The Brutalist: Imperial Expression Through Architecture

America has entered a colonization renaissance. Amidst the flurry of our current President's Executive Orders was a somewhat odd attack on building design. Brutalist architecture has been a recurring interest of the far right, with a 2020 Executive Order calling out in particular the Office of Housing and Urban Development. Built in 1968 under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and designed by Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian immigrant who studied at Bauhaus, it stands as a monument to an America the current administration would rather forget, and a design philosophy that Tucker Carlson said was invented "not to uplift, but to oppress.”

And while you don't have to hand it to him, I think he has a point. Brutalist architecture and the immigrant experience are on the surface, but the film is truly about homesteading, occupation, and the space buildings take from nature and other people. Lazslo Toth escapes the horrors of Hungary under the USSR, shown clearly by the torture of Zsofia, his niece and wife's caretaker, in the opening scene. He lives the "American Dream" as a dock worker swept into prosperity. But what would be a happy ending arrives before intermission and only foreshadows decline. 

The titular brute is not modeled on Breuer's life, nor any single person: he's an amalgamation of several Bauhaus graduates, including at least one Nazi collaborator. But the Odyssean journey Toth endures is never about his craft or the beauty held within it. The film stays true to its post-WWII backdrop; how does design define reconstruction? The audience is challenged over the course of three hours to watch this man build both a new life escaping fascism and a grand mausoleum for a wealthy capitalist. 

Once Toth's character is established, he is surreptitiously discovered by Harrison Lee Van Buuren.Van Buuren's exorbitant wealth is put on display for a man who just left a pornographic theater. Between dialogue we step into Toth's gaze, always on the material trinkets adorning the house and partygoers.  He is spruced up for the dinner party to tell the story of Erzebet, his wife, who is stuck in their home country. And to his surprise, his wife's salvation sits next to him; a lawyer with ties to the federal government that can expedite her emigration. His immediate gratitude begins the abusive relationship between him and Van Buuren's empire. 

Van Buuren's excess is laundered through a monument and community center dedicated to his late mother, but fondness for his family is never the highlight of his stories; it is always a background for success and profit. Instead of speaking well of the only family he knew growing up, he tells Toth a story about financially abusing his grandparents. This is the true reason for constructing his legacy: an expression of power directed towards those who have hurt him. But Toth's ideals, while similarly motivated by injustice, are represented in both the medium and the message. His vision to change the world requires Van Buuren's resources. His aesthetic philosophy is the expression of humanity outside of politics: “Is there anything more descriptive of a cube than its construction?"

"When the terrible recollection of what happened in Europe ceases to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood. I already anticipate a communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube's shoreline."

He then espouses romantic ideals that keep his art alive: his creation is in defiance of a totalitarian government. But at its core is inspiration, not aggression. Buildings stand to provoke those who would tear them down in fear and anger just as much as the people who would carry the revolution forward. 

All Van Buuren can muster, however, is admiration for the producer. He may understand the power of his words, but his only aim is to own the means of production. His imperialist ideals are never more apparent, and the association is rooted in historical fact. While Bauhaus shuttered its doors in 1933, a student of Klee named Franz Ehrlich went on to use his skills to assist the Third Reich, albeit under duress as a survivor of Buchenwald. After being released he continued to decorate and design houses for the empire, and he stayed in East Germany to help with reconstruction until his death in 1985. At least two students of Brutalism used it as a tool of oppression by designing gas chambers for the Nazis. 

The second half of the movie opens with construction on the monument starting and then falling apart. Toth's family arrives and is confronted by harsh American realities. Zsofia, who had been assaulted by the younger Van Buuren in a previous scene, endeavors to start the movie's cycle anew. She is married, five months pregnant, and repatriating to Israel less than a decade after the Nakba. While this foreshadowing worked overtime, today Israel is also a bastion of Brutalist architecture, as shown in the epilogue. 

 At this point the themes cannot be ignored, but the movie takes great care to go to the heart of colonialism, both philosophically and geographically. The expedition Van Buuren and Toth take to post-Mussolini Italy to acquire Carreran marble is almost too on the nose. By now we've seen the aftermath of Toth's maniacal oversight: his family is falling apart and emotions overwhelm him during bouts of frustration. During the trip, Toth is lured by the beauty into a trap, and he is only fully disillusioned after Van Buuren's sexual assault. 

In the aftermath Laszlo confesses his hardships to Erzebet, his sickly wife. "We are nothing. We are worse than nothing." And she asks the question we all should be asking: "What has been robbed of you?". Her bravery in confronting the entire Van Buuren family is the only vindication we are allowed at the end of the film. 

The epilogue being an award show is a masterful execution of dramatic irony: in the middle of one of the most powerful colonial states Zsofia retells: “'Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia', he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Lazlo Toth made that bargain with a man who destroyed him. It cost his humanity. This bittersweet epilogue in the heart of colonialism is the end result of his journey through "American prosperity".  He began the journey as an unwilling contributor to capitalist structure. But Van Buuren's wealth, and by extension his own, will always be extracted from the ideals of the vulnerable. 

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