It’s not hard to assume that most people don’t immediately recognize what the term Bbrutalist” means when applied to architecture. Then again, it’s also hard to imagine that there is anybody who isn’t familiar with many examples.
Brutalist architecture evolved in the 1950s after WWII and prominently featured the structural materials themselves rather than false exteriors, most importantly steel-reinforced concrete. Rather than emphasizing ornamentation, they were minimalist, simple flat sections of concrete, almost cubist in nature, broken up here and there by thick perpendicular wooden timbers. In addition to its distinct visual style, it’s also noted for its inexpensive construction. In many examples you can still see casts of the wood grain in the plywood used to construct the molds.
In the United States, in the first few years after WWII, most people were simply preoccupied with getting on with the rest of their lives. Various government officials, economists, and academics were elsewhere focused on the economy, and the significant cultural changes occurring across the country; everything was changing. One thing that was significant that they noticed, contrary to the surplus of just about every other kind of goods and services, was that there was an acute shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists all across the country. It turned out that the baby-making business was positively booming. Five or six years later there was an acute shortage of Kindergarten classrooms. By now, the government officials and academics had caught up to the important facts, and thanks to the construction industry, brand new elementary schools were popping up all over like mushrooms after a hard autumn rain. There were a good five or six years following that for plenty of new high schools to be laid down. There’s a good chance that if you’re an American, you went to one of those high schools, even if it had been remodeled and renovated half a dozen times.
And, of course, by the time all of those little baby Boomers were sending off applications to college, the universities themselves had finished a whole crop of brand new buildings. Of course, since it was all on the tax payer’s doll, they had to build all those new buildings relatively cheaply. So if a person is going to recognize a building of the Brutalist style, it would probably be on a college campus, noticeably of a different style than the great masoned brick and mortar buildings of the original part of the campuses.
So chances are, if you’ve been on a college campus you’re familiar with the style. A lot of people nowadays, if asked, would consider the whole style rather ugly and oppressive. The college administrators who commissioned the construction of those buildings were paying for the floor space, not the aesthetics, and when it comes to architecture, it seems that ugly is cheaper than pretty.
That said, there are many visual pleasing examples of brutalist architecture. They tend to be large public buildings like large city public libraries, or museums, or city halls. These are places built when they wanted the structures to last, and to make a statement, back when Brutalism seemed like the architecture of the future. They’re places where large numbers of people flow through, and interact with the stacks of books or the exhibits, and their surroundings seem like a natural metro-organic extension of the surrounding city itself. The point isn’t the building itself, but how it serves the people.
The Seattle Aquarium is a good example of excellent use of the style. It’s located right on the edge of Elliot Bay, just down the hill from the world famous Pike Place Market, and the towering skyscrapers of downtown. From the view from the street, it doesn’t appear to be a remarkable building, and certainly not Brutalist. The exterior appears to be a big wooden warehouse, almost barn like, jutting out into the bay on a pier. Back in the seventies, when this aquarium was built with taxpayer dollars, there were many such structures along the bay. They’d been common since well before WWII, but had largely declined for more modern urban renewal projects by the time the aquarium was finished.
The masterpiece behind its application of Brutalism is that it isn’t meant to be on display like so many other Brutalist buildings. It’s meant to be subtle, to be discovered as you move through the aquarium. A visitor entering the aquarium goes through a typical ticket counter and turnstyle. They’ll see a large tank of fish, or sea anemones or jellyfish and admire them for a while. Then the visitor, out of the corner of his or her eye, will see another tank and decide to inspect that. Then another, and so on, each visitor thinking they’re exploring the aquarium based on their own whims, but really they’re being guided by the subtle intentions of the architect. Every visitor, thinking they’re exploring by their own free will, follows the same basic path from the aquarium’s entrance to the gift shop at the end. It’s not just the tanks, but the placement of the interior walls, the decorations, and the low descending ramps which are both easy to walk down, and promise an interesting new sight just around the corner.
The Brutalism comes on slowly. A concrete surface here, another there. Sometimes they appear in decorative steps alongside the descending ramps. There are water features here, flowing down those artificial falls, and you get a strong whiff of salt air, reminding you how close you are to the ocean. By the time you’re outside again, on the opposite end of the pier, the Brutalism has organically taken over, completely hidden from the rest of the city, and it does its job so well that the visitor probably doesn’t even notice it. Here the sea otters play in their great big tank, observable from above or below through windows. The Brutalist concrete blocks they play on resemble the natural rocks on a wild shore. The portions of the building that decend into the bay have become encrusted with barnacles, and are stained by the salt water. If you stand in just the right spot you can see the tips of the skyscrapers just over the roof of the aquarium, and the city seems to merge into the ocean in one homogenous transition, accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of human society living in harmony with the wild world.
