2_Toth with Plans in Rain, Courtesy of A24

The Brutalist: A Cinematic Architect’s Dream—and Nightmare

The Brutalist is the latest addition to the film genre that features architects as primary characters, and it’s generating a lot of buzz. The winner of three Golden Globe awards, it’s been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Adrien Brody soulfully plays the architect, László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian who emigrates to the U.S. after his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp. He arrives at Ellis Island in 1947 to rebuild his practice (a Bauhaus graduate, he achieved design notoriety in his native Budapest). He finds work with his cousin, a furniture dealer, which leads to the redesign of a private library in the Doylestown, Pennsylvania, mansion of a wartime industrialist, Henry Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Postwar America is booming. This is the place to be, Tóth learns, but only if you’re the right sort. 

There are dozens of films with architect protagonists (you can find a list here). In many, the fact that the character is an architect is incidental to the plot. I’m thinking of movies like Indecent Proposal, where an architect, whose practice isn’t going well, pimps out his wife to a billionaire; or Something About Mary, in which two losers on the make pretend to be architects in order to score with a beautiful woman; and the Adam Sandler character in Click, who is an architect (according to screenwriter Steve Koren) only for the “positive spin” of respectability. Only a few films have memorable characters who propelled the plot through their actions as architects: Doug Roberts in The Towering Inferno, who takes on the superhuman architect task of saving his flame-engulfed skyscraper (I’m sure his professional liability insurance was cancelled the next day); Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (a cinematic portrayal probably more responsible than any other for people deciding to go to architecture school); and the character Miles Moss in The Architect, who delivers a steady stream of condescension and arrogance to the hapless couple for whom he’s designed a house that is wrecking their marriage (the film, described as a comedy, borders on parody). The Brutalist’s László Tóth is in this mold: the thrust of the entire narrative of the film is focused on his actions and efforts to realize the commission of a lifetime that is under attack from all quarters. 

“They do not want us here,” says Tóth to his wife. “We are nothing.” Tóth’s redesign of Van Buren’s shabby library is an elegant, light-filled space with louvered bookcases to protect a rare book collection. In this film about architecture, this project takes the prize. It reminds one of an Alvar Aalto interior with its teak details and soft luminance from a central dome. But the architect/client relationship sours, resulting in financial hardship for Tóth, who ends up living in a shelter and working as a day-laborer shoveling coal.

 

The underlying theme of The Brutalist is the plight of the immigrant, which makes it particularly relevant to contemporary America. Architects, however, might find resonant chords in Tóth’s struggle with a belligerent, domineering, and ultimately destructive client. Tóth’s fragility is in stark contrast to The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark. He’s more akin to director Peter Greenaway’s architect Stourley Kracklite in The Belly of An Architect: a stranger in a strange land, dealing with the locals, insecure, given to substance abuse and marital infidelity. 

Tóth’s architectural salvation, however, tracks closely with that of Roark, whose uncompromising modernist design for a bank is rejected by his clients (they want a few classical details added here and there). That’s a deal-breaker for Roark, who ends up working as a day laborer in a quarry. He’s rescued from this dead-end by a self-made millionaire who seeks Roark out for a career-changing commission. Tóth is eventually redeemed by Van Buren, whose reborn library receives an architecture critic’s blessing. He finds Tóth shoveling coal and hires him to design a new landmark “institute.” But Van Buren is also in the market for the social luster he receives as Tóth’s patron. For his client, Tóth is no more than a pencil and a pass among the cultural intelligentsia.

The project—to be built on the highest hill in town—is to include a community center, assembly hall, and library, but the program keeps fluctuating, to Tóth’s frustration. A late addition is a “Christian gathering space” (to grease the skids for a building permit). Tóth’s design makes this sacred space the building’s heart, crowning it with a cruciform tower.

The exterior of the structure—shown only as a model—is a dead ringer for Louis Kahn’s First Universalist Church in Rochester, New York. Which makes one wonder: Who actually designed the building in the film? Tóth’s designs were created by film’s production designer, Judy Becker, who isn’t an architect. Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light was an influence, along with the work of James Turrell. Becker also spent time looking at buildings by Brutalist architects—among them Marcel Breuer. She worked with architectural designer Griffin Frazen to create a building model that became the basis of the construction images, which were entirely fabricated. 

When real surgeons watch movie surgeons, they must pick up on all sorts of things they would never do. Same with architects in a film. There are a few odd things about Tóth’s design that undermine his reputation as an architectural genius: Why locate a community center on a hill away from the town center? (We can blame the client for that. He picked the site.) The design features a deep, windowless cellar filled with water. (I don’t get it. What’s it for?) Tóth explains that as the sun moves over the building, at noon every day a cross of light will fall upon the altar. This isn’t possible, as the sun is in a different position at noon throughout the year. 

“They do not want us here” just as easily applies to Tóth’s architectural vision for this major commission. He doesn’t articulate a comprehensive architectural theory, nor does he ever discuss Brutalism; the word is never mentioned in film, which probably leaves nonarchitects wondering what it means. Tóth says some vague things about beauty, but not much beyond that. “Why architecture?” Van Buren quizzes him. Tóth responds by reflecting on his training at the Bauhaus and his completed projects in Budapest.

“There was a war on, and yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects had survived,” Tóth tells Van Buren. “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.” For Tóth, his architecture is a legacy for change. 

 

Tóth’s Brutalist opus is historically a bit ahead of its time. The style surfaced in Europe and the UK in the early 1950s; Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, considered one of the first examples, was completed in 1952. But it didn’t pick up steam in the U.S. until the mid-1950s. It’s easy to understand why the Doylestown locals have their misgivings about the design. The general contractor notes that concrete buildings are hard to love, and this one doesn’t look like it belongs here. During a town meeting on the project, the design is met with polite silence. Tóth’s architecture, like himself, is an object of suspicion.

Van Buren also has his doubts. He hires a local architect to value-engineer Tóth’s design and keep an eye on him. Tóth explodes over the design changes, telling the interloper that the goal of his design is beauty and grace, while “everything ugly is your fault.” 

The film’s darkest, most revelatory moment transpires when Tóth and his client journey to the legendary marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, to choose a stone for the institute’s central altar—its most sacred place. It is here, in the same quarry where Michelangelo selected his stone, that Tóth suffers the ultimate humiliation at his client’s hands. At a boozy afterparty in the quarry, Van Buren finds Tóth dazed on heroin. He rapes him, whispering in the architect’s ear that he is nothing more than “a lady of the night, a tramp”—channeling Philip Johnson’s infamous quip that architects are just whores. It’s at this point where the significance of the film’s title becomes clear: the Brutalist isn’t the architect, it’s the client.

In this way, the film’s hackneyed portrayal of the architect as the misunderstood genius—fighting for an architectural vision against the world—is predictable and breaks no new ground. It’s a common trope for cinematic designers, which unfortunately colors the public’s perception of architects as difficult to work with, interested only in feeding their own egos. But the film also offers a gloomy twist on the architect/client relationship that will make many architect moviegoers—who may harbor their own dreams of the ultimate project—squirm: Be careful what you wish for. 

All images courtesy of A24.

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