Hasta La Ideas

Graphic designer Peter Chadwick has launched a website dedicated to brutalism. This Brutal House will include a photographic archive of brutalist architecture and graphic design projects inspired by the movement.

The site is the latest in a series of conceptual and self-initiated projects from Chadwick – we covered his CMYK desk with built-in printing press last year. As well as a global architectural directory, it will include photographs of brutalist buildings around the world, research projects on brutalist architecture and logos, typefaces and poster designs that draw on brutalist aesthetics.

The site (built by Matt Flyn and Joel Baker) is currently a holding page, but Chadwick has photographed several buildings around London, including the Alexandra and Ainsworth estate in Camden, Pimlico’s Hide Tower and Balfron Tower in Bow, and will upload images over the next few weeks.

He’s also enlisted the help of photographers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and is hoping to work with creatives around the world to build a global archive and launch commercial design projects inspired by brutalism.

Alongside his photographs, Chadwick will be selling several brutalist posters on the site, including a monochrome series:

And one depicting buildings in the London district of Thamesmead, which was built to re-home families living in cramped Victorian slums. Headline text is taken from original recordings and press coverage of Thamesmead from the 1960s and 70s, and the colour scheme is a reference to A Clockwork Orange, which was filmed there.

The full set of Thamesmead posters (24 in total) will also be produced in a newspaper printed by The Newspaper Club. “It is ironic today that some of those so called East London slums are now gentrified whilst Thamesmead a so called ‘Town Of Tomorrow’ remains unloved and decaying in part. It is a shame as Thamesmead is a design classic,” says Chadwick.

Chadwick says he set up the site “to satisfy a long standing personal interest in architecture…triggered when I first saw the Trinity Square car park in the film Get Carter.”

“As a practising art director / graphic designer we hope to offer the viewer an interesting visual and in some cases critical alternative viewpoint through the eyes of graphic design. I see the site as a long term project that will deliver projects and a photographic archive of the highest calibre including collaborations with like minded graphic designers, photographers, illustrators and hopefully architects to name but a few. In London alone we lose fantastic buildings every year, it is my intention to document as many as I can before they are lost forever,” he says.