Brutalism gets a bad reputation. People see concrete and think cold, hostile, inhuman. But spend enough time looking at these buildings through a viewfinder and you start to see what the architects actually intended – a kind of radical honesty.
The 50mm lens forces you to see at a human scale. No wide-angle distortion to dramatize, no telephoto compression to flatten. Just the building as it is, the way you’d see it standing across the street with your own eyes.
At f/8, everything is sharp. Every pore in the concrete, every water stain, every crack becomes a line in the building’s biography. These structures age in a way glass towers never will – they accumulate character rather than grime.
I spent three hours circling this particular structure, watching how the shadows migrated across its surface. The curves appeared slowly, revealed by the changing light – gentle arcs in what I’d initially dismissed as a grid of right angles.