Arguably the centerpiece of the aquarium is the “Dome.” The visitor descends down another shallow ramp, to their side sea water pores over another set of stair-like platforms. The air noticeably grows cooler, as if you’re descending into the sea itself. The visitor turns the corner, the prize purposefully set out of view, and then he or she findes themselves in the Dome. It’s an enormous underwater tank. There’s a great concrete honeycomb of concrete support beams, the pinnacle of Brutalist aesthetic. Between the concrete beams are thick aquarium glass, and beyond that the sea water, a good forty feet depth of it, stretching from the “sea” bottom, to the surface just above the Dome’s oculus. It’s filled with fish, of course. The sort of rock fish and pelagics you might expect to see swimming around in Puget Sound, in among tall fronds of kelp.
It would be easy to forgive an imaginative child thinking that the Dome actually extends out into open water. That this was what the sea really looked like. Indeed, even a naive adult might make that mistake. Of course it’s not true. It’s just another enormous tank. Concrete square walls all the way around, with the dome in the middle, flooded with sea water and stocked with fish, just like any other tank in the aquarium. Naturally, it has to be. No open view of Puget Sound is going to display so many fish, or entertain visitors for the two or three minutes that they linger in here, the way the Dome does.
This wasn’t the original intent of the original architect. No, the original architect had a much stranger idea in his mind. The original plan had indeed an actual submerged tank out into the open ocean, instead of a dome, it was a sort of bleacher seating arrangement, unidirectional, with all of the aquarium’s visitors looking out into the depths beyond. As if the ocean were a theater.
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On the surface of it, the concept was absurd and a hard sell. It’s difficult for people to imagine now, but throughout the 50s and 60s, the problem of pollution in the United States was every bit as bad, if not worse, than it would be in industrial China some fifty years later. Puget Sound, particularly in Elliot Bay next to Seattle and all of its industries, was a veritable dead zone. The vast school of herring that once sustained immigrant Scandinavian fisher communities were essentially gone. PCBs and mercury contaminated the muck of the ocean floor, and on up into the food chain.
Yet the architect sold his concept. The wasteland was indeed a part of his sale. Visitors wanting to see fish and other sea creatures would have many opportunities in the aquarium’s other exhibits. The point that he wanted to emphasize was the devastation that man had wrought upon the oceans. It was the early years of the environmental movement. The point the architect wanted to showcase, in addition to the harmony between steel-reinforced concrete cities and rocky ocean shores, was how humanity could play a role in restoration and healing of the natural world.
Sure, the view outside of that outwards facing tank would be a bleak one, at first. They’d see sterile muck, and random bits of litter and garbage. Even, on one side, a pile of old tires. What they wouldn’t have appreciated at the time- that pile of tires was a part of the architect's plan. The original visitors to the aquarium might pass through this portion of the exhibit, turn their cheek or roll their eyes, and pass on. But they would bring their children, who would be enthralled with the colorful tropical fish in the other tanks, or the strange and wondrous tactical sensations of the touch tank. Then they would come back. Maybe a few years. Maybe they would come back when they had children of their own. Maybe they would take their grandchildren when they had that precious opportunity. The whole point of the prescient architect's plan was one of transformation. Things would change.
The barren poisoned sea floor would change. The school of herring, with proper management, would return. That pile of tires was the basis for an artificial reef. Over time, life would regrow. Giant plumose sea anemones, strange albino lengthy things crowned with cloud like tentacles would cover many of the available surfaces. Great sea cucumbers, fat as a big summer zucchini, purple and covered with soft orange spikes, would crawl along the restored seabed. Monstrous sunstars, enormous sea stars with over twenty arms, would be a common sight, crawling over the tires, looking for mussels and oysters to devour, just like they did on any other reef in Puget Sound. Massive lingcod, a popular eating fish of all the local fish n’ chips spots, would find refuge in all the little crevices made by the artificial reef, the envy of all the local amateur fishermen, a fine meal just out of reach. If they were lucky, a Giant Pacific Octopus, a perennial fan favorite that can grow up to 14 feet across tentacle tip to tip, might just make her home and nesting ground next to the warming glass of the undersea tank, and satisfy her unearthly inhuman curiosity by observing all of the strange air breathing creatures inside. If they were very, VERY lucky, maybe the Gray Whale population would rebound, and on a clear high visibility day the visitors just might be able to make out their silhouettes. Perhaps, and this was a distant dream, pursued by the marvelous orcas which hunted them back when the ocean was healthy.
