“A mildewed lump of elephant droppings” is how King Charles, then Prince of Wales, described the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth after a visit to one of the UK’s most notable examples of brutalist architecture.
His verdict was typical of those who take issue with the modernist architectural movement, characterised by imposing forms of raw concrete, whose buildings still rank among the most lamented – and celebrated – structures in the country.
But if brutalism itself is divisive, The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic film about a fictional modernist architect in postwar America is anything but.
The story of László Tóth, a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust turned brutalist designer, has become one of this year’s most anticipated releases. It has already won three Golden Globes (including a best actor award for Adrien Brody), been nominated for nine Baftas, and is considered a frontrunner for the Oscars.
Architecture experts hope the story, which explores trauma, ambition, survival – and architecture – will help renew an interest in Britain’s own brutalist heritage and encourage people to protect buildings that are under threat.
“The film has generated a lot of interest amongst professionals and lovers of postwar architecture,” said Mary Keating, a co-founder of the Brutiful Action Group, which seeks to defend Birmingham’s brutalist heritage.
“Here in Birmingham, Save Smallbrook – a coalition of local organisations who came together to save Smallbrook Ringway Centre from demolition – will do a talk before one of the film screenings about how Birmingham responded to brutalism, including the work of local architects John Madin and James Roberts.”
Historians of the style believe “brutalism” is an unfortunate label, bringing with it negative connotations that obscure its eminence.
The Brutiful Action Group says the public have long been influenced by the use of phrases such as “1960s concrete monstrosity”. In 2020, Donald Trump targeted brutalist architecture by demanding all future federal buildings be designed in a “classical architectural style”.
This, combined with considerable pressure from Britain’s overheated property market, is putting an increasing number of brutalist buildings in the UK at risk. In Birmingham alone, a number of distinctive and irreplaceable buildings have been lost, including the Post and Mail, the central library, and the NatWest Tower.
Late last year, the artist Tracey Emin helped win a fight to protect Margate’s famous Arlington House tower block from redevelopment. “The sites are often a developer’s dream for making loads of money,” Keating said.
Otto Saumarez Smith, an architectural and urban historian, and the author of Boom Cities, said he was excited to see the film. “If it opens people’s eyes to the beauty and diversity of the architecture of the period, it will be marvellous,” he said.
“The history of how immigrants fleeing nazism brought the culture of modernism to new places is dramatic and important. Brutalist architecture, because of its powerful formal qualities, looks good on film, but it has often been used as a proxy for urban squalor and crime, arguably starting with Stanley Kubrick’s use of the Thamesmead estate [in south-east London] in A Clockwork Orange.”
Such portrayals do little to help people understand the diversity and beauty of architecture in the period, he added, “and often unfairly anathematise the experience of people living in these places”.
According to Barnabas Calder – the head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster, the largest architectural history research grouping in the UK, and the author of Raw Concrete – there has been much positive buzz about the film in the sector.
It is not the first time brutalism in film has fed into conservation arguments. “We lost the ‘Get Carter car park’ [in Gateshead], but if anything could have saved it, it was Michael Caine heaving Bryan Mosley over its parapet,” he said.
He emphasised that only a very small proportion of the UK’s brutalist buildings had any kind of heritage protection. “And even Grade II*-listed buildings can be massively altered (like Balfron Tower) or largely demolished (like the Commonwealth Institute) – harmful actions that would not have been countenanced with older listed buildings”.
The Brutalist, Calder said, was probably the biggest film since The Fountainhead (1949) to focus on an architect as central character, “and that, despite Gary Cooper’s brilliance, was compromised by Ayn Rand’s gruesome politics”.
There are environmental reasons to protect brutalist buildings too, he added. “The easiest big win in carbon reduction is avoiding demolishing and replacing a building that could instead have been retrofitted to reduce its energy hunger for heating and cooling. For a large brutalist building, this can save over 100,000 tonnes of CO2 in a single decision.”
