The Peterborough Examiner

Is it my imagination, or have we been through a dark age in architecture? I am thinking of some of the buildings built in our cities over the last 30 or 40 years, replacing much older and more awe-inspiring structures. The decade of the 1970s was an especially dismal period, influenced heavily by an architectural style known as brutalism, the word coming from a French term, beton brut, or concrete with no formal finish. The form is massive in outlook and minimalist to the pocketbook. In Toronto, the fortress-like Robarts Library is an excellent example of the brutalist style. In Peterborough, too, there are a number of buildings that were constructed during this era that have brutalist features. They replaced older buildings which were thought to be eyesores, yet these newer buildings appear, as do most brutalist structures, as architectural blights on the urban landscape. Inward looking, faceless and dreary, they do nothing to make our streets welcoming places. Here, in no particular order, are some local examples of the brutalist genre which, in purely architectural terms, we could do without.