‘The Brutalist’ proves architecture can be as captivating as any art form
It’s a Tuesday night and I’m surrounded by cinemagoers who have turned out to see The Brutalist at the Barbican Centre, London’s most celebrated brutalist building. “This is great for architecture,” I think, as I tuck into my popcorn.
As an art form, architecture has a bit of a reputation problem. Its lengthy academic pathways can make studying it off-putting for many. In everyday life, people’s views on buildings are only sought when councils want feedback on development plans. We’re also accustomed to accepting mediocre, poorly designed environments, from badly lit supermarkets to dingy train stations.
To change this, the discipline needs to find ways to communicate why it is important – and why people should care. And that’s what The Brutalist does. By the time this column is on newsstands, director Brady Corbet’s feature will have likely picked up at least one of the 10 Academy Awards for which it has been nominated.
Other films have touched on architecture before: think Nora Ephron’s 1993 romcom Sleepless in Seattle, about a widower architect finding love, or Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning 2020 thriller set in a strikingly austere residence. The difference here is that Corbet uses both architect and architecture as his film’s protagonists. It tells the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian refugee loosely based on Marcel Breuer and Erno Goldfinger, who travels to the US after the Second World War and introduces brutalism to North America. When Tóth’s concrete walls frame a crisp, blue sky, the audience gasps; there’s a collective intake of breath when a modernist library is revealed in a renovation scene.
After the screening, I hear people walking out of the film discussing the trauma that Tóth experiences but also how the on-screen architecture affected them. I pass a couple talking about commissioning their own light-filled library. The Brutalist is a great PR campaign for architecture. It encourages us to demand more from our environments and reminds us to take delight in great buildings – not just at the cinema.
