Brutalism is architecture’s frenemy—beloved for its stylistic concrete heaviness and inventive shapes, while often reviled for, simply, being “ugly.” As a movement that became prominent in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, brutalism has often been characterized by alien spaceships or Cold War relics.
But a new film, The Brutalist, presents an alternate stylistic inspiration with roots in the Holocaust. Directed and produced by Brady Corbet and cowritten with his partner, Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. Set in 1940s America, the film stars Adrien Brody as László Toth, a Hungarian architect who struggles to rebuild his life and his architectural practice, while attempting to execute his masterpiece: a cultural and religious building called the Institute.
The three-and-a-half-hour film follows Toth after he escapes the Nazi concentration camps. Toth has gone to live in Philadelphia with his cousin, Attila (Allessandro Nivola), who has changed his last name in the hopes of becoming “American.” We watch Toth return to his Bauhaus roots; first, as a furniture designer for his cousin’s shop, where he goes from building modernist desks to being commissioned to redesign the library of a wealthy collector, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce). Later, Van Buren commissions Toth to design the Institute: a massive community center that includes a church, gymnasium, theater, and library, which he designs in the brutalist style based on his time in a concentration camp.
Toth and his brother in Van Buren’s finished library.
Judy Becker, a production designer who has worked on films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Carol (2015), brought the universe of Toth to life. While Becker isn’t an architect, her job, she says, is to “design the world the movie takes place in.” She’s responsible for managing furnishing, color palettes, wallpapers, and overall sets—crafting a world with the most minute details. Dwell spoke with Becker about how she designed and built the environments that defined Toth’s career—the library and Institute—by tapping into his motivations and persona to produce a style unique to the fictionalized architect.
The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. How did fiction and reality play into designing this film? There are heavy themes from very real events like the Holocaust and internment camps; how did you balance this with a creative architectural vision?
One of the many reasons that Brady, the director, and Mona, his wife and co-screenwriter, wanted to make this movie was…they were thinking about how much talent and creativity was lost in those camps. And they invented this person who did survive, László, whom many people have asked me about as if he were a real person. He wasn’t. I think one of the reasons that László is so stubborn, so determined to create his art, is because otherwise, I don’t think he could have survived. So I really did thoroughly try to channel him when I was designing for him. And I talk about him as if he’s a real person, because I had to think that way.
It’s interesting that you say you’re able to channel a fictional architect to execute his vision.
I have often said that I’m a method designer. I try to embody the characters in any movie I design, because I think a lot about what their world would be like and what they would have. With László, it was a whole trajectory: he comes to the United States; he has nothing. He’s just got out of the camps. He’s had a horrible journey. He’s depleted. He goes to his cousin’s furniture shop. He’s lying on a cot in the storage room. His cousin’s American now. The whole thing is pretty depressing. And then his cousin asks him to design some furniture. So I felt like that’s his earliest work in which he’s going back to his Bauhaus training. He’s using found materials. There’s a whole story about how he’s designing that furniture, taking from some of the furniture in the shop and being influenced by other furniture there. And the next stage, Harrison’s library, is where László becomes very modern. It’s modernist design of the time and he doesn’t become himself as an architect until we see the Institute.
I’d like to hear about the design process. You’re not an architect but you crafted a realistic vision for what a brutalist community center and church might look like.
I designed the Institute before I did anything else; Brady asked me to, because it was when I first started on the film. It wasn’t even official yet, but we had to figure out how we were going to shoot parts of the Institute. We knew we couldn’t build the whole thing to full scale. So in order to do that, we needed to design it. The way I work is to channel [László’s] experience as a prisoner, and what it felt like to be a prisoner, to be a refugee, to come to America, to experience what he experienced in America, which maybe wasn’t as great as he hoped it might be—putting all those things into his design for the Institute. It was an emotionally difficult process to channel him creatively and architecturally. Once I kind of cracked a few things, it became easy. We ended up building parts of it, and also building a model that we shot as the Institute.
Detail shot from the Institute; Becker cites Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light as inspiration.
What type of architectural research was needed, or what were you looking at that influenced your design?
I knew of a lot of brutalist architecture because I’ve been interested in it for a long time, so I had a pretty good library of it in my head already. I did look at some modernist churches and chapels and some later ones, like Tadao Ando, who did a famous one with the Church of the Light. I also looked a lot at the architecture of concentration camps, because I had to incorporate that mostly on the Institute’s interior, but you don’t see it that much. I intended the exterior to look like a factory or a crematorium—the towers were like crematorium towers. I also looked at a lot of architects and artists like James Turrell, because I thought a lot about the relationship of the underground to light, and I incorporated a lot of that in the Institute and in the chapel and other places, too. I was a little influenced in using the cross symbolism by a synagogue that was in the town I grew up in that was in the shape of a Star of David. You couldn’t tell unless you were above it. And I only knew that because someone told me, and I love this sort of secrecy: there was the symbol that you couldn’t see, and I incorporated some of that. And I just found out that the synagogue was designed by Marcel Breuer.
The Institute’s lower level.
Going back to the Miller’s showroom, there is a particular style of furniture that they are selling—it sort of resembles a Shaker style. I’d like to hear about your choice in using very unmodern pieces in a film that centers a Bauhaus-trained architect.
We were shooting in Hungary, and I wanted it to be as American as possible as a contrast to László, and for [his cousin] to be as American as possible. I wanted to ship over this furniture because we looked [for it] in Hungary. It wasn’t there. And I don’t think it’s anywhere in Europe, frankly, because it’s American—I think they call it American Colonial.
Did you employ “method designing” for Harrison’s library? The bookshelves opened like flower petals but maintained the clean and modern feel that later built his reputation. What was being channeled there?
I think that Harrison’s library was driven by the location. Brady wrote something very vague because he didn’t know where it was going to be shot: He wrote that the shelves are lying on the floor and the laborers would pull them up by pulleys and they open up like a flower, which was hard to see how that would work practically, but it did give me the idea. So when we finally saw the mansion in Hungary where we would later shoot, the only room that seemed right for the library was a glass conservatory. But every wall was glass. And I had this inspiration of these cabinets with a wall, they’d have a wood backing and a forced perspective leaning toward the back; and then the cabinet doors would open up like a flower. It seemed really beautiful and a way of transforming the space in a very modern way.
What’s also interesting about the Institute is that, in the film, it exists as a construction site. How do you design an unfinished building, knowing that its finished form isn’t revealed until the end, where there are only photos?
A lot of it was vision. This is what you get to do in a film—you get to pretend a lot of things. I did have a lot of reference for how giant buildings were constructed, and we looked at them, and we used a lot of the elements like those pillars with the rebar sticking out of them, and things like that. But was it realistic as to how the building would be constructed? Probably not. This was movie magic, but this is one instance in which you could build this building. The interior is designed, the exterior is designed. I could hand over the plans so someone could figure out how to do it.
The Brutalist will have a limited theatrical release in the United States on December 20, 2024, ahead of a wide release in January 2025.
Top photo by The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley
Related Reading:
