Brutalist architecture is raw, powerful, emotional, and unapologetically honest. It rejects ornamentation and architectural devices designed to make its inhabitants feel comfortable, instead creating a visceral, primal experience. Brutalism is a feeling—a bold statement that doesn’t need to justify itself. Composed of raw, unrefined materials, it strips architecture down to its essence, evoking reactions that are often as extreme as the style itself. These are some of the reasons why I personally love brutalism, and perhaps also why I found myself captivated by The Brutalist.
To delve deeper into the mindset of the fictional architect, László Tóth, and his work, I spoke with Adrien Brody, the film’s lead actor, and Judy Becker, its visionary production designer. Their insights illuminate the emotional and symbolic layers behind this unique cinematic endeavor.
The Brutalist is an almost four-hour film that follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, as he rebuilds his life in postwar America. Trained at the Bauhaus and once celebrated in Europe, Tóth arrives in Philadelphia with nothing. He finds his talent and resilience is not enough, as he struggles with displacement, addiction, and prejudice. He is eventually commissioned by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) to design the Institute—a monumental community center that becomes both his artistic triumph and a haunting reflection of his past. Contrary to what many viewers may expect, the movie is less about architecture than it is about ambition, spirit, trauma, and survival. The cast delivers powerful performances, while Daniel Blumberg’s score, Judy Becker’s layered production design, Lol Crawley’s immersive cinematography, and the rare use of VistaVision collectively create a monumental experience.
When I suggest that viewers might be surprised at how little The Brutalist is truly about architecture, it stems from a curious disconnect. Director Brady Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have frequently cited their personal connections to architecture—Corbet through architect relatives and his own view of filmmaking as akin to architectural design. Panels and interviews surrounding the film have devoted significant time to discussions of architecture and brutalism, yet these themes are not as directly explored in the film as one might expect. Instead, architecture serves as a backdrop—a metaphorical canvas for the story’s deeper focus on ambition, trauma, and the human spirit.
At the crowded after-party following the Los Angeles premiere, I spoke with Adrien Brody about his personal connection to the character of László Tóth. Our conversation touched on a shared history: both of our mothers escaped Hungary during the 1956 revolution as children. This familial connection to the immigrant and refugee experience drew Brody to the role, as he empathized with Tóth’s struggles and aspirations. He also reflected on the idea of legacy, connecting with Tóth as an artist striving for permanence in his work—a theme that resonates with Brody’s own life, not only as an acclaimed actor in film and theater but also as a painter seeking to leave a meaningful, lasting impact.
Creating László Tóth’s architectural legacy for The Brutalist seems like an almost impossible challenge. How does one design a body of work that convincingly represents a fictional architect of exceptional talent—a Bauhaus-trained visionary whose designs reflect years of dedication? It’s a task that requires talent, technical expertise and a deep understanding of the character’s personal and professional journey. I spoke with production designer Judy Becker via Zoom a few days after the Los Angeles premiere to learn more about how this was accomplished. Becker’s thoughtful approach to building Tóth’s imagined portfolio revealed the intricate layers behind the film’s striking visual and emotional impact.
Judy Becker, an acclaimed production designer whose work has earned accolades including nominations for an Academy Award (American Hustle) and BAFTAs (Carol), doesn’t have a formal background in architecture. However, her passion for the field, particularly brutalism, began at a young age. Growing up, her earliest exposure came from her uncle, a mid-century Danish architect, whose architectural models she often dreamed of using as dollhouses. Becker credits her self-directed exploration of architecture and design as a source of invaluable knowledge, one that she believes might rival traditional education in its inspiration and depth. During our conversation, she frequently referenced Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect whose brutalist sensibilities and unconventional path into architecture seemed to resonate with her own approach.
How does one design a body of work that convincingly represents a fictional architect of exceptional talent—a Bauhaus-trained visionary whose designs reflect years of dedication?
When I asked Judy Becker about her familiarity with the Bauhaus and brutalism prior to working on The Brutalist, her enthusiasm was evident. “Brutalism, for sure,” she said. “I mean, I knew about the Bauhaus and was interested in it, but I loved brutalism. I loved brutalist architecture—I had loved it for many, many, many years, well before anyone else loved it.” Her love for the style was secondary, however, to her desire to collaborate with Brady Corbet. “I wanted to work with Brady. I was following his work. I’d seen Childhood of a Leader. I told my agent, I want to work with this guy—he’s genius.” When she learned, over 10 years ago, that Corbet’s next project was titled The Brutalist, she read the script and immediately thought, “It was like it was a joke, how much it seemed made for me.”
