This week an Oscar-tipped film, The Brutalist, opens in Britain. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-plus saga in which Adrien Brody plays the brilliant but tormented fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor struggling to make a life in the postwar US. He’s a singular, solitary, single-minded genius, always working alone, in the mould of Gary Cooper in the 1949 film of Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead and Adam Driver in last year’s Megalopolis. Tóth is, like them, forever fighting the misunderstanding and spite of mean-spirited adversaries. He would rather shovel coal (as Cooper’s Howard Roark drilled stone in a quarry) than compromise his principles.
The film’s title is a dramatic stage on the redemption arc of what was architecture’s most reviled style. Its makers evidently felt that the word would attract and intrigue audiences (while also carrying some ambiguity – there being a question in the film as to who is brutalising whom) and would be a fitting epithet for a man who, while complex and flawed, is a hero. To get an idea of how improbable this might once have seemed, imagine a film called The Former Post Office Chief Executive and Ordained Priest. There was a time, in the 1980s, when a writer in a national newspaper demanded that practitioners of brutalism be “taken out and shot”.
A brutalist, in the film’s version, is someone possessed of a vision so powerful that he will (almost literally) move mountains to achieve it. Tóth speaks sagely of a “hardcore of beauty” and the “inherent laws of concrete things”, and his work is said both to define his epoch and transcend all times. “Is there,” he gnomically asks, “a better description of a cube than that of its construction?” His architecture is not instantly likable – “concrete – it’s not very attractive”, says a sceptical contractor – but you’re left in little doubt that the judgment of history will vindicate Tóth.
Refusal to compromise, if not precisely this level of grandiosity, has been a feature of brutalism from the beginning. When Reyner Banham, critic and chief champion of the “New Brutalism”, wrote an essay about it in 1955, it was an architectural movement so nascent and tightly defined that it had one finished building to its name – a secondary school in Hunstanton, Norfolk, by the young architects Alison and Peter Smithson. But what brutalism lacked in numbers, it aimed to make up with conceptual and visual force: it was to possess ruthless logic and to embrace the rawness of the raw materials of building. Hunstanton is a spartan, severely rectangular work, its steel, glass, brick and concrete exposed inside and out, with visible pipes and conduits and a metal-panelled water tank rising like a blunt campanile above its transparent walkways.
It radiates wintry intellectual rigour, the opposite of what the Smithsons and Banham saw as the effete architecture of an older generation, incurably infected with an English addiction to the second-rate and the provincial. Brutalism, said Banham, was the work of “a younger generation to whom the given elements of the planning situation seemed to be social chaos, a world in ruins, the prospect of nuclear annihilation”. The movement was, like the slightly later theatre and fiction of the angry young men, belligerent.
Brutalism grew. It became the style of the huge council estates such as Park Hill and Hyde Park, draped on the hilly landscape of Sheffield, and of dramatic urban landmarks like the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. It reached Japan, continental Europe, the Soviet Union and the Americas. A bold and sculptural version emerged in the US, in buildings such as Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City apartment towers, twin 65-storey concrete corncobs on the Chicago River, and Paul Rudolph’s Temple Street parking garage in New Haven, Connecticut, a work of ancient Roman grandeur made for the age of the automobile. The term became looser, sometimes applied to architects who disliked it, such as the National Theatre’s designer, Denys Lasdun.
In the 1980s came reaction, with figures including Tom Wolfe and the then Prince Charles singling out brutalism for condemnation in their general onslaught on modernism. “A mildewed lump of elephant droppings,” said the latter of the brutalist Tricorn shopping centre in Portsmouth. The style’s name made it an easy target – these architects are actually proud to be brutal, went the attack. But, just as gothic and baroque were once terms of derision, so the wheel of fashion has turned back towards brutalism. English Heritage listed Park Hill as a historic building in the 1990s, and over the past decade or so, younger architects and writers have appreciated the confidence and vigour of brutalism, compared with our more cautious and compromised times.
A campaign to save Preston’s somewhat Rudolph-like bus station was successful. A flood of books came out with brutalism in the title, even though some of them were mostly about other kinds of architecture. You can buy brutalist-themed mugs and tea towels, and “brutalist” homes can sell at a premium. Rehabilitation is far from complete – many members of the general public and the media still detest brutalist buildings – but the style has come a long way.
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It has changed over time; indeed to call it something as superficial as a style rather than a movement is contentious. The Smithsons’s intention was that brutalism should be an intellectual attitude rather than a particular look – “ethics rather than aesthetics”, they said – but it became the latter, readily identified by its textured concrete and emphatic forms. Its guilty secret is that it is a luxury, expensive to build, and as the historian Barnabas Calder has pointed out, its hard-to-heat structures relied on an era of cheap energy that came to end with the 1970s oil crisis. For all that it is associated with council housing and the works of the welfare state, its greatest successes tend to be well-funded, well-maintained projects such as the Barbican development in London.
The film, directed by Brady Corbet, portrays a profligate version of brutalism. Tóth’s putative masterpiece is a money-no-object monument built on a hill on a multimillionaire’s estate, its construction an arduous and life-threatening endeavour. This is a Hollywood version of architecture, and the figure of the visionary architect who overcomes all obstacles is probably attractive to directors who see themselves in the same way.
The film ends with the 1980 Venice architecture biennale, which in fact was a moment when the rising style of postmodernism triumphed over what seemed to be the corpse of brutalism, here presented as a celebration of Tóth’s work. But never mind. This is a film that does no justice to the modesty of means that was part of the Smithsons’s original idea, but contains, if in highly exaggerated form, a truth about what brutalism became.