Brutalist architects left the wooden formwork's grain visible in cast concrete, refused to plaster over structural joints, and generally treated the building's actual construction as something worth seeing rather than something to conceal behind a decorative skin. The honesty was the point: this is genuinely how the building is made, not a polite fiction layered on top.
The web's brutalist turn
A recurring strain of web design borrows the same instinct: unstyled system fonts, visible grid lines, raw data tables instead of polished charts, layouts that look like they could be the wireframe rather than the finished product. It reads as a reaction against over-designed interfaces the way architectural brutalism reacted against the applied ornament of what preceded it — a claim that showing the structure is more honest than dressing it.
Honesty is still a design decision
The trap, in both disciplines, is mistaking "looks undesigned" for "wasn't designed." Béton brut required exact formwork, precise pours, and enormous control to look intentionally raw rather than simply unfinished; a brutalist web interface requires the same discipline in typography and spacing to read as considered rather than neglected. Raw is a style, not an absence of one, and it fails identically in both media the moment the underlying craft isn't actually there to justify showing it.
Nothing looks more designed than something pretending not to be. Nothing looks worse than something failing at the pretence.
A dashboard that shows a raw table instead of a glossy chart isn't skipping design. It's making the same bet a concrete facade makes: that the real thing, shown plainly, is more trustworthy than a version dressed up to look finished.