For The Brutalist, Becker was tasked with designing the fictional architectural legacy of László Tóth, including the Institute, a sprawling community center with a chapel, gymnasium, and library, as well as earlier works, such as a modernist library redesign and furniture that reflected Tóth’s Bauhaus roots. Each design needed to feel authentic to the character’s evolution and resonate with the film’s emotional and thematic core, while also being practically achievable within the constraints of the production.
I wanted the Institute to reflect both Tóth’s genius and the trauma he carried" - Judy Becker
Judy didn’t reference specific architects or designers when designing László Tóth’s body of work. “I didn't look at many architectural references because I didn't want to be influenced by too much. I wanted to come up with something on my own,” she shared with me. She did speak about a few areas of inspiration and research for this project. She spoke fondly of Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York, a building she considers one of the most striking examples of brutalist architecture. “It’s just so powerful and grounded,” she noted, highlighting its raw materiality and minimalist forms as key influences.
Becker also turned to more unsettling sources, including the architecture of concentration camps. The rigid layouts and confined spaces of these sites informed the Institute’s stark interior design, particularly its low ceilings and narrow passageways. “I wanted the Institute to reflect both Tóth’s genius and the trauma he carried,” she explained, layering emotional significance into the structure.
Another reference point was Harry Weese's Washington, D.C., subway system. Its steep staircases and vast, cavernous interiors inspired the Institute’s underground elements, which Judy described as “a reflection of confinement and the struggle toward freedom.”
Symbolism also played a significant role in the Institute’s chapel design. Becker drew on the cross motif common in Central and Eastern European architecture, designing a space where light would form a cross visible only from specific vantage points. She recalled a childhood memory of a synagogue shaped like a Star of David, visible only from above, which inspired her to incorporate hidden meaning into the building’s design.
One question that lingered in my mind as I spoke with Judy Becker was whether the designs for the Institute—László Tóth’s magnum opus—were presented in their entirety on screen. Could the audience fully grasp the scope of such a monumental creation, or were they only offered glimpses of its parts, leaving the whole to the imagination?
She acknowledged that much of the Institute’s design was intentionally fragmented in its presentation. “You don’t see the entire building in the film,” she explained, “but I designed it as a fully realized structure. Every detail had to make sense, even if it wasn’t shown.” This approach reflects the film’s broader aesthetic, where raw, incomplete elements invite interpretation rather than dictating meaning.
For Becker, the decision to show the Institute in pieces aligned with both the narrative and practical constraints. “The story is more about the emotional weight of Tóth’s journey than about showcasing his work in a traditional way,” she said. Still, the design process was meticulous. “The Institute could exist as a real building. Every element was functional, but it also carried symbolic layers—like the chapel’s cross motif and the confined spaces reflecting his past.”
In an ironic parallel with the field of architecture, The Brutalist was created on a budget that would fall into the “low-budget” category by industry standards. While I’ve heard estimates ranging from $6 million to $10 million, both Brady Corbet and Judy Becker have confirmed the figure was closer to $6 million. Considering that the project spanned nearly a decade from conception to release, a significant amount of creativity was required to stretch every dollar. When I asked Judy how this impacted her work, she explained that the budgetary constraints forced her to approach the designs with practicality in mind, balancing ambition with feasibility. “We couldn’t build the whole Institute,” she said, “but we had to design it as if it were real. We built specific sections—like the chapel staircase and the interior spaces—and used models and creative framing to suggest the scale and scope of the building.”
She also recalled how even seemingly minor requests, like additional plywood for furniture construction, required budgetary approval. “We had to ask for overages on plywood,” she said with a laugh. “It’s not the kind of thing you expect when you’re creating these grand designs.” Despite these challenges, she expressed pride in what the team accomplished, noting that the limitations often fueled more innovative solutions.
The Brutalist is not a film about architecture—it’s a film of architecture, in its raw emotional force, unapologetic honesty, and unflinching ability to challenge its audience
The Brutalist is, much like the architectural style it nods to, bound to divide its audience. Just as brutalist architecture provokes strong reactions depending on the viewer’s taste and expectations, so too does this film. For architects, or those lured in by the film’s title and pre-release publicity focusing heavily on architecture, there may be disappointment at the lack of detailed focus on architecture or historical accuracy. But to view The Brutalist through such a lens might miss the point. This is not a film about architecture—it’s a film of architecture, in its raw emotional force, unapologetic honesty, and unflinching ability to challenge its audience.
The Brutalist is a bold cinematic achievement that reflects the raw, unfiltered spirit of its titular architectural style. Its ambition, emotional depth, and powerful direction and cinematography make it a unique contribution to the genre—one that challenges viewers to confront both its artistry and its imperfections. Much like the architecture it evokes, The Brutalist is unapologetically itself: divisive, weighty, and unforgettable. It may not be for everyone, but for those willing to engage with its daring vision, it leaves a lasting impression.
