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.
Brutalism is indeed overused and has a clear meaning for architecture that really do not overlap with these "guidelines"
>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.
More like Vogon poetry to be exact...
Even the ones that look okay (the first one in particular) could be easily imagined to look better if they used more lively materials.
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.
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.
I always post this when open.gov comes up.
Might not be appropriate to other kinds of site.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
From Wikipedia: “The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur, and surprise to achieve a sense of awe.”
Fits IMO.
- 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...
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.
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