Simon Phipps: Brutal Scotland art review – A proud heritage
An atmospheric exhibition that pays homage to a spirited legacy of progress and the signifiers of an egalitarian optimism
What a treat. Simon Phipps’ photographs of post-war brutalist architecture have done as much as any other body of work to revive the reputation of a style once castigated for its ugliness, neglect and deprivation. Actually, the building stock of 1950s–70s Britain was beautiful, daring and oddly sensual (brutalism has more to do with curves than it’s given credit for). Phipps’ dramatic black and white photos of 160 structures spanning the length and breadth of Scotland (in which the tonal contrasts of staining and weathering only add to the atmosphere) remind us that this is a built heritage we should be proud of, and rush to protect.
What’s more, this architecture stood for an age of egalitarian optimism. Many of the buildings on display at Street Level were commissioned by public bodies and intended for civic or collective use. Here are university and college campuses, stadia, churches, sports and shopping centres, council offices and, of course, high-rise housing. You can imagine a well-trodden critical response to the latter images, deriding them as evidence of some sanitising exercise in middle-class nostalgia.
The location of this show in Glasgow, the capital of the UK’s largely failed experiment in multi-storey living, is a reminder that too often this was a state of affairs defined by isolation, crime and intergenerational trauma. But do these photos deny that heritage? They pay homage to a vexed and grizzled legacy while reminding us of a much missed spirit of progress that has vanished into the west coast fog.
Simon Phipps: Brutal Scotland, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until Saturday 16 May.