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03/12/2026

Join us on March 26th for the third installment of BALTs “The Brutalist Revolution” web lecture series! The Brutalist Image, a lecture by Valeria Carullo will discuss how Brutalist architecture, seen as a descendant of the Modern Movement, was highly photogenic. Its bold forms, sculptural shapes, and large scale suited the sharp, high-contrast style of post-war architectural photography, while rough materials like raw concrete and exposed brick highlighted texture and strength, conveying optimism about modern architecture.

By the late 1960s, growing criticism of post-war planning changed how Brutalism was photographed. Formal, dramatic images were replaced by grainier, informal photos influenced by social documentary, often showing people and everyday life.

Brutalism later fell out of favour but was rediscovered in the new millennium. Today, photographers once again emphasise the same striking visual qualities that first made these buildings appealing.

Details and registration link in our bio!

02/20/2026

Join us next Thursday for the second installment of BALTs “The Brutalist Revolution” web lecture series, Brutalism and the Transformed City!

Dr. Otto Saumarez Smith is an architectural and urban historian whose work explores modern British history through the lens of the built environment. He is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, where he teaches and researches the political, social, and cultural histories embedded in everyday buildings and cities. His first book, Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (OUP, 2019), was a History Today Book of the Year and widely reviewed. He is currently completing a second monograph on housing, sociology, and public-sector expertise in post-war Britain, and is co-editor of The Modern British City, forthcoming in 2025. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Trustee of the Twentieth Century Society.

Information and registration link in our bio!

Image Credit: Joanne Underhill / RIBA Collections

02/09/2026

Join us on February 26th via Zoom for the second installment of BALTs “The Brutalist Revolution” web lecture series! Brutalism and the Transformed City, a lecture by Dr. Otto Saumarez Smith, explores how architects and planners of Britain’s 1960’s “Brutalist” generation imaged bold new urban futures, from multi-level cities with vast megastructures to radical attempts to make the car a central part of city life. It looks at projects like the Barbican and Hook New Town, along with influential plans and reports that shaped city centers in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Blackburn. Driven by post-war optimism and faith in progress, these ideas promised a new kind of city. The reality, however, was often controversial, leaving behind concrete visions that still divide opinion today.

Information and registration link in our bio!

Image Credits: Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

01/19/2026

Join us this Thursday for the first lecture of 2026: Defining Brutalism by Owen Hopkins!

A cultural leader, curator, and writer, Owen Hopkins is currently Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University. Previously, he held senior curatorial roles at Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts, and is currently part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has curated major exhibitions in the UK and internationally and is the author of eight books, including The Brutalists: Brutalism’s Best Architects. He writes widely on architecture and its intersections with technology, politics, and society, lectures internationally, and regularly contributes to public debate through print and broadcast media.

Interlocutor: Hugh Pearman
9 AM PST/12 PM EST/5 PM GMT
Via Zoom

Registration link in our bio!

01/12/2026

Join us on Thursday January 22 for Part 1 of the 2026 BALT Lecture Series The Brutalist Revolution. In Part 1 Owen Hopkins will define Brutalism, the most controversial – yet misunderstood – architectural movement of the 20th century. Surveying examples of Brutalism from every continent, the lecture proposes a definition of Brutalism not in terms of singularity, but as duality, or rather a series of dualities. Beginning with Reyner Banham’s famous dichotomy of ‘ethic or aesthetic’, the lecture considers the ways Brutalism oscillates between the global and the local; how it frequently pointed to the future but was also deeply embedded in the architecture past; it synthesis of the hand-crafted and machine-built; and how exists in both visceral material form and as image. This duality was, the lecture suggests, both Brutalism’s greatest strength, its driving animated force, but also its downfall. Where Brutalism attempted the heroic reconciliation of the contradictions that had begun to fatally undermine the modern movement, the Postmodernists simply revelled in them. Nevertheless, despite its flaws and contradictions, Brutalism still stands as powerful evidence of architecture’s ability to remake the world – an ability, this lecture contends, we now need more than ever.

January 22 2026
Part 1 – Defining Brutalism
Speaker: Owen Hopkins
Interlocutor: Hugh Pearman
9 AM PST/12 PM EST/5 PM GMT
Via Zoom

Register at the link in our bio!

[📸: RIBA Collections RIBA45151] Balfron Tower, Rowlett Street (to the left) and Robin Hood Gardens (to the right), Tower Hamlets, London
Subject date: 1967
Architect/Designer: Alison & Peter Smithson, Erno Goldfinger

01/09/2026

The British Architectural Library Trust (BALT) is pleased to announce the 2026 Web Lecture Series - The Brutalist Revolution! Join Owen Hopkins as he opens the series by redefining Brutalism beyond cliché, examining its ethical, aesthetic and global contradictions, before turning to the radical ways Brutalist architects reshaped the post-war city.

Date: Thursday, January 22, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm EDT, 5:00 pm GMT, 6:00 pm CEST, 9:00 am PDT
Location: Zoom Webinar

Register at the link in our bio!

[📸: RIBA Collections RIBA69674]
Subject date: 1972
Architect/Designer: Philip Johnson

11/18/2025

Join us and Valeria Carullo this Thursday for a new lecture exploring the history of the RIBA Refugee Committee, established in early 1939 in response to the growing displacement of architects and artists fleeing N**i persecution in Central Europe. Tune in to learn how RIBA, guided by its young Librarian Edward “Bobby” Carter, created the Refugee Committee to balance support for émigré architects with protecting local employment.

Register at the link in our bio!

Thursday, November 20, 2025
12:00 pm EDT / 5:00 pm BST / 6:00 pm CEST / 9:00 am PDT Via Zoom

📸Czechoslovak Pavilion, Golden Gate Fair, San Francisco: the exhibit of Bohemian glass and optic equipment
📸Apartment or house in the Czech Republic, probably in Prague: the living room*

[📸: RIBA Collections RIBA15819, RIBA56667] Subject date: 1939, 1930 Architect/Designer: Antonin Heythum, Charlotta Heythum, Kamil Roskot, Arthur Blitz

*Arthur Blitz was chief architect between 1927 and 1939 for the firm Emil Gerstel, based in Prague, which specialized in interior decoration and furniture. This photoprint was originally part of the Refugee Committee Papers in the RIBA Archives Collection.

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