Beautiful Brutalism in Sacramento
My creative self has been tapped into this month as I moved, finally, into a newly evolving workshop space. I’ve been ‘in storage’ for several months while travelling and working on academic projects. It is interesting how the realisation of this space and access to my workshop, tools and clay once again has gradually unleashed those quiet ideas and begun to act as a channel for the artistic side of how I work. Design, and my creative capability sit well alongside my work with the built environment, architects and terracotta projects.
This album I rediscovered whilst looking for an image for my Fellowship reporting and have allowed myself a moment to recount the insprirational home I found, one September day amidst my travels in Sacramento.
I played contentedly with form and colour on a beautiful bright day. Sacramento is an interesting city, the capital of California, built on the gold rush and now full of grand civic buildings and some monolithic Brutalist architecture. I’ve noticed how cities use Brutalism for their law courts or prisons, which does not fail to underscore the severity of their purpose. I found these buildings enjoyably subtle in simple form and surface and the landscape design and planing around these buildings work in interesting ways.
