A Brutal Summer

For someone most at home in nature, photographing the wild and the beautiful, I seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of time photographing Brutalist architecture this summer.

Brutalism is pretty much the opposite of the things I usually find myself drawn to capture: lumps of concrete, repetitive windows, enormous slabs and staircases; and by and large, resolutely urban. And yet, looking back through the photographs I have made over the last few months, I realise that while snapping the concrete, I was in fact thinking of something else: the people who occupy and have occupied that concrete, and their stories. 

One of the places I photographed was Park Hill in Sheffield. It is an extraordinary complex, both visually and historically, and it carries with it all the complicated hopes and disappointments of postwar social housing. It was designed around the idea that architecture could help create a better way of living: streets in the sky, shared spaces, proximity, connections between people.

There is a quote about Park Hill that I keep coming back to:

“It is not the job of architects to form communities. It’s the job of architects to make places where communitiy can happen if it wants to happen.”

Architecture can make the conditions for something to happen, but it cannot make the something happen. You can design a walkway, a courtyard, a communal space, a bench, a street. You can arrange buildings so that people encounter one another. But you cannot design friendship. You cannot manufacture belonging. You cannot draw community onto a plan. People have to do that themselves.

And perhaps that is why I find these buildings so compelling. They are often described in terms of their intentions – the social ambitions behind them, the architectural ideas, the successes and failures. But standing in front of them, I find myself wondering about the much smaller stories happening inside.

Who has lived there for forty years?

Who knows everyone on their floor?

Who sits by the window every afternoon?

Who has grown old in the same flat?

Who knows how to fix the lift?

For that last question, let’s go to Tbilisi, where I photographed the Nutsubidze Skybridge apartment blocks: an extraordinary piece of architecture connected by a series of elevated bridges. Like so much Brutalist architecture, they are difficult to take in as an object. They are huge, imposing and slightly surreal. From a distance they can look almost like some kind of science-fiction landscape.

But the photograph that stays with me most is not really of the buildings at all.

It is a grainy iPhone snap in low light of Mzia Sabanadze.

Mzia has operated the lift there for decades. She is part of the building in a way that no architectural drawing could ever have anticipated. The lift is not just a piece of infrastructure; through her presence it has become a point of human contact. People arrive, leave, pass through. There are conversations, recognitions, routines. A job becomes a relationship with a building and, inevitably, with the people who use it.

And suddenly the enormous concrete structure feels very different. It becomes less about architecture and more about inhabitation.

This is the thing I think I have been circling around with my camera all summer. I am interested in the moment when architecture stops being architecture. When a building becomes someone’s home. When a corridor becomes somewhere you regularly bump into a neighbour. When a lift becomes the place where someone has spent decades greeting the same faces. When concrete, however monumental, becomes the background to an ordinary human life.

There is something particularly poignant about this in Brutalist buildings. Perhaps because the architecture is so emphatic, and was often built with enormous social ambitions; and yet time has a way of stripping away the original intentions and leaving the people to make their own meaning from the spaces and leave their marks on the buildings – to soften and adapt them. Fill them with things that weren’t on the architect’s drawings: curtains, plants, satellite dishes, signs, furniture, graffiti, repairs, modifications, cats. All the messy evidence of life.

Maybe this is why I keep photographing these lumps of concrete. I do like their seriousness and their geometry, and I have taken plenty of photos of that this summer; but ultimately, I think I am most interested in the things that undermine that seriousness: the tiny human details; the unexpected colour of something in a grey landscape; the glimpse through a window. There is something hopeful in that.

The concrete is only the shell, and there can be a strange kind of beauty in that shell; but it is the beauty of the human traces inside and around it that I am most  drawn to. 

Helen