Like all architectural trends, brutalism arrived a decade late in Sydney. But when it did make landfall through the work of architects such as Peter Hall, Harry Seidler and Col Madigan, it did so in a particularly contextual way that resonated with sandstone outcroppings, angophoras and bright Sydney light.

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The book presents an absorbing narrative that is a little diluted by Dokulil’s attempt to include anything and everything late-Modern as brutalist, including decidedly non-brutalist buildings such as the Sydney Opera House and the work of Rudolph Schindler, Oscar Niemeyer and John Lautner.

The author labels Sydney architects John James, Michael Dysart and Andrew Anderson as brutalists, despite the architects themselves disavowing the term, with Anderson going as far as saying that he “can’t stand the term brutalist”. Dokulil also celebrates the ingenuity and heroism of Sydney’s remaining brutalist buildings without sufficiently addressing their shortcomings such as drabness, monotony and inflexibility.

Infamously, for example, the precast concrete cladding panels on Dysart’s UTS Tower are post-tensioned, so that they cannot be altered or removed, and the window bands are set above eye level, ensuring a claustrophobic outlook even when 26 storeys above ground.

Despite these quibbles, Sydney Brutalism presents great value as a compendium of 20th-century architects and architecture. The book charts both the advent of the brutalist style and the “golden period” of the NSW Government Architect’s Branch (now the Government Architect NSW), which was responsible for many of the projects in the book.

This heyday, spanning from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, was relatively short-lived. Concurrent with Thatcher and Reagan-era privatisation and globalisation, most of the NSW government’s best designers left to pursue private practice, paychecks and prestige.

At the same time, brutalism was deemed to be outdated and was replaced by a still ongoing paradigm of generic, lightweight and panelised construction.

Dokulil laments the loss of craft in contemporary architecture with the demise of brutalism. She quotes Anderson as saying that concrete has gone “out of fashion”, “because it was too much trouble”, but this doesn’t quite capture the full story.

Concrete footings, slabs, structural members and tilt-up walls remain ubiquitous, while expressive concrete facades have proven to be difficult to maintain, thermally inadequate, labour-intensive, costly and enormously carbon emitting.

The book’s final chapter extends the narrative to the “new brutes”, a small group of Sydney architects who are continuing the fascination with in-situ concrete in their recent work. But whereas concrete was last century’s key material, contemporary mass-timber construction is far more sustainable and appropriate in our time of climate precarity, and surely a better embodiment of brutalism’s “truth to materials” ethos.

Sydney Brutalism concludes by noting the enormous embodied energy inherent in concrete construction, and highlights efforts to lower emissions and produce less materially intensive concrete mixes.

If brutalism’s admirers cannot succeed in convincing sceptics that this style of architecture is beautiful, intelligent and desirable, perhaps they should instead point to the enormous quantum of embodied carbon concretised in buildings that were designed to endure for centuries.

On this basis, we simply cannot afford to tear down the last remaining brutalist buildings. Love them or hate them, they should be here to stay.

David Neustein is director of Other Architects.

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