Brutal Marmi
Wallpaper
Brutal Marmi
There is something wonderfully excessive about imagining Brutalist architecture in marble. Concrete seems so fundamental to the language that replacing it ought to ruin everything. Strangely, it doesn’t.
Brutal Marmi takes those deep, box-like forms familiar from coffered concrete ceilings and gives them a rather more flamboyant existence. They still have the same imposing geometry and relentless repetition, but the mood has shifted. Veins wander through the structure, colours drift from plausible to improbable and suddenly all that architectural severity looks rather decorative. Perhaps it always was.
Some of the great concrete interiors of the twentieth century understood repetition beautifully. A ceiling could be enormously complex while consisting of little more than one form used again and again. The pleasure came from accumulation, shadow and the confidence of the gesture. Seen now, many of those structures have an almost ornamental quality, despite belonging to an architectural language supposedly stripped of ornament.
Marble brings its own baggage, of course. Grandeur, decoration, grand entrances, polished halls. Putting it together with the visual language of Brutalism creates a slightly peculiar marriage, but a surprisingly happy one. The rigid geometry stops the stone becoming too sumptuous, while the marble takes some of the earnestness out of the architecture.
Colour pushes things further. These are imagined marbles rather than geological specimens, so restraint seems unnecessary. Some remain within touching distance of reality; others cheerfully leave it behind. The stone only needs to look familiar enough for the fiction to work.
And fiction is really what Brutal Marmi is about. An immensely heavy architectural form, made from an immensely heavy natural material, ends up weighing almost nothing at all. On paper, it becomes pure image: monumental, decorative and just a little absurd.
The Colours
