The Art & Architecture Building at Yale University.

Is there anything so invisible as that which was fashionable the day before yesterday? This is the blind spot through which every work of art and literature must pass before re-emerging as a distinct entity in history’s rear-view mirror. Or not, as the case may be; for much popular art, the blind spot means permanent oblivion. Such I thought would be the case with Brutalism, that postwar architectural movement distinguished by its raw concrete, burly masses, and general air of insolence. Its heyday was the mid-1960s, after which point Brutalism began to fall from favor; by the time I entered a German school of architecture in 1980, it was as dead as could be—unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder. Brutalism would be like the novels of Bulwer Lytton: popular in his day, and unreadable till the end of time.

I could not have been more wrong. The revival of scholarly interest in Brutalism that began about five years ago has just burst into public view with a spate of exhibitions, books, blogs, and a major television documentary. These include Timothy M. Rohan’s The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, a monograph on the creator of Yale’s controversial Art & Architecture Building; Raw Concrete, Barnabas Calder’s forthcoming survey of British Brutalism; and Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, by John Grindrod (itself a wonderfully Brutalist name). Among the exhibitions is