At Etheca, our philosophy has a name: Brutalism. It's the practice of embracing the raw, un-decorated reality.
The term comes from architecture, where the core principle is that the structure of something is its truth. In a Brutalist building, a concrete wall is both the structure and the surface. There is nothing covering it. Le Corbusier's work showed how raw, honest materials could be the building's entire expression. Function and form collapse into one.
We apply this philosophy directly to our software. While much of modern software is decorative—prioritizing a polished surface that conceals its structure—we build the Brutalist alternative. Our software's surface is its construction. We don't hide how things work behind layers of ornamentation.
We do this as a deliberate counterbalance to a dangerous default in our industry: the bias to always add more. More features, more process, more interdependencies that gradually strangle the original purpose. Our work is the invisible but necessary act of pruning, of removing, of resisting the band-aid.
This, then, is our practice. It is a movement away from the endless decoration of justification and toward the simple, raw fact of what is. Our goal is not to perform credibility, but to embody it. In the honest act of being—raw, structural, and true—we build something genuinely useful.
At Etheca, our philosophy has a name: Brutalism. It's the practice of embracing the raw, un-decorated reality.
The term comes from architecture, where the core principle is that the structure of something is its truth. In a Brutalist building, a concrete wall is both the structure and the surface. There is nothing covering it. Le Corbusier's work showed how raw, honest materials could be the building's entire expression. Function and form collapse into one.
We apply this philosophy directly to our software. While much of modern software is decorative—prioritizing a polished surface that conceals its structure—we build the Brutalist alternative. Our software's surface is its construction. We don't hide how things work behind layers of ornamentation.
We do this as a deliberate counterbalance to a dangerous default in our industry: the bias to always add more. More features, more process, more interdependencies that gradually strangle the original purpose. Our work is the invisible but necessary act of pruning, of removing, of resisting the band-aid.
This, then, is our practice. It is a movement away from the endless decoration of justification and toward the simple, raw fact of what is. Our goal is not to perform credibility, but to embody it. In the honest act of being—raw, structural, and true—we build something genuinely useful.