Top 14 'Shadow-and-Line' Brutalist Buildings to visit with your smartphone for Powerful Architectural Shots
Hey there, fellow creators! Have you ever walked past a massive concrete building and felt… something? A sense of awe, maybe a little intimidation? That’s the power of Brutalism. Often misunderstood and unfairly labelled as "ugly," this architectural style is a goldmine for photographers who know how to look. It’s all about raw power, unapologetic forms, and a breathtaking dance of light and shadow.
Forget the fancy gear. Here at the Goh Ling Yong blog, we believe the best camera is the one in your pocket. Your smartphone is a formidable tool for capturing the soul of these concrete giants. The secret lies in a simple but powerful concept: 'Shadow-and-Line' photography. It’s about ignoring the "big picture" for a moment and focusing on the details—the sharp edge where light meets dark, the repeating patterns of windows, the dramatic sweep of a staircase. It's about finding the geometry in the giant.
So, charge your phone, clear some storage, and get ready to see the world’s concrete jungles in a new light. We’ve curated a list of 14 of the most photogenic Brutalist buildings on the planet, perfect for capturing striking architectural shots with nothing but your smartphone.
1. Barbican Estate, London, UK
The Barbican is less a building and more a self-contained concrete universe. This sprawling residential and arts complex is a masterclass in texture and scale. Designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, it was envisioned as a utopian ideal for city living, and its layered walkways, serene water features, and imposing residential towers offer endless compositional possibilities.
The key to shooting the Barbican is to explore its layers. Get lost in the high-walks (the elevated pedestrian paths) and shoot down, using other people as scale. The rough, pick-hammered concrete surfaces come alive in the side-light of early morning or late afternoon, creating a rich tapestry of texture. Don't forget the contrast between the harsh concrete, the lush green gardens, and the dark water of the central lake.
Smartphone Tip: Use your phone’s wide-angle lens to capture the immense scale of the towers from the ground level. Then, switch to your standard lens and focus on reflections. The interplay between the concrete and the water creates beautifully distorted, almost abstract images.
2. Trellick Tower, London, UK
Looming over West London, Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower is a true Brutalist icon. Its most striking feature is the separate service tower, containing the lift and stairs, connected to the main apartment block by dramatic sky-bridges. This clever design element creates an incredibly strong and photogenic silhouette.
The beauty of Trellick Tower is its stark verticality. It’s a monument to social housing that pierces the sky. The slim profile of the service tower and the rhythmic pattern of balconies on the main building provide a wealth of lines to play with. It’s a building that looks different throughout the day, as the sun moves across its textured concrete facade.
Smartphone Tip: Stand at the base and shoot straight up to create a dizzying, powerful perspective that emphasizes its height. Use your phone's gridlines to ensure your vertical lines are perfectly straight for maximum impact. A black and white edit on these shots is often spectacular.
3. Habitat 67, Montreal, Canada
Is it a building? A sculpture? A futuristic village? Habitat 67 is all of the above. Designed by Moshe Safdie as his master's thesis, this experimental housing complex is a playful jumble of 354 prefabricated concrete boxes stacked in various configurations. It’s a dream subject for photographers.
Every angle at Habitat 67 offers a new composition. It's a geometric playground where you can focus on the macro—the overall staggering form—or the micro—the way one or two modules intersect. The gaps between the boxes create deep, dark shadows that contrast beautifully with the sun-bleached concrete, making it perfect for high-contrast, 'shadow-and-line' photography.
Smartphone Tip: Don’t just take one shot. Walk the entire perimeter. Use Portrait Mode to isolate interesting clusters of boxes, blurring the background to make them feel like a miniature, abstract sculpture.
4. Geisel Library, San Diego, USA
If a sci-fi spaceship decided to land on a university campus, it would look like the Geisel Library. Designed by William Pereira, this building is pure architectural theatre. Its tiered, imposing form, which seems to hover above a glass base, is both futuristic and primal.
The power of this building lies in its unique shape and the deep, angular shadows it casts. The concrete "fingers" that support the upper levels create incredible opportunities for dramatic, low-angle shots. The geometric patterns of the windows add another layer of detail. This is a building that demands you look up.
