Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
In April, the internet seemed to abruptly discover a trend that had been lurking in its midst for years: Brutalism, an aesthetic borrowed from architecture and applied to minimally designed, bare-knuckle websites. After Hacker News — itself arguably a Brutalist website — discovered a Brutalist website devoted to other Brutalist websites, discussion surrounding the trend caught on and spread.
But what is a Brutalist website? That question is easier asked than answered.
Example of Brutalist architecture at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.
So far, there’s not really a consensus on what a Brutalist website is
On Hacker News, a giant debate broke out about whether the websites listed on Brutalist Websites are actually Brutalist. Maybe they’re just minimalist, or perhaps “vernacular,“ a term once used to describe the eternally “under construction” nature of the web in the mid- to late ‘90s. Or maybe they’re part of the vaporwave movement, a twofold visual and music subculture that evolved on the internet alongside seapunk and thrives on retro aesthetics, early glitchy computer art, and the intersection between yuppie-era capitalism and kitsch. (Think Lisa Frank meets mall elevator music meets Geocities meets pixel art meets loud Hawaiian shirts.)
As a descriptor, “Brutalist” seems to imply that the sites are somehow ugly or offensive to the viewer, but this isn’t always the case.