Brutalism has nothing to do with brutality. The term began as nybrutalism, coined in 1950 by Swedish architect Hans Asplund to describe Villa Goth, a modest brick house in Uppsala with exposed steel, brick, and board-marked concrete. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson took it up, and critic Reyner Banham’s 1955 essay tied it to beton brut, the raw concrete of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille. The Smithsons saw it as an ethic of honesty, wanting people to see “the woodness of wood” and leaving formwork grain, pipes, and water tanks visible, as at their Hunstanton School in Norfolk. Boston City Hall’s jutting volumes even reveal where the mayor’s office and council chambers sit inside.

Socialist governments from Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria embraced cheap, unornamented concrete as an equalizer, building prefabricated panel housing, while 1960s universities adopted it as serious and forward thinking. But by the late 1970s the style had become shorthand for decay. Porous concrete stained and grew moss in damp climates, and rusting rebar caused spalling, or concrete cancer. Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre was demolished in 2004 and the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in 2017. Since around 2015, a revival has saved London’s Southbank Centre after a 35 year campaign and protected Preston bus station, while neo-brutalism now appears in costly museums and boutiques far from the style’s egalitarian roots.

• Why the Smithsons’ Streets in the Sky walkways at Robin Hood Gardens became isolated, windy crime spots
• Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale and Denys Lasdun’s ziggurats at the University of East Anglia
• UC San Diego’s Geisel Library, planned by William Pereira in steel and glass and switched to concrete to save money
• A 2014 Economist observation that public demolition campaigns target brutalist buildings almost exclusively
• Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum in China, whose concrete carries the imprint of bamboo formwork