Before This Brutal World ($50) was an art book from Phaidon, it was a Twitter account. Unlike your typical Twitter feed, this one eschews 140-character musings in favor of images of Brutalist buildings. Its progenitor, an art director from London named Peter Chadwick, says he wanted to share the images with anyone who might be interested. That was in 2014. It has since amassed tens of thousands of followers, and jump started a sort of digital preservation society committed to liking, retweeting, and sharing photos of a style of architecture that, for parts of history, was despised.

Phaidon

Brutalism gets its name from the French term béton brut, which means “raw concrete.” The style came out of the modernist architecture movement, and took off in the 1950s, during the post-war construction boom. Brutalist buildings appealed to architects and intellectuals, who recognized concrete as an efficient, sensible material, and therefore a sign of social progress. But to anyone else, these hulking structures looked oppressive, dismal, and unsentimental. Because some of them didn’t have many windows, people associated them with disease.

Not Chadwick. The designer grew up in the steel industry town of Middlesbrough, England, and in the introduction to This Brutal World he recounts the beginning of his infatuation with Brutalist architecture. It started with the Dorman Long Coke Oven Tower, used for processing coal. “Uncompromising and faceless, the structure fueled my imagination,” he writes. “At such a young age I didn’t realise it was possible to build something so tall and so imposing using only concrete.”

Chadwick’s love for concrete continued into adulthood. He says he has a habit of photographing buildings everywhere he goes, and used those pictures to initially populate the Brutalism Twitter feed. Over time, he included other photographs, and This Brutal World, the book, does too. Chadwick says the book is part an homage to Brutalism, and partly an effort to retool how people define it. For one, he says, Brutalism has long expanded beyond monolithic, power plant-like buildings. Many people now commission Brutalist-style homes. Architects ranging from Zaha Hadid, known for her geometric opulence, to Alejandro Aravena, who designs chiefly for low-income communities, employ principles of Brutalist architecture. For that reason, Chadwick’s book includes several contemporary buildings.

But there are old buildings in This Brutal World, too, some of which have been recently demolished. (Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago and Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York are two of them.) In that sense, the book is also a preservation tool. It’s a function Chadwick plans to continue going forward, by launching a This Brutal World website, where he and fellow designers can share photographs and architecture-related projects, and keep the fandom alive.