Abstract and concrete: the beauty of brutalism

Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents romanticise it, yearn for the civic principles that built it and gloss over its failings; the young see period charm in flat roofs and straight lines, while the old associate them with deprivation; the wealthy mostly avoid it — and many people have no choice but to live in it. Nearly 100 years after Le Corbusier set out his five points of modern architecture the British are still arguing about its merits, partly because we still live with so much of it: housing, offices and civic and industrial buildings.

Two new books may change our perspective — or at least convince us that neither side is entirely right. The first, by the cultural journalist Owen Hatherley, is a weighty, glossy gazetteer of the most significant British modernist buildings. The second is a celebration of the Barbican Centre, London’s cherished late-modernist arts and housing complex, written to mark its 40th anniversary. Read together, they make a persuasive case for preservation.

Hatherley, the culture editor of Tribune, is a leftish champion of modernism. He has produced a sprawling study, packed with pleasurable details and prefaced with an essay that traces the roots of British modernism from blank Victorian warehouses through the expressive brutalism of housing estates and beyond into an imagined future. He is flexible in his dates and definitions, and includes 21st-century buildings, such as Hastings Contemporary (2012), which allow us to recognise that modernist principles are still with us. This is no dead trend.

He is as interested in modest modernism — council estates such as Wythenshawe in Manchester and Catford shopping centre — as he is in Hampstead’s private Corbusian villas or grand projects such as the Southbank Centre.