Catherine Croft, the director of the C20 Society, which campaigns for the preservation of architectural heritage from 1914 onwards, said while having the word brutalist associated with Hollywood success and glamour would be beneficial in counteracting the word’s negative connotations, and help renew public interest in the style, it was important to note that the film was not totally accurate.
Tóth’s magnum opus in the film – a minimalist concrete structure with a skylight – is built to represent the barracks of the concentration camps where he and his wife were imprisoned, and the idea of freedom.
“His work is not typical of brutalist architecture in Britain or the US,” Croft said. “Brutalism wasn’t the result of traumatised émigré architects, and to suggest most of it was is a good story but not exactly a historically accurate one.”
Eddy Rhead, a co-director of the Modernist Society and co-editor of the Modernist magazine, said: “The title is slightly misleading because I don’t think brutalist architecture features heavily in the film.
“But the exodus of talented architects and designers to the UK and US during the Nazi era is a compelling story and that narrative is more important to the film than it being simply about an architect.”
Brutalist Gems
Birmingham New Street signal box
John Bicknell and Paul Hamilton for British Railways, 1966
Birmingham has treated its brutalist heritage with unparalleled contempt, razing the magnificent inverted ziggurat of its central library, and now condemning the acclaimed Ringway Centre to the wrecking ball. But one sturdy sentinel refuses to budge. Arriving in the city by train, passengers are greeted by the sculptural heft of one of the country’s finest brutalist gems. The New Street signal box stands like a miniature castle, keeping watch over the tracks. Wrapped with concrete ribs, like a stiff corduroy cloak, and punched with projecting openings, it is a powerful foil to the tacky dross that has been built all around it ever since.
Dollan baths, East Kilbride
Alexander Buchanan Campbell, 1968
Scotland produced some of the most original works of brutalism in the UK, perhaps none more so than the remarkably futuristic Dollan baths in East Kilbride. Shaped like a series of arching parachutes, its parabolic concrete shell roof bulges above the surrounding grassy landscape, pulled tautly into shape by zigzagging buttresses along either side. The first Olympic-sized pool in Scotland, its innovative shell structure even attracted visiting engineers from Russia during its construction, and it has much more in common with experimental Soviet structures than municipal facilities of a Clydeside new town. A 2011 renovation added a cheesy entrance canopy, but thankfully didn’t destroy this inventive marvel.
Preston bus station
Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson, Building Design Partnership, 1969
Preston bus station was the largest of its kind in Europe when it opened in 1969. It looks like a beached ocean-liner, with a stack of immensely long car-parking decks edged with crisply curved concrete panels, whose ribs glint in the (occasional) sunshine, casting graphic shadows across the facade. Threatened with demolition as recently as 2014, a careful renovation by John Puttick has since brought it back to its original dazzling state. It is a model for how public opinion can be shifted, and it topped a local newspaper poll for the best building in the city.
Clifton Cathedral, Bristol
Percy Thomas Partnership, 1973
Rising above leafy Georgian streets like a jagged wigwam from another planet, Clifton Cathedral is one of the most striking modernist churches in the country, crowned with arguably the most original spire. Three vertical concrete planks thrust upwards from its octagonal conical roof, bringing light down into a space of dynamic, visceral intensity. Described in the Pevsner guide as a “sermon in concrete”, the building is a masterpiece of mineral origami, with an interior of great beams and planes criss-crossing overhead, forming a star above the baptismal font. It was built for only £600,000 – the ecclesiastical bargain of the 1970s – and a meticulous 2018 renovation by Purcell has ensured its longevity.
University of East Anglia
Denys Lasdun and Partners, 1968
Standing as the most complete realisation of an entire brutalist universe, it’s not hard to see why the dramatic campus of the University of East Anglia has been such a popular filming location for sci-fi movies. Featuring in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, it is a thrilling place of concrete ziggurats rising from rolling green hills, connected by elevated snaking walkways and switchback staircases. Designed by Denys Lasdun, the architect of the National Theatre, it is the most accomplished expression of a university as an entirely self-contained city, with everything just a five-minute walk away.
Oliver Wainwright
