Downtown Business Center
401 E. State. Rockford, IL 61104
Downtown Business Center
The Brut is four stories of raw concrete on the corner of State and First, with slot windows cut narrow and a slate floor in the lobby — one of the few brutalist buildings in Rockford.
It went up in 1968 for the First National Bank and Trust Company, a Rockford institution chartered in 1854 and then advertising under the line "Building for a Greater Rockford." The architect, C. Edward Ware, was building his own offices across town that same year — concrete, bush-hammered, and deliberately short on windows. He knew exactly what he was doing here.
The name follows from the style: béton brut, French for raw concrete — Le Corbusier's term and the root of the word brutalism.
Roughly 40,000 square feet of office and retail space in the heart of downtown.
