Concrete Terms

This article contains discussions and themes that may be distressing or disturbing to some readers, including references to violence. Reader discretion is advised.

It’s a mistake, though an understandable one, to watch The Brutalist expecting to see a film about Brutalist architecture. 

The source of the term Brutalism in architecture is a bit twisty. On the one hand it seems to have some connection to béton brut (French for raw concrete), especially as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s La Tourette and Unité d’Habitation. But it was introduced into the English lexicon by Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham in the 1950s as “New Brutalism,” derived from the Swedish phrase nybrutalism, which had been used by architect Hans Asplund. Roughly, New Brutalism refers to a design approach that treats structure as finish so that there is a consistency of material expression on the outside and inside of a building. Later, Brutalism was used to characterize a lot of civic and institutional architecture in the United States that employed a lot of concrete—most famously, perhaps, Boston City Hall.  

You will get none of that from watching The Brutalist, and that’s okay. Director-writer-producer Brady Corbet and his screenplay co-writer Mona Fastvold chose the name carefully. While they did have Brutalist architecture in mind (the film’s architect designs a concrete building), the brutalism in their film has quite a different meaning.  

The story follows László Tóth (played with nervy intensity by Adrian Brody), a Bauhaus-trained architect of Hungarian-Jewish origin who immigrates to the United States after World War II. It’s not made explicit right away, but László is a Holocaust survivor. The astonishing cinematic sequence that opens the film shows his boat arriving in New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty appearing upside down, foreshadowing that, while our hero has escaped a bad situation in Europe, his experiences on these shores will not be entirely harmonious. 

Unlike many actual Bauhaus alums fleeing Europe in this period, who found jobs at firms and in academia, László hits the skids. He sleeps in shelters, nurses an addiction to heroin, parties with the down-and-out on the Lower East Side, moves to Philly, and works on the docks. This somewhat dire and unexpected trajectory for someone with his resume (we soon find out he has designed buildings that have been published to acclaim) is significant, as the movie, more than an exposition of architectural history and process, is a meditation on the precarious position of the artist in capitalist society. 

This theme is explored through the relationship between László and his first American client, wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (played by Guy Pierce). It gets off to a rough start, is tense throughout, and only gets rockier, to put it mildly. 

They first meet at Harrison’s house, a Beaux-Arts pile in the countryside, where László and his work crew have just finished renovating the library. (Sorry, I’m skipping a lot of details. In addition to its other assaults on the senses, The Brutalist is long, more than 3.5 hours with intermission.) Harrison, surprised to find them there (his son arranged it as a surprise birthday gift), is furious. Unwilling to listen to their explanations, he screams bloody murder, kicking them out. Later, after the library is published in a magazine (again to acclaim), Harrison seeks László out to make amends. Detente achieved, they form a connection that will eventually lead to Harrison hiring László to design a community recreation center on a hill near his house. 

Harrison is proud of his new friend/employee. He hosts László at dinner parties. He helps him bring his wife to the states (she arrives wheelchair bound). He is generous, but his generosity comes with conditions, one of which is that László must make him look sophisticated. In addition to being extremely successful at business, Harrison is extremely insecure. Despite his great wealth and power, he lacks something that László has, some bohemian je ne sais quois. Harrison will take his animosity out on László in the most appalling way possible: He rapes him in an Italian marble quarry, whispering into his ear, “Who do you think you are? You think you’re special? You think you float directly above everyone you encounter because you are beautiful? Because you are educated?” If you haven’t put it together already, this should be an indicator that The Brutalist, true to its title, does not make its points with subtlety. 

Designing and building the rec center is also fraught. László faces suspicion from the community for being a foreigner, not to mention a Jew. (In his character it’s possible to see reflections of other notable Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, including Marcel Breuer and George Soros.) He woos them, however, by designing a skylight that shines a cross on the altar of the rec center’s Christian chapel. Beyond this bit of magic, we don’t get much of a sense of what the building is like. The drawings we see are sketchy. If this were a design crit, I might call the scheme unresolved. They were reportedly made by AI, as were the Hungarian accents of Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays László’s wife. This fact may be a little unsettling, but whatever, filmmakers deal with budget constraints as well. 

Returning to the action, Harrison backs László all the way—to his face—but hires a local architect to double-check and value engineer the plans. This gives rise to disagreements. László is a real bull when it comes to forcing his vision into reality without compromises. He does some screaming of his own. This sets up one of the key moments in the film: László decides to forgo some of his fee, reinvesting it into the project so he can make the ceilings a little higher. For him, it’s not about money, even though he and his wife are basically destitute. It’s about making something beautiful in a world that is otherwise, let’s just say it, quite brutal. 

The end of the film fast forwards to 1980, straight into the sloshing seat of a gondola on the Grand Canal, just in time for the first-ever Venice Architecture Biennale. László and his life’s work are being celebrated, which is ironic because the 1980 Biennale was the official world premiere of Postmodernism. (Maybe there is some secret message bundled in this anachronism, a suggestion that the rearward view Pomo cast resembles the peering into the past we now must do to understand the works of high modernism.) The architect appears in a wheelchair, trembling and stupefied by the ravages of age, and, we might assume, a lot more brutality. His niece stands at a podium and lectures on the greatness of his designs in words that fly a lot higher than the AI-drawn sketches flanking her. The rec center’s high ceilings, she tells us, were László’s response to his time in Buchenwald, when gazing up at the death camp’s volumetric proportions was all he had to hold onto. 

With that line (though it isn’t too hard to imagine an architect consoling themselves by admiring the design of their prison) my eyes rolled for the final time before the credits themselves rolled. They rolled a lot while watching The Brutalist, which is not to say I didn’t enjoy the film. I worry that linking Brutalist architecture with the Holocaust will leave some members of the audience with the wrong impression. On the other hand, apparently after its release, Brutalism became the most-searched term on Google. So perhaps, ultimately, the movie—despite itself—will generate a reassessment of a period of our architectural heritage that has been particularly under threat lately of the brutality of the wrecking ball.