Review: Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture by Alexander Clement; Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors; A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley

“For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the coinage of M. le Corbusier and have created a style—‘Contemporary’—easily recognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of ‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti,” Theo Crosby wrote in a 1955 editorial on the New Brutalism.¹ For Crosby, “contemporary” functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism—a modernism that had already been liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style for up-to-date living. As an antidote to such degradation, Crosby positioned New Brutalism as an archaeology of the modern movement that would include a rigorous reevaluation of its key architects—Le...