That’s Brutal, What’s Modern?: The Smithsons, Banham, and the Mies-Image

A study of New Brutalism through the lens of Alison and Peter Smithson’s enduring interest in Mies van der Rohe.

In That’s Brutal, What’s Modern?: The Smithsons, Banham, and the Mies-Image, Mark D. Linder offers an original understanding of New Brutalism as a consequential and generative episode in the history of post-photographic imaging practices. This episode exemplifies and anticipates the kinds of cognition and intelligence that dominate architectural imagination today. Linder aims to recover a specific and integral, yet overlooked, aspect of the peculiar novelty of New Brutalism by reconsidering the entirety of Alison and Peter Smithson’s work as a fitful and evolving fifty-year fascination with the imaging potential they found in the architecture of Mies van der Rohe.

In six chapters and some forty arrays of images, the book progresses from historical research to theoretical speculations on the historical legacy and contemporary potential of the Smithsons’ pursuit of the ＂Mies-Image.＂ The chapters situate New Brutalism in the context of emerging theories, practices, and cultures of imaging in postwar Britain, trace the Smithsons’ imaging practices and the appearances of the Mies-Image as it evolves in their projects and publications over five decades, reconsider Reyner Banham’s evaluations of Mies and his role in New Brutalism, and explore imaging theory and its potential to re-evaluate the significance of New Brutalism.

This book will appeal to a broad audience among architects, students of architecture, and those with a serious interest in modernist and contemporary architecture, but also among scholars in multiple academic fields including architectural and art history, visual studies, media studies, and photography.

Mark Linder is a professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture.