Frills are not part of the Brutalist vocabulary.
Brutalist architecture has never been very popular but its blunt forcefulness, its rude breaking with tradition, and its often startling and simplistic inventiveness have made it hard to ignore, and therefore still very much alive.
Brutalism's roots go back to Le Corbusier and his great Marseilles apartment house of 1952 known as the Unite d’Habitation. Notable for being raised on pilotis and constructed with béton brut (raw concrete) after a planned steel frame proved too costly, the building also featured a colorful grid façade, duplex units, and a rooftop with sculptural ventilation elements, a children’s wading pool, and a running track.
The 12-story project is also known as Cite Radieuse ("Radiant City") and colloquially known as “The Nutter’s House” and has shops, a bookstore, a restaurant and sport and educational facilities. A few years later, Le Corbusier would go on to design the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, on the edge of the Punjab plain near the Himalayas in India—his Brutalist masterpiece of abstract concrete cutouts.
Brutalism's roots go back to Le Corbusier and his great Marseilles apartment house of 1952 known as the Unite d’Habitation. Notable for being raised on pilotis and constructed with béton brut (raw concrete) after a planned steel frame proved too costly, the building also featured a colorful grid façade, duplex units, and a rooftop with sculptural ventilation elements, a children’s wading pool, and a running track.
The 12-story project is also known as Cite Radieuse ("Radiant City") and colloquially known as “The Nutter’s House” and has shops, a bookstore, a restaurant and sport and educational facilities. A few years later, Le Corbusier would go on to design the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, on the edge of the Punjab plain near the Himalayas in India—his Brutalist masterpiece of abstract concrete cutouts.
While Brutalism flourished to a great extent in the 1960s, particularly in England, it has long suffered from a reputation as being “ugly” and “cheap.” Yet in the face of the harshest critics, it remains in the news, and more recently on the big screen. And as with anything, there is, of course, good Brutalism and bad Brutalism.
East elevation of Unité d'Habitation Marseille (La Cité Radieuse) by By Iantomferry - Moto E4 phone, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77446879
In this article:
THE GOOD
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright on Fifth Avenue
Let's start with the city's more easy-to-love fortresses. One of the most well-known and beloved Brutalist masterpieces is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets. Built in 1959 by Frank Lloyd Wright, its curves are fortunately not threatened with demolition—though it is not a stranger to controversy. While it undeniably disrupts the avenue’s straitlaced masonry style, it remains a tour de force of modern architecture. Its bold form and pronounced sense of monumentality place it squarely within the Brutalist tradition.
Chatham Towers at 170 Park Row in Lower Manhattan, 1969. Image: Kelly & Gruzen
Also in the good category are Kelly & Gruzen’s Chatham Towers project of 1965. The pair of 25-story towers is perhaps the city’s finest example of Brutalism: raw concrete structures with a strong sculptural presence. Their claim to fame was the the city's first residential building to feature exposed concrete poured on site, the first to install Swedish-designed aluminum windows with Venetian blinds sealed between dual panes, and the first to use double-layered sheetrock walls—separated by an air gap—to dampen noise between apartments.
Ford Foundation Building on 42nd Street east of Second Avenue. Image Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates
Next up is Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Ford Foundation Building, constructed in 1967 at 321 East 42nd Street. The landmarked 12-floor office building is known for its lush introduction of an atrium as an alternative to a plaza. The structure’s main facade is denoted by large blank walls and a very grand, but recessed, glass-enclosed atrium – a very elegant bunker I must say.
Kips Bay Towers (view of the north tower from the central landscaped courtyard)
About a half mile south of the Ford Center, Kips Bay Towers (originally known as Kips Bay Plaza) consists of two very long slab towers that are 20-stories high on a site between 30th and 33rd streets and Second and First avenues. The South Tower opened in 1960 and the north tower in 1965. Webb & Knapp, which was headed by William Zeckendorf Sr. was the developer, and James Ingo Freed of I. M. Pei & Associates and S. J. Kessler were the architects.
The impressive, exposed concrete towers have deeply recessed windows and a very high fenestration ratio and extensive and impressive landscaped plazas-- and as such they present the city’s finest implementation of the “Towers in a Park” concept of city planning advocated by Le Corbusier in Paris in the 1920s.
Pei’s office followed Kips Bay Towers in 1966 with the three concrete towers of University Village south of Washington Square Park. The complex was designed by I. M. Pei in 1966, and two are owned by New York University and the third is a private co-op apartment building.
In the 2000s, the university was involved in a controversial expansion program that would add a fourth tower to this complex, which is centered around a 36-foot-high, concrete sculpture of a small Picasso work known as “Bust of Sylvette.” The university ultimately settled the controversy by cancelling the tower after Mr. Pei disapproved, and focused on the and redevelopment of their Jerome S. Coles Sports Center (brutal and unattractive) into the glitzy John A. Paulson Center.
The former Whitney Museum. Architect: Marcel Breuer
In the nearly 60 years since the Whitney Museum opened its now former building on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street, designed by Marcel Breuer. The stark building has housed collections of the Whitney Museum, the Frick Collection, and served as an outpost for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, auction house Sotheby's will make it the address of its new global headquarters.
When the $100 million sale closed in 2023, Sotheby's announced that it had tapped Pritzker Prize laureates Herzog & de Meuron for a renovation. Upon completion, the landmarked building will host state-of-the-art gallery spaces open to the public as well as a new fine dining restaurant designed by Roman and Williams.
John Carl Warnecke's 1974 Long Lines Building in TriBeca is very sculptural with great texture
One of the city’s more intriguing Brutalist buildings is John Carl Warnecke’s tall, windowless, 1974 Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street in TriBeCa, whose austere granite facades with protruding air ducts near the top make it striking and mysterious -– a modern Mayan temple of sorts.
The Heritage at Schomburg Plaza
Also praiseworthy is the Arthur A. Schomburg Plaza at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street overlooking Central Park and designed by Gruzen & Partners in association with Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder. The full-block complex hosts two very strong-looking and handsome, octagonal, reinforced concrete towers. The Brutalist creation adds dimension with pairs of recessed balconies with two floors between each pair.
About a decade ago, the1975 buildings were renamed The Heritage at Schomburg Plaza, not long after they were removed in 2009 from the Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program. Their sculptural qualities were diminished with a tepid gray recladding and the brick balcony enclosures were replaced with glass.
Fashion Institute of Technology on Seventh Avenue between 26th and 28th Streets
"Though wildly derided, this group was true to the dictates of fashion to be “distinctive” and even controversial."
FIT’s newest academic building now obscures the 28th Street façade of Nagler Hall, though it remains visible from the 27th Street side. Nagler Hall, 1964. Credit: Museum of the City of New York.
The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) has filled most of the two blocks between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 26th and 28th Streets with a mélange of Brutalist works, starting with a rather startling aluminum-clad, mid-block building fronting 27th Street designed by De Young, Moscowitz & Rosenberg in 1959 with diamond patterning in two tones and gold-colored square window frames.
The architects followed that construction the next year with Nagler Hall which touts a concrete façade with deep-set windows with eight-side framing. And in 1977, Youssef S. Bahri of the same firm designed the huge “megastructure” on Seventh Avenue straddling 27th Street, an undeniably hulking yet impressive building.
The architects followed that construction the next year with Nagler Hall which touts a concrete façade with deep-set windows with eight-side framing. And in 1977, Youssef S. Bahri of the same firm designed the huge “megastructure” on Seventh Avenue straddling 27th Street, an undeniably hulking yet impressive building.
Though wildly derided, this group was true to the dictates of fashion to be “distinctive” and even controversial. While most educational and health institutions in the city have fostered pretty banal architecture, FIT has, in comparison, been heroic, at least from a Brutalist vantage point. A new building for the public university and the condo-rental development known as Maverick, references the campus' Brutalist works.
The 1199 Plaza development on the east side of First Avenue between 107th and 111th Streets is a massive four-tower complex that exemplifies that fortress aesthetic of many Brutalist projects. Each tower has two mid-size wings that cascade towards the East River with communal balconies on the inside of the U-shaped plan and the towers present an extremely rugged appearance inland with its many “solid” balconies. It was eventually renamed East River Landing. Individually, ungainly and asymmetric. Collectively, a memorable phalanx of rugged sculptural quality.
One of four U-shaped towers on east side of First Avenue between 107th and 111th Streets that were designed by the Hodne/Stageberg Group in 1975 for Local 1199 of National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees
THE BAD
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Columbia University Law School
In the bad category are the just plain ugly Columbia University Law School, also known as “The Toaster,” and designed by Harrison & Abramovitz in 1961, and the 1969 classroom 12-story tower known as Helen Goodhart Altschul Hall designed by Vincent Kling. The latter was described in “New York 1960 Architecture & Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial” by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman as “having a menacing aspect.”
