On a family holiday in Florence, London-based art director and graphic designer Peter Chadwick was struck by the difference between the brutalist architecture in Italy and that of the UK. “Because of the different climate, it looked cleaner, the concrete,” he says.





Brutalismo, Chadwick’s new poster series of Italian brutalist architecture, is also influenced by Chermayeff and Geismar’s classic Pan Am posters of the 70s, which Chadwick has loved since his boyhood in Middlesbrough. “My dad was a travel agent and I remember seeing those posters in the agency where he worked,” he says.





The series is part of a larger project, This Brutal House, which Chadwick launched on Twitter in 2014, celebrating a style he admires but acknowledges is out of favour among today’s “faceless” glass and steel towers. But he feels there is still a place for brutalism’s “personality and grand gestures”. He adds: “I just hope that we keep some of them. I don’t know how many will be left in 50 years’ time.”

Le Lavatrici, Genova

Architect: Aldo Luigi Rizzo

Technical college, Busto Arsizio

Architects: Enrico Castiglioni and Carlo Fontana

Fiera District, Bologna

Architect: Kenzo Tange

Vele di Scampia, Naples

Architects: Franz di Salvo

La Nave apartments, Firenze

Architect: Leonardo Ricci

Corviale, Rome

Architect: Mario Fiorentino

Piazza Matteotti, Livorno

Architect: Giovanni Michelucci

Gallaratese Quarter, Milan

Architect: Aldo Rossi

Rozzol Melara, Trieste

Architect: Carlo Celli

Source: Graphic brutality: posters of Italian brutalist architecture – in pictures