Cleveland’s connection to “The Brutalist”
Cleveland
Adrien Brody on a press tour for “The Brutalist.” Photo: Dominik Bindl/Getty Images
In the Oscar-nominated film “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian Jewish architect who has survived the Holocaust and is struggling to rebuild his life in Pennsylvania.
Why it matters: The fictional character László Toth is a composite of multiple Jewish artists in the Bauhaus movement. But Brody’s biggest inspiration was Hungarian modernist architect Marcel Breuer.
Catch up quick: Unlike Brody’s character, Breuer immigrated to the United States before World War II, thanks to the support of renowned architect Walter Gropius.
Zoom in: He also designed the Cleveland Museum of Art’s education wing, which opened in 1971, and caught the eye of the Cleveland Trust Company, which sought to expand its headquarters downtown.
What happened: Breuer initially planned two 29-story towers to frame the historic Cleveland Trust rotunda on Euclid Avenue and East 9th Street, but only one was ultimately built.
One fun thing: Breuer designed famous tubular steel chairs still widely used today.
🍿 What we’re watching: “The Brutalist” and “Anora” look like they may be big winners at the Academy Awards on Sunday, but can Brody fend off Timothée Chalamet to earn his second Oscar?
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The Brutalists
CATEGORY
Architecture
DATE
02.25.25
PRODUCER
99pi
From Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men to Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, from Charles Bronson in Death Wish to Luke Wilson in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, there have been countless architect characters onscreen.
It’s not that watching someone design a building is particularly cinematic. But it is a romantic profession that lends itself to high drama and strained metaphors. In that tradition, one of this year’s Oscar frontrunners is a film that’s ostensibly about architecture (but is really about being a movie director): The Brutalist. The story follows a fictional Hungarian architect named Lázló Toth, who designs a community center in the titular style.
In this episode, we explore what it means we talked with Mark Lamster, who’s the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, editor of a book called Architecture and Film, and teaches an “Architecture on Screen” course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Architect Movies on Letterboxd
The Brutalist is now available on VOD
László Tóth is the fictional titular architect of The Brutalist, seen here trying to convince the community of the merits of concrete
The Fountainhead is partly about architecture, but mostly a vehicle for characters to spout Ayn Rand’s libertarian ideological nonsense
In Hannah & Her Sisters, Sam Waterston plays a hip, urbane intellectual who charms Carrie Fisher and Dianne Wiest by giving them an architectural tour of New York
The Brady Bunch’s architect patriarch Mike Brady is not equipped to handle the demands of his new client Beebe Gallini
If you walked out of The Brutalist feeling Brute-curious, 99PI is here to fill you in on the context the movie left out.
No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who turned cat-stroking into a thing that super-villains do, and then there’s Goldfinger—Bond’s flashiest nemesis. Fun fact: the author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming, named Goldfinger for a real person—an architect by the name of Ernő Goldfinger, who made giant, hulking, austere concrete buildings. Fleming disliked these buildings so intensely that he immortalized their architect as a villain in pop culture.
And Fleming wasn’t the only critic. Goldfinger’s buildings were decreed “soulless.” Inhabitants claimed to suffer health problems and depression from spending time inside them. Some of Goldfinger’s buildings were vacated because occupants found them so ugly. Yet, architects praised Goldfinger’s buildings. His Trellick tower, which was once threatened with demolition, has been awarded landmark status.
This divide—this hatred from the public and love from designers and architects, tends to be the narrative around buildings like Goldfinger’s. Which is to say, gigantic, imposing buildings made of concrete.
Some people refer to this building style as “Brutalist architecture,” but Brutalism is a big, broad label that’s used inconsistently in architecture, and architects tend to disagree on a precise definition of the word. Furthermore, the word “brutalism” has intense connotations, even though it’s not actually related to “brutality.” The word comes from the French “béton brut,” which means raw concrete.
Lots of folks, beyond the creator of James Bond, love to hate these concrete buildings. Their aesthetic can conjure up associations with bomb shelters, Soviet-era, or “third-world” construction, but as harsh as it looks, concrete is an utterly optimistic building material.
Around the 1920s, concrete was seen as being the material that would change the world. The material seemed boundless—readily available in vast quantities, and concrete sprang up everywhere—on bridges, tunnels, highways, sidewalks, and of course, massive buildings. Concrete has become the second-most consumed product in the world. The only thing we consume more of than concrete is water.
Concrete presented the most efficient way to house huge numbers of people, and government programs all over the world loved it—particularly Soviet Russia, but also later in Europe and North America.
