By Jude Jones
In this essay, editor Jude Jones reflects on the queer beauty of Brutalism. A divisive architectural and cultural movement, its haunting, liminal elements have long made it an uncanny viral phenomenon.

Grey concrete and an eerie ambiance are staples of Brutalism. Photograph courtesy of Freepik.
At some point in the mid-2010s, Brutalism enjoyed a sympathetic revaluation within the cultural fold. For a long-time its buildings were architectural pariahs, their ruinous concrete the eye-sore reminders of a bygone modernist dream of streets in the sky and utopian communal living.
However, aesthetic aficionados on Tumblr or Instagram were able to find beauty in the abject beast. They curated images into gallery-like moodboards, soon enough reified as glossy coffee-table books or revisionist exhibitions in chic metropolitan galleries.
This story of bad taste recycled into good is one almost inherently queer-coded. Was this not, after all, the invisible thread of Susan Sontag’s seminal “Notes on Camp”?. The gays, she insists, have an uncanny ability to upcycle the gaudy into the great, ‘Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.’ Maybe this is what cultural commentator Wessie du Toit was getting at when he wondered why ‘devoutly progressive creatives’ have made themselves so fond of Brutalism’s concrete age. Devoutly progressive creatives is, after all, practically a dog-whistle for limp-wristed queers.

The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth. Photograph retrieved from Facebook. Park Hill, Sheffield, UK. Retrieved from www.citydays.com.
Brutalism, as an architectural movement, has its own hidden queer histories. Paul Rudolph, one of the greatest eyes in midcentury American Brutalism, was a gay man and faced routine criticism for what his contemporaries considered garish tastes. Rudolph liked chiselled and svelte concrete exoskeletons, hiding inside them palatial interiors, shag rugs, and six-packed Grecian statues. In his lifetime, superstars such as Halston, who lived in a Rudolph-designed Manhattan apartment, admired him. Posthumously, he has been celebrated by the likes of fashion legend Tom Ford, who purchased Halston’s very same flat for $18million in 2019. Ford, talking to VICE, commented on the beauty of a home, Brutalist or otherwise, ‘built for two gay men.’
Yet, the queer appeal of Brutalist architecture is more complex than a queers just like bad taste conclusion. For the most part, there is very little authentically camp in the Brutalist building, designed as a reaction against excess and ornamentalism, two of the trademarks of queer and/or camp aesthetics (if such a nebulous thing as “queer aesthetics” can be assigned any trademark at all).

Inside Paul Rudolph’s apartment. Photograpy by Ezra Stoller.
Brutalism’s trademarks, rather, are a zealous functionalism that strips away all decorative elements, a gutting away of excess to leave behind only necessary materiality. This makes it an unlikely bedfellow of the queer, a form of design that one Quora user likened to a “cubicle wall.” It is totally totalitarian as an aesthetic mode, utterly empty of empathy.
But it’s exactly this, I would argue, that makes Brutalism a queer aesthetic. It’s the coldness, the inhumanity, the eery uncanny valley that Brutalist architecture seems to illicit. The Brutalist revival is in this way a precursor to the “liminal spaces” aesthetic that proliferated out of 4chan on the eve of the 2020s. The trend has since then spawned a subreddit with almost 800,000 members, a TikTok hashtag with over two billion views, and even an ill-received American Horror Story spinoff. It has gone digitally ubiquitous, become culturally canonical.

Courtesy of r/LiminalSpace.
Broadly defined, liminal spaces represent an unsettling yet familiar in-between: an empty hotel corridor, a faintly-lit backroom, an abandoned playground. Writing for the journal Pulse, philosophy student Peter Heft has connected the phenomenon to Mark Fisher’s concept of the “failure of presence.” That is, the mistranslation and deterritorialization of something outside its expected context. The liminal space is uncanny because it is neither here nor there – a playground without children, a hallway without people –, a “box that don’t fit.” This uneasy marginality has thus made the liminal space an online home for many queer people. It has written itself as a spatial metaphor for our own feelings of displacement, of not quite fitting in.
Queer peoples’ interest in Brutalism is an ancillary contortion of these feelings. Brutalism is both Fisher’s “failure of presence” and something more than that. It is a bygone architectural aesthetic, certainly, but its buildings are also reliquaries of a failed dream, one of communal social housing and simpler, non-materialistic living. Not just an architectural style, then, Brutalism was conceived as a philosophical position, innovated by two socialist utopians – Peter and Alison Smithson – to pave the way for a post-World War II settlement that strived toward egalitarianism and civil solidarity. The Smithson’s famously said, after all, Brutalism is “an ethic not an aesthetic.”
This is perhaps why the 2010s were especially ripe for a wave of Brutalist nostalgia. This is particularly true in Britain, where the neoliberalist quagmire of austerity fostered a longing for a different way of life. Brutalist architecture thereby embodies another Fisherian concept, invoked by DAZED editor Günseli Yalcinkaya when writing on the “liminal spaces” microtrend. She evokes neoliberalism’s “slow cancellation of the future,” which leaves in its wake a misplaced nostalgia for futures that never were. Brutalism represents then a what could have been, simultaneously nightmarish and aspirational, unwelcoming and idealistic. Hence why Brutalist buildings are often described using adjectives such as “dystopian” or “Ballardian”, all of which connote a troubled, mythic, almost messianic “what might have been”.

The guts of Berlin’s Berghain. Retrieved from AD Magazine.
Brutalist buildings might then be the ruins of a failed dream. Their concrete bodies can’t help but bear the violent marks of time’s passage, cracked and weed-ridden, stretch-marked with water-stains, lichen, moss, and rust. They occupy what cultural geographer Tim Edensor has called the “state of indeterminacy” represented by the ruin, whose “very fact of ruination exposes the myth of history as progress.” In their decay, they become the sites where “the events of history shrivel up.” They occupy an un-straight and non-linear time, a queer time on the Historical margins.
And in this indeterminacy, this historical abjection, they represent a new network of possibilities for queer bodies. Marginalised and abandoned Brutalist projects become “junkspace”, reclaimed by equally marginalised people as sites of liberation and joy, of underground parties and squat raves. Berghain, the world’s most infamous gay club, is, it’s worth remembering, but a Brutalist ruin, built from an ex-Communist power plant. “Junkspace[s],” writes raver-cum-queer-theorist McKenzie Wark, are those “urban ambiences that hover between decaying forms of usage and novel potentials. Where a city’s tendencies of coherent spatial organization fail.” Brutalism is an uncanny ambience, an urban decay. And from these failures it might become the generative, strangely beautiful site for new forms of queer life.
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