72 Wojciech Niebrzydowski
art must rst of all be moving, it must evoke emotions
2
.
Young architects reached for the ideas of avant-garde art,
as they did not nd the right ones in post-war architecture.
Actually, the only architect of the older generation who
inspired them was Le Corbusier [11, p. 87].
Brutalist architects also used elements found at the
construction site, e.g., the remains of old buildings
3
. Most
of all, however, they decided to treat building materials as
found objects. Therefore, they used them in a raw state,
not covered by plaster or façade cladding. In the rst
phase of brutalism, they did not subject their surface to
any aestheticization or treatment. Poorly made, discolored
and uneven bricks of the second class formed the walls of
the Sugden House designed by the Smithsons, and a rough
texture of béton brut with an imprint of formwork boards
and defects gave character to Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habi-
tation in Marseille.
However, the idea of As Found is much broader than
the use of ordinary, raw materials and exposing their sur-
faces, although this aspect is the best known. The archi-
tects following the New Brutalism doctrine, especially the
Smithsons, are responsible for introducing the idea of As
Found into architecture. The author of this article discuss-
es these issues at length in the monograph Architektura
brutalistyczna a idee Nowego Brutalizmu [The Brutalist
Architecture and the Ideas of the New Brutalism] [12].
The idea of As Found is, above all, an architect’s attitude
towards design, an attitude that also results in a specic
design method based on extreme objectivity. As a result
of its application, values such as ordinariness, sincerity,
directness, immediacy, materiality and uniqueness are
brought out. According to the idea of As Found, an archi-
tect became a neutral resonator of the existing situation.
When starting each design task, he rejected any standard,
predetermined patterns and solutions. John Voelcker ex-
plained this method: It can only be understood as a re-ori-
entation of spirit in which the specialist-architect who
aimed at putting the built world into a pre-determined and
pre-planned order has been replaced by the man-archi-
tect, who is almost passively receptive to the sequence of
situations in which he nds himself, and who relies on the
social validity of his plastic responses to those situations.
A kind of resonator that builds in response to a complicat-
ed poly-incidence of conditions [13, p. 184].
Research on the As Found idea allowed the author to
identify its most important attributes: ordinariness, sinceri-
ty, objectivity, and uniqueness. Later in the work, they were
the research parameters used for comparative analyses of
the idea of As Found and the work of Rudolph.
Ordinariness
The idea of As Found was associated with the glori-
cation of ordinariness. Prosaic, readily available ma-
terials were used. In post-war England, it was primarily
2
They rejected the classic concept of beauty as an overriding aesthet-
ic value in favor of the visual suggestibility of a work of art or a building.
3
For example, the Smithsons in the Upper Lawn Pavilion in Fonthill
Abbey, Gottfried Böhm in the Godesberg Hotel in Bad Godesberg.
magazines [7]. They were compiled in the book Writings
on Architecture [8].
Among Polish researchers dealing with the issues of bru -
talism, Jadwiga Sławińska, the author of the book Ru chy
protestu w architekturze współczesnej [Protest Movements
in Contemporary Architecture] [9], and Sta nisław La tour
and Adam Szymski, the authors of the book Rozwój współ
czesnej myśli architektonicznej [Development of Contem-
porary Architectural Thought] [10], should be men tioned.
The analysis of the literature showed that the research
conducted so far has focused on the individual character
of Rudolph’s architecture, emphasizing his strong creative
personality and very diverse phases of his work. Although
his buildings are among the most famous works of brutal-
ism, their relationship with the basic assumptions of the
trend has rarely been analyzed. Therefore, the author of
the article undertook to analyze the relations between the
concepts and works of Rudolph and one of the most im-
portant ideas of brutalism, i.e., As Found.
The research concerns both the theory of brutalist ar-
chitecture and its practice. The creative principles of
Ru dolph and other brutalist architects were studied and
com pared, as well as buildings from dierent countries
and periods of brutalism. As for Rudolph’s buildings, the
focus was on those created in the brutalist phase of his
work, that is, in the years 1955–1970. The years 1957–
1965 should be dened as a particularly important period
of research. Rudolph was the Dean of the School of Ar-
chitecture at Yale University at the time and designed his
most important buildings.
Rudolph and As Found
The idea of As Found was one of the foundations of
brutalist architecture. To a large extent, it was derived
from avant-garde art trends that developed after World
War II. Art autre, art brut and musique concrete should
be mentioned here, as well as the works of artists such as
Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuet, Pierre Schaeer, Eduar-
do Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson
1
. All these artists stood
up against the artistic rules and canons that were binding
so far. The works of art brut and art autre were to show
the creative force inherent in every human being, which
with time is suppressed by social norms or the educa tional
system. It was characteristic that the artists used found
objects in their works. They were usually simple every-
day objects (cutlery, parts of mechanisms) or products of
nature (shells, stones, pieces of bark). These prosaic ob-
jects became components of works of art and took on new
value without losing their ordinary form. While painters
and sculptors used objects and materials “as found”, mu-
sique concrete composers such as Schaeer used street
sounds and random human voices “as recorded”.
After the end of World War II, both avant-garde artists
and architects searched for a new style that would corre-
spond to the harsh reality and the changing society. They
were convinced that the language of architecture and
1
The last two of those mentioned worked closely with the Smithsons.
