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[center]Hubert H. Humphrey Building, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D. C.[/center]

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Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Brutalism rapidly became popular with governments and institutions around the world, with numerous high style examples located in Britain, France, Germany, Japan, United States, and Brazil. Examples are typically large buildings, massive in character, fortresslike, with a predominance of exposed concrete construction. The style was often selected for socialist government sponsored projects for public structures, high-rise multi-family housing, and shopping centres to create an architectural image that communicated strength, functionality, and frugal construction. Its popularity spread to include other uses such as college buildings, but was rarely applied to corporate projects, whose leaders were concerned about the association with socialism. It was typical for post-war government projects to be selected by public building committees through competitions.

The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, (beton for concrete, brut for rough, unrefined, raw), a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the exposed concrete walls with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings. The term gained wide currency when the British architectural historian Reyner Banham cleverly adjusted it with spin in the title of his 1966 book, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, to characterise a somewhat recently established cluster of architectural approaches, particularly in Europe.[1] \