Ugly Beauty: Brutalism and the Sublime in Canadian Architecture
This presentation examines Brutalism, a dominant idiom in Canadian architecture in the 1960s and ’70s, through the lenses of the sublime and the notion of “ugly beauty,” or the “jolie laide.” This work drew inspiration from the New Brutalism emerging from Europe, but also from the Canadian landscape, particularly as understood through the notion of the sublime: at once beautiful and terrifying, magnetic and forbidding, familiar and uncanny. Marco Polo is a Professor in the Department of Architectural Science of Ryerson University and the Curator of the Paul H. Cocker Gallery.