The scheme was bought. The plans were accepted and built. The privileged Seattle oligarchs who had nepotistic positions on the committees had approved of the idea, given their hardiest endorsements. After all, it would be all of the working class rubes who’d be fronting the real bill for construction. The pseudophilanthropists had simply given a pittance, and had their names placed on plaques claiming responsibility for the public aquarium, out by the ticket office where regular visitors queued up to pay for admittance.
It had been opening night. Not for the public, that would come much later. But for the elite, the crust of the upper crust. They had come for a party, finally dressed and delivered in limousines, late one evening, its details kept out of the press. They drank on champagne, and ate seafood hors d'oeuvres. They told terrible jokes about how they were eating the creatures they were casually observing in the tanks. Late in the evening, clothed in the now ugly 70s dresses and tuxedos, they funneled into the bleacher style seating of the tank facing outward into the ocean. It was obscured by a great red velvet curtain, ready to be opened on the big reveal. Of course all the attendees had known that the curtain would open up into nothing. What’s more, it was well after dark, and they’d only see empty blackness. What’s more, many of the people attending had been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the pollution that had killed Elliot Bay. They had made their fortune on it. They owned the factories dumping their waste straight into the water. Yet that wasn’t the point. The point was the opening of the curtain, and the speeches they wouldn’t remember. Then they’d pile back into their limousines and head back to their mansions for the typical hedonism they enjoyed after such important events.
The curtain pulled apart. The self-indulgent audience applauded the black view of nothing. A man began to talk. Not the architect, no, but an old and rich man from his firm, intent on taking the credit for the aquarium, began to talk. Then it came.
Where it came from, the audience would never know. Its origin was far deeper than any sonogram of the Puget Sound’s floor could ever plumb. When it struck the outer surface of the tank, it was traveling so many knots, it struck with such force that all knew its intentions immediately. They could feel its hatred in their marrow, in their neurons. When that ear-drum breaking thump hit the outward facing windows, each of them realized every mistake that they had made in their lives. It struck first, and then it enveloped the tank, like a Great Pacific Octopus attacking an oyster, or a sunstar turning its own stomach inside-out to envelope its prey. It formed a blackness darker than the black they had seen before. Then the lid of the thing opened, and it rolled its giant singular eye down to look at them. To stare at the horrible disgusting air-breathing creatures that lived within the tank. It saw them, and it hated them. They knew it too. It was inside of their mind, a concept utterly alien to them, but something that the thing understood as naturally as extracting oxygen from seawater.
Those that survived fled. Those that did not still remain. The next day the construction workers who had been still completing the finishing touches for the public opening ended up sealing the entrance and exit tunnels with fresh surplus concrete. It wasn’t even remotely cured before the plans were hastily drawn up for the Dome. The architectural firm had hinted to the writers of the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the grand new aquarium would showcase an underwater viewing experience, so naturally they needed to provide what they had promised. The dome was hastily put together, not by the original architect, he was long gone as was his dream of humanity living in harmony with what lurked in the deep, but by imitators mocking his style.
There was a delay, of course. Cost overruns. What public project doesn’t have them? But they did it. They built an artificial tank, completely offset from the open ocean itself, providing the illusion of the experience of being in an underwater dome.
The fish were stocked. The population of flora and fauna is viewable to this day, well controlled and unnatural. That’s how it’s been from the original generation, to their children, grandchildren, and now, great grandchildren. The aquarium was a great success, and remains to be.
That outward-viewing tank is still out there, down the shallow slope below the retaining wall that houses the Dome. Thanks to its good hermetic engineering, it’s still full of air. It’s still full of the corpses of those who couldn’t make it out.
As for the thing, the thing that saw and hated, its location is unknown. The original socialites who escaped, now long dead of natural causes, would have told you it's just as well. They had no idea how not to make their terrible mistakes and how to not screw over future generations. They couldn’t help themselves. They never told anybody.
It’s still out there. It still hates.