Enduring a Brutal Age
What The Brutalist and our crumbling modernity reveal about survival.
Just in time for the Oscars, I got to see Brady Corbet’s Best Picture contender The Brutalist.
I’m not sure what I expected.
Perhaps Adrien Brody pontificating à lá Howard Roark about the uncompromising vision of modernity? Of bold tracking shots of concrete angles and curvilinear modernism?
There’s some of that in the film’s near three-and-a-half-hour runtime as it tells the story of fictional Hungarian architect, László Tóth. But its ambitions stretch further, touching on the immigrant experience, drug use, and the fraught dynamic between creator and patron—depicted in ways both violent and disturbing.
I’ve been fascinated with Brutalism since grad school.
My colleague Sam Wetherell schooled me on the political importance of the architectural movement one afternoon over turkey sandwiches as we sat on the ledge of a traffic circle behind Dwinelle Hall in Berkeley.
The raw, functional form of concrete, Sam explained, reflected an optimism of the pre- and post-war era, a belief that man could be directed toward his better angels, and that even the working class should be afforded the grace of space, movement, and leisure.
Brutalist and modern designs on both sides of the Atlantic sought to reshape economies and societies, reimagining industrial estates, shopping precincts, and apartment blocks with concrete, glass, and steel. The designs were functional, even severe, but they were spacious, usually featuring numerous walkways and airy communal areas.
If you’re interested in this history—connecting design, urban space, and politics—you should read Sam’s book Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain. (Sam also has a new book on the history of Liverpool available this July.)
While living in London, I explored this architecture on foot.
I had some friends who lived on the south side of town far from my place—a lengthy trip by public transit. A few times, after a late night at the pub, I crashed on the couch in their Peckham flat, rather than stitch together night buses back to my distant attic room in Hampstead.
In the morning, while others slept off their hangovers, I’d step outside, slightly nauseous from the evening’s libations, for ten miles or so of running to sweat things out.
Trotting along an old canal path, I’d jog beneath bridges, their corners scoured from ropes affixed to horses pulling freight on canal boats headed to Surrey in the 19th century.
My destination was Burgess Park where I’d run laps around the fields, free from the sputtering traffic of Southwark. Originally part of the London city grid, the park was developed into open space in the aftermath of the Blitz, part of the Abercrombie Plan for postwar redevelopment.
I was always struck by the large concrete towers on the horizon, as well as the colossal grey-brown walls of apartment buildings bounding the park.
One morning I snapped a photo of the Wendover building at the Aylesbury Estate, a massive Brutalist complex built between 1963 and 1977 to house London’s poorest families.
The estate exemplified the idealism of modernist housing design. Built to hold over 10,000 residents, walkways let people move across the sky between buildings, linking together separate blocks, while communal heating warmed apartments.
Unfortunately, like many progressive interventions into urban life, the ideal of planned housing proved problematic in practice. Conditions began to deteriorate in the 1980s as public disinvestment accelerated the vandalism, muggings, and drugs plaguing the housing complex. The estate continued to slide well into the 2000s.
Aylesbury became a symbol of urban decline, seized upon by neoliberals advocating for housing privatization and conservatives scapegoating its ethnic diversity. Tony Blair did his first public appearance as prime minister in front of Aylesbury, describing it as one of the “sink estates” that had trapped the English poor.
In 2014, Channel 4 went so far as to use the estate’s grit in a promotional video for the television station, reinforcing Aylesbury’s reputation as a concrete dystopia, a reputation residents disputed vigorously.
The estate is now being “regenerated,” a decades-long process of demolition and reconstruction. The Wendover building I photographed is now being demolished. Its final residents were moved out in 2024.
The Brutalist withholds view of the film’s central building until the final scene.
Even then it is shot in the gloom of night and the impression is one of suffocation. The concrete building’s interior is tomblike and oppressive. It’s high ceilings are not so much airy as alienating. I can’t even begin to figure out what function the freaky water room was meant to serve.
We learn in the epilogue horror was exactly the point. (Spoilers)
The Van Buren Institute was Lázló Tóth working through the trauma of the concentration camps: the building’s dimensions map precisely with those of Buchenwald, its corridors chart a transcendent connection with his wife who was separated from him in Dachau.
Left unstated is whether anyone would ever want to spend time in a community center serving as a metaphor for the Holocaust.
For me, though, the key scene sits in the second act in a conversation between Lázló and his patron, Harrison Van Buren. The wealthy industrialist asks Tóth why he is an architect and the Hungarian explains his work’s provocation and resilience:
“There was a war on, and yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived and are still there in the city.
“When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe have ceased to humiliate us, I expect 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 un-dammed, but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.”
Like the brutal slabs of Aylesbury, Tóth sees his work as a lightening rod for the sorts of culture war we’re experiencing today. And he is not afraid.
We are speeding into an age of anger and fear.
A period when the frailties of weak men will erode our deepest moral and political values, un-damming God-knows-what upheaval.
I don’t have answers. But I can implore you to start laying foundations for what sustains us: friendship, family, and community. Not the hollow corporate “community” of brand campaigns, of sociability co-opted by companies for marketing initiatives.
No.
I mean the relationships built with those near and around you, and with those distant spirits who share your loves: the concrete solidarity of kinship, broadly defined, that shores up the structure of our health, creativity, and prosperity. Such is the foundation to make the small beginnings of effort toward big things.
For what else can we do?
In case you missed it
and I went live to discuss the running boom, independent running media on Substack, and more. I learned a lot!
I never expected to read about Aylesbury ever again, but if someone told me I would read about it today, I'd have guessed it would be your fault.
…war as architecture…the hidden waves of resistance are everywhere waiting to be read, seen, believed in, wished upon…hidden physical contexts dead out in the open…its amazing how much a space can shape us…i feel different in every city…in every part of a city…