Since the release of Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s three-and-a-half-hour architectural epic The Brutalist, much has been written centring on the criticisms levelled at the film by working architects. They tend to suggest that it plays fast and loose with both the cues it takes from real-life designer Marcel Breuer and the history of Brutalism as a movement, or else pick out finer procedural minutiae that don’t exactly align with the realities of the job. But to state that there is nothing of value in The Brutalist because professionals take issue is to claim Jaws is a bad movie because marine biologists say sharks aren’t actually capable of seeking revenge.
For some viewers expecting an immaculate record of design history and practice, The Brutalist may well miss the mark – but that was never its intention, nor its responsibility. If you want a brick-for-brick retelling of how this style emerged and rose to its current place in the architectural canon, there are hundreds of documentaries to choose from. Film as a medium has always taken influence from – and liberties with – reality in the name of entertainment and creating a vehicle for larger ideas. And where architecture critics might grumble in this respect, the filmmaking community has rightly recognised The Brutalist as one of the year’s finest. Nominated for ten academy awards, it has already claimed a host of international prizes, including Berlin’s prestigious Silver Lion.
Of those ten nominations, statues for best direction or acting would likely grab the most headlines, though in a film explicitly concerned with the making of objects and aesthetics, The Brutalist’s production design occupies a rare space where cinematic form aligns closely with subject matter. ‘The fact that the protagonist is an architect almost made it easier to engage with the story because it’s so similar to what I do,’ says production designer Judy Becker, who created everything the film’s protagonist is meant to have dreamed up. ‘I always try and design in the most authentic way I can in relation to the story and characters; that it was about Brutalism, a style I’ve loved for a long time, was an added bonus.’
Framed within Lol Crawley’s expansive Vistavision cinematography, the designs of the film are elevated to near mythical status while remaining firmly rooted in harsh reality. Born from both miraculous epiphany and brutal necessity, the first pieces of furniture we see Adrien Brody’s László Tóth design – a minimalist chair-and-desk set wrought from curved steel tubes – draws influence from the prison bars at Dachau. ‘I figured this is probably the lowest point of his creative life,’ says Becker. ‘He’s depleted mentally, creatively, physically, and his cousin asks him to design furniture, so he goes back to his Bauhaus roots and makes this tubular steel piece inspired by what he’s seen.’
The monumental commission at the heart of the film – a multipurpose cultural and community centre in honour of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren’s late mother – is equally layered in code. The meticulously concieved ceiling heights, subterranean tunnels and skylights all relate to an experience of the camps while simultaneously providing a symbol for the film’s other main thematic thread: the dynamic between creativity and commerce all working designers deal with. Indeed, this is Tóth’s masterpiece, but we never back down from its cost – by the end, its creator has left so much of himself in his vision that there is little remaining of the man but a frail husk.
With so much focus on the physical objects and spaces created for the production, it should be noted that the exceptional design of The Brutalist also extends to its underlying form. Separated into an overture, two main parts, an interval and an epilogue, the film is a piece of structured architecture in itself; the first sections a solid foundation of realism, built upon with a series of flourishes and abstractions before the terse ending tops it off with a brief but pointed spire. Even the production’s contentious use of AI – including to generate images that would inspire the hand-drawn designs Tóth is celebrated for in his final Biennale – can be deemed valid when considered in the context of the film’s wider values: the protagonist’s ending is far from happy and, in this context, the symbolic outsourcing of his vision and legacy to encroaching technology is part of the nightmare he has incurred.
The Brutalist is at its best when these two parallel threads of production design and cinematic structure interweave – that essential combination of form and function every design student is taught early on. But while there are certainly lessons in good design to be found in the composition and treatment of both elements, its most valuable insight for designers of any practice is perhaps, by nature, less obvious.
Deep in the final third of the film lies its most powerful scene. Not the one you may have heard about, but a confrontation arising from it. Presented with a terrible accusation levelled at his father, the reaction of Joe Alwyn’s Van Buren Jr hints at something much darker and more horrific than anything we have witnessed onscreen without ever saying what that might be. In design terms we might think of this as negative space; the absence of an intervention allowing the user to bring their own meaning and come to their own conclusions, as opposed to being explicitly instructed towards a fixed understanding.
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That The Brutalist affords its audience the space to do this is increasingly rare in the upper echelons of a filmmaking industry now hellbent on explaining everything away and breaking its own sacred rules of exposition to account for the rise of distracting second screens. While designers might not have to deal with this specific issue, it is nonetheless an important principle that any practitioner should remember. After all, the user bringing their own values and ideas to a space or experience or piece of furniture will always be infinitely more powerful than telling them what to do with it or how to feel.
We see the results of this firsthand, for better or worse, when Van Buren Sr meets with Tóth to praise his work renovating the former’s reading room having initially (and furiously) rejected the architect’s changes. It might be the attention it got him in the design press, or it might be the passing of his mother in the days following its completion, but in the end it doesn’t matter. ‘I don’t just appreciate it, Mr Tóth,’ says user to designer. ‘I cherish it.’
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