The Weakness of Hard Edges: A Critique of Brutalism from a Recovering Brutalist

The Hayward Gallery is an iconic early example of Brutalist architecture in Britain.

If you broke down who I am and how I think, it’s easy to mistake me for a Brutalist because of my preference for restraint. It’s a common assumption, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. The similarities between my work and that of David Chipperfield, Valerio Olgiati, or Grafton Architects exist for mainly this reason: I can’t stand aesthetics without purpose. Design without intention collapses into noise. I’m exacting, yes. I’m drawn to what’s raw and elemental. I don’t believe integrity needs a story to justify itself or to pretend at depth. My work isn’t about austerity or control, it’s about precision that serves meaning. This essay is, in many ways, a brutalism critique, an attempt to understand where strength ends and integrity begins.

The design world has long confused rigidity with strength and decoration with meaning. What passes for truth is often just control dressed as intellect, and what passes for feeling is usually excess posing as depth. Let’s look more closely at Brutalism, the clearest expression of that confusion, and the one I’m most often mistaken for.

“What passes for truth is often just control dressed as intellect.”

Brutalism and its descendants presented hardness as honesty: sharp angles, raw concrete, surfaces that reject touch. These were meant to signal truth and permanence, but in reality, they reveal fragility. The movement preached “truth to materials,” the belief that exposure itself was integrity, but built its gospel on contradiction. It showed the skin of a thing and called it its soul. That’s the paradox. A form that declares itself complete leaves no room for life. Concrete walls lock out air and exchange; their perfection is decay waiting to happen. What endures is never sealed; it’s porous enough to breathe.

The Barbican Estate, a prominent example of Brutalist architecture, embodies a utopian vision for inner-city living. Photo Credit: Joas Souza

Concrete, the emblem of Brutalism, doesn’t exist in nature. It’s a human-made imitation of stone, a material that pretends to be eternal but erodes, cracks, and stains at the first sign of weather. Left alone, it’s quickly reclaimed by moss, water, and roots. Nature corrects it. The planet rejects it.

In physics, right angles are the weakest point of any structure. Force concentrates until the corner fails. Curves, by contrast, distribute weight. They bend, absorb, and survive. Nature builds with this logic everywhere: the arch, the bone, the wave. Nothing enduring holds its shape through resistance alone.

“Any design that resists the logic of its environment is, by definition, temporary.”

Seen through this lens, my brutalism critique isn’t a rejection of the movement but a reexamination of its premise, truth without relationship. Brutalism’s mistake wasn’t in its ambition. It reached for permanence and, at times, achieved a rare kind of beauty: stark, geometric, elemental. I understand why people associate me with that language; there’s clarity in its restraint and discipline in its silence. But beauty in its simplicity isn’t integrity. Concrete can create poetry with light, but it resists the living systems that make life in that light possible.

Where My Work Lives

My work begins where Brutalism ends, at the point where structure must align with the natural order to survive. I’m not interested in resistance; I’m interested in integrity. Every material I use, even concrete, has to exist in dialogue with what surrounds it: stone, metal, glass, fabric, light. When treated consciously, concrete can ground a space rather than dominate it. If a material doesn’t belong to its environment, it doesn’t belong at all.

The Unite d'Habitation by Le Corbusier, it significantly influenced the development of Brutalist architecture. Photo Credit: Paul Clemence

Every material has a context where it performs best, chemically, structurally, and visually. Concrete, steel, glass, and stone each have specific tolerances: temperature, moisture, pressure, expansion. When you place a material in an environment that denies its natural behavior, humidity, salinity, light exposure, it deteriorates faster. So belonging isn’t aesthetic; it’s structural truth.

Atelier + Design was founded on that belief. Every element- the walls, the stone, the furniture, the air between them, is treated as part of a single organism. The goal isn’t decoration or spectacle; it’s calibration. I want each space to feel inevitable, as if it could only exist exactly as it does.

“I create because existing isn’t enough. The act of making gives gravity to thought, it anchors observation in form.”

When a space or object reaches balance, it becomes proof that coherence still exists, that integrity, not the illusion of permanence, is what endures.