Brutalism

Brutalism, an architectural movement that peaked in the 1970s, a movement that has been classified as a controversial, muscular style. Brutalism is often characterized by angular, topological forms and rough materials, usually concrete. Calder has once said: ‘Brutalist buildings derive their aesthetic not from borrowed historical motifs, but from the proud flaunting of modern construction methods’. Brutalism is raw, it shows unpretentious honesty, exposing the nature of the construction. Philosophically, it was often associated with a socialist utopian ideology, with its strange geometric patterns and forms brutalism had come across looking futuristic and the form had allowed function.

There is no denying that Brutalism had its enemies that …show more content…
It is the university centre of UC San Diego, serving as a gateway between campus and the surrounding community. Pereira’s intentions for Geisel Library needed to provide a ‘sense of place’ and required the ‘spirit and nobility’ of the site, which was located in a wooded area near the north San Diego-La-Jolla-Torrey Pine coast, implying a strong visual relationship with the ocean, rather than the community that would grow and surround it.

The functionality to why the Geisel Library looks likes a floating unidentified object is because Pereira believes that the ellipse shape allows optimum access to books from a central point, where each floor above and below the central floor is reduced in size to compensate for time travelling between floors. The spherical form allows a high degree of flexibility to organize the collections. There is more to than just functional advantages, Pereira intended to create an unusual form to establish a more powerful image for the University Centre. It is a strong architectural form that evokes a rich aesthetic