CONCRETE ART EXPERIMENT
A conference

To answer these questions, one has to be aware that Bru­ta­li­st arti­sts did not care for beauty in its tra­di­tio­nal sense. Their prio­ri­ties were quite dif­fe­rent. They leaned towards archi­tec­ture of radi­cal rup­ture with the exi­sting prin­ci­ples of com­po­si­tion and pro­por­tion. Above all, they valued truth, hone­sty and an objec­tive per­spec­tive towards reality – archi­tecture had to cor­re­spond with the living stan­dards. In the years fol­lo­wing the war, these con­di­tions were extre­mely dif­fi­cult, which found its reflec­tion in the first Bru­ta­li­st buil­dings of sim­pli­fied forms, with visi­bly accen­tu­ated con­struc­tion struc­ture, depri­ved of any kind of finish. With time, buil­dings would become incre­asin­gly ex­pre­ssive and monu­men­tal, which was to reflect social deve­lop­ment and the coming pro­spe­rity. Bru­ta­lism then became a taste for mas­sive forms with dra­ma­tic effect. The power­ful impact of the lat­ter was deter­mi­ned by sculp­tu­ral com­po­si­tions of heavy solid sha­pes and coarse, often meti­cu­lo­usly plan­ned, textu­res. The domi­nant mate­rial was con­crete, altho­ugh brick was fre­qu­en­tly employed as well. Bru­ta­li­sts inva­ria­bly tre­ated their buil­dings as works of art, and the lia­isons between archi­tecture and avant-gardist trends in art (in pain­ting, sculp­ture, music) are foun­da­tio­nal to this ten­dency.

It is hard to describe Bru­ta­list archi­tec­ture as beau­ti­ful; howe­ver, it does undo­ub­te­dly evoke emo­tio­nal reac­tions, and such was its aim accor­ding to its cre­ators: to express and move. This is illu­stra­ted by exam­ples of buil­dings in the USA, Great Bri­tain, Austria, Tur­key and Poland to be pre­sen­ted during the lecture.

Assoc. Prof. Gabriela Świtek: Concrete and the Art of Memory - The focus of discus­sion is on con­crete as the buil­ding mate­rial in moder­nist archi­tec­ture – thanks to its dura­bi­lity and pla­sti­city, con­crete has been employed in archi­tec­tu­ral and sculp­tu­ral pro­jects com­me­mo­ra­ting histo­ri­cal events. Usu­ally asso­cia­ted with moder­nist stan­dar­di­zing trend, it is by no means a “noble” mate­rial – as oppo­sed to mar­ble or gra­nite out of which monu­ments were carved. Inter­pre­ta­tion in detail – with empha­sis on the mate­rial nature of con­crete monu­ments – will be pro­vi­ded for four pro­jects exe­cu­ted in Europe: the Memo­rial to Those Kil­led in the Kapp Putsch, Weimar (Wal­ter Gro­pius, 1922), the Fosse Arde­atine Mau­so­leum, Rome (Mario Fio­ren­tino and Giu­seppe Peru­gini, 1949), the Juden­platz Holo­caust Memo­rial in Vienna (Rachel Whi­te­read, 1995–2000), and the Memo­rial to the Mur­de­red Jews of Europe in Ber­lin (Peter Eisen­man, 1997–2005).