Smartphone Tip: Visit at high noon. While photographers usually avoid midday sun, the harsh overhead light will cast the darkest, most defined shadows beneath the library's cantilevered floors, creating stark, graphic images.
5. Unité d'Habitation, Marseille, France
This is where it all began. Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation is the spiritual home of Brutalism, the first to be built from béton brut (raw concrete). It's a "vertical garden city" that redefined high-density living, and its influence is immeasurable. The building sits on massive pilotis (pillars), making it seem to float above the ground.
The facade is a grid of deep-set balconies and colourful panels, creating a rhythmic and visually engaging surface. The real magic, however, is on the rooftop, which features a surreal landscape of sculptural ventilation stacks, a running track, and a paddling pool. It's a sculpture garden in the sky.
Smartphone Tip: Focus on the repetition. Find a section of the facade and fill your frame with the grid of balconies. The repeating lines and the shadows within each alcove make for a powerful abstract shot.
6. Boston City Hall, Boston, USA
Arguably one of the most controversial buildings in America, Boston City Hall is a monumental piece of architecture that people either love or loathe. Designed by Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles, its top-heavy, fortress-like structure is an unapologetic display of civic power and raw concrete.
For a photographer, its "ugliness" is its strength. The building is a complex assembly of interlocking forms, cantilevered masses, and textured concrete surfaces. The grand, shadowy plaza beneath the overhanging upper floors and the deep-cut windows provide endless opportunities to play with light and dark.
Smartphone Tip: Get close and focus on the texture. Many of the concrete surfaces have a ribbed or bush-hammered finish. In the right light, these textures create beautiful, subtle patterns of shadow and line that are perfect for a detailed, minimalist shot.
7. National Theatre, London, UK
Situated on London's South Bank, Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre is a masterpiece of layered, geological forms. Lasdun himself described it as "strata," like cliffs, and you can see why. The interlocking terraces and walkways create a dynamic public space that invites exploration.
The real star here is the board-marked concrete. The wooden planks used for the moulds left a permanent imprint of their grain on the concrete, giving the vast surfaces a surprising warmth and texture. The building's complex geometry means that as the sun moves, new lines and shadows are constantly being revealed.
Smartphone Tip: The "golden hour" just before sunset is magical here. The low, warm light rakes across the textured concrete, making the wood grain pattern pop. Find a staircase and use its diagonal lines to lead the viewer’s eye through the frame.
8. The Breuer Building, New York, USA
Formerly the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marcel Breuer’s Madison Avenue creation is a Brutalist gem. It's an inverted ziggurat of granite and concrete, a formidable, top-heavy structure that stands in stark contrast to the surrounding townhouses.
Its most photogenic features are the iconic trapezoidal windows that jut out from the facade. These windows act as dramatic frames and create fascinating, angular shadows both inside and out. The building feels like an impenetrable fortress, but these windows offer a glimpse of the artistic world within.
Smartphone Tip: Isolate one of the unique windows. Stand across the street and use a 2x or 3x zoom to compress the perspective, framing a single window against the monolithic granite wall. The simplicity of the composition will be incredibly striking.
9. Wotruba Church, Vienna, Austria
This is Brutalism at its most sculptural and abstract. The Wotruba Church, designed by sculptor Fritz Wotruba, is composed of 152 asymmetrical concrete blocks seemingly piled on top of one another. It looks less like a building and more like a work of avant-garde sculpture.
This is not a place for wide, establishing shots. The beauty of Wotruba Church is in the details—the strange intersections between blocks, the slivers of light that peek through the gaps, and the stark contrast between the pale concrete and the sky. It encourages you to deconstruct architecture into pure form.
Smartphone Tip: Treat it like a puzzle. Put your phone into black and white mode before you even start shooting. This will help you see the scene in terms of pure shape, light, and shadow, allowing you to capture powerful, abstract compositions.
10. Torres Blancas, Madrid, Spain
Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza’s Torres Blancas (White Towers) is a stunning example of organic Brutalism. Eschewing sharp angles for sensuous curves, the building looks like a cluster of interconnected concrete trees reaching for the sky. The rounded balconies and cylindrical forms are a departure from typical Brutalist geometry.
The curves create a unique interplay of light. Instead of harsh, sharp shadows, you get soft, graded transitions from light to dark, which gives the building a softer, more sculptural feel. The intricate details of the overlapping forms provide a complex and rewarding subject.
Smartphone Tip: Use the sun's position to your advantage. Shoot when the sun is to one side of the building, highlighting the rounded form of the towers and creating beautiful gradients on the concrete surfaces.
11. Tate Modern (Blavatnik Building), London, UK
While the original Tate Modern is a repurposed power station, its extension, the Blavatnik Building by Herzog & de Meuron, is a modern masterpiece with a Brutalist soul. It's a twisting, pyramid-like tower clad in a perforated lattice of brickwork.
This "brick skin" is the star of the show. It drapes over the concrete structure like a veil, creating an incredible texture from the outside. From the inside, the long, horizontal windows slice through the building, offering panoramic views and creating dramatic lines, while the brick lattice turns the harsh daylight into a soft, diffused glow.
Smartphone Tip: Go inside and head to the upper-level viewing galleries. Shoot the light filtering through the brick lattice. You can create amazing semi-abstract photos, or capture silhouettes of other visitors against the patterned light.
12. "El Ruedo" (M-30 residential building), Madrid, Spain
A lesser-known but visually spectacular structure, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza's "El Ruedo" is a colossal circular housing block that acts as a sound barrier against the adjacent M-30 motorway. Its curving, continuous facade is punctuated by a rhythmic pattern of colourful window frames.
The building's immense, curving form is perfect for wide-angle shots that capture its scale. But the real magic is in the details of the inner courtyard and the repeating geometry of the windows. The contrast between the imposing grey concrete and the playful splashes of primary colours is a fantastic photographic subject.
Smartphone Tip: Play with panoramas. A vertical panorama shot from the ground up can capture the overwhelming curve of the building. Alternatively, focus on a small section, using the coloured windows to create a colourful, abstract, and geometric composition.
13. Central Post Office, Skopje, North Macedonia
A stunning example of Metabolist architecture—a movement that grew out of Brutalism—this building by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange is a testament to resilience. Built after a devastating earthquake, it was designed to look like a lotus flower, symbolizing the city's rebirth.
The building's form is otherworldly. The main structure, supported by massive concrete legs, looks like a spaceship or a concrete creature. It's a building that doesn't have a single "best" angle; you need to walk around it and discover its strange, powerful beauty from all sides.
Smartphone Tip: Use negative space. The area underneath the main structure, between the concrete "legs," is just as important as the building itself. Frame your shot to include a large patch of empty sky to emphasize the building's unique and alien silhouette.
14. Golden Mile Complex, Singapore
An icon of Singapore's post-independence nation-building era, the Golden Mile Complex is a "vertical city" that houses apartments, offices, and shops in a single, terraced structure. Its stepped, slab-like profile is designed to improve ventilation and reduce sun exposure—a Brutalist response to a tropical climate.
The slope of the building and the repeating lines of the balconies and iconic yellow-tinted windows create a powerful sense of rhythm. It's a building that feels alive, and its raw, weathered facade tells the story of decades of use. It's a reminder, as Goh Ling Yong often says, that great photos are found in places with character and history.
Smartphone Tip: Capture it during the blue hour, just after the sun has set. The lights from the apartments will begin to turn on, creating a beautiful pattern of warm squares against the cool, dark concrete of the twilight sky.
Your Turn to Shoot
There you have it—14 concrete canvases waiting for your creative eye. Brutalism isn't about coldness; it's about honesty, strength, and a bold vision for the future. By focusing on the fundamentals of shadow and line, you can unlock the hidden beauty in these structures and create powerful architectural photographs.
So, the next time you're out exploring, look for the lines. Look for the shadows. Look for the geometry in the world around you. Your smartphone is all you need to start your journey into the captivating world of Brutalist photography.
We’d love to see what you create! Go out, find your own concrete giant, and share your best 'shadow-and-line' shots on Instagram. Tag us and use the hashtag #BrutalismOnPhone so we can feature our favourites. Happy shooting
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
Stay updated with the latest posts and insights by following on your favorite platform!