The Brutalist, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold's towering film about the life of a Hungarian Jewish architect living in America after World War II, was nominated for 10 Oscars this year, including Best Picture, and Best Actor for an outstanding Adrien Brody as the titular brutalist, László Tóth. On the night, the film won three of the coveted golden statuettes: Best Actor, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography.
In the film, Tóth is a talented architect who trained at the Bauhaus. He has recently escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, and is now seeking a better life in the US for himself and his wife, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones). It is here that he meets Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an industrialist who sees something exceptional within Tóth's work and commissions him to design a vast community centre.
Throughout the film's 200-minute runtime, we see both Tóth's minimal, Bauhaus-inflected furniture designs, and subsequently the imposing concrete and marble of the immense, brutalist architectural project that the story revolves around. It is a hugely ambitious project that constitutes the pinnacle of design greatness that Tóth chases, as well as encompassing the great trauma and suffering that he has endured, and continues to wrestles with, both professionally and personally.
Brutalism as a style of architecture has experienced something of a reappraisal in recent years, its significance now recognised where some of its buildings were reviled the first time around. Luxury flats in blocky concrete behemoths such as Trellick Tower or the Barbican estate are now highly sought after. The character of László Tóth, though he feels very grounded in reality and history, is in fact fictional. The primary inspiration for the character was architect and designer Marcel Breuer, but Mies van de Rohe, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Frank Lloyd Wright are other names that Corbet has mentioned in relation to the real-life influences on the character and his designs.
Below, discover a curated edit of pieces for the home that capture the spirit and aesthetic of the architecture and design seen in the film.
