Introduction
January 13th, 2021

With brutalism growing in popularity, its presence in popular culture has surged over the last decade. Prominent appearances of brutalist architecture in works such as Studio TRIGGER's Kill la Kill and Kiznaiver, as well as Tsukumizu's Girls' Last Tour have left a profound impression. Despite this media attention, online discussion on brutalism is largely limited to regurgitating Wikipedia information. Blogs such as Jakob Bähr's concrete.neocities.org, which played a major role in inspiring this blog, whilst definitely being worth reading, obly give short summaries on media appearances, yet do not provide further analysis. This blog is dedicated to the latter, analysing brutalist architecture in pop culture and its broader context within the respective stories.

The Japanese word 混凝土 was coined by civil engineer Isamu Hiroi (1862-1928). It combines the characters for mixing (混), coagulating (凝), and soil (土) into a neologism pronounced as "konkuriito", or "concrete".