Philosophically, concrete was seen as humble, capable, and honest—exposed in all its rough glory, not hiding behind any paint or layers. Concrete structures were erected all over the world as housing projects, courthouses, schools, churches, hospitals—and city halls.
In the late 1950s and early 60s, Boston was plagued by a loss of manufacturing jobs and white flight to the suburbs. For decades the Massachusetts capital had the highest property taxes in the nation and almost no new development. So Boston set an agenda to make the city great again by erecting big, soaring, modern buildings made of concrete. And, though some of these buildings were celebrated, others were despised.
When Boston City Hall was built in 1968, critics were put off by the concrete style. It was called “alienating” and “cold.” And since it was a government building, this criticism became impossible to remove from politics. Boston City Hall became a political pawn as mayors and city council members vied for public support with promises to tear it down.
But tearing down Boston City Hall has never come to pass. Doing so would take an incredible amount of effort and money. And so, government officials have largely chosen to ignore the building. This “active neglect” happens with a lot of concrete buildings—they are intentionally unrenovated and uncared for which only makes the building more ugly, and then more hated, and then more ignored. It’s a vicious cycle wherein the public hate of a building feeds itself.
When people built these mammoth concrete structures, no one really thought about maintenance, because they seemed indestructible. In the early days of concrete people assumed it was an everlasting material that wouldn’t require any further attention. This has not proven true. But, it can be hard to tell when concrete needs repairing since its decay is not visible on the surface.
Concrete deteriorates chemically, from the inside out. Part of this has to do with the metal rebar reinforcements that help to hold up most concrete buildings. The rebar can rust, and this degradation can lead the concrete to fracture.
But despite their unpopularity, tearing down these concrete structures is probably not the answer. The process is costly and wasteful. We can adapt these buildings to make them greener, more appealing places to be. And the best way to break the cycle of active neglect may be to love these concrete brutes in all their hulking glory. As with any art form—whether opera or painting or literature—the more you know about it the more you appreciate it. This is especially true of concrete buildings.
Architecture students appreciate them because they know that concrete requires a great deal of skill and finesse to work with. Every little detail has to be calculated out in advance because once the concrete is poured, there’s no going back to make adjustments.
Aside from the interesting design challenges concrete poses, the material itself can be subtly beautiful.
We call the city a “concrete jungle” to talk about the artificiality of the urban landscape, but concrete can actually be a very natural expression of the environment. What we think of as a homogenous texture is actually rich and diverse, when you consider it closely.
Concrete’s color and texture can be dictated by local climate, local earth, and local rock. Concrete can also be an expression of local style and custom. For example, British concrete has big, thick textured chunks of rock, while Japanese concrete is fine and smooth.
But the beauty of concrete architecture might be the most apparent when you can observe the buildings like pieces of sculpture—without having to actually live and work in them which brings in concrete’s surprising ally—photography.
Concrete looks good in photographs. It provides a neutral background to bring out people’s skin tones, or the color of their clothing. Fashion photographers discovered this first, but in recent years, pockets of the internet started to appreciate these concrete buildings.
Photography is allowing a new audience to appreciate these buildings for their strong lines, their crisp shadows, and increasingly, the idealism they embody.
In the words of Adrian Forty, author of Concrete and Culture:
[Concrete buildings] represent a set of ideas about the state of the world and what the future was imagined to be that we want to preserve. We should remember what people were thinking 50 years ago. If we tear these buildings down, we will lose all of that.
Back in the 1960s, Victorian-style buildings were considered hideous and impossible to repair. We were tearing batches of Victorians down to erect big concrete buildings. But some Victorians were saved—and today, some of them are considered treasures.
Concrete architecture now finds itself at an inflection point: too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. And a small but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see.
Maybe, with a little time, we’ll come around to love these hulking concrete brutes.
This episode was produced by Roman Mars, along with Martín Gonzalez, who also mixed this episode. Music by Swan Real and Martín Gonzalez.
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‘The Brutalist’: Guy Pearce Weighs In On Van Buren’s Fate
Guy Pearce as Harrison Lee Van Buren in ‘The Brutalist’
The Oscars are now less than 48 hours away, and while this year’s race has felt quite hard to predict, The Brutalist and Conclave are predicted to win the most statuettes on Sunday night, according to Variety.
Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones are all nominated for their performances in the three-and-a-half-hour long historical epic. In the second part of the film titled The Hard Core of Beauty, Felicity Jones’ character, Erzsébet confronts Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) about the fact that he raped her husband. The long sequence shot takes place in front of Van Buren’s family and friends during a dinner and rapidly takes an extremely violent turn.
