"Everyone shoots these buildings on bright days and calls them brutal. I waited for the rain. Wet concrete remembers every storm it has ever taken.
"Mara Voss
Brutalism After the Rain
For three winters I photographed the same concrete buildings only when it rained. Dry, beton brut reads as a threat. Wet, it turns the colour of a storm cloud, and the board marks left by the timber formwork fill with water and shine like grain in old wood. This is a short essay in favour of the most hated architecture of the twentieth century, photographed on the days it looks most alive.
The stairwell
Geometry that looks brutal in sunlight softens into something closer to a riverbed once it is wet.
The facade
Identical balconies feel oppressive in a brochure and entirely human once you notice the laundry and the rain stains.
Mara Voss
Shoots postwar concrete only in rain and fog.
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"A building you only love on sunny days is a building you never really loved. Go back when the weather is bad. That is when it tells the truth.
"Mara Voss