Brutalist Connections: A Refreshed Approach To Debates & Buildings

Ruth Verde Zein’s core contribution to sorting out the troubled historiography of Brutalism is by severing the ties between Britain and Brutalism and to better take into consideration all the Brutalist architectural works that concurrently appeared during the same period in various places around the world.The claim regarding the simultaneous appearance of Brutalist buildings in the 1950s and the international dissemination of Brutalism in the 1960s has been well substantiated by the extensive documentation work that she has accomplished with her research team. Centered on the website “Brutalist Connections” launched in 2009, Verde Zein has tackled the daunting task of documenting and dating the worldwide phenomenon of Brutalist architecture. The expression she introduces to conceptualize this development is “Brutalist Connections.”

[ from Réjan Legaul’s ‘Foreword”].