How the "The Brutalist" Production Designer Went "Method" to Embody a Fictional Architect

Brutalism is architecture’s frenemy—beloved for its stylistic concrete heaviness and inventive shapes, while often reviled for, simply, being "ugly." As a movement that became prominent in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, brutalism has often been characterized by alien spaceships or Cold War relics.

But a new film, The Brutalist, presents an alternate stylistic inspiration with roots in the Holocaust. Directed and produced by Brady Corbet and cowritten with his partner, Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. Set in 1940s America, the film stars Adrien Brody as László Toth, a Hungarian architect who struggles to rebuild his life and his architectural practice, while attempting to execute his masterpiece: a cultural and religious building called the Institute.

The three-and-a-half-hour film follows Toth after he escapes the Nazi concentration camps. Toth has gone to live in Philadelphia with his cousin, Attila (Allessandro Nivola), who has changed his last name in the hopes of becoming "American." We watch Toth return to his Bauhaus roots; first, as a furniture designer for his cousin’s shop, where he goes from building modernist desks to being commissioned to redesign the library of a wealthy collector, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce). Later, Van Buren commissions Toth to design the Institute: a massive community center that includes a church, gymnasium, theater, and library, which he designs in the brutalist style based on his time in a concentration camp. 

Judy Becker, a production designer who has worked on films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Carol (2015), brought the universe of Toth to life. While Becker isn’t an architect, her job, she says, is to "design the world the movie takes place in." She’s responsible for managing furnishing, color palettes, wallpapers, and overall sets—crafting a world with the most minute details. Dwell spoke with Becker about how she designed and built the environments that defined Toth’s career—the library and Institute—by tapping into his motivations and persona to produce a style unique to the fictionalized architect. 

The Brutalist is a fictional biopic. How did fiction and reality play into designing this film? There are heavy themes from very real events like the Holocaust and internment camps; how did you balance this with a creative architectural vision? 

One of the many reasons that Brady, the director, and Mona, his wife and co-screenwriter, wanted to make this movie was…they were thinking about how much talent and creativity was lost in those camps. And they invented this person who did survive, László, whom many people have asked me about as if he were a real person. He wasn’t. I think one of the reasons that László is so stubborn, so determined to create his art, is because otherwise, I don’t think he could have survived. So I really did thoroughly try to channel him when I was designing for him. And I talk about him as if he’s a real person, because I had to think that way.

It’s interesting that you say you’re able to channel a fictional architect to execute his vision. 

I have often said that I’m a method designer. I try to embody the characters in any movie I design, because I think a lot about what their world would be like and what they would have. With László, it was a whole trajectory: he comes to the United States; he has nothing. He’s just got out of the camps. He’s had a horrible journey. He’s depleted. He goes to his cousin’s furniture shop. He’s lying on a cot in the storage room. His cousin’s American now. The whole thing is pretty depressing. And then his cousin asks him to design some furniture. So I felt like that’s his earliest work in which he’s going back to his Bauhaus training. He’s using found materials. There’s a whole story about how he’s designing that furniture, taking from some of the furniture in the shop and being influenced by other furniture there. And the next stage, Harrison’s library, is where László becomes very modern. It’s modernist design of the time and he doesn’t become himself as an architect until we see the Institute.  

I’d like to hear about the design process. You’re not an architect but you crafted a realistic vision for what a brutalist community center and church might look like. 

I designed the Institute before I did anything else; Brady asked me to, because it was when I first started on the film. It wasn’t even official yet, but we had to figure out how we were going to shoot parts of the Institute. We knew we couldn’t build the whole thing to full scale. So in order to do that, we needed to design it. The way I work is to channel [László’s] experience as a prisoner, and what it felt like to be a prisoner, to be a refugee, to come to America, to experience what he experienced in America, which maybe wasn’t as great as he hoped it might be—putting all those things into his design for the Institute. It was an emotionally difficult process to channel him creatively and architecturally. Once I kind of cracked a few things, it became easy. We ended up building parts of it, and also building a model that we shot as the Institute.