Perhaps the most famous Brutalist building in the United States is the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Brutalist architecture is characterized by raw concrete walls, imposing geometrism and repetition, reshaping space for the human collective and providing a site of modern living and life for the people.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building was voted the ugliest building in the U.S. in 2023. Perhaps it’s no surprise that director Brady Corbet uses the tensions between Brutalist and American visuals and ideals to unearth the tensions between the Jewish immigrant and artistic experience in the U.S.
In the film, The Brutalist, László Tóth is a Jewish immigrant, Holocaust survivor and architect. In the first act, “The Enigma of Arrival,” László arrives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Maybe this is the American Dream he should strive for: A shot of the Statue of Liberty upside down wavering in the sky and his friend Attila (Alessandro Nivola) who has changed his last name to assimilate. Still, Attila’s wife notes that Attila’s English is not quite like any American’s.
At the request of rich businessman Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), Attila and László renovate a library for the wealthy Harrison Lee van Buren (Guy Pearce). Harrison is initially surprised and horrified. But Harrison becomes invested in László’s work following praise from the architectural community, inviting László to his home and commissioning him to design a community center in honor of his late mother.
In the second act, “The Hard Core of Beauty,” the construction for the center is underway. Harrison’s connections have allowed László’s wife and niece, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), to come to the U.S.
The community center needs a gymnasium, a library and a chapel, but must be one and not four buildings, according to Harrison. As the project begins, the list of demands and objections grows. Why concrete, when there is something so ugly about it? The ceilings should be lower to cut costs. Will this building even work with the landscape of the American town below?
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More and more, László’s Brutalist piece juxtaposes a style of architecture meant to be minimalist and have collective-centered ideals — making space more equitable — with the money and capitalists financing it. This clash of ideals is further cemented by László’s own existence as he struggles to exist in his art and in America.
László understands the political and transformative power of architecture. When discussing the buildings he designed in Europe that he was forced to abandon during the Holocaust, he says, “When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.”
László struggles to balance his personal and architectural goals with the building he is being paid to design. I think this is most visible when a request is made to make the community center Christianity-oriented. László even asks: Wasn’t the chapel supposed to be for all faiths? But he must add a cross, so he does it by utilizing how the light interacts with his work. When the sun is in the middle of the sky, the shadows align so the light forms a cross in the center of the chapel. This use of light as a medium, a Brutalist technique, offers some agency for László. The defiant architectural style, each aspect he fights for being cemented into hard concrete, is a way for him to survive.
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On the other hand, Harrison views art as a status symbol. After receiving approval, he values the library. He wants the community center in his name as an example of philanthropy. He co-opts art meant for a social purpose for private ownership, focusing only on his public image. When two workers are injured by a train malfunction (of his company), he is more worried about the optics for his business rather than the lives of the people. He fires everyone on the project and puts it on hold.
Harrison rapes László in Italy when the two are going to collect marble for the building. He assumes ownership of László’s art through financing it, which blurs into an assumed ownership of László himself. Harrison’s dehumanizing treatment of Laszlo fueled by antisemitic views and capitalistic violence feels like a continuation of the dehumanization and violence Laszlo faced as a result of Nazism.
The second act ends with László’s wife, Erzsébet, confronting Harrison in front of his family, accusing him of being a rapist. Harry Lee violently drags her away after Harrison denies the accusation. But Harrison disappears, seemingly without a trace, an American enigma.
In the epilogue, “The First Architecture Biennale,” Zsófia speaks for László after his success at his exhibition, concluding: “It is the destination, not the journey.” Here comes the final nail in the coffin: After years of having his work co-opted by Harrison and his family, Zsófia erases his struggle for the sake of her speech, erasing his history and continuing the cycle of suffering and dispossession. But Zsófia also notes that the tall ceilings of László’s building were meant to evoke László and Erzsébet’s experiences in concentration camps, and the tunnels a way to connect them. Whether or not this was intended by László, the visual inability to detach such a horrifying, personal experience from this building is reflective of the inability to detach the human from their art. I cannot also help but interpret this film as an ode to human art and Brutalist architecture as a form of survival. The shots of geometric corners amidst a blue sky, tall and demanding of attention, are emblematic of an irremovable hard core of beauty evoking the raw human experience from a style with the collective people as its priority.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at [email protected].