hard · Enhanced ACT reading

For decades the concrete buildings of the postwar years were spoken of the way one speaks of a difficult relative: with lowered voice and vague hope that the problem would resolve itself, preferably through demolition. Brutalism, the style was called—from the French béton brut, raw concrete, though the English name did the buildings no favors. To the public they were eyesores; to their defenders, honest; to the wrecking crews, simply overdue. I confess I have switched sides more than once. What strikes me now, walking past the civic center I once loathed, is how unfashionable it always insisted on being. These buildings do not flatter. They refuse the reassuring brick and the friendly cornice; they present their raw material without apology and dare you to find them beautiful. That refusal, which once read to me as arrogance, now reads as a kind of integrity—an unwillingness to disguise what a building is made of or what it is for. I am not asking anyone to love them. Love may be too much to ask of a material that stains and streaks in the rain. I am asking only that we distinguish between a building that has aged badly and a building we were simply never taught to see, and admit that we do not always know, at first, which is which. The author's description of the buildings as daring the viewer "to find them beautiful" primarily conveys

1. Certainty that the buildings are more beautiful than critics admit
2. A grudging respect for their refusal to court easy approval
3. Resignation that the buildings will soon be demolished
4. Nostalgia for the reassuring brick styles the buildings rejected

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