The Brute.

A personal exercise in procedural building generation.

For a long time, constructivism and brutalism have been two art movements that I have greatly admired. The sharp edges, monolithic designs, and raw materials all make them feel imposing and unapologetically man made. To this point, I haven't had the chance to explore design in this style for commercial clients, so, after an extended project, I decided to give myself a quick creative exercise to get my artistic excitement back. Heavily inspired by the beautiful sculptures of David Umemoto, I set out to build a procedural structure generator in Houdini focused on using elements from brutalist architecture.

Below is a series of sculptures showing some of the variations that this setup can create. Randomizing the size, orientation, texturing, and positioning of each of the individual elements, the setup is able to generate infinite variations of sculptures all following the same basic design rules.

And here you can see a sample of some of the individual elements that make up these structures.