Why this church wants to hurt you; what is Brutalism?
Was it trauma or vicious narcissism?
You probably don’t like this church
You’ve seen them before; hulking unfinished concrete slabs; vast, windowless walls; squat, angular towers that loom without grace or proportion…
Lines pointing in random directions that feel like the walls are falling towards you and squash you as an irrelevancy…
Generally an air of hopelessness that comes over you when you look at it.
Or maybe you’ve been unwise enough to step inside and were struck by the sheer oppressive strangeness of it: the cavernous space that seems to be collapsing, the dimness, the way the walls seem to absorb light rather than reflect it.
Instead of warmth, there is cold. Instead of life, sterility. Instead of communion, alienation. Instead of beauty, there is… nothing.
There’s a name for it, and it’s surprisingly honest.
The architectural style is Brutalism, a movement that took hold in the mid-20th century, particularly in the wake of World War II. It was modernist, ideological, and uncompromising. Its defining characteristic - raw, unadorned concrete - gave it its name, from the French béton brut.
Brutalist architects prided themselves on their refusal of ornament, their disdain for traditional forms, and their commitment to a kind of aesthetic severity. Decoration, in their view, was dishonest. Beauty was an irrelevant relic of the past. A building should not be an object of delight or contemplation; it should simply exist.
Apparently Hollywood has made a movie about it, so I thought this would be a good time to talk, in today’s post for all subscribers, about why if you thought Brutalism was just Bad, you were right. You’ll be unsurprised to hear it’s not about aesthetics.
An update on our weekly offerings
I think today is a good day to let you know what’s happening. Starting next week, we’ll be reconfiguring the weekly offerings. I keep hearing from readers and subscribers that they’re getting a little overwhelmed. While I always respond that it’s not actually a class or course, and the material is always there on the site, ready any time you are, I still really get the point.
As we delve deeper into the rich and complex world of Christian sacred art, the workload gets bigger: research, writing, photography, image and video editing etc. I’ve reached the limits of what I can reasonably manage on my own, and to maintain both quality and sustainability, as well as sanity, I need to adjust the rhythm of our weekly offerings.
So starting next week, the new schedule will include:
One in-depth paid post per week – a substantial exploration of our current themes.
One free post per week – to keep sharing insights with a wider audience.
Occasional exclusive deeper dives – These won’t be weekly, but when they do appear, they’ll feature original photos and video footage, focusing on specific artefacts and sites, available for paid subscribers.
It’ll be mostly in the paid subscriber posts that we will be pursuing the Big Editorial Plan for 2025, where we are mapping out the history of Christian sacred art, in the context of Christian history in general. In the posts for all subscribers, we can make some space, as we did today, to explore aesthetics, philosophical issues and other more generally pertinent topics.
If you’ve been considering subscribing, now is a great time. Your support directly enables this work to continue and grow, helping to fund research, travel, and the production of the visual materials that bring these explorations to life. I want to do a lot more and that will, pretty soon, require bringing in more help and expertise.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey so far; I’m grateful for this community and excited to keep building it together.
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Why are they like this?
So close to real life it takes a few minutes to realise it’s a parody.
The solution to smashed cities
What most Americans don’t remember is that, unlike the continental United States, most of Europe was smashed to powder by 1945. Residential, industrial and commercial buildings were gone; roads, railways and ports were smashed beyond use. My mother and uncle, who grew up in post-bombing Manchester, knew nothing but a half destroyed city, where bomb-sites were places to salvage fragments of bikes and toys, kitchen utensils and any other useful thing. Infrastructure was destroyed and basic necessities were in short supply - anyone growing up in that era will remember saving string, paper and anything serviceable. My mother’s first words upon arriving in Quebec City on a ship in 1959 was, “Where’s the bomb damage?”
Governments across Europe faced the enormous challenge of reconstruction, not just in terms of buildings but in rebuilding shattered societies, economies, and infrastructures. Out of this devastation, modern architecture was born, not as a gradual evolution of previous styles, but as a violent rupture from the past that was seen as lost forever in the tormented minds of adults of the period.
In some ways it’s understandable: in such a situation of emergency, with whatever was left of industry having to be steered back from its war-footing, traditional craftsmanship and elaborate detailing were expensive, impractical luxuries. Concrete, abundant, cheap and fast, easy to mould into massive forms, became the favoured material of architects who envisioned a stark, functional future.
In Britain, Brutalism’s enthusiastic supporters saw it as a “socially responsible” style, suitable for public housing, universities, and civic buildings. In the 1960s and 70s, governments across Europe and North America embraced Brutalist architecture for its supposed durability and affordability. Massive concrete housing projects and institutional buildings spread rapidly, reshaping entire cities.
Brutalism and trauma
In the minds of architects and planners, who had lived through both wars, the European architectural tradition itself had been exposed as fragile, outdated, and insufficient - something that had radically failed.
It’s been suggested that Brutalism’s psychological roots lie in the trauma experienced by its key architects, many of whom were shaped by neurological disorders, war, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The sterile, inhuman landscapes they created were not simply artistic choices, but direct expressions of a wounded psyche that had lost its ability to engage with beauty, tradition, and human warmth.
