At a key moment in Brady Corbet’s film “The Brutalist,” architect Laszlo Toth, a tortured visionary played by Adrian Brody, berates another architect for revising his design of a career-making project in rural Pennsylvania: “Everything that is ugly, stupid, cruel, but most importantly, ugly … is your fault,” he roars.
The scathing scene is one reason the film lives up to its name (copious drug use, violence and sexual assault, and a nearly four-hour run time also help). But it’s realistic, said architecture Assistant Clinical Professor Ken Filler.
“Often there is a design architect and an architect of record on a project, and those disagreements really do happen,” said Filler. “But this film has definitely created a dividing line. Half of my friends who are architects really liked it, and half of them found it really frustrating.”
Like brutalism itself—a mid-century style of blocky, imposing concrete structures that is now often vilified—“The Brutalist” has evoked strong opinions within the architecture community over its depiction of the profession, which serves as a backdrop to the film’s gritty postwar immigrant story. Below, Filler and Adam Ainslie, a practitioner and lecturer with the University of Maryland’s Architecture Program, weigh in on its accuracies, overreaches and inspirations.
It reinforces the myth of the black-caped, solitary architect. Brody’s brooding character, a glowing cigarette dangling from his lips, seemingly creates the film’s signature project—a community center outside of Philadelphia—entirely solo with barely a draftsman in sight. The film’s depiction of an “individual, struggling genius” is a stereotype at which Ainslie bristles; architecture is a team sport, he said, with the most famous architects collaborating with dozens of people. “In reality I’ve never worked on a project alone,” he said. “It paints a weird picture of architects, and it's exactly what I don’t want any of my students to think.”
One of the inspirations for Toth has UMD ties. To bring the fictional protagonist to life, Corbet looked to several real-life Brutalist architects from that era, including the Philadelphia-based Louis Kahn, who often came to Maryland to serve on juries—and who dedicated the Architecture Program’s new digs (one of two Brutalist buildings on campus—the other being the Parren J. Mitchell Art Sociology Building) in 1973. “His experience as an immigrant turned American household name is emblematic of Lazlo's journey as well,” said Filler. “Kahn is a kind of mythic figure in architecture and architecture education, who we still study widely today.”
It cements the divisiveness of the style. Brutalism capitalized on new technologies like reinforced concrete and allowed Europe to quickly and economically rebuild after World War II. In the film, it enchanted Toth’s benefactor, played by Guy Pearce, while inciting the ire of the nearby town. Fast and cheap is also why it can be found across the United States, said Ainslie, whose firm was part of a reimagining of Brutalist buildings at the National Building Museum last year.
But not all Brutalism is as foreboding as the Buffalo City Court Building or Office of Housing and Urban Development headquarters; examples like Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, even Toth’s finished project in the film feel much less oppressive. “Brutalism typically doesn’t account for the human experience,” said Ainslie. “But some of it can be quite beautiful.”
It gets many details right. While some of his colleagues argue “The Brutalist” didn’t offer “enough” architecture, the timeline and elements of the process felt realistic, said Filler, and a far cry from “Sleepless in Seattle”-style formula flicks. Scenes of Toth surveying the project site, a contentious public forum, budget issues and setbacks that put the project on hold for years probably felt familiar to many of his colleagues. An extensive montage showed Toth taking his design from early sketches to an actual model painstakingly built out of chipboard, which students still use today. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where someone’s building a model,” said Filler.
Its use of artificial intelligence highlighted parallel debates. With a lean $10 million budget, “The Brutalist” took some shortcuts to create more authentic Hungarian dialogue and to generate Toth’s full body of work, featured in the film’s epilogue. Its use of AI has drawn sharp criticism in both the filmmaking and architecture communities. For architects, said Filler, it's fueling an existential fear for the future of the profession. AI is just beginning to infiltrate the design practice; UMD’s Architecture Program has been educating students about the technology since 2023, positioning it as a useful creative tool. “It’s about authenticity, so I can see it from both sides,” said Filler. “But not everyone has a ‘Game of Thrones’ budget, and movie magic has been around since the beginning.”