shortage, its extensive use became a key element to the Brutalist movement.

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The Unité d’Habitation (housing unit) in Marseille was built between 1947 and 1952, with wide corridors—dubbed “streets in the sky”—spanned across the central axis of every third floor. 

It comprised more than 300 apartment units across 12 storeys, and amenities for the healing community that included a communal terrace on the flat roof that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea and Marseille.

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The sizable housing complex at Cité du Havre was designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, whose blueprint of Montreal’s architectural landmark originated from his master’s thesis before it was amended for the Expo 67 world fair in 1967.

Believed to showcase the new urban lifestyle in increasingly crowded cities around the world, Habitat 67 was designed with the integrated benefits of a home in suburbia, but compressed into a dense apartment complex.

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The multi-levelled environments consisted of 354 identical prestressed concrete forms engineered by Estonian-American structural engineer August Eduard Komendant, a pioneer in concrete prefabrication. They were arranged in various combinations and divided into three 12-storey pyramids with a level dedicated to residential parking and another for building services.

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There were originally 158 apartment units in Habitat 67, and over time, several of them combined to create larger units, reducing to the 146 residences today. Each unit had at least one private garden terrace of varying sizes atop the roof of the unit below and in the residence, a moulded plastic bathroom and a modular kitchen.

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Chicago-born architect William Pereira designed the main library building at the University of California, San Diego, in the late 1960s, whose other futuristic landmarks included the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and the Los Angeles International Airport.

The building was devised to look like a pair of hands holding up a stack of books. Pereira achieved this vision with a 110-foot spheroidal tower of eight storeys and “stacks” atop the building’s arches that housed five more levels for individual study spaces, group study rooms and archival collections.

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Initially, Pereira envisioned a steel-framed building, but due to the maintenance cost, he opted for a reinforced concrete structure, a switch of material that presented more flexibility for a more sculptural design with more open interior spaces.

To add to the building’s star power, Geisel Library was named in honour of Audrey and Theodor Seuss Geisel, the former better known as children’s author Dr Seuss. The Mandeville Special Collections and Archives in the building houses around 8,500 items of his works.

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Despite its name—“White Towers” in Spanish—Torres Blancas featured mixed use concrete for its façade of overlapped cylindrical volumes that reached more than 80 metres in height, with round overhanging balconies as crowns, and yellow-stained glass made of methacrylate for windows.

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Built between 1964 and 1969, the high-rise apartment and office building was designed by Spanish architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza, and was a notable example of Spanish Organicism due to its curved forms taking after that of a growing tree: the reinforced concrete body was like the large trunk of the tree, and the curved terraces the leaves of the branches.

Besides the amenities of a small community, including a rooftop swimming pool with panoramic views of Madrid, Torres Blancas had three independent housing units of different sizes with their own garden terrace. Hence, they were advertised in the 60s as “cottages in the sky”—apartment homes in the city with the perks of a country house.

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In 1967, the CBR cement company needed new infrastructure for its headquarters. As it was an important producer and distributor of a large variety of cement for building constructions in Brussels, they would like one that showcased their skills and knowledge in concrete.

Architects Constantin Brodzki and Marcel Lambrichs were commissioned for the project, and between 1967 and 1970, they set about the construction of a New Brutalist architecture, which featured 756 white prefabricated oval modules, each with orange-tinted window panes set directly in the concrete.

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Brodzki took the project of highlighting the qualities of Belgian cement works to the next level when he spearheaded crafting the prefabricated modular. Together with the CBR company and two Portuguese brothers, they created a mould in epoxy. This sped up the construction process significantly, completing the building as quickly as one floor per week. 

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Standing a little over 103 feet in height, the CBR Building consisted of two parallel wings slightly offset from each other. The nine storeys above ground were fitted with mahogany partitions, parquet flooring and bush-hammered concrete details, as well as a complete air conditioning system that was the first of its kind in Belgium back then. There was also a concrete spiral staircase that led from the ground floor to a basement restaurant and three underground levels.

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