Does architecture matter in the movie The Brutalist?

Buildings and cities have always been the back of large and small films, independent or mainstream; European, American, Latin American … but rarely a film unfailingly refers to architecture from the title. And much less get ten Oscar nominations (including best film) and wins the silver lion at the Venice Festival.

However, The brutalist is not a film about architecture.

It is a film about the epic of a Jew who flees from the concentration camps and migrates to the United States. It is a fiction in which Tóth, the protagonist (Adrien Brody, Oscar winner for best actor), he could have been inventor, writer or plastic artist.

But he is an architect and then in the story the Bauhausimmigration in the postwar period, the process of design of a project, the relationship with the principal and even the Venice Architecture Biennial.

In the world of cinema, criticisms have “very good” to “excellent”, perhaps because it is an overproduction, has the chiche of having been shot with views of the 50s and hard and hard (unnecessary) three and a half hours, with a 15 -minute interval that made me long for nineteen.

In the world of architecture there were media that rescued her, like Domus. “The brutalist not only shows some of the most shocking images of architecture and design ever taken to the screen, but also capture and masterfully portray what makes architecture an art form and how one can talk about itself, the world and the relationships between people through design,” said Gabriele Niola.

But most of the initiates in the discipline were outraged. “The brutalist is wrong in architecture,” published the Washington Post. “Perpetuates a colossal cliché,” said Financial Times. Three American critics gathered to record a podcast entitled “Why the brutalist is a terrible film.”

There they have against everything, from the architect’s stereotype as a lonely male genius to the Graphic Design of the credits inspired by the Bauhaus, as well as (Alerta Spoiler!) The idea that someone could project a community center and a chapel based on the design of a Nazi concentration camp.

Director Brady Corbet insists that the brutalist It is not “based on real events”although it could have been inspired by the biography of Marcel Breuerthe Hungarian Jewish architect who formed in the Bauhaus in Germany before emigrating to the US, where he became a defender of brutalism.

However, both Breuer and his contemporaries Walter Gropius y Mies van der Rohe They emigrated in 1937 – before World War II, not after, as in the film – and built very successful races. Breuer and Gropius were teachers in the Harvard University; and MIES, appointed shortly after arriving as director of the Illinois Technological Institute School of Architecturein Chicago. None went hungry as Tóth laszló.

For his part, Oliver Wainwright, the architecture and design critic of The Guardian, points out that, although Breuer’s most famous works are the old New York Whitney Museum And the Unesco headquarters in Paris, the architect began to be known in the United States thanks to curved tubular steel furniture, very similar to the one that Toth shapes in the first scenes of the film.

“It looks like a tricycle,” says the wife of the furniture owner (the protagonist’s cousin, the first to give him asylum). Almost the same thing that happened at the time with the Breuer’s chairs, which were compared with bicycle pictures.

The similarities do not end there. The abbey of San Juanone of Breuer’s less known projects is the main inspiration for the key work of the film. “In the early 50s, Breuer received the commission of designing a great brutalist church in a hill, such as Toth, only in Minnesota, instead of Pennsylvania, and customers were Benedictine monks, instead of a millionaire psychopathic industrialist,” says Wainwright.

Here the local contribution: Toth’s design for the church makes the sun’s rays, depending on the time of day, project the figure of a cross inside. The same finding of Nicolás Campodónico For the San Bernardo Chapel, in Córdoba.

But returning to the abbey of San Juan, during its construction there were agonies similar to those portrayed in the film, which are documented in the book Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, written by monk Hilary Thimmesh.

There they tell the community oppose Breuer for not being a Catholic, as in the film, where they also fear that the building ruins the landscape and complains that ““The concrete is not very attractive” Now, pumps of fame, the original building has been rediscovered and religious are hopeful with raising the necessary funds for maintenance.

Corbet has admitted that the book was its greatest narrative inspiration, but it is clear that it had to add dramatic components to the script, in my seeing little justified. (New spoiler alert!) Breuer He was not a heroine addict As Toth and although he may have come to discuss strong with the monks, none of them raped him after a night of excesses, as with the principal-Magnate-Mecenas of the architect who, by the way, had not delivered a single indication that that could happen.

Nor are the protagonist’s reactions very plausible, almost on the verge of madness for his fundamentalist devotion to projects; So much decides to peel coal instead of reviewing suggestions. Nor are the prarly one for a professional for the work in the work, nor the scenes pulling planes and papers everywhere.

It is in the end when it is verified that the film speaks more about the fictitious history of an American self-man-man that it did not become than the history of architecture. After failing the United States, Toth returns to Europe – his wife and his niece had already marched to Israel – and is honored in the Venice Biennial of 1980.

It is recognized with a retrospective sample entitled “Presence of the past”, to which the architect, already old, assists in a wheelchair. Just in the 80s, when the paraphernalia of the Postmodernism trying to bury the canons of the past. «