Paul Petrunia is the founder and director of Archinect, a (mostly) online publication/resource founded in 1997 to establish a more connected community of architects, students, designers and fans of the designed environment. Outside of managing his growing team of writers, editors, designers and ...
25 Comments
Thanks for the review, the heads up, Paul. I assume we'll be able to stream this before too long?
It’ll be in the theater this January.
I’m not sure about when it will be available for streaming, but I do recommend seeing it on the big screen. VistaVision is quite the experience and not too common to experience these days. From what I understand, the film was released in limited theaters in New York in Los Angeles this weekend and will then be releasing to the wider public in a month or so.
I believe it is opening wide on January 10th (or at least that's when it will be available in my local theaters in Portland).
What I find striking, and ultimately - hopefully - uplifting is how this might serve as a counterpoint to Oppenheimer. Adjacent time periods it appears, but hopefully the message is more in service to the beauty and humanistic qualities of modernity, and not the destructive, less hopeful notes of the other.
This comment is dumb.
I watched it yesterday, and although I wouldn't call it cynical, the optimism modernist architecture symbolizes is exposed to be rotten at the core, as told through the characters and the life of the architecture. It's a redemption story and a tragedy.
Carolina Miranda, Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange did a podcast reviewing it here: "Why the Brutalist is a Terrible Movie". Ouch, and a reminder of how much we need criticism to balance out the fluffy PR that for understandable (but regrettable) reasons dominates architecture media.
Three writers I very much respect. I listened to their conversation over the weekend and found it to be a fun master class in cynicism. They bring up a lot of valid points, but I mostly disagree with their focus and harsh take. As mentioned in my article, I do think this film will be as divisive as brutalism itself. While real criticism is a dying art, many people (especially in architecture?) seem to confuse criticism with negativity.
I dunno - while I certainly found the podcast critical I don’t see any cynicism, the difference being that criticism intends to make the world better and cynicism is self-interested. It’s interesting that many film critics seem to have loved it, while these three architecture critics had very negative reactions. In the podcast, it seems to be because the movie actually seems to have little to do with architecture or its history and relies on tropes around the profession as an environment as a sandbox for singular geniuses. Each of these three writers has done a lot of typing to dismantle these myths and I am sympathetic to anyone who feels like the last thing architecture culture needs is another Fountainhead.
I found the podcast to be snide and cynical, which is abundant in today’s media. What they consider to be tropes, I found to be nuanced and rigorously studied (the director and his wife come from architect families). Yes, there are some echos of the Fountainhead, but it’s superficial. The main character is uncompromising, but more complex, and certainly not a libertarian trope.
I am surprised these people had no idea or knowledge of Alexander Kluge's Brutalitaet in Stein (brutality in stone)
Three writers, yada yada yada struggling to find something intelligent to say. Their references? Venice Biennale, Bauhaus, Fountainhead, Megalopolis, etc... Give me a break.
Brutalitaet in Stein
I'm going to see it on Tuesday in 70 mm. The last long film I watched was Killers of the Flower Moon as a big fan of Scorsese's storytelling.
The New Yorker has a full profile of Brady Corbet:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/23/brady-corbet-profile
Excerpts:
—To imagine László’s aesthetic sensibility, [Judy Becker] had consulted the work of Marcel Breuer, another Hungarian modernist immigrant of Jewish extraction, and, more darkly, immersed herself in the architecture of concentration camps, a built environment with which Tóth would have been intimately familiar.
—The next day was November 5th, the election. Corbet had spent the better part of a decade thinking about the nineteen-fifties, the same era hailed as a beacon by the once and future President. It had not escaped his attention that, in December, 2020, with a month left in office, Trump had signed an executive order to promote “beautiful” federal architecture: in other words, classical buildings that harked back to antiquity and the Renaissance. Among the structures identified as “unpopular” and “unappealing” were the Hubert H. Humphrey Department of Health and Human Services Building and the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, both designed by Breuer. For Corbet, the immigrant and artistic experiences are intimately linked. “They don’t want us here,” Tóth seethes to Erzsébet. “They” felt the same way about provocative buildings, paintings, sculptures, films. Some still do.
And their review is detailed and favorable:
—“The Brutalist” is an American epic of rare authority, and what gives it its power, I think, is what lends some buildings their fascination: a quality of dramatic capaciousness and physical weight, a sense that what we’re seeing was formed and shaped by human hands.
I'm looking forward to this.
