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Behold the power of a mistranslation: > The term ‘brutalism’ was coined by the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and popularised by the architectur
by msla 7y ago
Behold the power of a mistranslation:
> The term ‘brutalism’ was coined by the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and popularised by the architectural historian Reyner Banham in 1954. It derives from ‘Béton brut’ (raw concrete) and was first associated in architecture with Le Corbusier, who designed the Cite Radieuse in Marseilles in the late-1940s.
But since the word can be used as an insult in English, it's used with no reference to its original meaning, obscuring the fact it's a botched translation.
- arbitrage 7y agolinguistic shift. meanings and etymologies can drift over time. in english, in the modern age, brutalist implies brutality.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- oh_sigh 7y agoNo, it doesn't. No one is describing, say, the Geisel Library as 'brutal', unless they've heard that it is Brutalist and didn't understand the etymology.
- perl4ever 7y agoIt seems...not not accurate to me. I mean, "brutal" and "raw" are related concepts. In fact I think the words are sometimes paired in English - i.e. "raw brutality". You could argue that it's not brutalism if it's not concrete, but that seems unnecessarily narrow to me. Is it unreasonable to look at a large construction of raw concrete and think of a host of related concepts, that it looks raw, hard, unforgiving, and stark?
- larnmar 7y ago“Brut” (fr) and “Brute” (en) share the same Latin-via-Old-French etymology though, they’re related concepts demoting being untamed and simple (compare: “raw strength” vs “brute strength”) Furthermore, “brutal” is also a word in French, meaning the same thing as it does in English. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the Frenchmen who coined the phrase intended it to refer both to the rawness or the concrete and the brutality of the design, they can’t have been unaware of the associations.