Web Brutalism, and What It Was Reacting To
Beton brut means raw concrete, not brutal, and Banham did not coin the term. The architectural history, the web movement that borrowed the name, and the real critique underneath it.
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A secondary school opened in Hunstanton, on the north Norfolk coast, in 1954. It was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, built between 1949 and 1954, and listed at Grade II* in 1993. Its water tank sits on an exposed steel frame. Its services run where you can see them. The steel is steel, the brick is brick, and nothing has been dressed to look like anything else.
This building is where the word we now attach to a certain kind of website first came to rest. Almost everything commonly said about that word is slightly wrong, and the errors are worth correcting because they change what the term meant when web designers picked it up sixty years later.
The word does not mean brutal
The most repeated claim about Brutalism is that the name describes how the buildings make you feel. It does not. The root is béton brut, French for raw concrete, the finish Le Corbusier used at the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, where the concrete carries the impression of the timber shuttering it was poured into. Brut means raw, not brutal. The adjacent term is art brut, Jean Dubuffet's name for raw art made outside the fine art system.
Reyner Banham was explicit about this in his 1966 book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?: "if there is one single verbal formula that has made the concept of Brutalism admissible... it is that Le Corbusier himself described that concrete work as 'béton-brut'."
Tate's own art term entry gets the etymology right, stating that "The term originates from the use, by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le Corbusier, of 'beton brut'", but then says Banham "gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain", and credits Banham with coining the term. That second part is where the popular account goes off.
Who actually coined it
Banham did not coin New Brutalism. The earliest recorded use is Swedish. The architect Hans Asplund used nybrutalism in 1950 to describe Villa Göth in Uppsala, by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm, and the word travelled to English architects who visited that summer.
The Smithsons then put "new brutalism" into print in November 1953, in Architectural Design, describing their unbuilt house in Soho. Their stated intention for that project was "to have the structure exposed entirely, without interior finishes wherever practicable". Hunstanton is recorded as the first completed building whose own architects carried that label.
Banham's essay came after. It ran in The Architectural Review on 9 December 1955, under the title The New Brutalism. In it he is candid that the phrase began life as an insult, "a term of Communist abuse" aimed at modern architecture's flat roofs, glass and exposed structure, before the Smithsons took it up. He describes Alison Smithson as having "first claimed the words in public as her own in a description of a project for a small house in Soho".
So the sequence is: a Swedish joke in 1950, an English adoption by 1953, a built example in 1954, and a critic's theorisation in 1955. Banham was the movement's theorist and its best publicist. He was not its namer, and he did not invent it as a pun on brutality.
Banham's three tests
What Banham did do, and what almost nobody who uses the word today has read, is propose an actual definition. His revised criteria for a Brutalist building were three:
These are testable. The second and third in particular are claims about honesty of construction: you can see how the thing is held up, and the materials are presented in the state they arrived in. Of Hunstanton, Banham wrote that it "appears to be made of glass, brick, steel and concrete, and is in fact made of glass, brick, steel, and concrete", and praised its "abstemious under-designing of the details". He noted that it is "almost unique among modern buildings in being made of what it appears to be made of".
Brutalism in its original sense is not a look. It is a refusal to apply a finish that conceals how the building works.
Hold onto that, because it is the only part of the architectural term that transfers cleanly to the web, and it is the part the web movement mostly dropped.
Banham's subtitle in 1966 is the whole argument compressed: Ethic or Aesthetic? He was asking whether the thing he had named in 1955 was a moral position about construction or merely a way buildings could be made to look. That question was live for him because the answer determined whether Brutalism was a movement or a style, and whether a building could be Brutalist by imitation.
It is the same question the web version never asked itself. A site can be given the visual signature of the gallery, monospaced type, unstyled links, high-contrast blocks, jarring colour, without any of it following from a decision about materials. At that point the ethic has been discarded and the aesthetic kept, which is precisely the outcome Banham's subtitle was warning about.
2014, and the borrowing
Brutalist Websites, at brutalistwebsites.com, is the artefact that fixed the term in web design. It is curated by the Swiss designer Pascal Deville, and secondary accounts date its founding to 2014. I should flag that I could not find a dated founding statement on the site itself, so the 2014 date rests on secondary reporting rather than a primary source.
The site carries a short definition, and it is a statement about motivation rather than method:
In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today's web design.
Deville also distinguished three strands within what he was collecting. Writing in Smashing Magazine in January 2020, Frederick O'Brien quotes him describing purists, UX minimalists, and anti-ists or artists. Of the first group Deville says they "reference strongly to the architectural characteristics of Web Brutalism, such as the concept of 'truth to materials'".
That is the only point in the web movement's self-description where the architectural argument is actually invoked, and it is invoked for one of three sub-groups.
The split that makes the label incoherent
O'Brien's article is the most useful thing written on this, because it names the split that most coverage blurs. He identifies two strands he calls l'Internet Brut and l'Internet Fou. The first is raw and functional: plain HTML and CSS, light background, black text, blue underlined links. His examples are Craigslist, Wikipedia and Bloomberg. The second deliberately subverts convention, where, as he puts it, "design conventions are subverted and usability is an afterthought".
These two are not variants of one idea. They are opposites.
Property | Architectural Brutalism | Raw web strand | Anti-design web strand |
|---|---|---|---|
Materials shown as found | Central | Central | Incidental |
Structure legible | Central | Central | Often deliberately obscured |
Function served | Required | Required | Optional |
Difficulty for the user | Not an aim | Not an aim | Frequently an aim |
Ornament | Rejected as dishonest | Rejected as unnecessary | Re-introduced as provocation |
Read down the columns. The raw strand is a genuine descendant of the Smithsons' argument. The anti-design strand shares a mood with Brutalist buildings as the public experienced them, which is to say uncomfortable, but shares nothing with the ethic the architects were actually arguing for. Banham's second and third criteria are not met by a site that hides its navigation as a joke.
The version that was argued for
One document does the work properly. David Bryant Copeland's Brutalist Web Design, under the heading "Raw content true to its construction", sets out seven principles:
Nothing on that list is ugly, difficult or contrarian. It is a list of ways the web's own materials, hypertext, scrolling, the document, the back button, are allowed to be themselves rather than reimplemented in JavaScript as something that imitates them badly. That is Banham's third criterion applied to a different medium: materials as found. It is the only piece of web brutalist writing I have read that earns the borrowed name by argument rather than by association.
What it was actually reacting against
Strip away the styling and there is a real complaint underneath, and it was not invented by the brutalists. Boris Müller set it out clearly in Why Do All Websites Look the Same?, published in September 2018. His diagnosis is structural rather than aesthetic. Templates, he argues, are the problem, because "Templates are content agnostic. And that is the problem." He sets this against a principle: "One of the fundamental principles of design is a deep and meaningful connection between form and content." The result, in his phrase, is a web of "containers in containers in containers".
That is the grievance the web brutalists were gesturing at, and it holds up. The flat corporate style of the mid-2010s was not merely a taste that spread. It was the visible surface of an underlying sameness: the same handful of CSS frameworks, the same page architecture of hero, three feature cards, testimonial, call to action, the same template marketplaces, and the same design systems sold as a way to stop making decisions. When form is decided before content exists, every site with different content ends up with the same form.
The timing supports the reading. The flat corporate style consolidated between roughly 2013 and 2016, which is exactly the window in which Brutalist Websites appeared. Flat design had started as a corrective, a reaction against skeuomorphic shading and bevels. Within three years it had become the thing it replaced: a default finish applied regardless of content, recognisable at a glance, adopted because it was what the tools produced rather than because anyone had argued for it. A style that begins as a critique of ornament and ends as a mandatory surface is unusually vulnerable to the next critique, and the next critique used the word Brutalism.
A reaction to that is legitimate. The question is whether the reaction proposed anything.
What the label did and did not achieve
I have to be honest about this, including about my own earlier enthusiasm for the term. Web brutalism was mostly a borrowing, not an argument. It took a word with a specific and recoverable meaning, applied it to a gallery of sites whose only shared property was that they did not look like a template, and let the architectural association do the work that a stated position should have done.
The evidence for this is in the shape of the primary material. There is a curated gallery with a one-paragraph definition about mood. There is a three-way taxonomy in an interview. There is one manifesto, written by a developer, that makes the case properly and is the least cited of the three. There is no body of writing in which practitioners set out what their materials are and what showing them honestly would require. Compare that to the architectural case, which produced a published intention in 1953, a built demonstration in 1954, a critical framework with three testable criteria in 1955 and a book-length defence in 1966.
What the label did achieve is smaller and not nothing. It gave permission. Between roughly 2014 and 2018 it became briefly acceptable to ship a site that did not look like the others, and a generation of designers who had only ever worked inside frameworks discovered what the underlying materials do when you stop covering them. Several things that outlasted the trend came from that period: system fonts used deliberately rather than as a fallback, visible grids, undisguised links, pages that load in under a second because there is nothing in them that does not need to be there.
Those are all recognisably Banham's third criterion. They survived. The intentionally broken navigation did not, and should not have. If you want to use the word, use it for the first group. The buildings were never trying to be difficult. They were trying to stop lying about how they were made.
Sources
Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism", The Architectural Review, 9 December 1955. Text via architecture-history.org library and the Architectural Review archive. architectural-review.com/archive/the-new-brutalism-by-reyner-banham
Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, 1966, quoted in the Wikipedia entry on Brutalist architecture. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
Wikipedia, "Brutalist architecture", for the etymology chain: Hans Asplund's nybrutalism (1950, Villa Göth by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm), the Smithsons' November 1953 Architectural Design statement, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation (1952). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
Wikipedia, "Smithdon High School", for the Smithsons' authorship, 1949 to 1954 construction, 1954 opening and Grade II* listing in 1993. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithdon_High_School
Tate, art term entry "Brutalism". tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/brutalism
Pascal Deville, Brutalist Websites, definition of brutalism in web design. brutalistwebsites.com
Frederick O'Brien, "The Split Personality Of Brutalist Web Development", Smashing Magazine, January 2020, for Deville's three strands and the l'Internet Brut / l'Internet Fou distinction. smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/split-personality-brutalist-web-development/
David Bryant Copeland, "Brutalist Web Design", last updated 1 June 2025. brutalist-web.design
Boris Müller, "Why Do All Websites Look the Same?" (also published as "On the Visual Weariness of the Web"), 15 September 2018. borism.medium.com/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73
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