How ‘The Brutalist’ Gave Architecture a Starring Role

T he hero of Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe-sweeping epic “The Brutalist” is a fictional mid-century architect named László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. In some aspects—he’s Hungarian, Bauhaus-trained and a proponent of tubular-steel furniture—Tóth recalls Marcel Breuer, the creator of the former Whitney Museum building where Sotheby’s will move its New York headquarters this fall. But that’s where the similarities end: Breuer left Europe in 1937 for a job at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, while Tóth, a concentration-camp survivor, comes to the US after the war with few means to restart his once-thriving architectural career.

A wealthy patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren, seems to be the way forward, first with a commission from his son to redo his library, and then with a much larger plan to create the Van Buren Institute, a community center and chapel. Production designer Judy Becker was tasked with bringing these projects to life. A longtime fan of Breuer’s work and Brutalist architecture in general, she drew on what she calls her “extensive inner library” of the genre, yet she tried to not stick too closely to any one architect’s work. “I wanted to avoid copying people,” she says. “I wanted to come up with something of László’s.”

When Tóth first lands stateside, he stays with his cousin, Attila, a furniture dealer whose shop is full of traditional American pieces. (In reality, Becker’s decorator sourced it all in Canada and had a crate shipped to the film set in Hungary.) Soon Tóth begins designing for Attila. “I had him starting off creatively impoverished,” Becker explains. “He remembers tubular-steel furniture, he makes that, and then he is adding to it from what he sees around him.” The webbing on a chair he creates is from a foldable beach chair in Attila’s home, and a desk he makes uses drawers taken from Attila’s stock. “That’s his first creative accomplishment after the war,” says Becker.

It’s through Attila’s store that Tóth gets the assignment to design Harrison Lee Van Buren’s library, in his country manor. Becker was immediately taken with the space, an old conservatory, and sat down to sketch. In her vision, Tóth installs swinging wooden panels against the library’s floor-to-ceiling windows, making the space suddenly modern and fresh. “In the library, he comes into his own,” Becker says. “It had to be a perfect moment of design so you start to see that he’s an artist, a genius in a sense.”

For the institute, which was the first of the film’s designs that Becker tackled, she turned not just to Brutalism, but also to Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando and earthworks artists like James Turrell. Becker gave the institute the form of a cross, which can only be seen from above, a reference, she says, to the “constant embrace of Christianity” forced on Tóth by his new employer and homeland. She took inspiration from such opposing sources as T-shaped layouts of concentration camps and Marcel Breuer’s Westchester Reform Temple, whose sanctuary was built in the form of a Star of David.

To depict the institute on film, the production team built certain sections, such as an underground staircase and some walls and entrances, and used existing buildings as stand-ins for others. A cement silo, for example, plays the role of the chapel. In other shots, we see a large-scale model they made of both the interior and exterior.

At the film’s end, the institute’s design is revealed to have hidden symbolic importance for Tóth. Becker says that for moviegoers watching the building go up, the secret isn’t obvious. But in her mind, someone entering the building would understand from the sense of imprisonment and freedom provoked by its deep, claustrophobic staircases and soaring ceilings. “You would know through what you were experiencing,” she says, “that there was some kind of message.”

There’s one other clear but subtle nod to Breuer that Becker slipped into the film: Barely visible is the furniture she created for Tóth’s lodgings—simple pieces of plywood, brick and cinder block. They were inspired by the interiors of Breuer’s famous Modernist home on Cape Cod. “I thought that László would be the last person to spend money on furniture,” she says. “And he would want to build it and design it himself.”