1967 United States Federal Building facing Foley School
The unattractive granite checkerboard-like façade of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building and International Court of Trade on Broadway erected in 1967, to a design by Kahn & Jacobs and Eggers & Higgins, clashed wildly with the formal classicism of the Foley Square courts.
Marriot Marquis Hotel Times Square (Credit: John Portman Architects)
John Portman’s Times Square Hotel was a very tall “fortress” convention/tourist hotel with a very large and spectacular atrium with curved glass elevators and with seemingly random setbacks on Broadway. Construction began in 1972 but it was not completed until 1985. The scale of the project was instrumental in stemming the horrific decline of the area because of crime and rampant pornography. A true product of its time, it was not graceful, but it sure delivered a knockout blow to the area’s downward rush toward total tawdriness. It also wows those who venture inside.
The former Pan Am building, which is known now as the MetLife Building, straddles and overwhelms Park Avenue and is New York City's most prominent example of Brutalist architecture -- although almost universally hated for destroying the gracefulness of the Helmsley Building just to the north and the extremely poor quality of its polished granite base.
The elongated octagonal, plan of the MetLife building, designed with abundant Brutalism in 1963 by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius. Its very pronounced indented mechanical floors, its “floating” and now defunct helipad roof and its protruding fins between its windows would make it one of the city’s most likable major towers at any other location.
The staccato facades not only clashed with the pre-war formalism of Warren & Wetmore’s great “Terminal City” environs of Grand Central Terminal but dominated and virtually obscured the great Helmsley Building with its fabulous cupola romantically straddling Park Avenue -- one of the city’s greatest architectural jewels.
Furthermore, the unsightliness of its very poor granite panels at its base (which has been improved a bit with a recent renovation) demeaned this very important neighborhood.
The staccato facades not only clashed with the pre-war formalism of Warren & Wetmore’s great “Terminal City” environs of Grand Central Terminal but dominated and virtually obscured the great Helmsley Building with its fabulous cupola romantically straddling Park Avenue -- one of the city’s greatest architectural jewels.
Furthermore, the unsightliness of its very poor granite panels at its base (which has been improved a bit with a recent renovation) demeaned this very important neighborhood.
The tower’s form, vaguely reminiscent of archaic Chinese bronze containers, obviously influenced the very exciting and excellent 1969 plan for Battery Park City created by Wallace K. Harrison, William Conklin, Philip Johnson and Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, which called for three huge MetLife-style towers connected by skywalks and also to a smaller but still very large slab structure to the north with people-movers. That very grand plan called for 21,000 new housing units, but, unfortunately, was not executed and was derided by some leaders as “The Riveria on the Hudson.”
THE UGLY
New Building at Bellevue Hospital
The “New Building” at Bellevue Hospital on the west side of the F.D.R. Drive between 27th and 28th Streets was completed in 1974 and is probably the city’s most unattractive, or, at least, ungainly, building (inside: 1,500 beds across 25 stories). It was designed by Pomerance & Breines in association with Katz, Waisman, Weber & Strauss and Joseph Blumenkranz. This gigantic and very bland grey cube needs either a makeover or bulldozer.
Directly across from the medical center is the more interesting mega-complex Waterside Plaza. Built in 1974 on pilings in the East River and designed by Davis Brody & Associates, it is one of the most ambitious mixed-use developments ever realized in the city.
Directly across from the medical center is the more interesting mega-complex Waterside Plaza. Built in 1974 on pilings in the East River and designed by Davis Brody & Associates, it is one of the most ambitious mixed-use developments ever realized in the city.
The Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn was designed by Kallman, McKinnell & Wood Architects
Construction on the Woodhull Medical Center in Brooklyn began in 1971 and it was intended to replace Greenpoint Hospital (whose site is now being redeveloped). The building, which was initially budgeted to be just $85 million, was completed in 1978 at a cost of about $300 million. Concerned that it might be too expensive to operate, the city tried unsuccessfully to convince the federal government to use it as a jail. It then put the project’s opening on hold, but finally opened in 1982.
It was no white elephant as its 700-foot-long central slab was covered in gray tinted glass with panels of weathering steel that was also used in its very large, exposed framework. It was designed by Kallmann & McKinnell of Boston and Russo & Sonder of New York, and contained 610 beds on a 12-acre superblock bounded by Broadway and Flushing, Throop and Park Avenues.
