Brutalist architecture, if you ask me, is any exclusively box-shaped building. But mostly it's the functional, almost pre-fabricated apartment blocks of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Those rectangular machines for living with clean lines and ergonomic spaces connected by concrete passageways. Narrow balconies with views of the narrow balconies next door. Perhaps a regimented parade of low maintenance bushes or even trees. Metal benches that face each other across a no man's land of sunbaked asphalt. Such were the architect's utopian plans, his idealized sketches and immaculate scale model. Where did it all go wrong?
I often think the mysterious world of the enchanted forest must operate in the same manner. Here, for example, an unscrupulous goblin property magnate has redeveloped a former pumpkin patch into ugly brown mushroom condominiums. The poor pixies are evicted from the shade beneath their tiny toadstools and forced to relocate to the top floor of a massive fungus. Richard Dadd's faery fella with his craftsman's axe has been replaced by an army of elvish bulldozers, empty acorn cups repurposed as magical cement mixers, and spider's webs are the scaffolding for new high-rise woodland tenements. I think I could be the J. G. Ballard of children's picture books if I could find the time.
