Post-war Europe, licking its wounds, decided that the best way to scour the past was to design the future to look completely different; less socially divisive, more socialist. To replace the ruined grand palaces that represented the classist states, architects embraced Brutalism, a no-frills, utilitarian approach that foregrounded structure and raw materials over classic proportions and beauty. This was a style that purported to celebrate the common man, unadorned by the baggage of history, a tough, and no-nonsense kind of person who saw buildings for what they were: simply structures in which to conduct the necessary business of life. After all, look where tradition and beauty had gotten them: homicidally complacent about the sanctity of life.
Thus was Europe re-born in the image of a concrete God — hulking, angular, and utterly dispossessed of mirth. Public institutions in particular became expressions of civic self-hatred, soulless arenas in which cold-war politics were practiced with the dedication of termites, whose grandiose houses were grotesque cannibalizations of those they replaced.
The word brutal comes to us from the brute, the animal valued only for its obedient power, and which came to mean savage, cruel, and unfeeling — just like the architecture whose name it employs. To be brutal is to be a bully who slays you without conscience, just because he can.
Which brings us to this 1971 Brutalist version of the Caesar salad: a glass bowl filled solely with the undressed top half of a lettuce, into which two salad tongs have been plunged, as if to bring the point home — who needs taste, when literal tastelessness will do. Why, this is violence indeed.
See also: Making A Boob of Yourself
