Brutalism
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Brutal, violent behaviour; savagery. countable, uncountable
"1839, Earl of Clarendon, Speech to House of Lords, recorded in Mirror of Parliament, republished in 1840 January-June, The Eclectic Review, New Series, Volume 7, page 455, Their punishments for crimes were of the most savage nature: and the absurdities of the Theodosian Code, together with the ancient customs of Germany, came to be all blended into a singular amalgamation of refinement and meanness,—of brutalism and bravery."
- 2 A style of modernist architecture characterized by angular geometry and overt signs of the construction process. uncountable
"In similar spirit, Nigel Henderson, a member of the Independent Group's Brutalist core, exhibited black and white photographs of the East End at the 1953 ICA show Parallel of Life and Art which stressed the unsanitised reality of everyday life: Peter Smithson's defence of Brutalism through the categorical rhetoric of objectivity and truth, quoted above, echoes Anderson."
- 3 Alternative letter-case form of Brutalism. alt-of, countable, uncountable
"Art deco is one of the first truly modern styles and a precursor to the more streamlined and simpler lines of later styles, such as the international style, art moderne, and even brutalism."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Brutalism is a controversial architectural style."
Etymology
From brutal + -ism.
From brutal + -ism. Popularized in 1954 by the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson, from earlier Swedish nybrutalism (“New Brutalism”), after French béton brut (“raw concrete”), the material favored by Le Corbusier.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.