Articulo_6_EN_Doxa_28

1. Introduction

Many authors agree on the prominence in current web design of a trend which has come to be known as brutalism, originating from the architectural movement that reached the height of its popularity between 1950 and 1970. As Rubio Hancock indicates (2014), the term derives from the French béton brut (raw concrete) and its most outstanding representatives were architects such as Le Corbusier, Miles Warren (founder of the Christchurch School, New Zealand), or the British couple Alison and Peter Smithson. Driven by the responsibility to aesthetically renovate a damaged post-World War II environment , they were attracted by an architecture which, according to Merelo, “could be designed and executed both rapidly and efficiently, with a minimum of unnecessary decoration (…), minimizing costs and maximising capacity” (2017, para.6). Lorente uses the term New Brutalism to refer to a “purist trend which advocated taking the raw decoration and experimentalism of the pioneers of the modern movement to the most radical extreme” (2017, p. 145). The brutalist trend is inscribed within this philosophy even though, as Bayley notes (2012), many of the strictest supporters of modernism renounced its aesthetic value as questionable. Grindrod also includes it within this context, while recognising a certain affinity with other styles (such as humanism, prefabricated structures or the International Style), and prefers a certain flexibility and caution on positioning it:

Appreciating post-war modernism in all its nuances helps to contextualise brutalism, where the dramatic structural bluntness often contrasts with the softness, functionality and modernity of other styles (2018, p41).

Going back to Merelo (2017), the architectural structures linked to this movement are defined by the following features:

They use geometric forms and repetitive patterns, used either in modules or grid-based.

The buildings leave the construction materials on view rather than concealing or beautifying them.

Uniformity and layout of residential structures are the result of an eminently egalitarian and communitarian social vision.

Function is prioritised over arbitrary decoration.

These same key concepts which characterise brutalist architecture have been transferred to become a paradigm for graphic design –especially focused on web design, according to Gràffica (2016)– which Özdemir (2017) places as beginning in the middle of the 2010s in the period of transition from an “age of information” to what he defines as the “age of innovation”. Since then, numerous supporters have taken up a style, which, as Miller points out, defends “simple designs and basic fonts. It is a return to the early web design and a rejection of highly polished and usable design so popular today” (2017, para.1). For Hill, brutalist philosophy represents “an antidote to the softer web” (2017, para.9) and recalls the first days of the World Wide Web when there was no standardisation and far fewer possibilities for producing friendly designs.

Taking up this definition and the criteria which describe brutalist architecture, some of the attributes specifically associated with this trend in web design are as follows:

HTML codes are stripped bare by limiting –excluding even sometimes– the cascading style sheets (CSS). The aim of maintaining “the basic materials (in this case the code) in their purest state, with the intention of not ‘decorating’ or ‘beautifying’ the final result” (Casado, 2016, para.12) is one of the most apparent similarities with its architectural