New exhibition celebrating Marmite of architecture

The postwar decades saw many new buildings springing up around Bristol; offices, car parks and even churches featuring a lot of concrete and built in what was called the Brutalist style. Some think most of them hideous, but growing numbers of people love them, and this week sees a local art and photography exhibition all about them. Eugene Byrne reports, and looks at some of the images inspired by Bristol's Brutalism.

- Eugene Byrne

Bristol Marriott Hotel - drawing by Lisa Malyon

(Lisa Malyon)

EVERY generation fails to appreciate the generation before. Like Jonathan Meades said, 'There's nothing so dated as the recent past.' So one of the reasons why we're all interested in it is that we want to celebrate what the generation before did before it's too late.

The "it" that Andrew Eberlin and a group of like-minded collaborators want to celebrate is some of the 20th century architecture of Bristol, several structures which mostly went up between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s and which many at the time - and even more since - considered ugly.

These are the buildings in what might be loosely defined as the "Brutalist" style.

The very name makes them sound awful, but this week, Andrew and a number of others are putting on a temporary exhibition titled 'Brutal Bristol' at Sparks, the former Marks & Spencer store in Broadmead. The show also features a couple of guided walks looking at some of the buildings in question - but both have already sold out. Brutalism, it seems, is cool again.

But what, exactly, is Brutalism?

"I'm not an architectural historian, we're all amateurs. But it's part of modernist architecture, and it's about an honesty with materials ... and a lot of concrete was used."

Brutalism was often about function over form. It was characterised by the use of a lot of plain, unclad concrete or brick, and using straight lines or geometric shapes. It became associated with council flats, municipal buildings, courts, universities and other public sector structures as well as office blocks and flats for the private sector.

By the 1970s, fashions were changing and a reaction set in. Big concrete buildings were often associated with urban decay, and the totalitarian architecture of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe.