How ‘The Brutalist’ Conjures Up a Grand Building That Doesn’t Exist
It was the production designer who actually drafted an architect character’s vision. Showing it onscreen without constructing it was a film feat.
Central to the plot of the director Brady Corbet’s new drama, “The Brutalist,” is an enormous structure known as the Van Buren Institute. Situated in Pennsylvania, it is made of concrete. The negative space between the two towers that stretch high above it forms the symbol of a cross. When light pours into a chapel below, the same emblem illuminates a marble altarpiece.
Viewers have asked Corbet and his co-writer and partner, Mona Fastvold, if they can visit the institute. The couple regrets to tell them they cannot.
“And what we did build we destroyed,” including an approximately nine-foot-long model, Corbet added. Given that the production cost only $10 million, they couldn’t afford the storage space to keep the memorabilia.
The institute is one of many tricks that “The Brutalist” pulls off in its run time of three-and-a-half hours, intermission included. Imagined by the production designer Judy Becker, working from details that Corbet and Fastvold put in the script, the edifice is crucial to understanding the psychology of the film’s hero, the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody.
