This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

There seems to be a propaganda campaign afoot to try to persuade the public that the architectural style known as Brutalism has been other than an aesthetic, social and urban disaster. It is as if the National Association of Thugs were trying to persuade the public that being robbed in the street at knifepoint were a life-enhancing experience.

Recently I noticed a headline in The Herald (formerly the Glasgow Herald). Announcing an exhibition, it read, “A monstrous design: The beauty of Glasgow’s Brutalist buildings”. Accompanying the article were pictures of such buildings, one of them with a glass frontage not blacked, but pinked out, with the words “people make glasgow” in huge lettering inscribed on the vast pink space.

Needless to say, the buildings themselves could have been anywhere from Minsk to Vladivostok: there was nothing remotely or specifically Glaswegian about them. The elimination of locality has long been the aim of modern architects, and it must be said that they have been very successful in achieving this.

No giant statue of Stalin in a communist satellite country could have made the message clearer

Is there any city in the world of which it could be said that people had made it? Nevertheless, these three words managed, in the context, to insinuate a lie, namely that the building itself was some kind of symbol of the spirit of the people of Glasgow, spontaneously desired by them, when it was all but certain that its erection was the consequence of the inhuman and totalitarian impulses of architects combined with the corruption and aesthetic incompetence of the city council. It is the sort of building that screams of brown paper envelopes. These monstrosities were imposed on the population, not desired. They are largely detested, not loved.

However, there the buildings stand, a fait accompli, a permanent reminder to the population of who is boss and an aide-mémoire to their own impotence. No giant statue of Stalin in a communist satellite country could have made the message, the reality of power, clearer to a crushed populace.