Comment by Barrin92
4 hours ago
>It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities
the very point of brutalism is to turn its material 'inside out', what defines brutalism is that it makes the material and structural elements it's made of visible. It's not a 'visual style' or an aesthetic at all but an 'ethic of construction' something was brutalist if it was honest, and exposed, what a thing was made of.
If you want to apply that notion to web design It's not about 1 CSS file or 100 but whether the mechanics of CSS or HTML are still visible on the site, or if it's all buried under colors, animations, styling etc. Craigslist is a pretty good example of a brutalist website, so is this site, HN.
Brutalism is absolutely a visual style. It's an architectural style artificially designed to look drab, raw and ugly.
If you look at brutalist buildings, it becomes obvious that its looks are the results of intentional design completely removed from its underlying "structural" concerns. You don't accidentally arrive there by refusing to think about aesthetics or by just being "honest".
You can't accidentally arrive at a building, that's by definition true for all architecture, it doesn't fall out of the sky. They also didn't design it to be ugly, that's your value judgement, not a property of the architecture.
What brutalists meant when they talked about honesty or the ethic of design is that the building should reflect on the outside, its construction, its social purpose, and its function. Obviously that's a visual choice, but not an aesthetic one.
And the fact that so many people, including you reach for the description of it as 'ugly' proves that point. They weren't trying to appeal to some established notion of taste, or some aesthetic school that prioritizes the appearance of a thing over its function but the opposite.