top of page
Search

The Brutalist Season of the Mind: Dispelling Seasonal Mists with a "Project"

If I had to define the feeling that seasonal changes leave in my soul with an architectural movement, it would definitely be Brutalism . The gray, heavy, and unadorned bareness of raw concrete... Like that foggy mood that doesn't even allow me to wake up in the mornings; a world where the walls surrounding me are monotonous, massive, and impassable. Sometimes life feels like being trapped under a gray sky where everything just stands there as a meaningless mass.

Sartre, when he says that existence can sometimes weigh down on us like a 'nausea,' is actually referring to this meaningless massification of the soul. Every moment not crowned with action transforms us from a living subject into a concrete block that weighs down where it is. This raw weight that falls upon us traps us in the familiar, comfortable, yet suffocating darkness of choicelessness.


Ronchamp's Irregular Windows


However, Le Corbusier imbued the Ronchamp Chapel with magic within this heavy concrete. When you look at the chapel's enormous, dark wall, the first thing you see is a gray mass. But upon closer inspection, you see dozens of windows, each of a different size and depth, seemingly scattered randomly across the wall.

These windows are what Sartre called "choice." The light from outside doesn't enter through a single massive pane of glass; it filters through the thick, gray concrete, passing through different angles and colors. The light is there despite the concrete. In fact, what truly makes the light meaningful is the pitch-black darkness and heaviness created by that concrete.


Breaking Through Your Own Wall: Production and Action

To create something within this heavy season is like opening a new window onto that raw concrete of the mind. This creation could be a piece of writing, an image, or a sound; what matters is the action itself. Instead of trying to demolish the monotonous concrete of depressive inaction with a sledgehammer, it's about creating just enough space for light to filter through...

From a Sartrean perspective, the moment we begin to create, we cease to be "objects" and become "subjects" again. When a beam of light enters, that gray concrete is no longer a suffocating prison, but a backdrop that makes the light shine brighter. The resonance our work finds in the world is proof that the light seeping through that window has struck something.


Awakening: Adjusting the Angle of Light

That first productive morning after a long period of silence means being able to spend a little more time under the light streaming through the windows. The season may still be grey, the concrete still heavy; but now we know, as in Ronchamp, that no matter how thick the wall, the will to open a window is always in the hands of existence.


In this issue of Sekans, let's ask ourselves this question: What irregular, small, but bright window will we open into that heavy stillness today?


 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page