In late April, the city of Baltimore issued a certificate of demolition for the Morris A. Mechanic Theater, prevailing in a lengthy quest to destroy one of its most unique buildings. With a character somewhere between a stone-age helmet and a concrete cog, the nearly fifty-year-old building’s assertive structure has earned the affection of a small number of enthusiasts who embrace its almost oppressively functional style of architecture—and almost no one else. The theater, designed by the revered and often imperiled architect John Johansen, will be replaced by a condo.

The story of the Mechanic has become overly familiar. Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else.

Of the five at-risk Brutalist buildings I wrote about being under threat two years ago, three of them are now gone, or about to be demolished. It’s been a bad year for Johansen in particular: In addition to the Morris A. Mechanic Theater, the delightful Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City faces imminent destruction, as soon as the proper certificate emerges from the city’s administrative process. The destruction of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago began last fall, after such helpful developments as a Rahm Emanual Chicago Tribune op-ed hailing its replacement as progress. The Third Church of Christ Scientist, a Brutalist church in Washington, D.C., was demolished in March. Five of the buildings in Paul Rudolph’s Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, New York, are due to be razed.

As John Grindrod wrote in the introduction to Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain:

There is an accepted narrative to the way we think about our postwar architectural legacy. That narrative is somewhat akin to the plot of a superhero blockbuster: a team of supervillains—planners, architects, academics—have had their corrupt, megalomaniac way with the country for 30 years. Then, at long last, a band of unlikely heroes—a ragbag of poets, environmentalists, and good, honest citizens—rise up against this architectural Goliath and topple it in the name of Prince Charles."

This is, unfortunately, exactly how large numbers of critics conceive of Brutalism today. Those who wish to preserve examples of the the style aren’t simply fighting against indifference, they’re combating avowed foes—antagonists who would gladly take a turn at the wrecking ball—who view sympathy for the style as willful contrarianism of the “Bach or Before, Ives or After” variety, not just divorced from reasonable taste but purposefully set at odds with it. They sense that battle lines have remained neatly drawn between (lower-case) modernists and traditionalists, and that modernists are now making a convenient pivot to save their austere wonderlands—everyone becomes a fan of precedent once there’s a Supreme Court decision that they like. As Rod Dreher wrote in at The American Conservative: “It is ironic that Modernists, who based their entire movement on liberation from tradition, are in the position of making traditionalist(ish) arguments for saving their hideous buildings from the wrecking ball.”...Continue Reading

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