The mammoth, 10-story structure looks like might be a giant grainery with fancy silos, or a secretive Vehicle Assembly Building for NASA. Its darkness gives it the allure of intrigue, an attribute that is missing from many megastructures, but one that in no way diminishes its ominous presence.
It was no white elephant as its 700-foot-long central slab was covered in gray tinted glass with panels of weathering steel that was also used in its very large, exposed framework. It was designed by Kallmann & McKinnell of Boston and Russo & Sonder of New York, and contained 610 beds on a 12-acre superblock bounded by Broadway and Flushing, Throop and Park Avenues.
The mammoth, 10-story structure looks like might be a giant grainery with fancy silos, or a secretive Vehicle Assembly Building for NASA. Its darkness gives it the allure of intrigue, an attribute that is missing from many megastructures, but one that in no way diminishes its ominous presence.
TEN23 in West Chelsea by GKV Architects
Still widely derided, Brutalism has been gained some adoration in recent years, along with a subtle resurgence in contemporary architecture. For designers and homeowners who favor clean lines over ornamentation and tradition, the style’s sculptural simplicity and focus on functionality resonate with a modern audience seeking bold, sustainable spaces. By embracing the raw texture of materials, these buildings make a visual statement that feels both striking and timeless...to some.
While it's too soon to call it a full Brutalist revival, some recent projects—like the already mentioned Maverick Chelsea—channel the movement’s raw sculptural power. Firms like GKV Architects continue to push the aesthetic forward with vigorous cast-in-place concrete facades such as ones used at CODA , TEN23, and The Beekman Hotel & Residences. Super-slender condo, 432 Park Avenue also shares some aesthetic traits of Brutalism with its monumental scale and raw concrete structural facade (albeit polished). And like many of its mid-20th century predecessors, it has many critics and is allegedly falling apart.
While it's too soon to call it a full Brutalist revival, some recent projects—like the already mentioned Maverick Chelsea—channel the movement’s raw sculptural power. Firms like GKV Architects continue to push the aesthetic forward with vigorous cast-in-place concrete facades such as ones used at CODA , TEN23, and The Beekman Hotel & Residences. Super-slender condo, 432 Park Avenue also shares some aesthetic traits of Brutalism with its monumental scale and raw concrete structural facade (albeit polished). And like many of its mid-20th century predecessors, it has many critics and is allegedly falling apart.
More recently, Long Island City-based Charney Companies announced they’ve secured financing to begin construction on a 182-unit condominium tower at 95 Rockwell Place in Downtown Brooklyn. Designed by Fogarty Finger, the building is not strictly Brutalist but shows influences of the style through its use of polished exposed concrete, modular balcony formations, and the structural expression of repetitive elements.
Listings in Brutalist residential buildings
Chatham Towers, #24E (Cicada International LLC)
Westview, #814 (POWERED BY DMT LLC)
Kips Bay Towers, #18K (Serhant)
Chatham Green, #19H (Cicada International LLC)
The Corinthian, #51EF (Brown Harris Stevens Residential Sales LLC)
Maverick, #16C (Douglas Elliman Real Estate)
432 Park Avenue, #54A (Douglas Elliman Real Estate)
Rentals
Waterside Plaza | See availabilities here: https://rent.brookfieldproperties.com/property/waterside/
Waterside Plaza, completed in 1974 by architectural firm Davis, Brody & Associates and developer Richard Ravitch, is a distinctive residential complex built on a platform over the East River between 25th and 30th Streets. The development consists of four slender towers ranging from 31 to 37 stories, containing 1,470 apartments, and is supported by over 2,000 pilings descending 80 feet into the riverbed.
The luxury rental community features doorman buildings, spacious floor plans, and breathtaking views of the skyline and river. The buildings offer spacious studio, 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom apartments and amenities include a fitness center, swimming pool, storage units, and a private shuttle service for residents to various Manhattan locations. View availabilities here.
The luxury rental community features doorman buildings, spacious floor plans, and breathtaking views of the skyline and river. The buildings offer spacious studio, 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom apartments and amenities include a fitness center, swimming pool, storage units, and a private shuttle service for residents to various Manhattan locations. View availabilities here.
Independence Plaza, #310-08E (Stellar Management)
Gateway Plaza Battery Park City, #3B
$5,050/month
Battery Park City | Rental | 1 Bedroom, 1 Bath | 717 ft2
Gateway Plaza Battery Park City, #3B (Rentals Manager)
The brutal 25 Water Street prior to conversion, expansion and re-clad into SOMA | By SnowFire - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136503422
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