After Decades of Hate, Can TV Make Brutalism Cool Again?

First came AMC's Mad Men, whose brown Frigidaires and Eero Saarinen tables helped ignite a craze for everything midcentury, modern, and whiskey-spiked. Now Amanda Kolson Hurley writes for City Lab that BBC America's The Game is poised to do the same for Brutalism. In the spy thriller, "surprisingly intimate" concrete rooms are practically characters in and of themselves. The spy HQ, what with its "rough, ribbed-concrete walls," takes the harshest parts of the style and inhabits it with real human being feelings again. What's more, the building is actually home to the good guys rather than sociopaths. Here a Brutalist icon serves as the hub for a bunch of well-dressed folk fighting for Queen and country. As Hurley writes, "it makes Brutalism the scene of interactions that for once aren't thuggish or sinister." [City Lab]