"It rejects ornamentation and architectural devices designed to make its inhabitants feel comfortable"
A: Brutalism didn't reject ornamentation, it's structural exhibitionism was the ornament, and B: Why wouldn't you want to make the inhabitants feel comfortable? Thus the paucity of built examples.
That said, there are some which don't make for great pedestrian streets but are still fun to look at.
this building (Geisel library) was fun to be in too. I went for the Khan (Salk institute) and was thrilled to find this and a handful of other gems on campus. Also cool that the Geisel library is one of the star's of Rainbow's end, written by the prescient SF writer Vernor Vinge (about life in a super AR world set in 2025 where everyone sees a different reality but somehow that is not the actual problem).
Here's another great building on the campus, which I would also call Brutalist but not sculpturally. California, despite its over reliance on the car, is an incredible place. The food, people, and places.
What makes The Fountainhead so unsatisfying, galling in fact, is Ayn Rand's airy libertarianism and the cheesy architecture. Neither her ideas, if they can be called that, nor Roark's creative spirit are anchored in anything. (I liked Gary Cooper, however, who lifted the movie as far as it could rise.) The Brutalist, however, looks to be grounded in history, culture, and experience. And I am quite curious to see Tóth's work, how it reflects contemporary trends, and how it is presented. Designing work for a general audience, however, is a challenge.
Brutalist—the word is suggestive on many levels, and I wonder to what extent it applies to Van Buren in a completely different sense.
So a movie loosely based on Marcel Breuer pretends that Bauhaus architects had a hard time in America because OH NO CAPITALISM like socialist Howard Roark was a thing. In reality they were very successful, more in American than anywhere. So already the movie is wildly false.
Maybe one day schools will teach basic design history. Yes, modernism came from America, not Europe. Now they can’t even teach basic math and reading much less history.
The podcasters are loathe to admit design visionaries are a thing, when the fountainhead was heavily FLW inspired. Turns out they don’t know much history either.
Brutalism fell out of favor because it wasn’t well-maintained. The same happened to Penn Station. Classical buildings become less popular when they are associated with dirt and crime. It happens with all styles.
Speaking of history, there's Hollywood's version of heroic European Modernism and here's the public's reaction when it became clear how that vision was working out a mere15 years later.
How can one person be wrong in every statement and still have the audacity to keep showing up? Eamez you be illin.
"HERE WE GO"—on the sign.
If you want a movie of our times, the Age of $ and Fluff, we should get one based on developer Stephen Ross and Thomas Heatherwick. (I may have trouble sitting through it.)
Tóth is not going to provide a typical modern architect of the time, nor, I suspect, Van Buren the typical corporate mindset and relationship to architecture. We're looking back to see something now, and I'm really curious what.
I finally saw the film Quintin Torrantino's Vista Theatre in LA. Thank you, Paul's piece here is very well written.
the brutalist:
it is a gorgeous film. The acting is superb, masterfully location and production designed, shot and edited, musically composed, directed, and written. I watched nearly four hours of the movie minute by minute with no problem.
It portrays a Bauhaus-educated Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust, escaping Budapest and finding himself in America welcomed by the upsidedown and sideways Statue of Liberty. The film will reveal this symbology slowly.
Architecture in the movie is a background. As a device, an archetype of an architect is created by talented filmmakers in the most extreme level public tends to relate to architects.
I watched the film as a human story through the eyes and heart of an immigrant myself. Because of that, I almost shed some tears at certain parts of the film. The story might be difficult to take by some, but we all need to feel those feelings the storytellers tell in the Brutalist.
I recommend this emotion-packed story, expressed by all the characters developed masterfully. One needs to pay attention to every persona and detail in this, yes again, gorgeous film.
Hollywood needs to make stories like this, more than usual bim-boom-boom. I don't feel so good about the departure from our humanity to video game figures people are relating to at a personal level.
Im gonna watch it too on the big screen Orhan ... but probably not at the Vista. Not a great fan of Tarantino the person...
We watched it last night and it deserves everything that's been said about the remarkable cinematography and acting and that is enough reason to see it. The story itself is less perfect: the patron and his family are caricatures, the protagonist is complicated without ever seeming to have depth, and for a movie that is three and a half hours long the third act is somehow hurried and unsatisfying.
Miranda, Lamster and Lange aren't wrong in their criticisms, but harsher than I can be. Some knowledge of early modernism and post-war architecture makes the films shortcuts and tropes at least distracting if not as frustrating as the critics found them. But the movie isn't about architecture - it's a metaphor for the challenges around creative creation, or at least a particular and rare type of making of art films that for Fastvold and Corbet do very well.
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