Van Buren’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn) attacks Erzsébet and drags her on the floor. The guests leave the house, in shock, and suddenly, we realize that Harrison Lee Van Buren is gone. His children look for him everywhere, but the man simply vanished and what happened to him is a question left unanswered for the spectators as well. While many theories have surfaced, the main one is that Van Buren killed himself.
I asked Pearce if he had a theory of his own, or if he prefers to leave it a mystery. He said, “The point is that everybody can have a theory and if I’m to be genuine, I don’t really have a theory because it was made clear to me early on, that for Van Buren to be reduced to nothing at the end, he would essentially evaporate, disappear. The audience is going, ‘Hang on a second, he seemingly had all the presence and the power, and now he’s gone? What does that actually mean in itself ?’ That’s a better concept than thinking whether I think he killed himself or ran off to book himself in therapy for the next 10 years. That undermines the point of him just vanishing and everyone in the audience saying ‘God, I wonder what happened to him!’”
‘The Brutalist’
He added: “It’s kind of the opposite of a happy ending, where you are satisfied. If you are not satisfied, it’s like a child being bored, it’s good for the child to be bored, it forces them to use their imagination.”
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Van Buren might have disappeared, however, Pearce shared a few behind the scenes secrets regarding the filming of this entire sequence, including where he actually had to hide when everyone goes looking for his character.
He said, “It was one shot from the moment Felicity arrives, she comes in, confronts me, the camera moves around her, it becomes ugly, she gets dragged out of there, then when Joe goes back into the room and I’m gone, of course I had to be gone somewhere while we were filming. So I’m literally hiding behind a chest of drawers in the corner of the room, we all had to scatter and hide. So, for our story, you go ‘Where did Van Buren go?’ but the actor is literally hiding in the corner, kneeling down like this, hoping they can’t see me.”
Pearce also praised Brady Corbet’s work and his vision for this scene and said, “But to go back to Brady’s style, the way he filmed her profile for so long in that scene, there’s a slightly voyeuristic feeling to the scene, so I feel like the audience probably feel ‘Oh God, I’m in the room, it’s awful.’’’
Jones is a true force in this sequence and while in the film, her character is physically diminished most of the time, there is so much power in the way she literally stands in front of this family and holds them accountable for their actions, especially in a language that is not her mother tongue. Jones said she felt that there was something almost mystical about Erzsébet, and spoke on her performance during this crucial scene.
She said, “There was so much to get right on that one long shot, the stakes could not have been higher. My goodness, the apprehension before that scene! But we all thought about it so much, I knew the scene inside out, back to front. Joe dragging Erzsébet in her seeming one moment of triumph, it’s fueled with so much that moment. We were just fortunate that it all came together in that first take, or perhaps it was the second take, I can’t remember.”
Felicity Jones in ‘The Brutalist’
Pearce added, “We were aware of the effect this scene would have, the idea of Joe kicking out that walking frame that she has, and her falling on the ground, it’s so horrific. We talk about violence in movies, and we see people being shot at, and we become kind of numb to that, because it’s sort of unrealistic. But the idea of a woman who is kind of crippled, or is struggling physically, to have the one and only thing that is supporting her, kicked out from underneath her is so vile and hideous. And of course Felicity is amazing, she is a really terrific actress, wonderful. Not that she needs me to say that!”
Brody also shared his view on the decisive scene and said, “It’s a wonderful moment, Felicity does such a beautiful job in this film. I love how in spite of her disability, through the hardships she faced during the war, she is so full of strength and offers a pillar of support for László, who even if he is standing, is very much a shell of the man that he was and could be, as a result of his own trauma and enduring struggles.”
He added: “The power of that love and dynamic is so moving to me, and very honest. That scene epitomizes the cost paid when standing up to the wrongs, and it’s about people being held accountable.”
The Brutalist is a tale of the American dream, with all that this implies in terms of struggles, disappointments and frustrations, which is summed up perfectly in one fundamental sentence delivered by Brody, “I’m not what I had imagined”, which can be applied to every single character in the film.
When speaking on this quote and how it applies to his character, Pearce said, “He’s not at all what he imagined, he knows that he’s juggling a lot of things and juggling internal stories. He wants to be more confident, more successful and more power. But he’s constructing all those things for himself, they’re all kind of fake in a way. But at the same time, I’m sure he believes in this old trope ‘Fake it till you make it’ and there is some value in that, I get that.”
He added: “But you can get caught out along the way, and that’s how you treat people and your behavior, that are going to have you come undone actually.”
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