The new ugly

UGLY IS BACK! Or so we hear from Michael Bierut, a distinguished critic nonplussed by recent high-profile designs, including the London 2012 Olympics logo, which was panned by the British public, not to mention New York City's new tourism logo, which he calls "jammed-together-on-a-stalled-downtown-No. 4-train-at-rush-hour." Writing for the Design Observer blog earlier this month, the former American Institute of Graphic Arts president notes that a few influential graphic designers have actually praised the Olympics logo, despite the fact that it resembles nothing so much as a broken swastika; these trendsetters see the logo as an example of the "New Brutalism," Bierut says.

Brutalism, which takes its name from the French phrase for "raw concrete" (béton brut), was a tough, aggressive style of architecture practiced between the 1950s and the 1970s by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, I.M. Pei, and others. Boston's City Hall, completed in 1968 and often mistaken for a parking garage by tourists, is an infamous local example.

Patrick Cox of Wolff Olins, the New York- and London-based corporate identity consultancy that designed the Olympic logo, does sound like a Brutalist: "Its design is intentionally raw, which means it doesn’t immediately sit there and ask to be liked very much," Bierut quotes Cox as saying. "It was meant to be something that did provoke a response, like the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice."

Bierut also points to the vertical and horizontal scaling of type (usually a telltale clue that an amateur is responsible) in the trendy, newly redesigned German culture magazine 032c, and to the "clown being sick" layout and design of the British culture magazine Super Super. He sardonically advises these and other young designers that the trick to doing ugly work is to "surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but rather as evidence of one’s attunement with the zeitgeist."

Tom Menino, take note! Don't tear down City Hall. Instead, try recontextualizing it, by surrounding it with architectural attitude... of some sort or another. Luckily, the building's planners appear to have anticipated this moment: there is plenty of space on City Hall plaza.