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), was one of modernism’s most influential figures, has been described by biographers and psychiatrists as autistic, exhibiting classic traits such as social detachment, obsessive fixations, and a need to control his environment. People on the autism spectrum often experience hyperarousal to sensory input, struggling with visual complexity and unpredictability. His aversion to the organic, layered forms of traditional architecture, his love for stark, geometric abstraction, and his demand for rigidly ordered spaces mirror the cognitive tendencies of an autistic brain seeking to limit external stimulation.
His biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, wrote, “For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence…His fervent faith in his own way of seeing blinded him to the wish of people to retain what they most cherish (including traditional buildings) in their everyday lives.”
The work of another key German modernist architect, Walter Gropius, the theory suggests, reflects a PTSD-afflicted mind. His own home resembles a bunker, with slit-like windows, a hidden entrance, and a layout that suggests a permanent psychological defensive crouch. His famous insistence on “starting from zero,” erasing the past, can be understood as a trauma response; a deeply ingrained desire to create “year zero” a total do-over of history, dissociated from the horrors of the immediate traumatic past, to rebuild a world free of memory.
The night of Thursday 14/15 November 1940, the German Luftwaffe undertook its most concentrated attack on any British city of the Second World War. The raid lasted 11 hours and involved nearly 500 bombers, which dropped 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 landmines on the place and its citizens. At least 568 people were killed in Coventry that night, 863 more seriously wounded (some of them fatally) and a further 393 injured. Thousands were made homeless. More than 43,000 homes, just over half the city’s housing stock, were damaged or destroyed. 71 factories were damaged. Coventry lost its central library, market hall and hundreds of shops and public buildings. Nazi propagandists coined a new verb, coventrieren – ‘to Coventrate’ – to raze a city to the ground.
Neuroscience now confirms what trauma specialists have long suspected: prolonged exposure to near-death experiences rewires the brain, shrinking the areas responsible for emotional connection and making the sufferer permanently hypervigilant. PTSD sufferers tend to try to create the environments that deal with their trauma, fixating on repetition and control as a subconscious way of mastering their fears. This could explain why modernist architecture, particularly in its Brutalist form, so often resembles the ruined landscapes of war; concrete walls like trenches, windowless façades like bunkers, vast, empty plazas like bombed-out streets.
In this interpretation, Brutalism is not just an architectural failure; it is a psychological imprint of the traumas of the 20th century. The sterile cities, the soulless public housing blocks, the oppressive concrete churches, the products of wounded men trying to rebuild a world in their own damaged image.
This is the charitable interpretation. Another is that they were modernist ideologues, vicious narcissists who understood it perfectly and rejected it anyway and gleefully used the post-war situation to force their ideas on unwilling populations. Le Corbusier, Gropius, and their disciples were not merely designing buildings; they were engaged in an act of cultural revolution, not just indifferent to tradition but hostile to it.
Le Corbusier’s famous dictum, “We must kill the street,” (that is, eliminate the organic, pedestrian-centred “walkable” urban environment) was not the remark of a passive observer who found cities overwhelming; it was the battle cry of a man who sought to eradicate the organic, historical, and communal in favour of the mechanized, controlled, and abstract.
Brutal ecclesiastics: Brutalist churches
What baffles many Christians is why church leaders embraced Brutalism at all. And especially why, eighty years after the end of World War II, we are still being served up an unending parade of ugly, soul-crushing or banal Modernist and Brutalist trash church architecture.
It was one thing for governments, universities, and emergency post-war housing projects to adopt the style under the justification of cost, efficiency, or ideological purity, but what compelled bishops and clergy to commission churches in this stark, anti-traditional aesthetic? The answer lies in the broader theological shifts of the 20th century, particularly the rise of Modernism, which sought to eject the Church’s connection to its own heritage, and ultimately redefine the nature of faith itself.
Modernist theology, condemned as a heresy in the early 20th century but increasingly dominant in later decades, was characterized by a rejection of tradition, a distrust of supernatural realities, and an obsession with keeping Christianity “relevant” to the modern world. Just as Modernist theologians sought to strip doctrine of its mystery and historic continuity, Modernist architects sought to strip sacred spaces of their visual connection to the past.
Churches, they argued, should not feel timeless, transcendent, otherworldly, or rooted in centuries of Christian tradition; they should be contemporary, industrial, and “honest” about their materials. To them, stone vaults, frescoed walls and gilded icons were relics of an outdated medievalism, worthless symbols of a Church clinging to the past rather than embracing the future.
The ecclesiastical embrace of Brutalism was not merely an aesthetic choice but a theological statement. It reflected a Church leadership increasingly uncomfortable with its own heritage, eager to distance itself from the past, and willing to trade beauty for ideological conformity. The result was a kind of liturgical and architectural iconoclasm, in which the very shape of the church began to embody an implicit rejection of transcendence.
Step into a Byzantine, Gothic or Romanesque cathedral, and your gaze is drawn upward, the vaulting of the ceiling a visual echo of the heavens themselves. In both, there is a sense of transcendence, of human art and craft working in harmony with divine order. The space does not merely contain worship; it expresses it. It makes the invisible visible.
Instead of evoking the presence of God, these structures often felt more suited to bureaucratic headquarters or bomb shelters. By the late 20th century, Brutalism had fallen out of favour, widely criticised for its inhuman scale and lifeless presence. Yet its legacy remains, particularly in the churches built under its influence, spaces where the absence of beauty, proportion, and transcendence continues to weigh heavily on those who enter them.
The problem, of course, is that this effort to strip away the visual language of tradition did not make churches more “authentic” or more spiritually powerful. It simply made them ugly, unwelcoming, and spiritually barren. The faithful, who instinctively understood the link between beauty and worship, were often left alienated in these new Brutalist spaces, where the absence of art and ornamentation translated into an absence of warmth and presence. The embrace of Brutalism, like the embrace of Modernist theology, was ultimately a self-defeating project that severed the Church from its past and left it with nothing compelling to replace it.
20th century Modernist Iconoclasm
This all goes beyond mere psychological reaction to trauma and into something darker. Aesthetic destruction is never neutral; it is an assertion of power. The blank, inhuman spaces of Brutalism are not just ugly; they are deliberately dehumanising and desacralising. They strip away warmth, history, and scale, not because their designers were incapable of perceiving these things, but because they believed such things had no right to exist. They saw beauty as a weakness, tradition as an obstacle, and the human need for transcendence as something to be re-educated out of existence.
Brutalism can be understood as another iteration of iconoclasm, though in a different form than historical movements that destroyed sacred images outright. Instead of smashing statues and whitewashing frescoes, Brutalists and their ecclesiastical enablers simply took advantage of the destruction of the war, and pre-emptively erased beauty, symbolism, and the very possibility of sacred art, an act of Orwellian historical memory erasure.
Historically, iconoclasm has taken various forms. In each case, there was the same set of theological or ideological justifications: images are idolatrous; sacred art distracts from “pure” worship; faith should be expressed in a less fleshly, more abstract way. The result has always been the same: destruction of beauty, loss of continuity, of the deep connection between the human and the divine.
Just as the iconoclasts of the past sought to remove the physical presence of Christ and the saints from sacred spaces, Brutalist architecture removes the very framework through which sacred art and meaning can exist. It is an erasure, not just of images, but of the entire visual language of Christian worship.
At its core, Christian sacred art has always been both transcendent and deeply human. It lifts the soul while embracing the person. In an icon, the saint looks at you, meeting your gaze across the distance between heaven and this world. In a church, light enters through high windows, transforming stone and glass into something weightless, almost immaterial. A frescoed vault tells a story; a carved column invites the hand to trace its curves. These things are not incidental. They reflect the Incarnation itself, the reality of the fusion of the human soul with the material body.
Brutalism, by contrast, rejects both the transcendent and the human. In keeping with its name, it is cold, inhuman, and indifferent, it aims to overpower to the point of visual violence. Its architects scorned tradition, yet they built nothing to replace it. What they left behind are buildings that feel more like bunkers or prisons than houses of God. If you have ever stood before one and felt an unspoken sense of loss, an awareness that something essential is missing; you are not imagining it.
I'm reminded of a rather quick line from the movie Prometheus, "God doesn't draw in straight lines." The hard and straight lines of brutalism reeks of artificiality, and unlike Cologne or Chartres or Notre Dame, they cry out, "This was made by, for, and of men," rather than God. It's a shrine of temporality, not eternality. Likewise, I think there's a vain slothfulness in the architecture of brutalism. What does it take to pour hundreds of tons of cement into the simplest, crudest shapes? Not a lot of effort (concrete is purposefully and intentionally mass producible for the sake of building the hard infrastructure requisite for industrial civilization). Meanwhile, how long did it take to build a Gothic cathedral? Salisbury, which represents one tail end, took about 50 years, whereas Cologne took several centuries. Why? Because of the effort needed to mine stone, to chisel stone, to raise it 200 feet in the air, to collect the sand and materials to create the stained glass, to fell the trees, to arrange the planks in timber trusses, or a hundred other marvelous, painstaking details that would take dozens of craftsmen years to accomplish. It's a labor of love, an act of sacrifice, a rendering of our gifts unto the Most High God. It's quality over quantity, pursuit of virtue over pursuit of efficiency or productivity. In other words, it's eminently Christian.
Yes, that's why the postwar reconstruction wouldn't allow for Europe to cultivate virtue by going through hardship and experiencing the pains of a slow, committed recovery, rebuilding what was lost, but merely smoothing it over and replacing it with technocratic and bureaucratic tyranny. And I think the way you put it so blunt and precise, "This church wants to hurt you." No, not connect you with God or raise you to a higher plane, but to bully your senses and degrade your being.
Good work as always. 🤗
The modernists understand that you need a very different kind of church architecture for a different religion.