Palm Springs may have become synonymous with the midcentury modern era, but the preservation of representatives from another architectural period from the recent past is moving into public consciousness: the long ignored and often derided Brutalism. Its signature concrete structures were inexpensive and functional, and many people saw them as hulking and unattractive, whether they took shape as schools, banks, or low-cost housing.

But, says Steven Price, “I think the resurgence of interest here is because the term ‘Brutalism’ is applied very broadly in the valley.” He would know. He writes about architecture, is a board member of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, and an adviser to the John Lautner Foundation. “Properly, it refers primarily to structures of poured or reinforced raw concrete which Le Corbusier called ‘beton brut’ in regard to his Unité d’Habitation [a 1952 French housing project], hence the genesis of the type. Here, it’s applied to buildings and homes made of stucco, adobelike materials — even wood — if they feature bulky masses and deeply cut windows and portals.

“When Hugh Kaptur’s Musicland Hotel or Michael Black’s wildly angular Pomona First Federal Bank [now US Bank] on El Paseo in Palm Desert, gets included in an article about ‘Notable Brutalist Buildings Around Palm Springs,’ you see that people are finding their own associations which may not be academically pure,” Price notes, “but they’re close enough for many to get interested or excited to begin with.”