It’s often said that art should be judged by its ability to cause a riot. If so, then Brady Corbet should have realized that his latest film, The Brutalist, was off to an auspicious start when it caused uproar in a restaurant before it was even made.
It all happened during a meeting with production designer Judy Becker. With his plan to make a movie about migrants and architecture in postwar America, Corbet knew that she was the perfect choice, as shown on her work on films like Carol. “I don’t think there’s anyone that does midcentury Americana better than she does,” he told the Chronicle.
They’d been collaborating over Zoom across the pandemic, but for their first in-person session about The Brutalist they shared lunch at Barney Greengrass, “the iconic Jewish deli on the Upper West Side. … She arrived with these mood boards, and it was a mix of stuff, like a Brutalist synagogue that was in the shape of the Star of David, and she was, ‘What if we did that but with the sign of the cross?’ But she also had all these photographs of Dachau and all of this Holocaust imagery. We were outside and there was a gust of wind and these images went flying across the restaurant, and everyone starts going, ‘Lady, are these the camps?’ I remember the whole restaurant lit up, and she and I were trying to explain, it’s for a project.”
It’s not simply the Holocaust, but the terrors of life as a cultural or ethnic outsider that have been playing heavy on the mind of filmmaker Corbet: not just because it’s the subject of his new film, The Brutalist, but because it’s impossible to avoid if you live in America. The expansionistic nativism of the incoming administration has added new hues to Americentrism not seen in decades – threatening the Danish territory of Greenland and referring to Canada as “the 51st state” while musing about revoking birthright citizenship, and terminating all visas.
“[My films are] Mid-Atlantic, dealing with international themes but as they relate to America.”
And yet The Brutalist speaks to the porousness of borders when it comes to concepts and ideas. Recently, he was fortunate to visit the Isokon Flats in London. Famous for its former residents, like novelist Agatha Christie and architect László Moholy-Nagy, undoubtedly, but more so because the 36 apartments designed by Canadian architect Wells Coates were revolutionary in their simplicity and elegance. “It’s an extraordinary building and it was such a treat,” he said.
However, he would never have gained access if it wasn’t for The Brutalist, as the building’s doors were opened for a magazine photo shoot to publicize the film. While not strictly Brutalist itself – the flats were designed in the late 1920s, while Brutalism as an architectural movement did not erupt until the 1950s – the Isokon Flats share the movement’s stark, austere, monolithic sensibilities that sometimes seemed at odds with its purpose as architecture for the people.
There’s a similar dry dramatic tension between The Brutalist and its inception. The film is about how much of his personal history that Hungarian migrant architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) has hidden within the concrete and rebar of the community center and chapel he is building in rural Pennsylvania for industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). However, Corbet is less clear about the psychological roots of any of his own works. “It’s always a fascination or an obsession which I can’t quite shake off, and eventually that snowballs into something like a story.”
While Corbet was always fascinated by architecture, there was one book on the subject in particular that influenced The Brutalist. He was lucky enough to have architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen as one of the advisers of the project, and while Cohen literally wrote the book (three, in fact) on godfather of modern architecture Le Corbusier, it was his tome, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, that served as partial inspiration for The Brutalist. “It’s all about postwar architecture and postwar psychology, and how the two were intertwined,” Corbet said, and it showed him that Brutalism “was the perfect allegory to talk about postwar trauma.”
Yet such ideas only become clear in hindsight. In the rubble of postwar Europe, Brutalism and Modernism were deeply optimistic – artistic rejections of the aristocratic pretensions of prewar architecture, using the most modern of materials. They were also deeply pragmatic, intended to create new structures as fast as possible to fill in the civic spaces and mass housing that had been obliterated by bombs. They were designed to fulfill a purpose – capturing Le Corbusier’s old saying that “A house is a machine for living in.” Widely misinterpreted as rejecting aesthetics for utilitarianism, the idea was that the form and the function should be one, and there will be beauty in that melding.
“If you think about the proposals for these buildings in the late 1940s, early 1950s, they must have just looked like spaceships.”
That emphasis on usefulness will always be why Frank Lloyd Wright can never be considered a Brutalist, as anyone who has tried to find a usable cupboard or shelf in one of his designs can testify. “I know all the Frank Lloyd Wright’s quirks pretty well,” Corbet smiled. “My uncle studied at [Wright’s home and school] Taliesin West, and he was living with my mother and I while he was attending school there, so I spent a lot of time at Taliesin when I was growing up. … He wasn’t a big fan of barriers that would stop toddlers falling off the roof.”
If anything, valuing form over function can lead to architectural catastrophe – or at least wild comedy. Corbet said, “I’m fascinated by projects that have gone completely off the rails.” Case in point, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. “They had done this building in glass, from floor to ceiling. It was only after many years of people having turned the key on the project that the folks at the Bibliothèque showed up and said, ‘We can’t store anything here because there’s sunlight in every direction.’ So what they ended up having to do was curtain the entire building.”
It’s hard not to see Corbet correcting those errors with Tóth’s first project for Van Buren, a grand library in his home. However, he credits his partner, Fastvold, for its execution. “She had a real vision for what that space should be,” Corbet said. “The idea of a room that’s floor-to-ceiling windows that needs to be converted into a space with shelves that block the sunlight from harming the books, but then you still need light to read by so there’s a skylight in the middle of the room – that was all in the screenplay.”
Alongside Cohen’s work, a second volume that influenced Corbet was Hilary Thimmesh’s Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, chronicling the construction of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. In its story, it’s not hard to see the resonances with The Brutalist: Like the fictional Tóth, Breuer was a Hungarian Jew who moved to Weimar Germany to study at the Bauhaus school, the wellspring of modern architecture. Both began their careers in furniture design before becoming better known as architects, and one of their greatest works was built in the middle of nowhere (architecturally speaking) with a purpose as a place of Christian worship. In making the connection to interwar German culture, The Brutalist shows the underpinning of Brutalism were laid before well before Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm laid out the plans for Villa Göth – often referred to as the first truly Brutalist building. Corbet said, “Even though the style was not officially recognized until the 1950s, there were seeds of it in 1925, through the Weimar, and into the 1950s.”
(Not so coincidentally, Breuer was another resident of the Isokon Flats. Seeing his flat, Corbet said, “It was beautiful, but it was very, very minimalistic. There was one bedroom, one bathroom, but it had a huge outdoor area. About 25% of the roof space was the apartment, and 75% was the deck.”)
Just as The Brutalist reveals the connections between structure and philosophy, that a building conveys the architect’s intentions, so Corbet had to become an architect himself. After all, the Van Buren Community Center is the vessel for Tóth’s message, and so the design had to reflect that. However, unlike the Van Buren library, where every design feature was already in the script, “we didn’t have a solution for it at all.” What he did have was a final scene explaining Tóth’s intentions “and then we needed to back into a design that would make that monologue cohere.” However, he credited production designer Becker with understanding what he needed from that very first meeting. “She had cracked the code prior to sitting down with me, and the design for the building, it never really changed [and] she was able to do it in a way that wasn’t heavy-handed or where the symbolism would feel clumsy.”
The Brutalist opens in Austin theatres on Jan. 10. Read review.
This article appears in January 3 • 2025.
