This post was originally published on artnews.com
Few can agree on whether Brutalist architecture looks nice, but seemingly everyone wants to weigh in on the matter.
In 2020, for example, US President Donald Trump targeted Brutalist architecture in an executive order that demanded that all future federal buildings be done in a “classical architectural style.” Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, that order said, “fail to satisfy” the requirements of that aesthetic. The next year, when Joe Biden became President, he undid that executive order, much to the relief of many architects.
Even before then, however, people couldn’t stop talking about Brutalism. “Brutalism Is Back,” read one 2016 headline for a story published by T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The movement has become the subject of viral tweets, much online discussion, and even a subreddit.
Brutalism is once again the matter of mainstream discourse with the release of The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour film about an exponent of the style named Lászlo Tóth. (Just like Lydia Tár, Tóth isn’t real, even as the film works hard to make him like a key figure of the postwar era.) The film has become a serious awards contender, having taken the top prize for dramas at the Golden Globes earlier this month, and an unlikely box office success.
But what is Brutalism, and why does it matter? Below is a guide to the movement.
What do Brutalist buildings look like?
Many Brutalist buildings make extensive use of concrete, which are utilized in large, unadorned, and spare structures. The Breuer building, the former home of the Whitney Museum on New York’s Upper East Side, counts as one of the defining buildings of the movement. Completed in 1966, it was designed by Marcel Breuer, who envisioned the structure as an inverted ziggurat. The building typifies Brutalism’s tendency toward minimalism and heavy, hard-edged forms—two things that have proven divisive with critics and the public alike, who have often found this aesthetic tough to admire.
When was Brutalism formed?
The answer to this question, like any other about Brutalist history, proves tricky, since not everyone tied to the movement particularly liked the name given to it. Still, most scholars agree that the tendency emerged sometime not long after the end of World War II. By that point, architects associated with the Bauhaus school and related movements that emerged from it had already begun placing an emphasis on functionalism, which prioritized utility over anything else.
Where did Brutalism’s name come from?
Le Corbusier, the influential Swiss architect who would ultimately design the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, ultimately birthed the term while creating the Unité d’habitation, a housing development in Marseille, France, that was completed in 1952. He described that building as “béton brut,” which translates from the French to “raw concrete.” He was referring not just to the materials but the rawness of their aesthetic. Once poured, the concrete finished so that it was smooth, flat, and largely rid of imperfections.
The Swedish architect Hans Asplund has also been commonly cited as a source for Brutalism’s name. He is thought to have used the word nybrutalism to describe the Villa Göth, a structure that he built for a Swedish pharmaceuticals CEO in 1949. That building, unlike many of the ones we now associate with Brutalism, was less reliant upon concrete than it was on brickwork. Still, its facade is harsh and imposing in a way that feels similar.
Who theorized Brutalism?
British architecture critic Reyner Banham is typically credited with having formalized the movement. In a 1955 essay for the Architectural Review, he praised the Brutalist style as something that hid nothing from its viewers. “Whatever has been said about honest use of materials, most modern buildings appear to be made of whitewash or patent glazing, even when they are made of concrete or steel,” Banham wrote. Brutalist buildings appeared otherwise, since they were so obviously composed of concrete, glass, and the like. As an example, he cited a school designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in the British town of Huntsanton.
What was the point of Brutalist architecture?
For many designers involved in the movement, Brutalist architecture was not meant as a provocation. Quite the opposite—the style was meant to hold nothing back from the public, showing laypeople that modernist architecture was in fact compatible with daily life. In that way, Brutalism aspired to bring the world toward a utopian ideal, a tendency that became particularly obvious as the style traveled beyond Western Europe.
In the former Yugoslavia, for example, Brutalist architects created residential blocks and hotels, among other structures, with an eye toward bringing society onto equal ground. While many hotels across Europe laid bare divisions, with ritzier ones meant for vacationing members of the elite, the Brutalist hotels in Yugoslavia were intended for just about everyone, regardless of ethnicity or class. The sameness of the facades was a reflection of the movement’s aspirations of egalitarianism.
Why so much concrete?
One reason Brutalist architecture took off was because of the relatively low cost of the materials involved. At a time when the destruction of World War II had left budgets stretched and cities decimated, concrete was readily available—it could be sourced in large quantities, and buildings that were heavily reliant on the material could be constructed quickly.
Why is Brutalism so controversial?
There is arguably no architectural movement more polarizing than Brutalism, and Trump is hardly the only person to have called styles derivative of Brutalism “ugly.” The reasons why typically rest on the unflattering look of it all: Brutalism is thought to be an eyesore, a relic of a different era far removed from our own. In 2024, NPR interviewed residents of Washington, D.C., about what they thought of the FBI’s Brutalist headquarters. One said, “I work right across the street from it, so I have to look at it every day that I’m in the office, and it’s just—it’s so ugly.” Another interviewee said that the building looked like “a prison with windows, just a concrete slab stuck in the middle of the city.”
Still, the movement has adherents who prize the Brutalist aesthetic for its honesty. “Frequently maligned, Brutalism remains my ideal arrangement not only for housing but also for living,” wrote journalist Alexander Nazaryan in a 2024 New York Times essay. He said that the Brutalist building in Soviet Russia where he was raised, in what was then known as Leningrad, instilled him with the belief that the aesthetic could bring about a “society more hopeful and audacious than our own.”
Where can you find Brutalist architecture?
Brutalism made its way all across the world, from Boston to Belgrade, and can now be found both of the world’s hemispheres. There are arts centers built in the Brutalist style, from London’s Barbican Centre to Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery, as well as housing projects, schools, government buildings, and more.
Did a real Brutalist inspire The Brutalist?
Lászlo Tóth, the architect played in Brady Corbet’s 2024 film by Adrien Brody, never existed, but some have noted parallels between this character and Marcel Breuer. Like Breuer, Tóth was born in Hungary and ultimately ends up in the United States. (Breuer left Germany in the 1930s amid the rise of the Nazis and became a US citizen in 1944; Tóth emigrates to the US sometime after World War II.) Like Breuer, Tóth is Jewish. And like Breuer, Tóth specializes in bulky, blocky architecture made of concrete.
The similarities between Tóth and Breuer largely end there—Breuer never worked produced a civic center–cum–cathedral for a rich Pennsylvanian, as Tóth ultimately does. However, Breuer did build a Bendectine monastery in Minneapolis, and Corbet has said one inspiration for the film was the antisemitism experienced by Breuer.
Why Brutalism, and not another architectural movement, for The Brutalist?
Corbet told RogerEbert.com this week that Brutalism was relevant to him because the style was still “pissing people off” today, citing Trump’s executive order. But Corbet also said another reason was the style’s honesty. Just as Tóth openly portrays himself to the world, so do Tóth’s buildings. The world, however, is not so willing to accept these structures, and neither is it willing to accept Tóth himself.
In that same interview, Corbet said, Brutalism is the “perfect visual allegory for exploring postwar trauma as it relates to postwar architecture.” What, exactly, that allegory signifies is a matter of debate. In the film’s much-debated epilogue, when Israel honors Tóth’s Brutalist structures at the first Venice Architecture Biennale, the architect’s niece informs onlookers that his buildings translate sights seen while interned at a concentration camp for a new audience. Yet this interpretation is not common among historians for real-life Brutalist architecture, and in the film, it is unclear whether Tóth personally believes this to be true, as he sits there silently.