Dragana Zorić
https://doi.org/10.60152/v0ujucm7
Abstract: The Brutalist Cookbook explores radical architectural form in landscape. Landscape architecture often positions itself at the intersection of ecology, design, and urbanism, yet its disciplinary potency is diluted by a persistent vagueness—both in scope and in form. While it aspires to address urgent issues like climate resilience and social equity, it often lacks the formal rigor and aesthetic ambition that would give it cultural traction. The field’s retreat from composition and spatial articulation in favor of systems thinking has led to projects that are technically sound but visually and experientially underwhelming. In seeking legitimacy through science and sustainability, landscape architecture has too often abandoned its design imagination—its capacity to propose compelling, provocative forms that reshape how we relate to land, space, and one another. Brutalism by contrast, embraces a raw, uncompromising aesthetic rooted in the expression of structure and material. It rejects ornament in favor of the intricacy of the structural detail and bold, often monolithic forms. It values a material and tectonic honesty resulting in an architecture that feels visceral, sculptural, and often confrontational. Its aesthetic impact lies not in delicacy or decoration, but in the drama of scale, repetition, and exposed materiality. Brutalism challenges conventional ideas of beauty, favoring intensity over charm, and integrity over polish. Therefore, if the Modern movement considered architecture as an object, with landscape as an accessory, the Supermodern movement focused on architecture as a field effectively co-opting landscape logics Landscape Urbanism reversed the relationship—positioning landscape as the primary organizational system for architecture, then this research proposes a body of work that will demonstrate the simultaneity of architecture and landscape architecture. Organized into a series of design vignettes, it envisions the two disciplines not as separate, but concurrent – where their tectonic results operate simultaneously on a conceptual, experiential, and temporal level —toward a more integrated and imaginative spatial future.
Keywords: landscape, architecture, brutalism, form, hybrid
How to cite this Paper (Harvard referencing style):
Zorić, D. (2025) ‘The Brutalist Cookbook‘, in R. Bogdanović (ed.) On Architecture — Crosscutting and Fusion of Disciplines, Proceedings. Belgrade, Serbia: STRAND, pp. 236–245.
See publication On Architecture (2025) Conference Proceedings
