History is peculiar in that it doesn’t change once it happens. You can study it and learn new things, but we have a concrete understanding of what brutalism was

History is peculiar in that it doesn’t change once it happens. You can study it and learn new things, but we have a concrete understanding of what brutalism was at inception. Brutalism was a style 50+y ago. It’s over now. You can’t redefine history. Things can grow and change, and language especially can change too. But even as things change, language is still used to convey meaning, and if words can be used to mean anything at any time, it no longer becomes a tool to convey meaning. Maybe one day we’ll say the color of the sky is “green”. But the first guy to point to the sky and call it “green” should expect a lot of people telling him that actually it’s “blue”. Isn't that what's going on here? Hahaha! :) I think it is! On a more serious and academic note, things change, and styles and movements and definitions change. This is known and accepted, and not really the goal of this debate. But styles and movements are defined by a collective, they’re contemporary to a time and place and group of people. One guy self-labeling his work on HN is not the evolution of a movement. Movements are defined by a group of people working together (or at least interacting) to define their movement. There is a social discourse amongst them, and collective understanding - even if it changes over time. Neo-brutalism is a movement that is happening now, across the internet, by a lot of people. It is distinct from the 1950s brutalism (hence the new name). Most of those people have clear and overlapping idea of what they’re creating - many literally publish goals and definitions of what it means to them. Those people are the ones engaging in a contemporary discourse around design and style, and defining their movement… while a lone HN post is using their name but not their discourse.