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From the series "New York, golden age"
Brutalist movement in architecture was/is not the best loved style, to say the least. This incomprehension came by two mistakes the architects did, both having a common ground. Miscommunication. Architecture, as photography and other arts backed by Muses, is a wish then a will to communicate, to share, to gather people. This engineered movement was supposed to protect people in a socialist embrace. If you know the windowless 'AT&T long lines' skyscraper in New York city, you know that it looks like the tower of Orthanc (for Tolkien's connoisseurs). Neither welcoming nor socialist whatsoever. First error. The second one has been to impose the tough cookies in a "delicate" proximity.
Despite the faulty aspect, I like this style. It's extremely inflexible, even brawny. I mean, you can't be nonreactive. You can't stay indifferent. You love it, you hate it. Mostly you hate it; but then, you think about this emotion, you try to justify it, you dissect it. Like some abstract works, the brutalism is a vortex of emotions, of thoughts coming in your mind without asking for it, and that's why many people don't like it: they don't appreciate to be forced to feel, thus to think. It's brutal, we react, angry. But that's one of the purpose of the art: to communicate, even if the first exchange is a slap on your face. On this view of the Financial district of Manhattan, only one building is really in brutalist style, but the others are salt and pepper and enhance the emotion.

From left to right:
** the hive band is the One New York Plaza building, Modernism, 1969
** the million arrow slits background is the Goldman Sachs building, Modernism, 1983
** The clay block is the Chase Manhattan bank, Brutalism, 1968
** The blue stripes are from Two New York Plaza building, Modernism, 1971

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