Natural materials and basic construction techniques. Aspects of neo-brutalism in current architectural experience

Abstract

Contemporary research in architecture recognises the enduring influence of neo-brutalist poetry in the simplicity of construction and simple linguistics of many developments inspired by minimalist asceticism that are important in Europe and particularly significant in Switzerland. In fact, there is the same preference for using untransformed natural materials and adopting basic construction techniques that facilitate the reading of these experiences as a continuum notwithstanding the different approach to form choices. Indeed, although the two trends differ in terms of form since this is fundamental in minimalist poetry but purely transcription of the construction project, being mere consistency in time and space, in the neo-brutalist experience, they are similarly interested in an architecture based on construction techniques and the full visibility of the materials and their characteristics, on the unfinished and the imperfect. Through a new way of reading and interpreting the ordinary and the banality of daily life, the continuity of the two experiences manifests itself in the adoption of a basic technology that exalts the joints between elements and materials. What emerges from comparing the development of the construction technique expressed in the projects of authors such as Peter Zumthor, and especially Herzog & De Meuron in their initial projects and the imperfect austere experiments in the London suburbs by Alison and Peter Smithson in the 1950s is that arguments now crucial to sustainability can be evaluated, arguments such as the use of materials not meant for buildings, the recovery of disused space and urban contexts unused instead of building consuming the soil, and more generally with reference to an architecture lacking the spectacular, able to draw its extraordinary characteristics from the communal world.